I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.
Howard Minsky had gotten the script to her agent prior to my involvement.
Even the busboys at the restaurants have a script to give you. Everybody is in the business.
It doesn't help anybody to put out a bad script.
I've done about six comedies. Oddly enough, the script came to me from one of the guys in Platoon.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
In 'W,' I did not change a word in the script. I have never spoken this much in other series. I just stick to whatever is written. I always carry the script with me and read it before I sleep.
In the movies, you typically do get to see the script beforehand. TV is different because there are a lot of scripts in the future that you haven't seen. You commit to a show, and you have to believe in the showrunner and their team and the stories they're going to tell.
I think first impressions are important when you pick up a script.
As an actor, you work to the script: that's our main priority. But you have to be aware and look around for things that help you bring that little bit extra, that touch of realism that rams the point home.
I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.
After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.
I like 1977 because it is more primitive. If it were modern day, like one Universal guy was like wouldn't they just use their cell phone? I guess he did not read that it was 1977 in the script.
I look at the action scenes as placeholders when I arrive on a script, knowing that I'm going to expand on them when I understand the constraints of the movie, the locations of where we're shooting, the abilities of the actors, and where we want to go with the characters.
I keep every script from every film that I ever made because it's like a workbook of that time in my life.
When I get a new script my mom will read them and just be aghast. I think it's hysterical.
As much as most of the actors were kind of curious to know what their character meant in relation to the script and to the plot, they really were quite happy to be part of the adventure of not knowing.
I think I read films having grown up around the pre-production and post-production aspect of the filmmaking medium, a lot more than most young people who are in acting would have experienced. I do think about scripts in a different way. I can't just read a script as an actor. I don't know how to do that.
I feel as though my career really hit its high point when I was cast as a supporting actress in 'American Wedding'. I thought the script had a lot of depth and intelligence, and it really just jumped off the page.
'Argo' was a great script from day one. I don't think we knew that it was going to be such a success.
With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.
You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.
As an actor, you really want to respect and honor the script. You want to try to be in the moment and you also realize that you're one part of a bigger picture and when they call action, you have your dance.
Oh I am trying to remember, we would read the script after we did the show.
I have done many films across the globe and would love to be a part of Bollywood, but the script must have a strong character for me.
Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.
I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.
But if you put a script up in front of me to read, or a cue card, I couldn't do it without stuttering.
Polanski is a great film director - although the much-acclaimed 'Chinatown' has a muddled script - but his true talent is to make fools of his friends.
Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.
First, you do a piece of material that begins and ends and has a flow; it's not chopped up as in a film, where in an extreme case you might be doing the last scene of the script the first day that you go to work, and you don't know enough about the character you're playing.
It's a struggle for anybody to take their paradigms and set of beliefs and understandings and completely flip the script.
Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.
I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
I don't know if I've ever read a movie that's as strange and unpredictable and hilarious and wonderful as the stuff we're doing on 'The Last Man on Earth.' It's jaw-dropping every week when I get a script, because it goes to such strange places.
You never know when you read a script how it's going to turn out because so much depends on the collaboration between people. If I'd been in some of the movies I turned down, maybe they wouldn't have been a success.
