Thelma Schoonmaker Quotes

Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business.

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

I love improvisation. It's quite exciting.

Honestly, I really, really love making movies. It's so much fun, and I love losing myself in the moment and just being there with other actors. When you're truly in the moment and you're feeding each other, it's such an exciting thing to be a part of.

When I was in primary school, I was given a five-line script in 'Anansi the Spider Man,' and I decided to just improv and make it my own. For a second, I felt like Kevin Hart because everyone was laughing. I just continued to do it. Why not?

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

Then I came up with this crazy idea just to walk out on the stage with no band at all and just start singing whatever came to mind. I actually fought the idea for a while because it seemed almost too radical, but it became obvious what I was supposed to be doing.

It's so cliche, but I love the feeling you get from improv that anything can happen. The audience is already accepting that there are no props or costumes or furniture, so the performers can be anywhere doing anything; cut from underground to space, and it doesn't matter.

I guess, like, the whole thing with music is - you're a little bit in control but not fully in control. Which is kind of the fun of it.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

Street performing can be a great teaching ground and a barometer for what you're doing. It's rough and unforgiving at times, but it can be wild and fun and a real open canvas for your creativity.

I think the best thing you can do for an audition is to just do your work, be creative. It's OK to be spontaneous.

I always just like to improvise, and that goes for my audition tapes as well.

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

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

It's always fun to improvise. What's weird is that when you're recording, you're by yourself, for the most part.

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.

There are no mistakes and it's never boring on the edge of imagination, which is only pure spirit having a bit of fun.

One of the things that's great about doing a show over and over again... is that you have to find ways to make it spontaneous, as though everything is happening for the first time... to continue to mine the material and find new things.