A Quote by Billy Crystal
We were in front of a live audience and I would be acting with the man who was playing my lover, and we used those words, and the audience would titter and laugh, and make me uncomfortable doing the scenes. ... I wanted to sort of stop and yell at them, "What's so funny? What's the matter with you people? Grow up!" It made me very self-conscious at times.
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Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.
I wanted to be a pro volleyball player, and I fell in love with performance and audience response. The pressure of performing and doing something that I love doing in front of people who were grateful to see it. That relationship sort of worked out to be acting and theatre.
Comedy is a serious business. It's frustrating when I can't find the right thing that makes the crew laugh. If I don't make them laugh, I get very disappointed in myself. You don't really have a live audience, so you just depend on the crew to let you know if you're doing something funny.
I would say I'm self-taught, but Corinne Day made me less conscious of myself. I was 15, and she'd make me take off my top, and I'd cry. After five years, you get used to it, and you're not self-conscious anymore.
The thing that struck me is so many people that said, "Hey, I've been watching you since I was 12, and I'm 25 now." It was a weird shift, because you start off fighting for an audience based on doing something so strange that only you find funny, and it's weird when other people find it funny. Those people aren't always ready to laugh yet, and there's a sort of standoffish quality to it.
I really don't act. I just live what George and I are doing. It has to make some sort of sense to me, or it won't ring true. No matter what the script says, there's no audience and no footlights and no camera for me. There's no make-believe. It's for real.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
After my day at the Uni winded up, I used to go and perform gigs - I used to look forward to playing in front of an audience. It was when people came to me and gave me positive feedback that I got the confidence to pursue this as a dream.
I make some movies for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine that I'm an audience member. I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience. There are other types of genre films that I need to be able to direct from the audience, to be right next to you watching the picture being made.
I was afraid no one would laugh, and I wanted to pretend I wasn't noticing the audience. I didn't want the audience to get the idea I was telling a joke and waiting for a laugh.
My dream role would be a role that is entertaining and 'massy,' and it should be able to make people laugh and cry and make the audience scared of me and then make them fall in love with me again.
Every morning when I woke up, I would pray, 'I have to throw today, please let there be no pain.' Those were very gloomy days. Meanwhile, the atmosphere around me had become, 'Is he faking an injury?' 'Is it a mental problem?' Those words made it extremely difficult for me to stop and rest, and it really took a toll on me emotionally.
Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people's performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment. Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.
. . . I felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience . . .. To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.
The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don't get people to laugh unless they surrender - surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they're with you. And they listen to you if you've got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they're your friends.
I like getting up in front of an audience. It's fun when you go to a baseball game and the crowd is cheering you. I can't deny it. And it's very funny, too. Sometimes you're shy; you go somewhere and everyone's looking at you, so you feel a little self-conscious.
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