Allison Tolman Quotes

I'm one of those people that is up for most things. When I was offered to sing at the Oscars I was like, 'Yeah, I want to know what that's like!' I'm always curious to know what things are like - as long as you're not compromising who you are.

I learned I'm not a good executive, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm creative. I have to go with my gut and do what I want to do.

As I get more confident as a filmmaker, I don't need to prepare so much in advance. I can trust that I and my team can come up with a solution.

Canoeing was hard and scary, and the wind could blow you across the lake if you did it wrong. After a year of not doing it right, I could talk to people and get them to sit up straight, take different kinds of chances, to breathe differently, to engage in the moment in the boat. And I changed them, and I changed me in the process.

Before I finished another level of Scientology auditing, I had a very hard time with being wrong and I always had to have my own way - and not in a good sense. After auditing, I was able to have my thoughts, communicate them and not have to be right all the time.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Early in my career I was accused of being overconfident and even cocky, but I really was confident that I had done the training and didn't see any other reason to say otherwise.

I'm quite shy. Really. I'm trying to expand myself as a person more, get involved with people.

We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything we bring - the people and the equipment - must serve us in that goal.

You know how sports teach kids teamwork and how to be strong and brave and confident? Improv was my sport. I learned how to not waffle and how to hold a conversation, how to take risks and actually be excited to fail.

I really like to experiment. That's the only way I can work. It's instinctive.

Improvising things is always changing. A lot of momentum.

I'm very unpredictable, but at the end of the day, I'm working. Sometimes things change in my life. It's like, 'Hold up - that ain't feel good. That felt good.' And that's how I look at anything I do.

I take improv classes. Improv is something I can use in any aspect of life.

It's such a great thing to work with people and not have a plan.

I can't imagine doing anything without being an improviser. I can't imagine trying to write or act or direct without what improvising offers you.

It's like, the more you commit, the happier the animators are; if you're at all iffy and concerned, then it doesn't free them up to do as much fun stuff, so you have to just go for it and, again, trust the people around you and not be seemingly guarded and numb. Throw caution to the wind a bit.

There's always some room for improvisation.

I research every part thoroughly. I talk it out with my actor friends, but then I throw it all away when I get to the set. You have to be spontaneous.

I wanna keep creating those situations for myself so I don't have to be out front all the time. Then when I do have to be out front, I can do it to the max.

With each job that you're given an opportunity to do, you're asked to use new parts of yourself and to figure the play out with other tools that you perhaps didn't use with the last show.

With Fincher, you can take chances and try things. And what happens is that any pretension and preparation you've done, all the square, intellectual work, you can't keep that up for 40 takes. It breaks down, and new things start popping up. This, for me, is the most exciting thing about film-making.

You've got to find a way to relate to people. I just did an improvised episode for Joe Swanberg's new Netflix show, 'Easy,' and it was a huge learning curve for me and taught me so much about fear and courage. But when you're present in the moment, the audience, it's incomparable.