Unscripted Moments Quotes

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

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 try to shoot the first rehearsal because people are more spontaneous. People in real life don't really know where they are going to be either positioning themselves or how they will be saying their words. When people goof during the first take, it usually looks realistic.

WWE is live. There is no second take.

Working with animals forces an actor to work harder because you have to be quick when it comes to improvisation, and you can't break character - at all.

Broadway is amazing because you're performing for such an intimate group of people. You're living in the moment and whatever happens happens, and you go on. You can't say cut and redo it, you have to be on the whole time.

John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience.

The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.

There were radio shows where you actually got to hear people play off of each other and get that immediate magic that goes on. And rather than doing what a lot of shows do, where an individual comes in, reads their part, and you edit it together later on and try to build a performance, we're lucky because this is really very much a theatrical performance that is going on, every single week.

It's nice to not feel like you're just re-enacting a preconceived moment, but there's room for an organic feeling to develop while the camera is rolling. Even amidst these enormous technical productions, Chris [ Nolan] always prioritized making sure that sort of spontaneous and organic feeling could happen at the moment.

People say never work with children and animals. I actually like working with Oliver Bell, and working with a rat really opens possibilities to you because you don't know how it's going to be. It's just a rat, so you can just react to this rat being a rat, if that makes sense.

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

I don't like to rehearse, and the film-makers that I have been drawn to are interested in provoking something between people rather than nailing a scene in advance.

I don't think that any scene [in Pineapple Express] is word for word how you'd find it in the script. Some of it was much more loose than others. The last scene with me, Danny [McBride] and James [Franko] in the diner - there was never even a script for that scene. Usually we write something, but for that scene we literally wrote nothing.

I definitely believe in the energy of the set and the energy of the actor, way more than your written word.

I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work.

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

The two things an actor dreads most are children and dogs.

Altman works in such an interesting way, letting things occur in the film even if he didn't particularly plan them.

Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.

That's what makes live TV exciting - the unknown!

I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing.

There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation.