I'm definitely one of those actresses who comes to a set knowing how I want to do a scene, and I definitely love input from my directors and my writers.
I think I always try to be accommodating and open and available and proving for my director. I love to give as many takes as they want. I love to give them as many choices as they want.
I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.
It's often the case with directors that they don't like to share credit, which is the case of Stanley. He would prefer just A Film By Stanley Kubrick including music and everything.
Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.
There are still people who have an issue working with a woman director. Women can be viewed as 'difficult' even though they work in the same way as men.
Actors look for characters. If they read a well-written character, and if they think the director's not an idiot, they're going to sign up and do some acting.
In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.
Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.
I've worked with a lot of directors who really don't have a sense of what the hell they want.
I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors. I don't have the patience. Why, I'd probably kill the actors. Not to mention some of the beautiful actresses.
As a director, it's my job to provoke, and when people decided 'The Room' be called a phenomenon, or whatever you call it, it's fine with me.
In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.
I'm not aware that I was consciously influenced by any director, though these things often happen unnoticed, submerged in the unconscious.
I think part of the fun of being an actor is getting to work with different directors and seeing their take on it, what they're passionate about. They all have different ideas about your character.
If I'm going to produce something, it's going to be with somebody I think is special. Once I go beyond a handful of directors, like Scorsese, there are very few I want to work with.
But a lot of that kind of work is done pre-flight, coordinating efforts with the flight directors and the ground teams, and figuring out how you're going to operate together.
In Scotland, we're a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there's a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like.
I was trained to serve the writer and director as an actor before I serve myself. Not to say that's gotten in my way, but that's a different way of working than most American actors work.
Writer/directors are, for me, the most inspiring people to work for because they are the person on set that knows the answer to all the questions. They have the most invested in the project because they've been with it from conception.
Not many French producers work the American way. In France, the director decides everything, he has final cut. I'm trying to do things differently, without the Luc Besson solution.
