Scene Exploration Quotes

There are a lot of times that if a detail in a scene or a beat, feels unnatural, they'll allow me to explore another direction to go until we're all comfortable with what we are doing.

Stanley Kubrick was very selective when he went into a close-up. Every director has his taste in a performance, but Stanley would explore a scene to find what was most interesting for him.

On a film set, for me, there's so much more time to process what's going on than there is on a television set. There's more wiggle room to try things and fail and try again and get to the heart of what's going on in the scene, which is really fun for me. It's what I like to do.

When you are repeating your co-star, it's good to bring something new to the equation on screen.

When you explore a scene, the most important thing is who to cast.

On television one gets to do things in detail and at an easier pace. You can experiment a lot with the character, give it lot more time, and let it grow.

I do prefer doing more takes. There's something very organic that comes from the first take, but certain things come out. More details come out, in the way another actor says something. It's always this investigative process. You come further and further to the truth, the more you escalate. I like to do a lot of takes. I have a hunger for it. I like to see what there is to discover in a scene, that hasn't been thought of.

As actors, sometimes we want our character to go somewhere different than it goes, but that's being an actor.

Working with Sukumar was amazing. He's someone who trusts his actors and allows them to experiment with dialogues and scenes. When you're working with him, you learn a lot subconsciously, and that helped me in discovering the actor within.

Michael Pitt is amazing. His physical comedy is extraordinary; he's so committed and so willing to play within the scenes. It makes you feel very free to also explore.

I like to give my actors a lot of room.

In terms of how I work with actors, having worked so heavily on the script I have a very clear idea of the characters; they are reasonably well illustrated in the script. If you cast it right, to a great degree you can hand it over to the actor and I just make suggestions. I'm not the kind of director who needs or wants to get into too much finessing. Ideally, when you hit the set, you have this conversation, like, 'eh, what did you think?' 'I don't know, what did you think?' 'Why don't we just try it again, make a few physical changes.'