On 'Glee,' the director can be like, 'Hey, your face is looking a little too intense here.' And they can show me the screen, and I can be like, 'I know exactly what to do here.'
Every actress has a line she'll draw, where she'll say, 'This I will do and this I won't.' For me, everything has to be important to the story and the director has to be able to tell me why.
I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morris College in Atlanta, Georgia.
My philosophy is, 'Show up, shut up, and do your job,' and if you do it to the satisfaction of your director and the public, you're likely to be able to do it again.
But the privileges that one has enjoyed and exploited can sometimes turn against you: nobody thinks of you as a director, you are always an actress.
Sometimes the director will want you to write about the character, sometimes he'll want you to live in the location that the character is from or something like that, but I don't usually make a lot of notes or anything like that.
You have to remind casting directors out here that you don't just do one thing. There's a lot of people who do just one thing.
We had a very energetic floor manager and he was always jumping around all over the place. The director would send down messages like, Can you tell that actor to calm down?
And when I have lived elsewhere, every two weeks I have to fly back to LA. Even New York directors go there to audition. So I have to be there to a degree.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
The similarity between the big directors I've worked with is that they allow the writer to find a way of doing what they want done without saying 'do it this way.' They describe what they want, then letting the writer figure out a way to do it.
I view the whole thing as a collaboration. As an actor, I always found that to be the most freeing thing, when the director would collaborate with you, so that together you'd come up with something exponentially better.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
Even with revivals, I don't really pay attention to previous incarnations. I always just go with the script and with the director and am willing to treat it as brand new.
When I worked on Altar Boys, they wanted to see us having fun. The four of us would have fun on set and steal each other's lines, and mess with the director.
I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.
A director should not define everything. For me, the movie is a form of a question I pose to the others or to the audience. I want to ask their opinion on my point of view and discuss it with them.
The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It's better for the economy. It's a fantastic thing.
I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.
