David Duchovny Quotes

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

Well, I love acting, and I love acting quick.

What I've learned about acting is that it needs to be mysterious. If you overthink how a beat needs to be played, it can trip you up.

I try to shoot the first rehearsal because people are more spontaneous. People in real life don't really know where they are going to be either positioning themselves or how they will be saying their words. When people goof during the first take, it usually looks realistic.

They just said, 'Roll the tape.' No rehearsal or nothing... Muddy [Waters] didn't come in and say 'I wanna rehearse.' He used to look at me and say 'Let's just play the blues. That's all you need to do.

It may seem like improv because it flows quite naturally, and a little bit of leeway for improvisation is good, but you have to be judicious with it. So it's good, but sometimes people deify it. You can't improvise your way out of a paper hat.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

I'm not one to dwell on rehearsal or preparation. I like to just go out and do it. Of course, that doesn't mean actors are free to do whatever they like, they're always being directed.

I love improv-ing, you know, from very early on when I started acting the school that I went to and everything was very big on ad-libbing and improv-ing and messing things up, so I feel very comfortable doing stuff like that.

If you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic - make it up on the spot.

Things move so quickly on set. When you're about to do another take and you have a minute to figure out what you're doing, you just kind of determine how you're going to do it on the spot.

I certainly am not a great believer in over-rehearsing between actors, and certainly not doing the dialogue too much.

I have to go over my carefully prepared ad-libs.

I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

Sometimes people don't rehearse at all, but you might have had a chance to rehearse for a few days, or even more than that. Then in the moment when the camera's running is the only time it matters. So whatever you've discussed or thought about or discussed with the director, the other actors, hopefully there's a part of the experience that you've left open so that only in that moment the camera catches it. That's of course the hardest thing to do because everything is planned and you have thought about it in advance.

I love working on the fly when the writers come up with new jokes on show nights. It's exciting. I love it so much.

There were a few things that, in rehearsal, any one of us might try. [John] Hughes would go, "I like that," to me spitting up in the air and catching it in my mouth. It was just something I did in a rehearsal and Molly [ Ringwald] went, "Ewww." And John went, "Can you do that again?" And I went all day long, and he was like, "Okay, let's do that."

As an actor, you always find your way. You have whatever preparation techniques you use, and you just go with the scene when you're on set. You can only plan so much when you're working, because things have to come naturally in the scene.

If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

When we start shooting I don't have rehearsals with characters at all. So, rather than pulling them towards myself, I travel closer to them; it's very much closer to the real person than anything I try to create. So I give them something but I also take from them.

I think if you're doing a play, you're rehearsing enough that you get to a point where it's freeing again. But in a movie, if you rehearse too much, now you've just shown everybody what you're going to do. And any element of surprise or impulsiveness is taken away.

You learn your lines as well as you can and you go in there and go with whatever is thrown at you. Sometimes you don't know whether or not they're going to break the scene up, so you don't have to do it all at one time.

I write and rewrite and memorize, and then inject my performance with improvising and spontaneity, because if something feels too rehearsed, it's not going to be fun.