A Quote by Jeremy Piven

I was in a play directed by my father, and I was doing a fight scene, and the choreography went haywire, and I flew backward over a chair and ripped my thumb all the way to my wrist and had to have surgery to sew up all the tendons in there.
My first five years, I missed a ton of games. I had elbow surgery twice; I had wrist surgery, knee surgery.
This past Thanksgiving, my father was at the farm, and I had all 11 dogs in the house with a father who never allowed dogs in the house. And he got up to leave the table and came back and Solomon was in his chair. And he says, "This dog is in my chair." And I said, "It's the other way around, you're sitting in his chair."
I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.
It's funny, because it's like the fight when you watch it, it's probably going to be like five minutes, but it's taken us like a month to shoot it so I think what was really interesting was that instead of going through an entire fight sequence, you're doing one or two moves over and over and over, so I'd say it's less exhausting than actually training, because you're not really constantly going over the choreography, like the whole entire thing with everybody. You're just doing that one part that they need in the shot.
Basically, my parents messed up because it was the Sixties, and they both had affairs, but they had a great love for each other. I saw that when my father flew over from Los Angeles when he knew my mother was going to die.
Fight choreography has far more in common with dance choreography than it does with actual martial arts. You learn martial arts techniques, but those are just the movements for the choreography. You're working with a partner in choreography. You're working on timing.
I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn't afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.
Well, for me, the real excitement of doing physical things in films, whether you're talking about a fight scene or a stunt sequence or even a love scene, for that matter, is by necessity it has to be choreographed very much like a dance. That being said, you have to rehearse it over and over again and find a mathematical precision.
When you're doing a play and you're afraid of a scene, that's the scene you should embrace, because that's the scene that will tell you something about the play.
Generally, when you prepare for a fight scene, you have a day before, where you're going through hours of choreography and getting comfortable with the different moves.
When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this
When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this.
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.
You know the first time I sat in the chair I felt anything but up, it was very emotional for me. I had a chair in my hotel room, a chair at rehearsal, and I was trying to spend as much time as I could in the chair.
My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.
Shooting a fight is like shooting any other scene. You have to tell a story using a very specific choreography.
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