Steve Coogan Quotes

I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.

I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool.

Acting is probably what I'm best at, but there are certain stories kind of rattling around in my head that I like the idea of developing over time.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

I'm more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I'm mostly an improviser, though I haven't improvised in awhile.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

I've written virtually as long as I've acted, it wasn't a sudden transition. I acted in my first play when I was 16 and I wrote my first play when I was 17.

I like to originate new roles and characters for musical theater.

I do a lot of improvising when I'm writing, and I work very hard on the scripts... they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.

When we don't have all the details about our characters, we have to make it up to fill in all the details. So, for me, writing and acting go hand in hand.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

I'm acting a lot when I'm writing for other people.

I write in the booth and memorize in rehearsals.

I really wanted to create some of my own characters, then it became wanting to act the parts, then it sort of grew from there because I really enjoyed doing it.

Acting is my first love and I want to stick to it. But I would be happy to offer my inputs to a script, if asked.

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.

Improv is like writing. It's actually a different discipline to acting. It helps acting greatly, but it's completely different. It's the same side of your brain when you write as when you improv.

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.

What I would do is I would just remember the scene and I'd go home and I'd write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn't remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we'd do it.

I have difficulty putting words in peoples' mouths. The best dialogue is very, very thin dialogue; you let people improvise and then basically you record what they've improvised and then write it down.

Some of the best things that have happened in my stories have happened seemingly of their own accord. The writer becomes a listener, just writing things down as they come.

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.

During improvisations, I'll hear people bringing back up details from something I heard about at breakfast or something somebody was saying that they were thinking about, and it informs a rewriting of a scene.