A Quote by David Mamet

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***. — © David Mamet
Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
The stage is the opposite: you are talking loud so you can project to the back row and you know the whole play. In a movie, you are scene-to-scene; you only know the purpose of that scene. On the stage, that is artistic science. It is real, it is loving, it is truthfully you. It is two different formulas to make two different art pieces, but it is all about truth.
What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show."
Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.
I have a Crock-Pot, and I have an All-Clad slow-cooker - I have two different ones. The All-Clad is larger, for maybe a gang of people, and my Crock-Pot's a little smaller if I'm just making something for myself.
The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party.
Don't start a scene where two people are talking about jumping out of a plane. Start the scene having already jumped. If you are scared, look into your partner's eyes. You will feel better.
When a teacher tries to teach something to the entire class at the same time, chances are, one-third of the kids already know it; one-third will get it; and the remaining third won’t. So two-thirds of the children are wasting their time.
How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.
Cliché openings in fantasy can include an opening scene set in a battle (and my peeve is that I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle) or with a pastoral scene where the protagonist is gathering herbs (I didn’t realize how common this is).
Befikre' is not just about two characters. There is another very prominent third character, and that is Paris.
have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?
The third point is that for some time the UN has been talking about helping Afghanistan in the reconstruction of the country but there has never been any real commitment by the international community to provide resources for that.
Occasionally, as an actor, you're not... Sometimes, at least for me, I'm not fully in the groove until the second or third take, in which I would not want to just stop. If it's a scene that takes a lot of work and time, sometimes the scene gets better with time, and sometimes it gets exhausted. I think it just depends on the scene.
I love getting ready to do a scene, and thinking about it, and talking about it. But the rest of the time, I'm so nervous and obsessed. I'm just tearing my hair out in the trailer. The whole time I'm really tense.
I've always noticed talking about lyrics is like talking about a duality. It's like a Gemini time every time I talk about one line. Because each line, of course, means different things to different people, millions of interpretations. With me, I always see two sides. I just see things split into two.
I'm fortunate in that I'm what you call a utility player, in that I can take a scene, if there's five or six minor characters in a scene, that need voice and personality [and] I can supply those characters.
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