Tom Green Quotes

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

At 'The West Wing,' I cast newscasters, and when you put out a casting call for actors, half of the people who come in are real local L.A. newscasters. Each time, I ended up hiring one of them, because they're better at it. Big surprise! A newscaster is better at playing a newscaster than an actor is.

If you're trying to be realistic and bring real life to the screen, you are going to have different elements. That's what I'm trying to do. As I make the movie, different elements come in naturally.

I use people's real voices because I want realism. So often I mention the actors' physicality because I want it to be like a real documentary.

I try to shoot the first rehearsal because people are more spontaneous. People in real life don't really know where they are going to be either positioning themselves or how they will be saying their words. When people goof during the first take, it usually looks realistic.

Your duty as an actor is to try to make it as real as possible.

And there's also not enough films that are more of a imitation of what real life looks like.

The film [Close Up] made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.

It's so great as an actor to get the opportunity to do something that's incredibly truthful.

I have such respect for people who do non-fiction casting after settling on the grandparents we got for this. It is really hard to find people who are not fame-whores. We're lucky these people actually wanted to spend their time doing this. All of them would have much rather been cooking without the cameras, being with their families. That's why they're great characters.

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

One of my jobs as an actor, regardless of who I play - even if I'm playing a despicable character - is to make people think that that character could exist, that he's real, and the way to do that is to make him believable. He doesn't have to be likable or charming, but he just has to be believable. That is someone who I could see on a bus. That is someone who I could walk past in the street.

Sometimes with a comedy it's just having the instinct of how real you play it and what level you want it.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

I don't like theatrical actors and actresses. I like people that talk like real human beings.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story

Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don't have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they're far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, "I wish they were more close to real life." But when I was watching real life films I was thinking, "Well I wish it had more drama." I've tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

I think one of the hardest things to do in film or TV is to make something feel real, which is weird because it's about being a person, and life is something that everyone making films and TV can relate to.