If I had to say the secret recipe for acting melodrama, I think it comes from myself in real life. I have a belief that when I do melo scenes, I try to make them less cheesy.
Different scenes call for different acting styles. The kinds of scenes I like most are the ones where you just bury yourself in there. So I wouldn't say that's the only way to be funny, but that's my favorite way to play stuff, to try to put myself in a situation where that kind of acting is necessary.
I try and imagine myself in situations and figure out how I'd have reacted and responded to them, and then bring that insight into my acting. Much of acting is about borrowing from your real-life experiences.
Richard Pryor had real sincere and vulnerable moments. Now it seems so cheesy if you stop your act and say, "This is why we have to help them kids. We've got to make sure them kids can read."
I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.
I kind of connected the dots, like, 'Oh, we're just saying stuff. We're just saying things that make sense, so let's just say them like you say them in real life.' It was my first and one of my only acting lessons 'cause I never really studied acting.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
I'm only 13, so I can't say "life experiences." So, basically, I had to... act! I had to make up character that is very old. I guess that's why they call it acting - you do draw from some stuff in your life, I guess, but it's not real life. You have to fake it.
Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.
I think my life is often more interesting in the tabloids than it is in real life - or less; it depends. But I'm curious. I just try and see what they're going to make up next, and I try to just have fun with it and not take it all too seriously, because otherwise you can't function.
I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.
I think of myself as a human being first and foremost, and secondly as a person whose profession is acting. If people want to make that into something more or less, that's up to them.
The kinds of scenes I like most are the ones where you just bury yourself in there. So I wouldn't say that's the only way to be funny, but that's my favorite way to play stuff, to try to put myself in a situation where that kind of acting is necessary.
A lot of writers do think of their characters as living beings. I know that's the way people think. That's why I try to make them real in a certain way, because otherwise people won't read them. It's fine if some readers think of them as real. It's just not the way that I think of them.
I think it's more normal to make a movie dealing with love, sexual or not, than to make movies about bank robberies, which very rarely happen in real life. So I would say the problem is not what some people feel is normal, I would say the problem is why this whole industry is far more obsessed with filming scenes of dominance, guns, invasion.
Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father--who had to say so--told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!
It sounds cheesy, but music has saved me in a lot of ways. If I had just continued acting, I don't think I would be alive.