When I take on a role, all I tend to do is get to know the script and ask millions of questions, and keep fine tuning what I think the character is trying to say.
I always get quite close to my script because I work quite hard on them.
I just have a belief that when there is a rare script out there that speaks to you, you have to stick with it. You have to.
I’d just love to have an audience and it’s the most fun in the world to get a new script every week and have the audience come in, and work with those actors.
With indies, all they have is their script and it’s very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they’re shooting.
Once you start to play together, vibing off each other in the scene, it’s not just the notes – it’s the music. The script might be the notes playing, but we’re making it music.
I’d love to do a sci-fi movie, a western, or an espionage thriller. But I’m not going to limit myself. If a good script comes along, I’m not going to discount it because it doesn’t fit into one of these genres.
Why not provoke some thought and get people talking about things? I like characters that are flawed because we all are. When people break up in a script, you think, Oh, right, there must be tears shed here. But maybe the fact of the matter is that they’re both laughing.
Of course you want to be good and you want to do the best you can, but I am inspired by great writing. If there’s something about the script, that’s what I go for, although I know that that doesn’t always translate because sometimes it’s about the vision of the director.
I’d love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.
For me, I need to fully immerse myself in a script to the point where I’m literally locking myself away for weeks at a time and I just write it. So I can write twelve to fifteen hours in a day, with breaks in between, obviously, but I need to just sort of live within the world of the script.
When an actor asks you to read his script, your heart sinks. The number of scripts I’ve been given by actors that are so unbelievably terrible!
I just think Australia tends to make very good movies, so if someone hands me an Australian or an American film script I would guess the Australian film would be more intriguing.
I like to make all kinds of movies. I’d do ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’ with the right script.
If I get a script that’s set in the jungle it goes to the bottom of the pile because I don’t think the playgrounds are going to be very good there! I’m really aware of how lucky I am but I have the kind of job where I can bring my child to work.
I don’t differentiate game design and script; it is one and only document. I think that one of the biggest problem with storytelling in games is that people tend to separate story and interactivity. Both should be conceived as one entity, each using the other.
If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.
There’s the occasional script that just hammers you, that you can’t shower off.
But you’re not necessarily ever going to be handed a script where you can say: it’s all done and perfect.
‘Sparkle’ fell into my lap. I had heard a little bit about it, that it was being redone in early 2011. I was just kind of like, ‘Oh, that would be really cool,’ and not really thinking too much about it, and then it came through my agency. I read it, I fell in love with the script and I went in to audition.
Certain movies like ‘Wag The Dog,’ we used improv on every scene that we did. Pretty much, we would shoot from the script and then some stuff that we came up with in rehearsal, and then we’d have at least one or two takes where we completely went off the script and just flew by the seat of our pants.
I prepared the script of ‘Pataas’, when working for ‘Kandireega’. When I approached Kalyan Ram with the script, he liked it and said that he will produce the film with a big hero.
When I read the script of ‘Karu,’ there was a spark within, and I instantly connected with the story. I was emotionally attached to the story. After we finished shooting, I was so attached to the kid who played my daughter, I wanted to adopt her. That’s how strong my emotional attachment was with the role and the story.
In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason – the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you’d be off mike and off camera.
In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.
I always believe that Kar-Wai has a complete script: he just doesn’t show it to us. He wants us to experience and explore the character. He gives you a lot of space, and you know every time will be a very long journey. You just live in the character, and that’s very different from other directors.
I definitely script things out. I definitely write things down and try to write jokes. Often, they’re terrible. I often write terrible, terrible jokes.
It was also wonderful to have the prospect of playing with Jack Nicholson. It was a terrific part, a terrific script, with Alexander Payne and Jack Nicholson. You can’t get any better than that!
I have always tried to work according to what affects me, to a script that I like because it touches me in some way, without deliberately pursuing a commercial career or a particular image.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s.
I always write the script by myself.
The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything. And if you don’t connect to that foundation, if you don’t believe in that and feel that you wanna spend three, four months of your life exploring it, then all of the other elements are secondary.
If making movies was easier, there’d be a lot more good movies. So you kind of learn that if it’s just a good script, or if it’s just a good producer, that’s not always enough. You need an entire team of creative people coming together.
I’ve never had a written script.
I do finish reading a script and say, Why are they making it and what are they talking about? I like to try and be responsible in my choices in that way.
I try to look at the whole thing and say ‘yes’ to the projects that I cannot stop thinking about. If I read a script and the subject stays with me – then that’s when I want to go to work.
To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: ‘We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,’ and when you ask what’s left, they say: ‘Well, the typing is very good.’
My plan was to go to New York and do some theatre, and then I got the script for ‘Psych.’ I was like, ‘Ahh – just as I thought I was out, you pulled me back in!’ I had a great meeting with the show creator and we laid out the parameters to make the show work: what I would do, what he would let me do.
They’ve got this house style which is writer driven. I heard of one person who sent his script in, and Karen Berger said there weren’t enough words in it. Put some more in.
Normally when I’m sent a script I’ll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I’ll go back and read it through again and look at the character.
I think that whenever there’s a good script we try to make that happen, but it’s all based off of a good story, a good script, but I don’t believe you should do it just because it’s African-American.
There have been a few times when I’ve read a script and it’s really cool but the girl character’s just kind of pathetic. It’s not going to do me any favours just being ‘the girl’ in a cool movie.
It all starts with the script: it’s not worth taking myself away from my family if I don’t have something I’m really passionate about.
I love Marlon Brando and James Dean. That was when it was all about the star and the script. Nowadays, everything has to be action-packed.
I’ve been pretty lucky – or slothful – in that I’ve never been a ‘career builder.’ I take the jobs that come along that feel right, and that’s left me fairly open to all genres, really. But with ‘Caprica,’ the complex, dark and very smart script was the draw.
The only description for Nolan in the script was that he’s a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin.
I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.
In general, when moviemakers talk to scientists, they usually see them as a resource to solve particular technical problems or script problems for them. So, something like: what sort of weaponry would aliens be able to wield?
I wanted to do a film for a while, but I never found a script that I felt I was going to be the right person for; because if you’ve never made a film, you’re not taught how to make a film, and you feel like you lack skills.
Every time I get a script it’s a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It’s like falling in love. You can’t give a reason why.
