James Mangold Quotes

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I want to keep a thread between the studio and the stage, and I want to flow more easily from one to the other.

As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.

That is a big danger, losing your inspiration. When I work in film and television I try to do each take a little differently. I never want to do the same thing twice, because then you're not being spontaneous, you're just recreating something.

And as I've gotten deeper into the process of making films and television and such, I think I have more trust in the fact that you really never know what you're going to find after the twenty-fifth take.

Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. And I love that it's like theater, too, and the audience, and it's so short. It's only 20 minutes. It's like a haiku or something.

I love acting. It's an interesting challenge to make something that doesn't exist appear like it's happening, and to do it in a real way.

I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.

Usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing... you just go out and have a play over it, and see what comes, and it's usually - mostly - the first take that's the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.

That's the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.

I love to do very long and complicated scenes.

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.

I think that you get something for your acting from almost anything you do.

A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

The best script in the world doesn't work perfectly when you actually act it out. That's a law. That's a given. So you have to play with everything. And the more fun you have with it, the better the finished product.

Shooting should not be about delivering something I've prepared; it should be a live process of finding things out. When things happen that you haven't planned, that's when the film comes alive.

When we were in the studio working stuff out, and even when we were on stage, the music was a priority.

I never improvise. I create the character and transform into it.

I kind of do it in my head, then I'll try pieces of it on stage and if it looks promising, I'll put it together.

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.

I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.

No matter what you do, it can't be perfect. I told Jack White, 'If I'd 'a sung that song more'n twice, it might of sounded better.' He said, 'Well, it might not of. You might have took the spark out of it.' I don't know if he has a point or not. We'll find out.

I was able to bring my process of doing improv with actors into the animation world, which was fun.

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

Acting is really instinctual and I think you can overanalyse what you're doing. A lot of it has to be based on instinct.