A Quote by Jennifer Jason Leigh
I like to investigate all different kinds of people, I guess, and find out what makes them who they are, and try to be honest in the portrayal, and truthful, and find out how to understand that person, how to communicate that person's experience.
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And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?
I guess they say that you can find out if you're an extravert or an introvert by how you recharge yourself and I guess I'm more of an introvert in that way because I like to be by myself to recharge, but I'm definitely a people person. I love socializing and being around people and having good conversations.
Marriage is referred to in the bible as “mystical union,” and it really is in the sense that two people who don’t know each other get together. I’m always interested in how much you find out about the other person and how much you don’t find out.
Listening and hearing are two different things, and acting is comprehending what the person is saying, thinking how it makes you feel and responding. That's the key to really honest, truthful, compelling performance.
You can't blame the person for creating that illness for themselves, because it was a creation. If you could find out how you created it, you might be able to find out a way to let go.
I find that I relate to most of the characters that I play on a really personal level, just because we're the same age, we're girls, and we're growing. I can find myself in those roles, so it makes it easy to connect to. But all of them are their own person - they're all hard to understand and hard to figure out, just like I am.
I don't set out to make movies about famous people, though I guess I have. I think what I set out to do is to try to understand things that we don't understand. Or to find out what is blocking us from understanding things we should understand.
I am very interest in the human condition. That is what I love about acting. I like studying different people and their psychosis. I like discovering what makes them tick. I always find that with any character I play. I need to find out what makes them tick.
When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here's what I have to say; how shall I say it? I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It's almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.
Journalists like to invent a person, and it's not necessarily the person that they're writing about. The image the tabloids try to create of me and Bob is very different from how we really are. They try to make us out to be mad jokers. But I wouldn't want to put journalists down. That's their job.
You asked me if I believed in magic, and I said yes, and that's how. You just step out, start pulling your life out of the air. You make friends, you find work you really like doing, you find places. You find diners and Laundromats. You find beaches. You find a junk car and drive it for a month, then lave it beside the road. You find someone to fall in love with you. You make it all up as you go. Or, you know, maybe it makes you up.
In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities.
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.
It's always exciting when you work on a show that's written by one person because you know that their vision is so specific. I need to find out why this person has chosen these words to communicate this thought.
Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.
You learn the most by listening and so, to me, always just listening, always just paying attention and finding out what it is that people see in somebody like them. You find those things, and you try to figure out how to fit them into who you are, who you want to be, and how you want to lead.
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