Jim Evans Quotes

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.

For me it's always about first impressions. I trust my instincts. I love to prepare if it's something that requires training. But I don't like to prepare the psychology too much. I enjoy the psychology of the character but I work better from a first impression.

I don't like the actors to work together beforehand. I trust my intuition, and I like when the actors are the same.

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

I think people who are regarded as better actors must have better instincts because, at the end of the day, once they say 'action,' it's you who has to do it right. You can do all the research and preparation or none at all, but it's your instincts that tell you, 'No, I'll do it like this.'

There's actually something interesting about having no rehearsal time - you have to just walk in and go with your gut, which is exciting.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

I was very lucky when I started doing comedy because I hadn't seen much stand-up. I just got up on stage and did it without thinking.

I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete.

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.

I did everything by the seat of my pants. That's why I got hurt so much.

We don't know what we're doing. We don't have a plan. We don't sit down and calculate it.

I think I get credit for my timing because most of the time, I really have no idea where I'm going with it.

I love flying by the seat of my pants, going at something instinctually.

Everything in 'Satya' was by chance. It was a film which just started evolving by itself. I just went mostly by instinct and kept on improvising on location, and the film just got made itself.

I'm one of the school of people who don't do research of the reality of the thing or the unreality of the thing. In all the movies I've done, I've never done any research.

You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

I just feel my way through. If I had to give an acting class, I wouldn't know what to do.

you have to play it out sometimes.

We didn't talk about devil on the set. My mother and I didn't talk about it. Billy Friedkin and I didn't talk about it. It was a closet subject. But it was the best thing that happened because I had no idea what I was going.

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.

I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.