Tatiana Maslany Quotes

As an actor, you really want to respect and honor the script. You want to try to be in the moment and you also realize that you're one part of a bigger picture and when they call action, you have your dance.

Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together.

As an actor, I love working with directors. As much as I love working with other actors.

There is nothing better than playing a scene with John Cleese or Maggie Smith. It's electric. But I don't think I'm the sort of person who needs to have an outer ego in order to produce something. I realised that through the travel programmes.

Improv has been immensely beneficial to me as both an actor and a writer.

When you act with phenomenal actors, it makes your job much easier because all you have to do is react.

Everybody does their homework, and we all come together and just knock it out. There are adjustments to make, and if you have actors who are collaborators and who really know how to listen and be in the scene together, than it works out beautifully.

For me, you have to do as much work as you can beforehand and, once you get on stage or set, throw it out the window because you need to be collaborative. You shouldn't have too many ideas about where it goes before you get into the room with the director and other actors.

Being in Los Angeles, I've had access to some of the best improvisers around and I really study them and what they do. It really it just about listening and what you can add to it.

I like collaborating with actors. I love finding that moment where it all comes together.

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

One of the things I love about acting is other actors, looking into their eyes, and working off them, and listening and responding to them.

I think every time you take on a new role, you're trying to help find that voice and you add your own bits and pieces along the way but with Noah [Baumbach] it's already done.

I really learned how to improvise at the Groundlings.It's something I've always loved to do. For some reason it feels more honest at times.

To me, performing means trying to do the most you can with the partner in front of you, with the story you're telling. There are actors who have carried me, who have brought me elsewhere or with them.

When you do improv, you're everything. You're a performer, writer, and director, because you're moving the scene in the direction you want it to go, you're making it up as you go, and you're acting it. You're all of those things, so I always viewed myself that way. And with the films I've done, I've written on them, I've acted in some of them. And even ones I haven't acted in, I've acted them out just to be sure another actor can do them.

The trouble with improv is that it is often about being funny in the moment without any real consideration for the bigger picture.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

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.

I could never write. I would just be too lonely. What's great about acting is, it's so collaborative.

In film, other actors' performances really are not your concern. If the other actor isn't giving you what you want, act as though he were.

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

There are a lot of things I love about acting and one of the things I love the most is, here you are taking words off a page, working with someone you might have met just a week before, and somehow you're creating a moment that separates itself from space and time. You feel an incredible rush when you have that moment with another actor. You can feel it bounce off one another. Every take you do can reveal different things that were hiding. And things outside the story get revealed to you, too. It's an incredible way to work and to experience a story.

There's was no pressure on it for me - I just went in and had fun. Whatever Jason Moore, the director, asked me to do, I did it! I ran around the room acting like a crazy guest on "Jerry Springer" and yelling at the audience. I just went for it.

The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv.