I write in the booth and memorize in rehearsals.
I envision the script as a story in my mind, memorize the entire thing and have it play out. It helps me figure out where my character needs to go.
Something I learned as an actor was which scenes needed to be rehearsed and which actors are good with rehearsal, which actors learn from it, and which ones grow stale because they start to second-guess themselves.
I've worked with actors who treat the first two takes like rehearsals. And that's okay. If the camera is on you and we're doing a scene where I'm off camera, I'm treating that as a rehearsal.
I'm always writing; I'm always jotting things down on paper or making notes in my iPhone. Then I'll make myself sit down and kind of shape it up, but there's really no other way to practice other than onstage.
I usually mug up my Telugu dialogues much before going to the sets every day.
I don't want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.
Usually I design the lighting and when I have the physical set there, I'm not good at going out loosely and saying, 'Do you what you want, give it to the editor, and he'll figure it out.' I physically then walk on with the actors and I say, 'Let's walk until you guys feel the space works for you, and tell me when all that happens.'
If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.
You have formal rehearsal, a lot of things you don't have in movies - which is, you have to formally rehearse. You have to know your back story, discuss it, and almost everybody onstage has to know each other's [story], so that when it comes time to actually do it, you can throw it all away. That's the way I like to - and I didn't realize until very recently - that's the way I like to prepare for movies.
I run the material, always with two people, sometimes three. We all see things so differently, so to get a couple of people's perspectives on what I'm doing and the material itself is insanely helpful for honing in on what to take into the audition room.
Personally, I need to learn every word on the page before I go in and audition. I have not mastered the skill of holding pages in my hand and acting with pages in my hand. I find that every time I have to look at the page it takes me completely out of the scene.
I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again.
A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
My process is I try to learn my lines so they're so solid I don't have to think about them or how I'm going to say them.
We start with a rehearsal where the actors kind of bring what they think should be in the scene. But we film everything, and we use cuts of this first take, also.
I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.
As soon as I have the script in my hand, I'll be up in my apartment room pacing up and down learning it because it's just such a lovely thing to do.
I just decided to play make believe, memorize it like it was just some kind of song and just take the emotion out of the words. And I did. I goofed a couple of times.
So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing.
Ivo van Hove is directing The Crucible, and rehearses in quite an unusual way. We started rehearsals last week and dived straight into the first act, like, five minutes after we all turned up. No warm-ups. We were very intensely immersed in that whole world on day one. It was quite surreal because I've never done any theater before.
When I rehearse, it ends up doing more harm than good. I think I work a little bit better when it's right off the bat. Mostly, I try to wrap my head around a role as much as I can without rehearsing and then kind of make it as fresh as possible on the day.
I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it’s possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It’s very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.
