A Quote by Doug Liman

I had one scene in 'Invisible' with 12 actors delivering dialog at the same time. — © Doug Liman
I had one scene in 'Invisible' with 12 actors delivering dialog at the same time.
I love actors and I understand what has to happen within a scene. Any scene is an acting scene and actors never act alone, so there has to be an interchange. If it's a dialog scene, if it's a love scene, it doesn't matter because you need to establish a situation.
I can pick up a screenplay and flip through the pages. If all I see is dialog, dialog, dialog, I won't even read it. I don't care how good the dialog is - it's a moving picture. It has to move all the time... It's not the stage. A movie audience doesn't have the patience to sit and learn a lesson. Their eyes need to be dazzled. The writer is the most important element in the entire film because if it ain't on the page it ain't going to be on the screen.
When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.
One of the things I tried to do is to kind of talk my actors through the scene, but at the same time let them know how I plan to shoot the film and just give them an insight into the way I'm thinking, so that when they're acting out their scene, they can kind of see it in their minds' eyes.
I was 12 years old when I had my first job, delivering packages.
Some directors don't say much. Michael Mann, for example. I remember on 'The Insider' he never had much to say. He would do a scene, just kind of nod, and then set it up to do it again. And you might do a scene 10 or 12 times or more, the same little 31-second bit. And you could tell he wasn't satisfied, but he wouldn't say much.
There's a tacit belief that actors shouldn't write books, they're sort of allowed to direct movies but there will be a lot of skepticism, and they shouldn't do artwork or music. There are these invisible roadblocks to gain entree to these areas for actors, and you kind of have to crash through those invisible barriers.
There's this scene in "The Night of the Hunter" when the kids are downstairs, and you have the feeling that they're both in a room and at the same time it looks remote. And you wonder, How can you give the effect of both "inside" and "outside" at the same time. And you realize, by watching it many times, that around the scene there's this black edging.
We're interested by public personas and private personas, otherwise we wouldn't put on with actors rambling on with the same kind of stuff, over and over again, saying variations of the same thing. I'm always amazed by how fascinated people still are by actors because it's the same version of events that actors describe, all the time.
They were looking for actors - real actors - who could play instruments. There was a lot of improvisation and scene work involved in addition to the music. The auditions went on for a long time.
But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...
My first band was an Argentinian folk group when I was 10. When I was 12 I had my electric guitar, and by the time I was 13, the Beatles came into the scene, and that was over. So I have a mixture of all these traditions, and I think that's who I am, a mixture of everything.
'Everwood' I think provides a unique feeling, an emotional experience. And other shows on TV don't have the acting talent to do that. Each one of our actors can do a serious scene and a humorous scene, and can do it all within the same sequence. They can go from a heartbreaking moment to a humorous moment.
The first time I ever heard professional actors delivering lines that I wrote was completely surreal and was just a gigantic moment in my life. It was just a little bit mind-blowing and completely strange to have something that had been on my computer being said out loud.
I want to attack and to lead my life with vigor, but I'm in the watching stage at the moment. Younger actors feel pressure to bring a pop to every scene; as the roles get bigger, I'm finding you can add layers and do less scene-to-scene.
I came in rather late in the casting process of Reaper. I believe they had all the other roles cast. They were having trouble finding the devil. They had seen almost 100 actors for the role. I got the script and I liked it - it was clever and witty and very, very funny, and a nice, fresh take on an old story. I went in and did a scene for the producers, the kitchen scene from the pilot where I'm cooking a chicken-fried steak. At the end of it, they all had a smile on their face, and they realized they had found their devil.
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