Scene Quotes
-
In Canadian comedy, you'll almost never see guns. If you bring a gun into a scene, it's like, 'Whoa! Wow, how are we going to deal with that!' Guns in an American comedy are a given. Violence in America is used in a much more cavalier way.
-
Emotions are the natural result of striving for something. Every single scene has two or more people in it, and nobody wants the same thing, so they are negotiating this one way or another. The result of that negotiation will bring out all kinds of emotional stuff in you.
-
Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.
-
“Best scene in college football is at LSU on a Saturday night.”
-
I think I got into acting because I kind of had not much else to do! I guess I was kind of looking for something challenging. I heard about the London Theater scene and it was very different from the upbringing that I had and it felt like a challenge. And the whole sort of London Theater schools, I was told that 6,000 apply and there are like 30 accepted to each one. I was like, "Yeah. Let's see if we can do that!"
-
It's hard on an actor when you have to do a scene 45 times and you know damn well that three of the angles a director is shooting will never make it into the movie.
-
What impresses me is the young actors with terrific talent arriving on the scene. They'd have blown us all away in the old days. Guys like Brad Pitt.
-
I usually cast myself in things because acting is how I best relate to artistic impulses. It's what I've wanted to do since I was a child, so a scene usually plays itself out in my head with me performing it. And if I cast myself that's one less person I have to pay, one less person I have to explain my vision to, one less person I have to worry about.
-
With sex scenes and intense scenes, in general, a lot of it is preparation before the scenes happen, so that you don't have to worry about it on set.
-
Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
-
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
-
You always have to know what the ambition of the scene is, what the purpose of that scene is in the telling of the story overall, so that you're there to support the story.
-
There are always those Gossip Girl walk-and-talk scenes where you're walking and just talking about life and death. You're having a serious conversation, looking someone in the eye, but everywhere around you, it's literally a circus.
-
If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.
-
I'm fortunate in that I'm what you call a utility player, in that I can take a scene, if there's five or six minor characters in a scene, that need voice and personality and I can supply those characters.
-
There was that one scene that involved three night elves, a tauren, and two bottles of molasses but that got nixed right out of the box, darn it!
-
Sometimes when a scene is written or directed to be shouted or played incredibly angrily, I always think it's way more terrifying when someone is fuming and talks in a very calm way. I always want people to shout at me if they're angry - it freaks me out that whole thing of, 'I'm not angry I'm just disappointed.'
-
So, as opposed to getting people in to read the script and read scenes with me, what I wanted to do was sit down and chat to these people and just say, "Okay. Do you share my sense of humor? Do you understand what this film is getting at? Do you know the tone that we're trying to get to?" And it was interesting.
-
We were born ahead of our time. Don't forget that the riot-grrl scene had a lot to do with making The Slits a legend, and that didn't happen until the early '90s. We couldn't get together before then, because the legend hadn't been built yet. In the 2000s, we've become bigger than life in that way. It's become really important for The Slits to be here now, but idealistically, we should have done it in the '90s.
-
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and-we must now add-generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly.
-
When I first see the dailies, I look only at myself, but then you start to see the scene.
-
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
-
When you're doing the same scene over and over, all day long, you need to keep your levels up for your own performance and for the other actors.
-
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.
