I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don’t trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.
As soon as people see my face on a movie screen, they knew two things: first, I’m not going to get the girl, and second, I’ll get a cheap funeral before the picture is over.
Whenever I get a good script, I don’t care whether it’s telly or theatre or big screen – I’m not bothered.
There is no such thing as a Bollywood hero or Hollywood hero. All you see on the screen is the lead actor’s interpretation of the role that has been conceived by the writer.
Even after four years in office, George W. Bush’s record on women doesn’t leap out at you. It’s composed almost entirely of little things, small enough to fly well under the media’s radar screen, so few of us have any sense of their cumulative impact.
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.
The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they’re all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.
My mantra is: put your brain into gear and if you can add to what’s on the screen then do it, otherwise shut up.
I’m an athletic actor. I’m known for my action; I’m a guy who does my own stunts on screen.
What I got, unconsciously, from admiring Fred Astaire was that he didn’t want what he was doing to look difficult. What was difficult, in my opinion, was making it look so genuine, so effortless. I equally have tried to remain unseen on the screen.
There’s nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring ‘Schindler’s List’ to the screen.
I’m leaving the screen because I don’t think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I’m elegant on the stage.
I have a beautiful platter of various fruits as my computer screen saver. It’s a constant reminder to eat healthy! It helps me to make healthier food choices throughout my day.
And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.
I started out dabbling in rock and roll; then I did playback, and I have also sung for my own songs on screen.
When characters change on screen, it makes you feel better about yourself. You think, ‘Oh I change too, I’m constantly becoming a better person.’
I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.
The essence of the stage is concentration and penetration. Of the screen action, movement, sweep.
I watch virtually no TV. All my screen time is computer time for me. When I’m not doing that I’m reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.
We do have a black president, and that means a lot. People ask, ‘What has he done?’ What he’s done is change the color up, which you see on the screen. When the head of the free world is black, there’s got to be some sort of spin-off from it.
As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate.
For characters where, in a comic, I’d avoid using screen tone because it’s such a bother, I’d deliberately use it in animation in order to highlight their individual characteristics.
I do think that it’s better for a musical to live its life first because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You’ve seen it. And that’s the mystery of a musical that hasn’t been filmed. You’re bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket.
When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.
I draft on the computer. I have a really giant screen that attaches to my laptop, and then I have a humongous digital drawing tablet called a Cintiq. It sits at all different angles, and it’s so big that it would take two people to move it.
Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren’t in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.
I’m kind of intimidated by the big screen – I often keep my performances much smaller and much more natural and subtle.
I don’t want to act just to be on the screen doing anything and looking any kind of way.
I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.
You can see some very great theatre actors who don’t work at all well on screen. They’re trying too hard at it.
You can crack a joke and make a person smile but it matters a lot when that’s on screen. It can be a very nice joke but if you shoot it badly or the actor gets the timing wrong, it won’t be funny.
The actor is there to translate what’s on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That’s my philosophy.
When you’re sitting in front of a screen, you’re not using all of your senses at the same time. Nowhere than in nature do kids use their senses in such a stimulated way.
To answer the question, though: I didn’t always want to direct. I just liked the idea of it. If a friend was making a short and needed someone who knew screen direction, I would jump in. It would be horrible, but it led to a short, then another, and another. It was like student films.
There are actors who are really fantastically talented at being natural on screen and appearing to be themselves, but I like the challenge of becoming somebody else.
We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile.
My life may seem glamorous from the outside but off screen it’s as ordinary as anyone else’s.
As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.
Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.
He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.
When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
Weight is just not a hot button. In fact, during my life, it probably should have been on my radar screen a bit more. I look back at work photos and am shocked. Was I eating the people I was interviewing?! Good Lord, I was big.
Animation translates well to a small screen. When you look at Walt Disney or Chuck Jones – you know, Bugs Bunny – there really isn’t any difference if you watch on a very big screen or a computer screen.
I gave up on the big screen. The Witching Hour was at Warner Bros. for 10 years and it just didn’t work out.
Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer’s daily routine, unless you’re Dominick Dunne, isn’t exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.
I make video art pieces, take photographs, and dabble in acting ever since my screen test for ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ with Steven Spielberg. But music is my first love and always will be my priority.
I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them.
I hope ‘Chess’ will hit the big screen. It seems a natural to me. Good venues, tunes, and politics.
I find that the skills and the muscularity required to be on stage, you need to keep those up – I do, personally, in order to maintain your ability to perform on screen. You don’t want to always be working in the one medium.
Making a movie like ‘Felony’ is hard work because you’re really putting your own ideas on the screen. You can’t hide behind some other person’s script; you’re saying, ‘This is my brain, and I want you to know what I think’.’
Anyone who has watched ‘Premam’ in theaters would understand the camaraderie between the members on and off the screen and that’s what translated to that brilliance.
I think I might want to get into development, as in developing my own sort of piece, whether it be for the stage or the big screen or for television.
Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor’s Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there.
