Arthur Hiller Quotes

I like to improvise.

We actually use a lot of improvisation on 'Transparent.'

I know very few people who have literally improvised a film from start to finish.

Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.

I've done lots of improv things but not a whole movie.

One of my favorite things is when people will ask for a song that I hadn't planned to play. It is really fun to see if you can remember something, and you don't always. I mean, sometimes it's just crash and burn.

Many times I'll improvise it, which isn't done a lot in movies or commercials. But a lot of my commercials are improvised.

There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill.

As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is.

I think you never want to have to go into the scene having to improvise; you want to make sure its working on the page. But I do like to have the ability to try stuff just in the moment, to give it some sort of spontaneity.

Those are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

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.

Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.

We would do improvisation together. And that in a way, had almost a "student-film side" where we'd be sitting there with Robert Downey and Jon Favreau and we're playing around, we're jamming around and we read those pages and in next couple of days that's what we do, so it was a good experience. Kind of frightening at first because you didn't quite know how it was going to work out, but they had some very talented people there so it worked out well.

Some of the best stuff in all my movies has been improv.

I don't think that many people today, understand the nature of what an improv does for an actor in a specific setting. What an improv does for an actor is help him find the life; it's the life that an actor's after.

The piano song that I do in the movie [The Hangover], it's a great example, that was never - that wasn't in the script.

John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.

As I got more confident, I was able to let actors improvise, and do long takes. It's 10%, 5% you learn and experience. The rest you just have or you don't have.

I love showing up and giving a performance without the benefit of a lot of rehearsal or dissection. It's fun to me to act on a kind of instinctual level and go straight for the performance.

Your life is what you remember. I mean, some things I wish I still had. But it doesn't matter.

I've been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

A good liar must have a good memory.