A Quote by James Franco
When we were doing 'Freaks and Geeks', I didn't quite understand how movies and TV worked, and I would improvise even if the camera wasn't on me. I thought I was helping the other actors by keeping them on their toes, but nobody appreciated it when I would trip them up. So I was improvising a little bit back then, but not in a productive way.
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The first feature film I did, when I did 'Night Shift,' I improvised quite a bit because I would improvise at the audition, so sometimes I would return to the original lines, and then when I was on set, I would improvise even more.
I would go with my husband to the tailors where he gets his shirts made, and I would watch the bespoke process. I would ask them, "Would you be able to make that for me?" And they would always say, "Well, yes, but no." They were very French about it. I decided I would just do it for myself. And I started doing that. Then other people would notice, and want it. So I started doing things for friends, little pieces, and my own line grew that way.
You work with every actor differently. It's like if you're a mother, if you have children, some children need more discipline. Other children you back off of a little bit and let them be. It's the same way with actors. Some actors need a lot of hand holding. Other actors like to be let be and you let them go. Some actors like to be nudged just a little bit. Some actors don't mind line readings.
A lot of my inspiration comes from the movies and TV, watching other people doing things that I one day hope to have the opportunity to do. The other sides would be my friends and family, people who have supported me and always been there for me. I want to do a good job for them and show them they were right for believing in me.
All entertainment is an element of fantasy because you are seeing something that is not quite real. There is no such thing as reality TV. Reality TV would be to leave a camera on in front of someone's house. Just leave it on. Then whenever the person comes or goes walking the dog or getting groceries, that's what it would be like. Any time you make an edit, you've lost reality TV. You're either compressing time or extending. That's a term that's been overused and overexposed. I think it's fantasy movies that take the fantasy of movies even further.
The way I see it is, you can be a character on a TV show for years, then the TV show gets cancelled and your favorite actress or favorite comedian, you don't see them for a little while and then you see them back doing something else. You can still be enjoying them performing on TV.
When I worked with Chevy Chase, Michael Ritchie would say, "Just ad lib and try to break me up. Just insult me. Anything." When we were doing his close-up, or when my back was to the camera, I would come up with jokes or quips or anything, to get a real reaction out of him. He was smart enough to know that was gold. So it was great fun working with him and Michael, and getting to see how the two worked together. I think Fletch and Clark Griswold were Chevy's two best roles. He's so incredibly talented and still vastly underused.
I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries - on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn't think filming them was helping much, so I wondered how we could use TV for them, to teach them.
When I was a child, I would draw these little stick-figures, and my mom would put them up all over the loft and tell me how wonderful they were. Then you get out there into the harsh reality of the world, and you realize not everybody loves every little thing you do the way your mom did.
I worked as bricklayer, operating forklifts, building scenes for TV shows. I did everything. When I worked at the TV, I told them I would come back one day to give interviews, and they laughed at me.
The thing I was up against in documentary films - was trying to get non-actors to convincingly play themselves in a way I'd come to know before the camera started rolling. And many non-actors can't do that convincingly, even if they just have to play themselves - they can't be naturalistic. And I would always want to recreate something I'd witnessed them do or say, and it just would be incredibly difficult because of the fact they weren't actors.
You work with every actor differently. It's like if you're a mother, if you have children, some children need more discipline. Other children, you back off of a little bit and let them be. It's the same way with actors. Some actors need a lot of hand holding. Other actors like to be let be, and you let them go.
In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.
I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.
So what that he had children with other women? He was always truthful, he always told me when another child was on the way. He would even bring the babies to me when they were born, and sometimes I would even bring them up myself.
So when I was working with Amy Winehouse on "Back To Black," you know, she had all these beautiful songs, incredibly well-written and just her on an acoustic, nylon-string guitar. And she'd play them for me, and then I would kind of drum up my idea of what I thought - make a demo with what I thought the drums should be doing, the guitars - like, quite a crude demo.
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