A Quote by Gillian Jacobs
I think when you have some success as a kid, your notion of being a good actor is pleasing the director, doing exactly what they tell you to do.
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There was a choice of being a director who's more familiar with the technicality of doing a movie, like learning about the camera and filters and setup, or being a director who can actually talk to actors. And I always wanted to be an actor's director.
Film is such a director's medium; you're really in their hands in terms of the real storytelling. As an actor, you can give a performance moment to moment and some of your takes will be used and some of them won't. I think there are great films you can make with bad performances, and vice versa. There are all combinations of those things. It's really down to the director what happens, I think, so that's why it's really good to work with very talented, bold directors.
You can be playing a line some way and the director wants you to change that, or you can disagree. But I always think that the creative conversation between director and actor is what leads to good work.
I don't know how you can tell a good actor in the movies. I really don't. I think you simply just do the part and hope to God that the director has a good cutter and a good editor, and it'll all get cut and put together so that you look good in it.
If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall.
Talking about the fact that I get depressed or that I've had some suicidal issues in my life is not easy. I don't know of many comedians who are going all in on that. In some sense, I think I've maybe sacrificed some momentum doing that. In another sense, I'm in a place where if I can talk about that and if it helps some kid in a way that gives them some help that wasn't available to me when I was a kid, then I gotta do that. Put being a good person first. If you have a platform, use it for stuff that's noble and good and worth putting out in the world.
As an actor, it's always important to understand what the director is after. That, to me, is my job. When I'm acting, I like to ask a lot of questions and understand exactly why the director is doing what they're doing, so that I can provide him or her with the ingredients that they need to get the scene that they want. It's not to challenge them, in any way. It's just so that I can do my job best.
There's no such thing as an actor giving positive criticism to a director. The minute you say 'Don't you think it would look nicer...', that director's going to hate your guts. Particularly if it's a good idea.
There's no such thing as an actor giving positive criticism to a director. The minute you say 'Don't you think it would look nicer', that director's going to hate your guts. Particularly if it's a good idea.
A lot of times I don't know if I trust the director to tell that film's story. Or I think it's inappropriate for a male director to tell a female story, or a white director to tell a black story. Everyone walks away from a movie differently, because you're relating it to your own life.
The first time you have a little success, some good feedback, you start imagining having a career, or being a professional musician. But while being creative, or doing creative work, is very natural for humans, to think of that as your main occupation, that's a really important transition.
Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.
An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable.
I think acting helps me as a director no matter what. There is something about being reminded about the vulnerability it takes to be an actor and what I'm really asking of actors every day when I'm on set as a director that I think it's a really good reminder.
I learned so much from my life as an actor, as a kid actor through being an adult actor, and then becoming a writer and producer and doing animation.
I think my family's watched me over the years in my career, in my pursuit of my career, and they've seen the challenges and the struggles that come with being an actor, with being a writer and a director, and the challenges of morphing my career in from just being an actor into a writer/director.
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