One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
Elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive.
I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.
The amount of coordination it takes to shoot a television show is mind-numbing. There are so many things that have to be exactly right to create the correct environment for a single shot, let alone a whole scene or the full episode.
'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
I think, over the years, I've earned the respect of my teammates as someone who first got on the scene and wasn't internationally ready and has just continued to put in the work.
I love scoring. Putting music to picture is a rewarding challenge and one that relies on interpretation of emotion - as in, what is the pivotal feeling in a scene and which character's point of view is driving it at any given moment?
Theatre requires devotion that is all-consuming. When we started out, we didn't mind working 12 hours a day. We didn't mind going endlessly over and over a scene to make it right. I was the company's costumer for the first few years, and I remember the budget for 'Balm in Gilead' was $150.
I'm quite fluent in Telugu now, but there's a difference between talking and dubbing. While dubbing, the diction must be in sync with the emotion in the scene and would impact my performance.
I love working with the actors eye-to-eye. I think something gets lost in translation, not only through a monitor, but when you leave the area where the actual scene is taking place.
OK, I love 'The King and I.' I'm a huge Yul Brynner fan. I love the scene where they danced after the big banquet; that's one of my favorite scenes in a movie of all time. It's romantic and sweet and wonderful.
We have gotten to the point where everything the government does is counterproductive; the conclusion, of course, is that the government should do nothing at all, that is, should retire quickly from the monetary and economic scene and allow freedom and free markets to work.
The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.
I like to give dimension to shots inside action scenes. It's demanding because you have to rehearse a lot of things happening at the same time and frame all those things in a shot. But I feel like when you accomplish that then you've got a cool action scene.
I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious, see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.
I always choose music based on whatever the scene calls for, or whatever my mood is supposed to be.
I'm from Louisiana, and that's where I got my start, in Cajun music. There's a huge music scene down there centered around our culture. Those are people that are not making music for a living. They are making music for the fun of it. And I think that's the best way I could have been introduced to music.
Sometimes the nature of a big movie, the nature of the material, the scene doesn't have the richness that you'd want it to.
How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.
Texas is really special in that we have our own music scene, our own music chart. It's almost a genre on its own. It feels like you can make a great living just touring the state because it's so big, but eventually, I wanted a new challenge.
I guess the difference between the Korean hip-hop scene and the American hip-hop scene is that in the American hip-hop scene, you know, they have their Jay-Zs. They can become conglomerates through hip-hop. In Korea, it doesn't happen.
That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.
I play the father in the scene when Will and Tommy go back to Tommy's old apartment. It was a big mistake. I hope not to be in the next movie I direct.
Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.
The trick is after a workout you're supposed to have gummy bears or some candy to get your veins to stick out. Of course, it's all about protein, too, but right before you're filming a shirtless scene, you have a little bit of sugar to pop the veins.
Cleveland's a great city. I love the city. The people here are awesome. They're loyal and hard-working, and they're loyal to our sports scene, and things are changing here.
For some, being involved in a scene is a great thing because the social element can drive creativity. For me, though, it's never really been like that. It's the opposite. I've always had this instinct to escape.
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.
I don't know we have a method. We show up at the office. Is that a method? That's about the extent to which it's been formalized, asystematised. We show up at the office and talk, talk a scene through.
The joy of 'Crash' was that it was all about the work. It was my first real part. Before that, it was a line here and there, maybe a scene. 'Crash' was five scenes, a beautiful arc, a little vignette of my own. It really meant something.
When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crew cut, cropped, with suits or Levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska scene; we used to dance to Prince Buster and the Skatalites.
I really, really liked shooting and doing the scene with Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage at the end of 'Winds of Winter,' when she gives him the Hand of the Queen. Because we shot it very simply. We felt like we had managed to do something that was visual but really was a very intimate scene between two people.
I think meeting someone like, meeting Sam Shepard, that was someone who was kind of important for me, because I'd read so much of his work and watched him as an actor since I was a kid, then being on set doing a scene with him and thinking, 'This is really surreal.'
If the setups take too long, you wind up losing momentum. Momentum is very good for comedy. Not having to do eight setups in a single scene and have it take five hours is very good for comedy.