When you have quick scenes, it becomes difficult to ascertain where your character fits and where they’re going. I always enjoy scenes that have a movement to them.
In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I’ve ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.
I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.
Yeah, you know, if I’m having an emotional scene I do like to go off and be by myself; not to say that I’m a method actor or anything like that, but for scenes like that that are more emotional, I do like to take that night off and not be so social.
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.
I am older than most of my on-screen colleagues, and the ones behind the scenes, too.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don’t speak in dialogue. Their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
I’m always interested in the ways in which a character can inhabit either a theme or a premise personally, so that those scenes that are about his character or his relationship with other characters feel in context and don’t seem to be apart from or oddly vestigial to the actual drama.
The interesting thing is that I found scenes which I put together which could appeal to almost every woman, or apply to almost every woman after the war. Falling in love, dancing, marrying.
It’s hard in America as a writer of color, an actor of color, not to get caught up in race and culture. But you’re also supposed to be able to write characters and scenes in a way where it’s just a matter of fact, a component.
All of my friends at drama school were still sat on the floor doing voice exercises and I was doing scenes with David Tennant and Catherine Tate.
For so many people, it’s very hard to feel okay with success, because success is not cool. It supposedly tarnishes your thing; it ruins little pockets of scenes and the self-importance that comes from thinking you’re the only people in your town that are doing something.
I haven’t seen the film yet because I just got in from London. In the scenes where the two characters are bantering with each other, it is like bobbing at the net in tennis.
It comes down to something really simple: Can I visualize myself playing those scenes? If that happens, then I know that I will probably end up doing it.
Obviously, New York and Boston and Los Angeles have pretty vibrant entrepreneurial scenes.
When you’re working on a novel, you never think about how much it would cost to shoot one of your scenes. But that’s a huge consideration in film and TV.
I’ve done five films directed by women. I did like it. They had qualities, particularly in the romantic tenderness of scenes. I felt sometimes they were a little bit soft, but maybe they were clever to get the guys working the way they wanted them to.
An Emraan Hashmi film has come to guarantee certain ingredients: An intense, grey central character, a beautiful girl – if he gets lucky, then two – couple of kisses, a few bold scenes, fabulous music and a climatic twist.
When I was at Villa and I was captain there and I had the opportunity to go to City, it played on my mind I wouldn’t be as pivotal. So initially I didn’t want to go, but a lot of things happened behind the scenes and I realised I had to go.
When you think Tink, you should just think of me as that around-the-way girl – relatable and honest. Even in my lifestyle, my entire aura is real. I don’t sugarcoat anything, whether I’m on stage or home in Chicago or just behind the scenes just chilling. I’m the same person you see on stage, always.
I love going to weddings. I love movie scenes of weddings. Even, like, TV-show weddings – I cry at every wedding.
I spent a lot of time in Chicago at a place called The Annoyance Theater, where we would develop one-act plays through improv, and you would just improvise scenes and then discover something about the character and use it in the next scene.
Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.
Mostly I work really unconsciously, and I think if the scenes are really well written, which they are, and if I just throw myself into it, I don’t really think about it.
I would always prefer radio or working behind the scenes where I don’t have to be seen. I don’t like how appearance oriented TV is (especially now that I’m middle aged!). But I am developing a show revolving around animal rescue which will hopefully entertain and maybe do a bit of good for the cause as well.
For ages, in my lunch hours, I would just go round and choreograph fight scenes. For fun. So now I’m very good at being thrown around. I bounce, in the words of my friends.
We’re a show-and-tell generation. People want to see behind the scenes. The more involved and invited they are, the closer affinity they have to your brand.
I try not to do scenes a certain way, because then I become conscious of it, and it dosen’t come off as realistic. I try to make it so that I’m not really aware of what I’m doing.
There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I’d really like to do that.
When you’re shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That’s much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
My favorite kind of acting scenes, or at least where I think people shine the brightest, are odes to Meisner technique scenes where people are face-to-face, and it’s almost like a repetition exercise.
In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.
But I think our humour is exactly the same today. Only, we’ve made rules now. We’ve said we are not going to do prosthetic make-up scenes, because when they take it off half your face comes off.
If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don’t make sense and that they wouldn’t have happened that way.
I’m a fan of music documentaries and I always love seeing what goes on behind the scenes. In kind of the new era of record companies and record releases and that sort of thing, there has to be way more content for the audience.
I tried to make every bit of it as creepy as I could. And I had the same response you do. I feel the same way. The hospital scenes, that procedure was so real.
‘Vikings’ is a very physical, tough show. If you see battle scenes, it’s us doing it. There are so many similar physical elements to WWE.
I’m really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I’m much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.
The degree that these scenes went to… there was a couple of days I was upset… I’d have to hurry back to the girls in the makeup trailer and have a bit of a cry because it messes with your head.
On ‘Angel’ I got to work a lot with Mike Massa, who was David Boreanaz’ stunt double, and Mike would let me do most of my stuff by myself. I did almost all my fight scenes by myself.
My job is designing shoes. It’s work that happens behind the scenes, as they say, and that suits me just fine because in general I am a shy person. But sometimes I have these extroverted outbursts.
I understand, certain scenes have to have a lot of takes. As an actor, I think it’s quite nice to have a handful of takes, because you don’t want to do it once or twice; I think once or twice sometimes is quite terrifying because you don’t really feel like you’ve given them what you want.
I always enjoy fight scenes and being grubby and bloody and not having to look good. I prefer that very much, as odd as that sounds.
That’s the challenging thing with TV; it’s not the action scenes per se, and it’s not the location scenes and the heavy dialog scenes, but the fact that there is just no let-up; there is no break.
I don’t write a play from beginning to end. I don’t write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It’s not all in ether. It’s on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what’s missing, and that’s my first draft.
For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they’re all doing.
