Gary Cole Quotes

I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.

I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

Most of the time I'm thinking, I'm glad that scene was improvised.

I can't ad-lib, or not for long.

The word got out that I can ad-lib very well.

I think the good ones, the interviews and the promos people remember, those are improv.

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

There is no such thing as a wrong note ... just as long as you're singing along.

What people think improvisation is and non-improvisation is, it's nothing to do with what you like or dislike. It's all about how it happens with certain directors and certain scenes. That's the way it works. It's not something, in general, that you can decide.

Improv is not something I had a lot of experience with, because for a long time, my only experience in front of a camera was all television, which is pretty rigid script-wise, except for the occasional scene where you toss in an ad-lib just to elongate something.

If somebody says, "Oh, we're going to improvise!," I'm like, Oh, get me out of here.

It may seem like improv because it flows quite naturally, and a little bit of leeway for improvisation is good, but you have to be judicious with it. So it's good, but sometimes people deify it. You can't improvise your way out of a paper hat.

Doing reality TV is a lot harder than I thought because I come from the world of [scripted] television where everything is thought out and you know what's going to happen, your lines, what your wardrobe is going to be, etc. But with reality, it's very spontaneous and the cameras are around for 12 hours a day.

I think if you're doing a play, you're rehearsing enough that you get to a point where it's freeing again. But in a movie, if you rehearse too much, now you've just shown everybody what you're going to do. And any element of surprise or impulsiveness is taken away.

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.

A lot of improvisation ends up being about just thinking outside of the box in the scene. It's not improvisation as much as it is quickness or making it real.

A lot of lines in movies were written, but I'm always improvising. Once you get into the scene, it just comes to me.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Improvisation is really not so much remembering things. And this is what I do when I play. I forget things. When I go on the stage, I want my mind to be a blank, so that I can - things can come into me without my knowing where they came from.

Jazz is my adventure.

On set, the playground for the character, how much it takes varies. Is it like ballet, is it like jazz? The content always lends itself to the form, and it's really not mathematics.

Sometimes you have to kind of keep proving that you're improvising. That's the game, or the goal, of long-form TV improv, is that you have to kind of keep reminding and showing people that you're improvising, because they won't believe you really.

The process of acting, not necessarily the business of acting, but the actual doing of it in the moment is my greatest kind of personal passion, the thing that brings me alive the most. Also, my two children.

I try to preload as little as I can. I like to come to the set with minimal preparation.