You create a blueprint of your best performance, and you're happiest the night you surpass that blueprint. That won't happen that often, but it will happen. It's like sculpting: you keep refining. When you have a piece that is yours, that is just you, that becomes obsessive; you think about it all the time.
I used to be very controlling with visuals and editing, and I would pretty much craft the performances; now I have learned to trust the material and the actors.
On my best days, such as when I was a junior in high school coming off a 42-point performance and near triple-double, my dad was there to tell me I haven't arrived yet and bring me back to reality.
I preferred delivering my performance in person. I liked to be in control. You couldn't be in films.
In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.
My natural bent is to have an overabundance of energy, and motion-capture essentializes your every breath, your every move. Seeing yourself through that mask, you realize how far you can pull back and make the performance even more powerful.
It's important to go out on the pitch and make a fantastic performance.
I get nervous every time, for every single performance, before getting up on that stage.
All of us are trying to achieve 100 percent in our work. That's all we struggle to do. We never do, but we never stop trying until the day we die. It's that struggle to achieve 100 percent, that's where our performance lies, that's what the audience gets. They get the struggle.
When I first came to New York City in 1967, I joined up with Richard Schechner's Performance Group - where we worked in the Performing Garage in SoHo.
The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.
I guess because you study the character and you do all those things. But when it comes down to it, it's still my performance, it's still my interpretation. I'm not going to, you know, be a clone - well, I was a clone of Richard Dean Anderson!
Look at Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster: It's an incredible performance.
I always think that a director who knows about the technical side, but cares about the acting performances and casting as well, is ahead of the game.
The term 'overachiever' sort of makes it look like the person has mediocre talent and he just works so hard that he achieves beyond what you would think. 'Overachiever' is sort of a - it's sort of an incorrect term. An overachiever is someone that's just willing to pay the price to get so much more out of his performance.
A lot of companies make diversity a part of the performance goals against which an executive gets paid. Just as you have to make a certain sales number, you have to make a diversity number to get your bonus.
On the last day of our five-day work week, we did two performances and we had an audience. It was similar to theatre; we went from beginning to end, and it was very pleasing.
All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.
There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.
It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.
You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theater because it is an unmerciful life. It's six days a week. It's eight performances a week. And that's doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.
The best piece of advice my father gave me was to always work hard. One thing he instilled: Proper preparation prevents poor performances.
Jackie considered his resurrection, the world's best return performance.
I like that feeling of letting loose, of not planning every step. The best performances are the ones that you just let happen.
The most memorable performance was my appearance in concert in Carnegie Hall. The first standup to do so.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
I try to get the best performance an actor can give.
An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.
If you take my performance or my understanding of the role and my appreciation for story and then dress it in CGI, that I guess becomes an action film.
I accept that responsibility and ask only that I be judged by my performance as its chief executive.
I don't work with Sia every day; it depends what we do, whether we do performances or music videos, so the schedule is weird, but when we're off, we always try to see each other in between. We just hang out; we went to brunch one time, but for the most part I go to her house, and we eat and watch TV.
When you are new to the business, you think if you give a really bad performance, that's one they will print. You will be judged. You just have to be brave.
I think the biggest myth entrepreneurs have is that the growth and performance of their startups depends more on their entrepreneurial talent than on the businesses they choose.
Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious.
That's the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.
The console games, as they come out with this new generation, will have a temporary advantage in price performance, but there are still many things you can do on a PC, more conveniently than you can do on a console machine.
