David Koechner Quotes

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

By the way, everybody approaches acting differently. Like, I'm kind of sloppy and I like it kind of loose. I like to kind of play around. Some people don't.

Playing Fagin in the play and film was a small miracle.

I love doing both animation and live acting.

You have to play the character in the best way you know how and do what you need to do in order to bring that character to life and not worry about the millions of people that you may be disappointing!

I've always wanted to be a voice actor. Well I think at first I wanted to be a singer. Then in middle school I auditioned for a musical and I only really cared because I wanted to sing in it. I had to act as well as part of the audition and that was the first time I ever really acted, and I was like 'Oh hey, this is fun, I like doing this.'

I've been in front of the camera a million times as a musician, and even directed a few music videos. So, I know a lot about spacing, focus, blocking, etcetera. So, acting isn't totally new for me. Still, I find it fascinating, because you actually get to be another person.

There's nothing wrong with an actor that can't improvise, but if you're going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.

As an actor, doing animation is definitely on the list of most actors because it is such a freeing, fun, different experience than being on camera. There's just something different about it that's not more fun, but a different sort of fun.

Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

The more you're able to understand how to do a good dramatic performance, that can inform your comedy. It all informs one another. And it keeps everything interesting.

The fun thing we get to do is mess around playing all sorts of different people. People that really existed, people that exist in a book - whom people love and have a specific idea of who they are, and you kind of have to work with that - or people that you can take a completely fresh look at.

It's fun to play somebody who has no boundaries or rules. There's no book you can read on how to play a witch, so you just create a version. It's really great!

What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.

When it's all said and done, I'm very, very glad to work in this business, but that's exactly what it is. It's a business, and I get to do the fun half of it. I get paid to pretend. I get to play really great characters. And, we have such a wonderful writer. She just knows people so intricately, and it's so fun to be able to act out her words.

Sometimes the characters that I'm most resistant to are the ones that I find the most satisfying to play, because you have to dig deeper and you have to find different parts of yourself that are not necessarily the first thing you access and that's fun and interesting.

I'm trying to use the camera to get into people's heads. I use camera techniques a lot to articulate character.

The challenge and love, for me, of acting is if you get to transform or do something you haven't done before. That's fun.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

It used to be embarrassing. In the beginning, because you listen to yourself so much, you think, I must look like an asshole right now - or sound like an asshole. And then, you just get to that point where you've done so many ridiculous, ridiculous things in the booth from screaming, to having orgasms, to whatever your director is asking you to do for this character, you just lose your inhibitions.

I got good at trying to throw a voice on a character from the very beginning as opposed to like reading it and sitting with it and mulling over it and stuff like that just try to read what it is and then try to put a funny voice to it like as soon as possible and stuff like that. Once you get laughs with your voice then you can start thinking about, you know the physical characteristics and how they might walk or if they stick out their buck teeth or if they wear an afro and stuff like that. I think like finding the voice of the character helps to like build the wardrobe and everything else.

for me the most fun of my career is to bring a little bit of irreverence to characters. And, you know, I don't think that the producers were expecting me to be as irreverent as I am.

I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old. . . When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence.

When you start and you're taking the character seriously, it's going to lead down a variety of paths.

Probably the most fun I've ever had, actually, acting. Because it was the perfect extension of the stuff that I'd started to do on Late Night With David Letterman, and when I look back on all my work, it was probably the best possible incarnation of Chris Elliott, of me.