If I do a bit on stage, I prepare too much. Those bits are all really, really carefully written, and overwritten, and researched. I really don’t feel like I can wing it. So I write it out word for word, and when I’m onstage I’ll improvise around it.
Part of the mystique of shows like ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ is the idea that they begin with a couple of plot lines, and then a bunch of geniuses improvise dialogue. It’s not quite that unstructured and loose. It makes for a good urban myth, but everything’s a little more tightly scripted and programmed than that.
I’m not a classical player. I don’t want to be a classical player. I love to improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.
I can’t just play in a rock band. The National is a great, exciting band to play in. We improvise a lot onstage, and it’s very intense, but after a while, I crave other kinds of experiences.
My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.
We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don’t just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.
I like doing them and they’re ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don’t have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They’re really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.
I’m not a good improv-er, which is what a lot of comedic actors are really good at. I have failed miserably when I’ve been asked to improvise.
If I improvise at all on ‘The Goldbergs,’ it’s with the physical stuff.
It’s fun to improvise, but I still think it’s better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.
I also think if you’re an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you’re just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that’s not in the commercial they think you’re a genius.
Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it.
I wrote my book ‘The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue’ completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn’t go too far out of the box.
See, that’s the thing: I’m not one of those actors who thinks, ‘God, I’ve got to improvise and make it my own.’ No, my first job as an actor is to take what’s written and make it work. And then, if they want me to improvise, I’ll do that.
It’s always fun to improvise.
Liquid architecture. It’s like jazz – you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it’s a way of – for me, it’s a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
A major component of jazz is improvisation, which forces you to stay in the moment because you never know what will be coming up. There’s a lot of freedom and space available as you improvise around the chord changes.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
‘When Harry Met Sally’ will endure. It will be the standard rom-com that others will improvise on for years to come.
In the kind of films that I do, there is an extremely limited number of people that can improvise. The reason the ensemble continues in the movies is because those are the people that can do that kind of work. It’s not just an accident those people are in the film.
If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.
My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That’s the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.
It was actually quite easy to work with Uggie, because he’s a really well trained dog. Very talented. I just had to follow him a little bit, improvise a little bit. Sometimes he’d follow me. Especially because of the sausages I had in my pocket.
Everything is real but we write the jokes too and improvise them.
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