I think everyone's different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I'm on the right page.
The scene then as now was centered in New York. For the most part, I've kept a bit apart from that attractive and seductive city. I've done it by living in the country within commuting distance.
If you had told me when I was starting out that I would be coming down to Nashville, kind of weaving in and out of the country scene, I never would've thought that in a million years.
I'll need every ounce that I have to drive it through. Film and TV require that energy. Sometimes fight scenes can be pretty intense. When I was shooting 'Heaven' it was truly guerrilla film-making.
I remember doing the sex scene in Red Rock West. I had to kiss Nic Cage and then look like I was going down on him. And he couldn't do anything - he just had to lie there.
I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.
I felt alive when I read a script and acted out a scene, or sang a song. It was my dream. I'm just very lucky that I'm still doing it and able to earn a living from it.
I played a paraplegic on a show called 'Neighbours.' Just turned up on set, sat in a wheelchair. The producer came up to me one day and said, 'We have to cut around that entire scene because your leg was moving.'
Harrison Ford comes on set, and he's very polite and says, 'Hello' to everyone. He cares about everything that's going on, on set. He cares about what's going on with your character and what's in the scene and what's on the desk.
Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.
No matter how much I plan the overall arc of the character, you get there day one on the film and you shooting certain scenes first, and it goes completely different to anything you ever thought of, and then it's done.
Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.
When the sun sets beautifully, other beauties rise. Nature is a theatre; when one great player leaves the scene, another great player immediately enters. The play always continues excellently.
I'm a very recent convert to the gay scene. I went to a party a couple of years ago and met a very nice man who took me under his wing and started taking me out to clubs. It was a revelation.
The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.
If it's a very emotional scene, you're kind of relieved when you've done it, kind of spent. And there are times when you can be rattled, certain characters if they're hyper, that can carry over, the residue of that. But I try to leave it on the set.
I don't get to do a lot of fight scenes on 'Sanctuary,' but I'm a trained fighter; I've been doing martial arts for years and, you know, I'm very active physically; I used to be a circus performer.
The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party.
On 'Whose Line,' we had six, seven, eight scenes per show, so everything was pretty quick. And there's a lot of games that we just got tired of, like 'Hats' and 'World's Worst' and 'Hoedown' and stuff.
So we were doing this scene, and the kids get 20 minutes a day, um, so, all I had to do was pick him up out of the incubator and take him out, and that was the whole shot.
I began imagining scenes in public which some drunk would come up to me and slap me in the face. Nothing like that ever happened, but I often wonder if I would have turned the other cheek.
