Tom Hiddleston Quotes

The great thing with comedy is that I don't memorize ahead of time like I did on 'Breaking Bad.' With 'Breaking Bad,' I wanted to know those words inside and out, really have my lines down so I could say them verbatim. But with comedy, you keep it a lot more loose.

I've done all sorts of different kinds of action. We did a thing in 'Blood Diamond,' the attack on Freetown, where I carefully staged the action but did not show the camera operators what we were going to film - so it has the feel of documentary, trying to capture something, and that gave it a whole different feel.

There's never enough time to shoot battle scenes or fight scenes. It always feels rushed. Anytime horses are involved, it eats up time like crazy.

Both 'Udaan' and 'Lootera' were largely rehearsed. With 'Trapped,' I left room for improvisation.

I think you never want to have to go into the scene having to improvise; you want to make sure its working on the page. But I do like to have the ability to try stuff just in the moment, to give it some sort of spontaneity.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.

We get the scripts before the table read, but I don't look at them until we go into the table read. I don't want to know, when I'm playing a moment in the current episode, what's going to happen because it might change how I'm playing that.

The world has to tell us. In other words, we don't have an agenda or a battle plan or a map or a direction or anything. We're just going along, and our world is telling us.

I don't think fast enough on my feet in terms of the writing to change the script too much when I'm shooting it. I like to have it set and done and know that I feel good about it and I might add a few lines here and there while we're shooting, if I think of a new joke, I might toss it in, but for the most part, I try to stick to the written script and have all the latitude exist within that.

I end up improvising in almost everything to some degree, 'cause it's often necessary on movies. The script is one thing, and it's this kind of theory of what you're going to do, and then you get there on the day and you realize, "Oh, the script is not appropriate to this room, the door's over here."

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

I always tried to live up to Leo Szilard's commandment, "don't lie if you don't have to." I had to. I filled up pages with words and plans I knew I would not follow. When I go home from my laboratory in the late afternoon, I often do not know what I am going to do the next day. I expect to think that up during the night. How could I tell them what I would do a year hence?

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

My advice to you: live in the moment. Stay fluid and roll with those changes. Life is just a big extended improvisation. Embrace the ever changing, ever evolving world with the best rule I’ve ever found. Say 'YES AND.”

The beauty of the unexpected and unknown, and it's certainly very tantalizing for me as an actor. Other actors can't deal with that; they want to know, but then they make choices and decisions with that knowledge because that knowledge gives them forethought, and they can think about how they want to play something that takes away spontaneity of what they could be doing.

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.

I don't like to plan harmonies too much, because there's something fun that happens when you just sing a pass, then sing another pass, and layer them on top of each other.

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

I'm constantly changing up my show. It's never the same.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

I love walking onto the set and the blindfold is taken off and then everything I do is fresh and in the moment. That's why I loved working with Darren Aronofsky.

Compose first, worry later.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.

Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.