When I direct - everything I've directed has had improv in it, because I think there's something special in a performance the first time it's said out loud that's hard to recreate.
I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.
I don't want actors to know anything. The more they are lost, the better they play.
Many times I'll improvise it, which isn't done a lot in movies or commercials. But a lot of my commercials are improvised.
I started doing the big Hollywood stuff, and I realised, 'Oh, there's no rehearsal at all; you just turn up on the set, and sometimes you haven't even met the other actor, or the woman who's playing your wife, and you're suddenly in bed with them.'
I'm a spontaneous actress, not a studied one.
People call me an instinctive actor. I used to consider that an insult early on, only because I had never studied. Now... I love it.
I work with my instincts. I don't have a process that I learned in an acting class whereby I break a script down or whereby I do a certain kind of research.
I try not to do scenes a certain way, because then I become conscious of it, and it dosen't come off as realistic. I try to make it so that I'm not really aware of what I'm doing.
I'm probably one of the worst actors as far as preparation goes, because I actually don't prepare. I find it easier to read the script and whatever hits me in my stomach, like deep down, I just go with it. And the director kind of molds me whether to go right or left with it.
I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.
Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you're not going to be good.
I never contemplated. I just went in there and did my acting. I never thought, "What's the character actually feeling here? What's he trying to get across?" And never looked at it from that classically trained actor's point of view.
You would never dream of going on to play a scene in front of an audience at least without having rehearsed it. But you do somehow in front of a camera.
It felt scary because there was no auditioning, no rehearsing.
