A Quote by Kevin Spacey
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.
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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.
Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance.
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.
If you mess up the performance on stage, you do it again the next night. You're like alright, you let yourself off the hook, and you've got to go back in there. Whereas, with a film, I would go home and be like, "Well, I've ruined the arc of the character forever. That scene is never going to work. I know because I can never shoot it again." So, it's all miserable, but in different ways.
Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you've got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene.
With stage, it's very tough. You have to have a lot of stamina - you're doing eight shows a week for 19 weeks. The same thing, every night. Twice a day some days. The only full day I actually had off was Sunday. And every night is different.
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.
Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.
I have to learn sometimes 25 pages at a time. The takes can last 20 minutes - we do big, long takes. You always hope that you get a couple of days in between so you can learn the next one because you can't keep everything in your head at the one time.
Learn to manage your mind. Do not let a situation lure you into thinking negatively. Sometimes you will fail but you'll learn for the next time. Every time a negative thought comes at you ZAP IT! Replace it with positive thoughts. That takes energy but the result will be stamina, positive stamina, the necessary ingredient for success.
Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I'm convinced she'll get away with it. It's the only way to get through life.
The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie.
It's a do-it-yourself kind of era with these pieces and bits of technology called iPhones. You can film your own stuff and throw it up on YouTube, I think is just a fantastic novelty and opportunity for young actors, young filmmakers to learn and hone their craft.
In '7th Heaven,' more than 'Teen Wolf,' was that I got to learn more about my character. In 'Teen Wolf,' I'd always get a new arc for that character every season, which was discovery for me.
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.
With 'Journey,' we created an emotional arc for two different scenarios. So, if you play alone, it's a good game. You have what we think is a complete emotional arc. You will feel, I guess, a sense of transformation in the single-player. Because it's a hero's journey.
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