A Quote by Lin Shaye

I just kind of do my thing with sort of tunnel vision for the story and my role and how it fits together. — © Lin Shaye
I just kind of do my thing with sort of tunnel vision for the story and my role and how it fits together.
In choosing any role, I ask the same questions: what kind of part is it? is the role challenging? does the director have a vision? is the story moving? etc.
There was recently a story out that I turned down a role in a major franchise. That's not true. I refused to audition for it. I didn't get the part. I didn't even go in because I thought that the part was just a repackaged version of the parts I played before in these young adult films - sort of moody, masculine, but sensitive and all this kind of thing. It was just a repackaged, rather dull thing.
In high school, my first thing ever was I played Tony in West Side Story when I was about 17. I was a really shy kid and I just like forced myself to learn how to sing this one month because I loved West Side Story so much and I somehow managed to get the role. I had an afro and glasses, and the guy who cast me goes, "All right, the first thing to go is the afro and the next thing, I'm going to buy you contacts and we're going to get you..." So he kind of molded me into what it had to - that's still probably the hardest role I've every played in anything, the most taxing role.
It takes a lot of time to be a good junkie or alcoholic - you spend hours getting the necessary supplies, then imbibing, then recovering, rinse and repeat. That's like eighteen hours of a day. And assuming you get out of that lifestyle before it macerates your heart, you have that Junkie Tunnel Vision, except now you get to use it for something positive: you know how to work tirelessly for one thing. Instead of using that tunnel vision to get high, I use it to make art.
It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything,. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size....I figured on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.
You kind of wake up in the morning, and you don't see anybody but these actors until you go home at night and pass out and do it again. So it's structured a lot like the process when you're making a film. You just kind of get in that tunnel vision. I like that. I like when the rest of the world kind of quiets.
The Head of Story is defined differently for each film. But I found that the role for me was to support the director's vision, and to be a conduit to the story team - and managing that team to realize the vision.
I just block everything out. It's not even something that I do. When the ball's in the air, everything goes quiet. That's how it is. I don't really think about it much. That's how I play. Tunnel vision.
I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.
I actually like seeing how the world - trying to figure out how the world works, how it all fits together. Also, it makes me happy when I feel like things are consistent, when there's some sort of order to the universe.
The main thing is to win. You just try to keep your tunnel vision on to get the team the win.
There's always light at the end of the tunnel, right? It just depends on how long the tunnel is.
But it just comes down to trying to get the work out there and however the team fits together then that's the way it sort of plays into itself.
I think I was a bit naive when I was younger. I don't know what it was: I sort of felt tunnel vision - I didn't really have peripheral vision or see the world and what was happening. I'm much more worldly, and I believe that I'm much more grounded in my body than I probably was when I was younger.
I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever.
Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.
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