When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.
I'm a crier. I always cry. I cry at the dumbest things, too. This is why I sort of steer clear of movies and films that I know are going to be depressing. I don't care how many awards they've won - I know they're good. I don't need to watch them, because I don't want to be depressed, and I don't want to cry.
let yourself cry, OK? One of the worst feelings in the world is being unable to cry and eventually it…starts to make things darker.
I'll shout out to James L. Brooks. 'Terms of Endearment' always makes me cry. Also, 'Stepmom' always makes me cry. I guess, you know, mothers dying. It's a safe bet that I'm going to cry.
I would walk into my office, and I would close the door, and I would say, 'I won't cry, I won't cry, I won't cry'... At least, I wasn't going to let them see me cry.
What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.
I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
I feel like if you shoot one scene all day long or you take two days to do a scene, that scene is going to be stale.
Storm the castle
Stem the tide
Rise above yourself
Cry baby cry
Cry cry to heaven
If that doesn't do it for you
Go ahead and cry like hell
There's an awful lot of scenes where we don't know what the scene's going to be about, we ask the audience, pick a place that the scene is happening, pick the relationship, tell us who they are, things like that.
The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
I remember watching that scene in 'My Girl' where Anna Chlumsky cries at a funeral. I would cry with her and be like, 'Yeah, I think I could do that. I could do a funeral scene.'
A great discipline comes with knowing that everyone's very focused. I've never shot a scene thinking, I wonder if this will make it. Every scene I shoot, I know that it's going to make it into the final cut.
It's more fun in a way to do ensemble scenes, where you know your background, you know the scene, but you can't prepare because someone else is going to say something that is going to lead you off
It's more fun in a way to do ensemble scenes, where you know your background, you know the scene, but you can't prepare because someone else is going to say something that is going to lead you off.
My first scene ever on camera was a dinner scene and I ate all the food. They yelled cut and the actor across from me was like, 'You know you're going to have to eat the same thing every single time.' I learned the hard way.