A Quote by John Patrick Shanley
If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks. You need the script. I could build the house, but I have to know how.
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If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks.
I knew it would be hard work, but that's the reason you're an actor. If you're a bricklayer, you don't want to just show up at someone's house and put a little row of bricks around their garden. You want to build a building.
I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'
I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house.
I really wanted the house to be a character. And I knew, I said, I'll produce that one, but if I direct it, I need to build a house.
The one thing you know when you're shooting a script - and I've been on a lot of sets - is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.
What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
You need a blueprint to build a house because you need to know how far the concrete is going to be poured and you need to know how think the walls have to be.
The way I pick movies is, first, if the script is any good. Then, if the script is good, who else is in it, the director, the producer, all that. If you have all that, there's a chance the movie will be great. If the script isn't right, or the director or cast isn't right, you've got no shot in hell.
The trade schools closed, so young Black men don't know how to build a house, or put a roof on a house or build cabinets anymore. We used to go to school to learn how to make ourselves useful in the trades. Then a man by the name of Samuel Gompers, a Jewish fellow, brought tradespeople from Eastern Europe, unions started and kept us out. We're having a problem on the national level, on the state level and on the local level because it's telling us that the White man doesn't want you anymore. You have no place in his house anymore except to be a little flunky around the door.
I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.
The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.
I read the script for 'Somnia' when I was filming 'Oculus,' and I remember calling my manager going, 'I really need to do this movie,' and he's like, 'How about you finish this one first and then you see it?' I was like, 'I don't need to. I don't need to. You need to read this. I need to do this movie. The script is very good.'
When you're, like, writing a Python script, it doesn't feel like you're doing something to someone. You just don't think, 'How could this actually harm people?'
Normally, when I read a script, it takes me two and a half hours. I usually put it down and come back to it. So, I know if I can read a script in one sitting, it's a fantastic script.
I was going to do a big radio show, and I said to my driver, 'Radio can wait, take me to the Full House house.' It literally was a drive-by. I photobombed the Full House house yesterday. I took like 20 pictures because I thought I didn't look good in any of these - you can't see the house! You gotta really show that that's the house!
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