Thelma Schoonmaker Quotes

You don't improvise with a Cameron Crowe script.

It's important that period films aren't seen as just a lovely visual exercise.

I'd always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they're born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

I'm something of a history buff. It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

For Kitty Gilbert in 'Topsy-Turvy,' I had to get to the point where I could improvise in the style of 1880, which is difficult. The research for that was huge.

It often disturbs me, when I see a film set in a historical time, that the people are too modern.

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.

I'm not used to a script.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

I wasn't setting out to write a documentary; if I had, I would have done it in a completely different way. I was asked to write a drama that would appeal to a big audience in America that had no knowledge or interest in The Tudors at all.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

I think the hardest thing I've had to learn is that just because people might speak a certain way in real life doesn't mean it's engaging in the theater.

Historians are responsible not only for the words they write but for the words they don’t write.

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

Actors know one thing: If you're left just with words, you're in trouble.

I see it in a lot of period pieces where everybody is standing and talking, in a stilted, archaic way, instead of being loose in the world. So, I try to do a little bit of research, just so that I can feel like I'm grounded, but then I try to bring as much of my human understanding that I can, under the filter of it being 1865.

Sometimes when you're working on a period piece, there's this tendency to be nostalgic about the period and do everything superglamorous, which can end up looking cliche.

'Dinner' is completely scripted. There are some improv elements, but I'm not interested in pranking people. It's more like a play than standup.

I have this habit of not rehearsing a lot; I don't go on practicing my dialogues, pauses, and actions.

I love period drama as much as the next person, but there's a tendency to let all of the costume get in the way of the people.

To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.

Those are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.