Emily Watson Quotes

I'm not a very 'this is planned out' person when I get to set. 'This is how I'm going to do it' - I'm never like that.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.

On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.

We were doing things with a hundred per cent feeling. It wasn't programmed. It wasn't asked for. It wasn't structured. It was just there. It was very raw. I don't think the industry would allow that to happen again.

If you're playing a character who says whatever he wants, I felt free to say whatever I wanted on set.

'Curb' is 100 percent improvised, which is wild. I'd never done anything like that.

When you go to set, they just go, 'OK, let's see what you guys do!' The camera moves around what you initially feel.

I write my scripts on a whim, without worrying about plot points and graphs.

There's never anything planned. I just do what I feel is best for the song at that time.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

Sukumar comes from a very different school of working style. He never shoots with set dialogues and scenes. Most of it is improvised on the spot. He'd tell me, 'Rakul, if this is your character, how would you behave? Show me.'

I just love to sit and go, 'Let's just write a song and not worry about how it needs to be'.

I really do like surprises. I'm not so talented at planning things out or having schedules before or sticking to the plan per se, but yeah I'm very much a spontaneous guy and it's sort of hard for me to multi-task and to have all these things going on at once.

I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

I always wanted the actors to feel really free to leave the words behind if they weren't working, reword lines, if they felt like there was impulse they wanted to follow, if it was taking the scene out of order or adding something, that you should always feel free to do that.

I never work from the script. I get the script more or less.

With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

Darkwing Duck and Don Karnage are the most fun to do, because they're both probably the closest to me - I kinda improvise a lot of them, kinda ad lib.

Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director. Part of the freedom in directing, for me, is that I'm also the camera operator. That's the place where things are less rigid, where I can adjust as I go along.