A Quote by Grant Heslov
As a writer, you know what the purpose of the scene is. It really has nothing to do with the actor so you have to really get out of that space because for actors it's a micro-focus and then you figure out your arc through what the writers have given you to say. But that arc is just one little piece of the huge arc of the whole film. It took a while to get out of that.
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What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.
When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what's happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what's happening.
Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.
I have to go through that arc with Dolores, and I didn't know what my arc was going to be. We found out episode by episode, and the more it went on, the more I felt a change in myself and allowed myself to be strong and to get angry and to access emotions that I don't normally, and I think a lot of women don't because we're kind of conditioned not to. It's freed me in a way, and it made me find a strength in myself.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
You have to understand that when you're a voice actor on an animated film, you're really just a tiny little piece of this huge process. And when you finally get to see the finished product and see all of the wonderful work that the animators & the designers & the writers did to make your character stand out, it's just so touching, so humbling.
To me, great writing - and when you can really make something wonderful out of it as an actor - is when your character has a sense of self-awareness. It doesn't necessarily have to arc. It doesn't have to grow.
Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc.
I think, as an actor, I would find it a little run-of-the-mill doing procedurals where it's the same sort of thing week in and week out. Your character doesn't get to grow very much, which, purely from an actor's point of view, you want to see an arc of your character.
I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!
I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character's arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you're sort of powerless to what happens.
Having been a theater person first, you have the whole character, and you see the arc of the character in a play. And then when you do a movie, you have the whole character - or, if it's a small role, there's not much arc, but you see what the whole part is.
A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.
I think there was a lot of working out the arc of how Manny [Daniel Radcliffe] talks. Scene to scene [in the Swiss army Man], if I would start talking a little too well, they would come in and say like, "Hey, you need to [dial back] your ability to speak" - things like that.
I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.
The visual stuff just lives inside of you. As far as really being able to take care of an actor on a set, how to talk to an actor, and how to get what you need out of a scene is probably where I might know a thing or two. Although, in TV, the actors are pretty much left alone. It's really the writer's medium more than anything.
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