Kenneth Lonergan Quotes

The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

Something that comics afford me is being able to change my mind at the last minute.

My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

You've got to remember that improvisers are writers and actors and directors all simultaneously. That's what's happening in real time because you're writing on your feet, and you are acting out the words and you are directing what the staging is. You're deciding what staging is.

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.

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.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

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.

I think the goal is to make a well written scene seem like it's improvised and/or to come up with things that you find in the room that you couldn't have known until you get into the real situation, just try to improve things as you go along.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

I don't think that any scene [in Pineapple Express] is word for word how you'd find it in the script. Some of it was much more loose than others. The last scene with me, Danny [McBride] and James [Franko] in the diner - there was never even a script for that scene. Usually we write something, but for that scene we literally wrote nothing.

It started off for me as just wanting to be an actor and sort of resenting in a weird way being expected to write as well as be a comedian and an improviser. And then you think about it for a minute, and I smartened up and realized that the only way to sustain a career is to generate your own material. Or to be in control of your career as best you can. And in allowing yourself to do that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And then you're like "Oh, producing is a thing."

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

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.

Good actors never use the script unless it's amazing writing. All the good actors I've worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.

I like to use a bit of chaos when I shoot. I think it may be something from the way I shot my first film - I was very scared, of course, and I prepared everything, I wanted to make sure that the characters did the right thing at the right time on the storyboard. But then I realised that in life, there is so much more than what you can predict or write in advance, that when you shoot the story, it's good to leave some gaps where you lose control. I think this combination of chaos and organisation gives a kind of quality.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important.

Mark and jay Duplass really like to improvise. Even if we beg them to go back to the script, they invariably ask us to go "off the rails," as they like to call it. It's just the way they work. You get a full written script. And it's really, really, really good, so that's why it's kind of peculiar that they always want you to improvise, because if I wrote something that good, I would want everyone to stick to the dialogue that was written.

I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice.

I've never really prided myself as being quick on my feet. Maybe you've had the experience where somebody's asked you a question and you give an answer, then later in the day you think, "Oh, I wish I'd said that!" I tend to journal these things and put the answers in sermons.

I always try to stick to the script because I want to respect the writers, and I want to respect the director. But if the director and my fellow actors are okay with me playing with it a little bit, then I definitely want to play with it. I definitely want to do that, because I tend to... when I put things in my own words, it comes out way better. It flows naturally, it just feels better. I can put some weight into the words. Even in comedy, it just comes better.

I feel like my own background in improv and doing documentaries makes me really comfortable with a situation where you're letting things unfold and you don't have to be a jerk, stomping his feet, trying to get his way on everything.

When I'm improvising, I'm out of my head. I've done a lot of projects recently where there hasn't been a script. It's all been based on outlines. At first, that's terrifying, just because you don't have the words in front of you and you don't know how it's going to come out, but that's what's really exciting about it. You don't know what's going to happen. It really forces you to listen to the other people, and I think the most natural acting comes out of that.