Judd Nelson Quotes

If I have to write by a certain time, I can pull through, but usually I just let stuff happen, hanging out with comic friends - or bringing a basic idea on stage and seeing if it goes anywhere.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.

With 'Silver Linings,' I didn't feel - I was thinking of certain things, but I just said, 'Let me go with it.' You have to know what you're doing, where you're going with the scenes, and I put a lot of work into that. But when you're out there, at the same time you gotta be ready for anything.

We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

I found the recording sessions very freeing because you can really try things. When you're filming something, if you're improvising a film and you're wasting film and wasting a cameraman's time.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

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.

I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

If I crave a frequency in the mid, I'll just drag in a sound and try to mold it into what feels right. It happens very quickly. And if I've been making a piece of music for five hours and it sucks, I'll just throw it away.

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.

Most of my songs are pretty sketchy. There's not a lot of bass sections. I don't write big bridges. Sometimes I'll try. But it's hard for me to focus that way, because I always think it's more interesting to just see what will happen next.

The only planning I do is about a minute before I play. I desperately try to think of something that will be effective, but I never sit down and work it out note for note.

While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.

When you're in the studio, you've got a narrative for what goes on, you might switch on a bit of gear and it might not work as you intended or come out a bit wrong, and you try and exploit it.

You are not just, "This is the way I play it every night." You are constantly finding new ways in, new attacks, "I want to try it this way. Maybe this scene is affecting that scene. I want to attack this scene differently."

I kind of end up getting caught up in whatever the rhythm of the movie is and how open the director is to changing things in the moment or finding it in rehearsal.

People have said to me for a long time, "Man you're funny." I say, "Well, I'm quick," but being funny on purpose, take after take - that's why I said for me it was new territory, and so by improvising something might come out that might be good. And it's film, so they can cut it if it isn't.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

When you're on stage performing stand-up, things only happen one time. I've done bits where I improv a joke, and people are dying. The next show, I try to repeat it, I can't do it. Because with the first audience that was our moment. It can't happen the same way again. We were all there: a certain type of people were at that show and we all got it.

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

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.

When you're doing a movie, you're in a vacuum, just going, "Well, that's done. Let's see what happens."

I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

I love the joy in the improvisational creative process.