A Quote by Terry Teachout
The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions.
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The best script in the world doesn't work perfectly when you actually act it out. That's a law. That's a given. So you have to play with everything. And the more fun you have with it, the better the finished product.
You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.
Once a script is released that doesn't mean it's the final product. It's not set in stone.
I can play guitar - but I can't really. I wouldn't say I'm talented at it. I just kind of watch videos on YouTube, and I follow the instructions... OK, yeah, my hidden talent: I'm good at following instructions!
When you do a voice in an animated film, you don't see the finished product at all. You're not animating. You're not doing the voice on the finished product. You're doing the voice long before.
The final product in a play is not just the written word. It's the production, the performance. The script is, of course, a very important piece; but it's only one element. Ultimately, yours is one of several voices. People can change your work in a play for better or worse.
The finished product is not finished when the actor is. The work is completed by a pair of shears.
The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
The journey matters as much as the destination. By engaging in the moment on set, I've stopped rushing and now find pleasure in the collaborative process - the characters, the costumes - rather than worrying about the finished product.
Any good movie or script usually, if they're doing their job, gives the highest platform possible for an actor to leap off of, and that script was very high up there. It was a very smart, tight script. There was a lot of improv, as well, once we got to the set, but a lot of the original script was also in there.
One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.
I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.
I love TV, don't get me wrong. But with film, you're just banging out this one product and you're not waiting on another script. You have your script. It's great, in that way.
Even after the text is written, there are a tremendous number of stages along the way to the finished book. If a publisher cares about the finished product, none of them will be omitted.
When I'm making the movie, I absolutely do. I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me.
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