A Quote by Dolph Lundgren
You really have to work hard to create a three-dimensional character. You have to rehearse and explore and take your time. You can't just memorize your lines and do it on the fly.
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In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen.
If I know I have to memorize lines, I'm really gonna try to memorize lines. It's hard for me sometimes, because somebody wrote these words and you're trying really hard to get them the way they said it.
Your work isn't just to learn and say the lines. Your work is to figure out what the chatter in your brain is, that's going on under the lines. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking or not speaking because your mind is working the way your character's mind would work.
They tell you to memorize your lines, follow your light, and hit your marks. Those are the three things that you shouldn't do. You should not learn your lines, you should not hit your mark, and you should never follow your light. Find your light - that's my opinion. Everyone else will tell me I'm wrong, but that's my opinion.
You really have to take your time; you have to know your character and your scene. The line you are about to say comes from the moment right before. It's not what's said, it's what is in between the spaces, it's what's in between the lines; that is the most important to play.
I've always been one to want to memorize everything and just be confident that I know all of the lines, but that changed. After college, I realized it's not as much about being off-book as it is about completely understanding the character and, more so, getting into the mind of your character.
For the longest time, the Asian-American community would talk about representation, but I think it's also about the freedom to really shape, create, and explore issues that are important to us, regardless of whether it's positive or negative, as long as it's three dimensional.
I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.
When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.
I think it's easy to forget just how massive the muscles in the legs are, and how much testosterone is released in your body when you make sure you work your legs hard. Some people's bodies just take a long time to grow, and if you're naturally thin there's no cheating. It takes time. Your body will only grow muscle at a certain rate for your genetics, so take your time and keep at it.
Practice your improv more than learn your lines. 'Cause there's no way you'll be able to learn all those lines in a short time. You have to realize what you know and what you don't know - and what you don't know, just come up with three alternate lines or improv that you can put in that spot.
I don't really rehearse, because I don't really step into action until I'm forced to. The only way I prepare is just by memorizing it backward and forward so that when I get in the room, I can become the character and not think about the lines so much.
Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.
Having been an actor, I always want to leave room for the actors to find their comfort zone, so I don't like to be too rigid in how I plan my shots. It's different if you have weeks to rehearse and you can rehearse on your sets or in your locations and you can plan that out with your actors, but in modern independent filmmaking, you don't really have that time. You have to have a certain level of improvisation.
Life as a performance is just a way to look at life choices as character choices. Every morning you choose what to wear, you choose how to wear your hair, you choose your friends, you more or less choose your profession, and how hard you will work at it. Those are all things that an actor decides about his character when he is performing, and they are things that we decide in life. We create our "character."
One thing I've really never had a problem with was memorizing lines. Most of the time I don't memorize the lines until we're on the set shooting the scene.
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