A Quote by James Wolk
With 'The Crazy Ones,' we were really encouraged to improv and go off script.
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It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works, as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set. So, to have people around you who encourage improv is really exciting.
I love improv. 'Crazy, Stupid, Love,' the script was really great, but the directors were open to letting you try different things. And that felt like a muscle I hadn't exercised in a really long time.
It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.
Any good movie or script usually, if they're doing their job, gives the highest platform possible for an actor to leap off of, and that script was very high up there. It was a very smart, tight script. There was a lot of improv, as well, once we got to the set, but a lot of the original script was also in there.
You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.
Certain movies like 'Wag The Dog,' we used improv on every scene that we did. Pretty much, we would shoot from the script and then some stuff that we came up with in rehearsal, and then we'd have at least one or two takes where we completely went off the script and just flew by the seat of our pants.
Mark and jay Duplass really like to improvise. Even if we beg them to go back to the script, they invariably ask us to go "off the rails," as they like to call it. It's just the way they work. You get a full written script. And it's really, really, really good, so that's why it's kind of peculiar that they always want you to improvise, because if I wrote something that good, I would want everyone to stick to the dialogue that was written.
We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor.
Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.
I would ask my parents something, but then go to my siblings. We were encouraged to bounce ideas off everyone.
I think with a lot of comics, their gift is improv. They don't have a script. They'll have a couple of good ideas they start with, and go from there. And it's the same in wrestling.
[Before I Go To Sleep] script was a great journey with all the twists and turns that were kind of unexpected. I had to finish the script, and I thought if we can emulate this in the film, it's going to be a really good film.
It's so much harder to make a living off improv. Improv is so rarified and for such a specific audience.
Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
If you go back to the '80s, I didn't really know much about the characters. I knew what they did in the ring. I knew Hogan went off and spouted lots of crazy promos, and Ultimate Warrior did the same. They really were just characters.
We live in a time where improv is king and people love improv, and I think there's a time and a place for that and people who are really good at structuring improv.
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