The thing is, I love a great death scene - no good actor doesn't. Sorry, any actor, I should say.
For 'Spartacus,' we've committed 100 percent of our production time to creating great scenes. So all the training I do is on my own time. And that's pretty limited.
There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late '60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.
I think I went more toward writing because that's my talent. I don't think I was a great performer... And I like being behind the scenes a little bit.
Watch MTV and you can see what the music scene is like in England. The Spice Girls? Not a lot of creativity in the commercial area. There are still great musicians in England, but not a lot being heard that much.
The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'
Congress suffers a great deal of criticism for its partisan acrimony. But while we may disagree politically, and air our opposition in this chamber, it is the conversation behind the scenes that cements and defines our relationships.
A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.
I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.
If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer, a director, a producer, and an actor, I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work.
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.
Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
Fight scenes are like learning a dance. You learn it move by move, and then you put it all together and it looks awesome when you edit it together. It's great!
I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.
I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.
Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, 'Ah that's great.'
A lot of times you have very ego-driven actors and actresses that stay in their little world, and when you have a scene together, your worlds meet for a moment. But I don't think that makes for a very good cohesion.
For ages, in my lunch hours, I would just go round and choreograph fight scenes. For fun. So now I'm very good at being thrown around. I bounce, in the words of my friends.
I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.
This is the way I look at sex scenes: I have basically been doing them for a living for years. Trying to seduce an audience is the basis of rock 'n roll, and if I may say so, I'm pretty good at it.
