A Quote by Amy Poehler
I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius.
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Improv is more than just spitting out a bunch of funny stuff that's unrelated to the material. You have to stay in character, you have to react and respond as the character you're trying to play. You have to service the story, and I think improv training has helped with my listening, responding, and my audition technique. It's sounds so silly, but it's true. Because not only do you improvise during the audition, but once you get the part, they'll say, "Throw away everything. Just improv this scene. Do whatever you want." Someone could panic if they're not used to doing something like that.
Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.
I got hit up for a tampon commercial and so I asked [JD and Jo] if they had anything. Jo sent that over and I was like, "I love this track. Oh my god. It's so upbeat. It's so positive. It would be so great for a tampon commercial." That commercial never came through, so then I just had it. I was like, "That would be great for a Hillary [Clinton] song." I think it's so funny that it could be a tampon commercial.
See, that's the thing: I'm not one of those actors who thinks, 'God, I've got to improvise and make it my own.' No, my first job as an actor is to take what's written and make it work. And then, if they want me to improvise, I'll do that.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings a certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
Acting is constricted because you have the lines. But I improvise with it and what I learn on the set. I improvise rhythms and just changes.
You can actually improvise a lot as a voice actor. It's not that entirely different than shooting a live action movie; the characters mouths are quite easy to manipulate once all the information is built into the computer. So you can improvise a lot and it doesn't matter really how far along they are in the process they can really just make the character say something different.
There's nothing wrong with an actor that can't improvise, but if you're going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.
My first professional audition - god, I've never told anybody about this - was for a test commercial, I think it was for Xbox. It involved me getting kidnapped by a granny who wanted to play the Xbox. It was very weird and I definitely had no idea what I was doing. I actually got the gig. It wasn't a commercial; it was what directors did when they wanted to show the company what they would do with a commercial.
I always just like to improvise, and that goes for my audition tapes as well.
I think that all the Mel Brooks' company of actors is just tremendous. It was a crazy group of genius people. All of them taught me what kind of actor I should be and what was funny.
I'm a commercial director; I do some very very commercial stuff in the commercial world. My music videos are always analyzed. I need to think about what the audience is going to think.
There are certain things in the scripts that need to be planned: you know, big stunt sequences, battle sequences... you can't improvise that stuff. You can improvise when there's just two of you standing in a kitchen and the most dramatic thing that's going to happen is someone's going to open the fridge.
The first feature film I did, when I did 'Night Shift,' I improvised quite a bit because I would improvise at the audition, so sometimes I would return to the original lines, and then when I was on set, I would improvise even more.
Confident people, who understand comedy, improvise so much better than people who are scared. You can't be scared to improvise. You have to know your character, and then you have to let go.
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