Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.
I definitely want to work with Thom Yorke. I want to work with Damien Marley; there's a few international artists I wouldn't mind working with - like Massacre Children would be ill, and I still have an affinity for the U.K. hip hop scene.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
Every time I find a picture of him with other women, or read in magazines that he's involved with 'groupies,' I don't go and show up where he is making a huge scene and getting our faces put all over the TV and papers.
When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?'
It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.
If I want to kiss, I shall kiss. If I am told that a lovemaking scene is integral to the script, I will consider it.
We were shooting 'Hot Fuzz' in my hometown of Wells, Somerset, and I remember looking at the dailies and going, 'Wait, there's a Starbucks in the shot. I don't remember that being there!' We had to digitally remove it; the same thing happened with a McDonald's in another scene. I had this sensation of, 'What's going on here? Where am I?'
You know, I remember watching Morgan Freeman when he did the two Alex Cross movies, and he's so confident that he's going to knock the scene dead. And I'm really confident that I can tell a good story now, so I just don't worry about things.
I like the fact you can spend two hours setting up a scene that will only last a couple of seconds. And I like just sitting around and dozing between scenes!
I don't think I ever will do a sex scene because of my religion and my personal standards.
My dream is to take the Indian independent music scene to an international level. People like Alisha Chinai, Baba Sehgal and Daler Mehndi took it to a very high level. My ultimate target is to win a Grammy. I don't want to primarily be a Bollywood playback singer.
I've worked with actors who tell everyone what to do in the scene - that makes me go pretty atomic.
I haven't had the time to plan returning to the scene because I haven't left it.
Portland is the perfect weekend getaway. I studied acting in Portland and lived there for five years. It's a small city with so much to do. There's beautiful scenery, a great bar scene, and so many fabulous restaurants.
They were looking for actors - real actors - who could play instruments. There was a lot of improvisation and scene work involved in addition to the music. The auditions went on for a long time.
The thing about Netflix is that you get more minutes in your episode because there are no commercial breaks. You have time to let things breathe and be quiet. You get to see an entire scene play out instead of just jumping halfway in.
Like any other person who reads a ton of books, I hate many, many books. Oh, how I hate them. I have performed dramatic readings of the books I hate. I have little hate summaries. I have hate impressions. I can act out, scene by hateful scene, some of these books. I can perform silent hate charades.
You know the stories of a woman saying to Churchill, 'Sir, you're drunk,' and he said to her, 'And you're ugly, but in the morning I'll be sober.' I was really excited to do that scene, but I did get slapped.
I made a movie when I was 15 years old with all my friends. This is when IMDb was a little more lax with its proceedings, so it's listed as one of my projects. I was 15 years old; it's a terrible movie. I wrote 50 percent of it because I wanted to kiss this one girl, and I wrote a kissing scene for it.
I just never want to be in this situation where I get to set and they're like, 'We rewrote this scene, you're now naked.' I need a little prep work.
I lose tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. For Scary Movie 3, for example, we had a lot of Matrix spoofs, a Hulk scene, and some of that stuff just doesn't hold up - it's too much plot, audiences just didn't want to hear about it.
He also didn't like a lock of my hair and said that he couldn't get into the moment without the hair being just right. I quietly knew that he was anxious and that the hairdo wasn't the real issue. But we all let it go and came back to the scene sometime later.
A good fight scene is really a good love scene.
The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you've got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky's the limit.
If you're a director and someone shows up and asks how I do it, I'd imagine, as a director, you're like, 'Man, I've got a million decisions to make; can you show up with an idea for the scene?'
I think there was a lot competition in the rock scene.
The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.
I made a big mistake with him the first day I shot. We're shooting the scene where I come back from the party, the dance, in the sleigh with Julie Christie and we turn the corner and go past the camera and the camera follows us just a little bit and we disappear.
Sometimes you will do a close-up for a scene in the morning where you are totally distraught, then shoot the rest of that scene seven hours later. How do you hang on to that feeling all day without burning up, without going so far that you have nothing left to give when the cameras roll again?
Every single second of extra time to work with other actors has definitely always, for me, paid off for the film. For the project. Every single extra heartbeat you could get, mutually considering the scene, was of benefit.
Most of the time I'm thinking, I'm glad that scene was improvised.
In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened the music I wrote and wanted to extend the scene to let my work stay completely.
That is what has happened to the United States in the international economic scene. We have deteriorated into a debtor status so that we are now dependent upon the kindness of strangers. That is not where the world's leading power should find itself.
I did put on weight for the last half of the film, but the Ferris wheel scene was shot with a harness on me so that if I fell I wouldn't fall all the way.
