There's nobody who loves being around actors working more than David Mamet, especially actors bringing his tremendous dialogue to life. I've never seen a movie director who was happier to be directing a movie than Dave.
For an actor, a Mamet play is definitely on the list of things you hope to be a part of before it's time to exit.
[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
I think I'm better than Mamet, I would say.
You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.
Any time you get to do a David Mamet play, it's a great opportunity. His writing is such that I think it's a big challenge, but when you get it right, it's a great opportunity to play every night, really.
I did about 10-12 national commercials and then got one line parts in things like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and the show 'The Unit.' Got a little part in the movie 'Redbelt' by David Mamet and kept slowly grinding up and then started getting bigger parts in independents and getting noticed by Liz Meriwether.
David Mamet's writing is pretty spectacular, obviously. I like the honesty of it; I like how funny it is and how sad it is.
Oh, 'Sports Night' was tough because 'Sports Night' was... Well, you know, it's like Mamet. It's Sorkin. And I didn't realize that you had to immediately be off of the other actors' last line in their dialogue.
Why is being a female having an agenda any more than being a misogynist - which David Mamet most certainly is?
I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.
The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.
I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.
David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.
My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.
You've never seen anything until you've seen David Mamet be an Edwardian lady. He always conveys what he means, but he's so... masculine.
I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.
Val Kilmer gave my husband, David Mamet, a Randall knife as a gift when the two of them were making the film 'Spartan.'
My husband is a graduate of two Ivy League universities - with a degree in Classics! - and he sounds like a David Mamet character when I hear him on a business call.
I would probably do anything with David Mamet. He's so great. I just love his writing.
For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do.
[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.
When I was growing up in the '80s and working in the theater, David Mamet exploded with a whole new reworking of what dialogue should sound like. It was punchy and raw and repetitive, bursting with dynamic. I remember that switching on a lot of lights for me.
I've studied Stanislavsky, and Mamet taught Stanislavsky, and I studied with Sanford Meisner. But the part of the method that I think is the most fruitful is the method of physical actions. It all comes down to your objective: Nothing else counts except what you want. How you feel will take care of itself.
