You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.
Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.
I find myself improvising a lot. But, sometimes I'll come us with a chorus or just one line and it will sort of hang out for a long time before it get's flushed out into a real living song.
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
I detest . . . anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating.
I came up poor. My mother only had a fourth-grade education. My dad didn't have any education at all. But they were very structured. They worked hard. You know, they didn't complain. They didn't murmur. And they believe in the Christ.
When I started out in films, I didn't know any of the languages I worked in.
I think what happened with 9/11 is that people sort of felt that it came from nowhere. Whereas I think now we understand the roots are very deep. I say it's like revolutionary Communism, something that is going to have to be knocked out over a very long period of time. This strain of extremism continues to be very strong, whether it's in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Yemen, or any of these places.
I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.
Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.
Apart from films and television I have explored behind-the-camera work, and worked as a script consultant at Phantom films.
When you've worked as long as I have, which I'm truly grateful for, you go in and out of these different environments. Sometimes it's not so much fun or easy or healthy. Sometimes you're fighting a lot of things off-camera that have nothing to do with the work on-camera.
The weird thing with 'Kismet' is that Vincente Minnelli didn't know what to do with a Cinemascope camera for that film - so he never moved it! It's like in the old days when sound first came in and was so complicated that the camera just sat there. There are hardly any close-ups in 'Kismet,' so everything's at a bit of a distance.
the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.
People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually.
Where does Terry live? Somewhere deep inside. So I just let that come out and try to make something out of it without worrying about techniques or rules or any of that stuff. Just do it, you know. As long as it doesn't burn or get deleted, you know, then somebody will find it someday and I will have left something that I think is beautiful.