I made a big mistake with him the first day I shot. We're shooting the scene where I come back from the party, the dance, in the sleigh with Julie Christie and we turn the corner and go past the camera and the camera follows us just a little bit and ...
He also didn't like a lock of my hair and said that he couldn't get into the moment without the hair being just right. I quietly knew that he was anxious and that the hairdo wasn't the real issue. But we all let it go and came back to the scene somet...
I think so much of writing is an instinct, or a feel for a scene, or a feel for a character. You have to put into words the word 'tone,' which I think is thrown around a lot and can mean a hundred different things, but communicating that to other peo...
You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm n...
Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a d...
If I do a scene with an actor who doesn't have much experience, I say, 'I tell you what we're going to do: You just listen to me, and then you respond. We don't have to do any acting.' And that's good advice because you shouldn't see the acting.
Part of what made 'The Bling Ring' such a fun, freeing experience was that we got to wear these really over-the-top clothes we'd never pick in real life - like for the nightclub scenes, we'd have on these really short, really tight dresses. But you k...
Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued; Olympia had bagels! We didn't have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me - a place with so many...
The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and...
Having written both comedy and drama, comedy's harder because the fear of failure's so much stronger. When you write a scene and you see it cut together, and it doesn't make you laugh, it hurts in a way that failed drama doesn't. Failed drama, it's a...
I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' w...
I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going t...
TV is so different from the movies. It takes a lot of stamina because you work such long hours. It is really challenging. You are learning the next day's lines while you are shooting today's scenes. I found courage I never realised I had. I hope to d...
Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came...
I laugh at it now, but one time I had an agent tell me I would never work in TV if I didn't get a nose job. People tell you to change yourself to fit into the L.A. scene, but the advice usually doesn't make any sense. The next agent told me my nose w...
I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to...
I remember watching 'Colombo' a lot with my dad. That was one of the first detective shows I remember watching. And I remember my dad turning to me - my dad loves to turn to me and explain why things are funny. He used to do that with 'Seinfeld' all ...
Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a pos...
I find that kid actors are great reminders of the simplicity of acting. As you get older, you can sometimes complicate things a little more. You can become too aware of, 'Okay, this is the scene emotionally. This is where we need to be. We've got the...
I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see ...
My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. ...
