I’m happy to have a physical part in ‘High Tension,’ in ‘Hereafter,’ and in a lot of French movies and Belgian movies. But its not by chance directors choose me for physical parts. I like to do that. I like to tell a story also with the body. It’s important, because you can tell a lot of things.
I love the Kathryn Bigelow example: she didn’t just do war movies – she did them better than other directors.
I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish – we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.
I wanted to trust in my partners and the directors and producers and do the best I can to deliver what I could deliver.
On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.
There are cliques in Bollywood, and people stick together, but I have always tried to stick to my work. As an industry, Bollywood is very competitive, and I’m very competitive as a person, but I’ve never been a part of any clique, and I’ve always worked with all actors and directors, all camps.
There is a dearth of senior artistes in Kollywood and it is up to the directors to utilise my potential and experience.
I’ve worked with some incredibly difficult directors but my understanding is that a lot of the best people are driven from a place of being extremely challenging and dark within their way.
I feel that I don’t have to wait around for good scripts anymore, that I can get things moving more quickly. I can ring up directors I like and say I’m keen to work with them, which is pretty great.
Well, this is the second time I’ve done New Directors.
Control is the wrong word. The practice is very much about sharing, and, in any creative practice, some individuals, whether partners or directors, are much closer to certain projects than I could ever be.
A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor’s input.
As a director, just to be able to jump in to do something that’s different, and to explore comedy and be challenged by that, is great. Some directors never get that opportunity.
I don’t know what it is, exactly, but there’s a negative drag on film sets after the second week or so, a mutinous vibe because the infinite capacities of the directors and everybody else become quite finite and everybody’s under the gun and it becomes work.
I don’t want to work with directors who use music only to accentuate sound effects. I want to work with people who give music the value it deserves.
Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It’s a great relief to feel that you’re working with someone rather than for someone.
Casting directors I don’t think are the best in Mexico at street casting. Whereas, I think, in New York and in L.A., that’s more common; not so in Mexico. So it’s up to you as a director in a lot of ways to go out and do that.
I’ve never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television, I always did what I wanted to do, and if I couldn’t, I didn’t do it. It was a freedom that, these days, young directors starting out don’t have.
A lot of directors in my experience are very receptive. They see what you do first, and then they want to find a place to put the camera, and they tweak you here and there.
There aren’t many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don’t speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself – people were curious about what I was doing.
Since 2000, I’ve been based in Paris at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it’s a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.
I’m not being offered a constant stream of wonderful parts with wonderful directors that would keep me away from the theatre. When they turn up, I do them.
There’s a wonderful stable of directors I’ve worked with, and work I’ve done that has dignity and meaningfulness.
All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That’s what I love.
As an actress, I think it’s important to look back and realize that we aren’t always quite as original as we think we are. There’s this grand, textured history for us over the last 100 years of incredible writers, directors, and performers.
I love westerns. John Ford is one of the 10 best directors.
You have great athletic directors, you let them run it; you keep yourself informed, but I’m not the athletic director. I’m the president of the university.
Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.
I guess I like a lot of directors. Or at least I try to.
I used to play a lot of foreign women in my youth because I was prettier then. I would go for interviews, and directors would look at these sultry, exotic looks, hear this clipped accent and think the two don’t go together. So they would give me a foreign accent.
As far as directors, I’m a big fan of any kind of Billy Wilder stuff. Anything he does.
I’m very interested in directing actors – many directors direct cameras.
To be honest with you, a lot of directors can be very lazy.
I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn’t intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, ‘Well if I’m going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.’
Do I feel that white directors have to tell only white stories? No. Do I feel that black filmmakers should only tell stories about black people? No. If we say that, then that means Asian people cannot write about anybody but Asians. I don’t think a woman should only write about women.
I’ve always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it’s hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had.
I’m trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.
Clark Gregg and I are around the same age. He has been an actor and is a writer. But with a first-time director, there is a way to talk about things they might not know. Because Clark was an actor, though, he knew more about the process than most first-time directors.
Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.
I feed off variety. I don’t want to repeat myself if I can help it, but once they’ve seen you doing one thing, directors often just want you to do it again.
Know your lines; otherwise, have an open mind because you want to get lost in the moment. When you have talented actors and directors to work with, then it’s pretty easy to do.
There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master’s degree program, and we want them – to expose them to everything.
I was at the National Film School and was a cinematographer there. I got quite a lot of experience on documentary film-making and with directors who were interesting – maybe they weren’t using scripts or were using non-actors.
You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it’s like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
We all like indie directors – heck, I even married one… but we’re divorced now.
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.
What I found about ‘Nashville’ coming in is it’s about these small performances. It can be on a big stage but detailed, small, heartfelt, real performances from musicians and singers. So if you try to do something bloated or showy, the directors dial us in and let us know.
What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven’t seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn’t a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.
I’ve always thought that as long as directors and casting directors don’t see me as just Harry Potter, I’ll be OK. People have shown a lot of faith in me, and I owe them a huge debt. They’re letting me prove that I’m serious about this.
