A Quote by James Wan
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.
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If you give the actors a problem 'I'm not getting something out of the scene' and it's the writing, we just don't have the scene, if you give them the problem and just give them some key thoughts they can bring some great solutions to the equation too. So if it's just not perfect, or I'm not getting all I can, I'll open it up to them and say let's talk about it.
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.
To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.
General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene.
My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.
When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
When you sit down to write a film, you direct it in your head. If you are writing a scene, you are watching the scene. And maybe it's different when you are writing a novel because you are thinking of it in terms of being read. But films are only consumed one way - through the eyes and the ears.
Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time.
So you have the challenge of just learning the lines, period, and not only learning them, but learning them to the extent that you assimilate them, so that you're not worried about what the next word is coming out of your mouth when it comes to doing a scene. And you're also in the trenches with the writers, just in the wonderful kind of back and forth of how is it best to say something, even if it involves four or five words. I love that kind of thing.
I've never done a kissing scene with someone even when you're friends. I mean that sort of even makes it weirder. If you don't know them or like them at all, you can kind of put some weird like ... I don't know. It's the strangest thing. Look at the person next to you and imagine making out with them now, while I film it.
I always thought the piano scene was kind of unique to shoot because we were actually able to film with the playback of the actual song. And that was quite amazing because it almost made it easier - music is usually something that is added after filming has finished so to be able to shoot a scene with music was really wonderful.
In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.
It's one of those scenarios where no, I never imagined that I'd be directed in a love scene - not even a love scene because it's kind of a hard-core sex scene because it's kind of just purely played for this carnal venting.
Directing is kind of like acting through other people. You see moments and you see things and if you don't see the actors hit it, you paint in those little spaces and tell them what direction to go in.
My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.
I see how people boss other actors around to try to get a scene favorable to them. I absolutely just never engage in doing that. If someone's going to do it to me, I just let them have it.
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