I've had some painful experiences in my life, but I feel like I'm trivializing them by using them for a scene in a movie. I don't want to do that. It just makes me feel kind of dirty for having done that.
When someone's acting for a scene, they can fool the camera. But in everyday life, unless you're watching and censoring yourself every minute, or spending all your time in the company of ladies, what you feel is bound to show in your eyes.
I came from a dance background, so that's what I did my whole teenage years. I was at the dance studio a lot. It just becomes your social scene and part of your life.
Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.
Onstage I'm the one in control - I'm not at the mercy of how an editor chooses to put the scene together later. I can do things onstage that I would never do in real life. It's very freeing.
It's pretty simple to me: we come from a really grounded world where anything you say could be the thing that the scene becomes about. We're always treating it as if we would treat it in real life. It's all observation.
You're over there in the corner either thinking about the dead dog or whatever, you're bringing up your personal life and you need the space, and then somebody throws you a joke. Especially if it's an emotional scene, you don't want the joke.
I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being 'someone's girlfriend', and now I am happy being single.
When it's a love scene with someone you actually love, there's no feeling like, 'Can I touch him here? Can I touch him there?' You know what your boundaries are - or what they aren't, I suppose.
I love getting ready to do a scene, and thinking about it, and talking about it. But the rest of the time, I'm so nervous and obsessed. I'm just tearing my hair out in the trailer. The whole time I'm really tense.
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.
I haven't had to do too many, or many explicit ones. Everybody feels weird, and everybody is trying to tiptoe around and make you think they're not there. The last time I did a love scene, I couldn't keep a straight face.
I really enjoy the consolation when I'm having to cut loose stuff I love, of saying 'Well, at least it will make it onto DVD.' There's a couple of scenes which I liked very much, but couldn't fit them into the film that are on there.
During one performance of 'Les Miserables,' the barricade didn't leave the stage, so we had to actually end up finishing the second act with the barricades on the stage, which was very strange... doing the love scene on the barricade.
Comedians like to see people smile. With acting, I love giving people a feeling, an emotion. I like to give people a feeling. When they come away from my scene, I want them to think.
When I need to think of, like, a peaceful scene or something, I think of my back garden in summertime. And whenever I hear the lawnmower next door, I always think it's really peaceful.
It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.
Actors know, with me they aren't going to be allowed to rehearse a scene for a couple of hours and then get away with doing 25 takes before we get it right. So they come with their full bag of tricks.
I don't storyboard, and I don't really shot list. I let the shots be determined by how the actors and I figure out the blocking in a scene, and then from there, we cover it.
On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.
Julie Dryfus and I were both afraid of heights and in one scene, I had to be quite high up and I was rather terrified, but Julie was very kind, encouraging me and we got through that together.
