Ed Helms Quotes

John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.

'Curb' is 100 percent improvised, which is wild. I'd never done anything like that.

The best working experiences I've had are with directors who want to create with you while you're on set. I prefer a much freer environment. That's why I'm always trying to mess things up, just to know that I can!

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.

I always wanted the actors to feel really free to leave the words behind if they weren't working, reword lines, if they felt like there was impulse they wanted to follow, if it was taking the scene out of order or adding something, that you should always feel free to do that.

The idea of improvisation kind of freaked me out.

Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.

We would do improvisation together. And that in a way, had almost a "student-film side" where we'd be sitting there with Robert Downey and Jon Favreau and we're playing around, we're jamming around and we read those pages and in next couple of days that's what we do, so it was a good experience. Kind of frightening at first because you didn't quite know how it was going to work out, but they had some very talented people there so it worked out well.

Some of the best stuff in all my movies has been improv.

I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice.

When I'm improvising, I'm out of my head. I've done a lot of projects recently where there hasn't been a script. It's all been based on outlines. At first, that's terrifying, just because you don't have the words in front of you and you don't know how it's going to come out, but that's what's really exciting about it. You don't know what's going to happen. It really forces you to listen to the other people, and I think the most natural acting comes out of that.

Sabrina ran for seven years with a different director every week.

There's not much in the way of written-down arrangements - just things that Gerry and I have worked out, from playing spontaneously together and hanging on to whatever seems to fall in right.

And then 'Wanderlust,' Ken Marino and David Wain wrote the funniest - they're amazing. That was one of my most favorite creative experiences; we're all up at that commune, a small group of people. Everyone was funnier than the next. It was an amazing ensemble feeling. Everyone gave and took in the best way.

My first movie was totally improvised.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That's the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.

Many times I'll improvise it, which isn't done a lot in movies or commercials. But a lot of my commercials are improvised.

You've gotta leave enough space for your actors to bring stuff to the table and whatever the weather's doing that day or what the light's like. Things can shift, and you have to be malleable. Every day is a different feeling and a change.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

I don't like to rehearse, and the film-makers that I have been drawn to are interested in provoking something between people rather than nailing a scene in advance.

What I love about jazz is the improvisation, the fact that you never know what's going to happen next.

It's always a stunt acting opposite Robert Picardo, because you never know what he's going to do.

People say never work with children and animals. I actually like working with Oliver Bell, and working with a rat really opens possibilities to you because you don't know how it's going to be. It's just a rat, so you can just react to this rat being a rat, if that makes sense.

There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill.