A Quote by Willem Dafoe
Any actor who tells you that he makes choices, absolutely, is wrong. You find work and work finds you.
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Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.
I hate the school of thought that says work is work and that you have to be unhappy at work because that's what work is. I totally respect the fact that not everyone has the choices that I have, and that some people have to work jobs that they don't like because they don't have any other options.
As an actor you make choices that are either right or wrong, and you find the ones that are right for you. As an understudy, the choices have been made, so you have to make those choices right. Going into the role, you can't really question it.
When I choose a role, I look for that spark that tells me it's going to work. Is the role fresh? What does it have for the actor in me? Those are the only things any actor should be concerned about, really.
The truth is, an actor's performance is the result of work by a lot more people than just the actor. When you see that character portrayed up on screen, there is the work certainly of the actor, but there's the work of the editor, there's the work of what the camera was doing. What the music was doing, all of the above.
I always do stories that I believe in, characters that I find interesting, and directors who I want to work with. All these factors have contributed while making choices and continue to as an actor and as a producer.
I find it's very confusing when one critic tells you one thing and one tells you something completely different. Unless all the critics agree on parts of the play that just didn't work. I have stopped reading reviews, because I find writing is all about courage. You must have courage when you start writing a play and you cannot have the voice - you must write things out. You cannot have the voice of a critic telling you, "That didn't work in that play, you cannot make it work in another play." Every time you do a production, it's an experimentation.
Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
I try to take the pain and find a way to use it in my work; I find that it makes the work deeper.
I too did not want to take the path of a warrior. I believed that all that work was for nothing, and since we are all going to die what difference would it make to be a warrior? I was wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. Whenever you do realize that you are wrong, and that it certainly makes a world of difference, you can say that you are convinced. And then you can proceed by yourself. Any by yourself you may even become a man of knowledge
For any actor - not just talking about myself - but if you've been fortunate enough to work for a long period of time, there's going to be different choices you're going to make.
If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.
There should always be that leeway because if you think of your character as sort of absolutely fixed, then you just try and find actors to come and do exactly that thing, then you're not gonna be working with that actor's own set of internal impulses and who they are, so the best work is always a coming together of the actor and the character.
I have no problem having any actor from anywhere play a role. I'm excited for any actor that gets a job, I truly am. Even if it's a role that I'm up for and I don't get it, I never begrudge any actor having it work out for them.
What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.
I do like celebrating women, I do like celebrating different lifestyles and choices and people and it makes me happy when others find my work empowering.
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