Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher.
When you're a working actor and you're happy to be one, you can't focus all your energy on acting because you will go crazy. You have to focus as much energy as you can away from yourself.
Writing for film is so different; it's such an act of submission, both on a monetary and time level, because you basically kind of have to just set everything else aside - it's like suddenly getting a temp job that requires you to work 16-hour days. Also just aesthetically, you have to completely leave all of your ego out of it.
The one and only thing over which you have complete and total control is how you focus your own mind. Luckily, this determines everything else.
Acting is everything to me and it's at the core of every decision. Whatever importance costumes, details, lights, camera, dialogue and everything else have, if the acting is bad, cheap, or overdone everything else is just gone.
Stage fright and acting blocks are just unfocused or misplaced energy. Everything is possible if you know how and where to focus to invite inspiration...Inspiration is a sensation in the body. It can be invited upon your will and willingness to experience it taking you over.
Humor requires perspective. Perspective requires focus. Focus requires balance. Balance requires attention to the present moment. In the 'now' one is freed from labels. Success and failure, good luck and bad—they're all constructs of your mind.
It is about doing everything you can so your body can perform at the highest level.
I was new to acting on a stage in a narrative as opposed to acting on a stage as a stand-up. And like everything else it's just like comfort level. The first time I did stand-up I was at a place called the B3 in New York on Third and Avenue B and I not only didn't take the mic out of the stand, but I clutched the stand of the entire time.
It's just important that you plan your week with food and everything to try and be on your highest level on a matchday.
To me, the producing falls into the same as acting. It requires so much time out of your life, and I take it very personally, I realize, so if I do something, it just has to be something I love and I don't want anyone else to do.
You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.
To concentrate implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point; but thought wanders away... Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attention, which means giving all your energy, the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, to attending.
I do focus my energy on music, but it's just the way that the industry works. I kind of have to take what I can get when it comes to acting and show up so they'll hire me. And music I get to do when I have time. It's not that I focus less, it's just the way it works.
Doing a musical is not just acting. It's total theater. When you have to justify the enormous projection of energy it takes to just go into song and dance, you realized why it's such a humbling experience every time you go into a show.