Amber Stevens Quotes

When you're on TV, you're looking at a half-page of material, trying to memorize it really quickly. By the time it's on TV, I've already forgotten what I said, but I can still recite my whole role from Shakespeare in the Park. It works a different set of muscles.

I enjoy making films, but my heart is in the stage. Every night you have to be on. There's no second take.

In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.

Some stage directions you just simply have to throw away.

In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you're going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theater because there are no second takes in front of a live audience.

I think that sometimes in theater, I don't prepare much beyond going to the rehearsals.

You don't get to rehearse much on TV. You are kind of rehearsing on film. Depending on the way you work, that's either a good thing or a bad thing.

I really miss the rehearsal process of theater.

When I am rehearsing for a play, I try to read nothing that might distract my concentration from the work in progress.

Because if I don't know my lines, I really don't know what I'm doing.

I've done a lot of theater, and I know that it's a different audience each time who doesn't know the story, and we have to tell it.

On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it.

As soon as you get two actors in a room and they're locking eyes, they're doing a scene.

We rehearsed our 'Scarface' to the nines. Long period of rehearsal, so that by the time we started to shoot, it was almost like doing a play. We all had a grand time doing it. It was a wonderful cast.

Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls.

With a play, there's more of a definable arc because of the nature of theater: You know, there's no editing, so there's something more natural about the arc a character follows in a play. I think theater is more an actor's medium, whereas film is more a director's medium, because that's who controls the final feel of the film.

I guess I'm used to TV where we don't really rehearse. You block it out, and then you just start shooting.

On film, when you're driving home from the set, you realize what you should have done, but it's too late. When you're taking the subway home from your play, you realize what you did wrong, and you go back the next night and you do it better, or you screw it up again in a different way. It's a different thing altogether.

I like to rehearse before blocking.

The great thing about doing a play is you get this rehearsal period, which you don't get with most film and television roles.

We've always had the sensibility that you work on the set, and you structure it, much like a play, where once you've got the lines down and blocking right, you freeze it, and then you go out and do what you're doing night after night. You want to structure something that has form and that builds the right dynamic from start to finish.

You have to run, an awful lot, on instinct. Even on 'Veep,' it's not like you get weeks of rehearsal to break out what's going on in the scenes.

For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.