If there is an action scene, I want to do everything myself.
At 21, my career took a comedic turn when I was cast in a new Broadway play called 'Brooklyn Boy,' by Donald Margulies, which was equal parts funny and sad. I realized that the more seriously I expressed my character's feelings, the funnier the scene became.
It's more fun in a way to do ensemble scenes, where you know your background, you know the scene, but you can't prepare because someone else is going to say something that is going to lead you off.
When it's a love scene with someone you actually love, there's no feeling like, 'Can I touch him here? Can I touch him there?' You know what your boundaries are - or what they aren't, I suppose.
I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.
If you're shooting a really serious, dramatic scene, personally I wouldn't want to look at the camera.
The best preparation for acting is life - observing life and people and observing yourself. All that becomes your library. So when you have to research a part, a scene or an emotion, you go into the library and get what you need.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
The scene we shot with Charlie Rose was actually the last piece that was ever shot for 'Breaking Bad.' My daughter and I flew to New York; we got to shoot in the 'Charlie Rose' studio. Adam Godley and Jessica Hecht are such expert performers that we were able to get it very beautifully and very quickly.
When you're working on a huge, elaborate set that took months to create, and you're surrounded by hundreds of extras, you better remember your lines and know what you're doing in a scene!
When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.
I remember times when the whole music scene was just flourishing.
I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.
This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.
I think that it's awkward watching a video with your mom, particularly when you're making out with a girl or a sexy scene. I would rather be away from that!
It just clicked that it was the next step for me; choreographing didn't interest me, and opening a studio wasn't a passion for me. I didn't know if I'd be very good at acting, but then my first scene in acting class... I just loved it.
The music scene is more competitive in the States.
The lighting is so important. One thing that makes me nuts about the lighting now is that they spend an enormous amount of time lighting the set, the background. But the most important thing in the scene is the actor.
I like working with actresses, and I like women a lot, not for obvious reasons, but just in that that there's so much about what they bring to the scene that keeps it so interesting. Their instincts are so different, and they never explain them to you.
The studio scene in California is sort of ridiculous anyway.
I first came on the scene during the Johnson years and that crowd was out all the time enjoying themselves. Nixon wasn't particularly social but a lot of the people in his administration were.
I love when you get to work with people you know because there's so much more trust, and you're much more willing to be vulnerable in a scene with someone you trust.
Of course I danced a lot when I was making 'Swingers.' The swing music scene was big in Hollywood, and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I'd be good at dancing.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
There was some scene in The Blues Brothers movie, when they had the chicken wire across the front of the stage, and it was almost like that. They had a big guard rail around the stage, which kept the college kids from getting on... we had some good times.
The only reason for using another cut is to improve the scene.
Obviously, my life and my job in 2010 is very different from Peggy's experience in the 1960s. I exist in a world that enjoys more equality between men and women. But I don't take any of that into my performance. I just want to play the character as who she is as an individual - scene to scene.
The first time I heard Johnny play at the Fillmore East, I wasn't really impressed. He had come on the scene with everybody telling me how great he was, and I didn't hear it.
America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution.
It feels so great to be back on the scene.
If you're sitting in the audience, you probably can't see the preparation and work that goes into creating a great scene or a great part, but I can assure you that a good film depends on lot of different things falling perfectly into place.
Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
The connection between pathos and broad comedy is very tight. But you do far more work in a comedy scene than you do in a straight scene. It's much harder.
Vegetarians are doomed in the Chilean street-food scene, though if they are willing to ingest small quantities of lard, they can enjoy the ever-popular squash, salt and lard biscuits known as sopaipillas.
The most moving scene for me in 'Pride and Prejudice' is the Pemberley music room scene: Elizabeth has just saved Darcy's sister from embarrassment and confusion, and as the music plays on, Darcy's look of gratitude becomes a look of love, which we see reciprocated in Elizabeth's eyes.
When you explore a scene, the most important thing is who to cast.
