Words matter. These are the best Barry Levinson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The more pressure that an actor puts on himself, the harder it is to deliver behavior that’s interesting, and so I just try to find a way without talking too much.
The interesting thing about movies, it’s not always – y’know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.
There is always a hesitancy with actors, and inhibitions can get into the work, so you have to figure out how to make it feel so loose that you can do anything, and if it is not right, that is okay because we’ll do it again.
I got involved with an acting school and studied for a couple years. They used to have improv exercises that you would work on and you would do improvs.
How do I make the son, daughter, wife of Paterno interesting? Then you just have to start seeing people.
If you create a visual that actually captures the imagination, that’s not real. It will look real, and that will spread at such lightning speed that by the time it’s found out, it has already done its damage. It’s a very, very scary time that we’re living in. I say it’s an age of absurdity.
It was about a football program that brought in massive amounts of money. They’re going to try to cover something up, because it’s about money at the end of the day. That’s clear. There’s no ambiguity to that. Paterno is much more complicated and contradictory, and that’s why he’s interesting to me.
You can never squash something and assume it’s not going to come back in some fashion. It’s going to bubble up until it explodes. Society evolves to find a better way.
Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it’s going to be one of those really silly movies and that’s how it got made.
I’m thinking, this is Robert Redford. You know, he’s won an Academy Award, he’s talking to me about directing a movie he’s in. So you just think that it’s Hollywood stuff or whatever.
Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.
It’s those moments, those odd moments that you look for and sometimes by creating this kind of loose atmosphere you find those little moments that somehow mean a lot to an audience when they really register right.
You used to need a big camera to direct, but now, anyone with an iPhone can tell a story visually. You can film something. You can start off with a five-minute story, then a 10-minute story.
Writing by committee becomes much less about a vision. It is really about a piece of merchandise.
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
My advice is that it’s easier to write than direct. If you have an interest in writing, write. You might as well start with yourself or some event you know well, and you need a point of view.
Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.
At the end of the day, you can’t do a copy of somebody.
I worked at a local television station and I got a chance to direct and do all those things – worked kiddie shows, Ranger House show with the hand puppets and things like that.
Some stories seem to lend themselves to telling right away. ‘All The President’s Men’ was done, what, four or five years after the event? It certainly seemed to work there, as opposed to something that happened 40 years ago.
When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.
The public doesn’t know what to believe anymore. We don’t know what stories are supposedly true, this idea of ‘fake news.’ We watch it on what I guess you would call a split-focus. It’s half entertainment and half mystery.
Some actors are supposed to be very difficult, but I’ve not found that to be the situation.
I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.
It’s finding those nonsensical pieces of conversation that we all do all the time. We do all the time. When we’re talking on the telephone, there are arguments with people who agree when they both think that they disagree.
