Improvisation

Oh, you poor bastards having to sit through this. Now, they told me they were going to put good violin over me, and you guys had to sit through me practicing. I remember that. And here's a semi-scripted, semi-ad-lib card game, which became a running bit between Booger and Takashi. Yeah, you guys made that up. That was improvised because once we were in the place, he just came through and told us to make up something. Yeah.

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Whose idea was it to keep your glasses on in the shower? This little scene was not in the script, but it seemed that after this little spat in the shower, we needed a healing moment between our heroes. And so we just set up the camera and said, why don't you guys try to make up before you go to bed? And they ad-libbed this right down to that little tandem eyeglass removal.

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There's Michelle Meyrink. And who didn't get this part, I'll tell you who didn't get this part, am I allowed to say? Sarah Jessica Parker auditioned Joan Cusack, Jami Gertz, and we picked Michelle. I actually think Julia Louis-Dreyfus came in, too. Tony and Michelle also did a lot of improvisation in their scenes together. This was an animation that is kind of a... You have to sort of suspend your...

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and who knew it could improvise, and Fran came out of nowhere, and this is her. She's just going here. She has no... None of these lines are written. She's just... She's so perfect. She's just smacking it. Yeah. We went to every major studio in town, I think, with this 20-minute demo under the four of us, Rob and Chris and Michael and I, and you've never seen blanker stares on the faces of major film executives after they'd seen this 20 minutes, and they'd say...

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He would be running around the room like a real documentary cameraman. That's why he had that documentary experience. Rob would be walking, you know, crab walking with him, whispering in his ear, you know, because he might have a better sense of whom... Of where the focus of the scene was going. But Peter's instincts were very, very good. And those pans off of people, because the improvisation mimics what would really happen, he was able to instinctively just do what he would do as a cameraman if this were a real documentary.

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Because it was in documentary form, if you have a written script, there's no way to really make that seem spontaneous. There's just no way to act that. And we just knew that that was not going to work. And we knew enough people that could improvise convincingly to portray this as a real life experience that we felt confident that this would work. I did go to one screening where they showed the four and a half hour version. There's a bootleg copy of the demo that's around.

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William Friedkin

Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet used to in the films of the 1940s and late 30s. And this was, again, created by Turturro. I loved his accent, which was not his own sound. The way he sounded, his attitude, a lot of the dialogue which he improvised from what had been written and took it a step further and took it a step wilder. I loved the way he had this...

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William Friedkin

and then everything comes out of improvisation. Improvisation is a word I probably used a couple of times on this recording now, and it's something I very much believe in when you're dealing with an American contemporary film, where you want the acting style to be loose, you know, not sound like the words were typed first. You want it to sound as though the actors are just making up the words as they go along.

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William Friedkin

You want the photography to almost be caught by surprise by what the characters are doing. And so I let that attitude follow me into the cutting room, where I'm improvising not only the structure of scenes, but the order of scenes. I'll very often change the order of one scene or another while the film is telling me what it wants to be in the cutting room.

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encouraged, allowed to improvise on a large scale at all? Or would it be, you know, just those moments, like you said, where, you know, Amato pulls you to the side and encourages something. But, you know, like you bringing up Tangerine, how much were you able to put things into that that were not necessarily in the script? I mean, I'm going to be very, very honest. I later became what's known as a telenovela star. Their turn, not mine.

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which is actually scripted improvisation, like most of the lines are not what's in the script, and you get one take and you move on. And so I became very good at improvisation, but I think at the time we were filming, I'm going to be very honest, I don't think I would have trusted myself to improvise that much. I was still too young to trust my instrument enough to improvise in scenes. Mac? Yeah, the moonwalk and the Dukes of Hazzard slide. That was it. That was the stuff he got to try.

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especially in a skirt I'm not interested in doing that but Mac was all over it that was a really really cool moment for him you know what I think also maybe halfway through the film we realized it probably wasn't a good idea to give her money yeah make the day there was already quite a bit of improvisation happening around us I just want to point out that's a beautiful car right there that's probably the nicest prop in the film oh come on

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John Mackenzie

Yes, it was like it was personally tailored for me. And of course, we do do things in certain scenes where we slightly change the dialogue or we improvise it a bit just to make it even more holy or completely his. Oi. Which one's Errol's house? Never heard of him, mate.

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John Mackenzie

Bob came out with this half improvised, half written speech. He kept adding to it and I kept encouraging him. That's the sort of thing I think you could do with Bob. At that stage, Bob was a wonderfully raw talent.

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And he loved it. Mike's great improvised line here. Hey, I didn't even eat the moose.

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which wasn't in the script it's one of the few bits of improvisation a strange looking house i'm not sure what it was meant to be it's on the yorkshire moors idea of the death party getting into their cars

1:39:16 · jump to transcript →

Well, there's no track. I don't think there's track. The idea that the sound would stop and the theater would really... This was all basically... The scenes were written more or less like you see them. But there was a lot of improvisation on the set for the staging. Jost built his camera in a chair so that we would always have this looking up look. What do you think, Jon?

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Kurtwood Smith was really good in his improvisation. Oh, he was the best of the... You let him improv all the time because he was the best. Yeah, because he had always... This was... Yeah, we went a bit overboard here, but in general, a lot of these little things that he's doing or saying are all Kurtwood, isn't it?

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Richard Donner

You know, a lot of movies... I'd like to work with them again. I'd love to improvise. Let the actors go. This particular script, this particular group of writers... Michael and Mitch, it's so well written. It's so perfect for each character that the only improv that ever happened was moments when Bill would just run off and keep going, or Bob Goldthwait. But as far as the, well, the character scenes and the people, it's all on paper before we started. Good writing. Really good writing. And it continues to be at less. I can't wait till Christmas to see this again.

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Richard Donner

Poor Richard, he's gone too. But I assume you all realize that there was a moment in Richard's life where he... That was improvisation. It was improvisation. It was a mistake. The floor was wet. He slipped, and, boy, did he make a lot out of it.

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Jim Piddock

You schedule the best you can, but sometimes an actor will simply be unavailable for an important scene. He'll be introducing a new line of automobiles to dealers in Missouri or wherever. The filmmaking process is really one of constant improvisation, giving this line to this actor and that line to that actor or whoever's available in a way that hopefully preserves some of the sense. And so there's no dialogue here again. The writer's soaring well beyond words, just a bit of

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Roger Moore

And so it's a question of discussing. I remember Lewis Gilbert, when we did a couple of films with him, and he would always say at the beginning of the day, what are you going to say now, dear? I'd say, well, what's in the script? He says, well, let's try something else as well. And I think the improvisation sort of just, well, for me,

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Judd Nelson

Great use of music and sound in this movie. Yeah. I love how the door just slams, hard. That right there, Judd, I told you this before, but that is, in my opinion, the greatest "Fuck you" in cinema history. That's a great "Fuck you." - I like that. Yeah. I know that they went back and did a little audio stuff with it. That's a great "Fuck you," if I may say. Judd was a master of Tourette's early. Definitely. - You just feel it all, though. That whole scene gets built up, and it all comes out right there in that. Throws his head back and just roars. - Yeah. How did you wind up setting your shoe on fire? Was that your thing? Was that you? - I think so. Yeah. It's like anything you could come up with, I think, was encouraged. This kind of stuff, too, we ad-libbed and then we'd shoot it. Yeah, any little behavioral stuff. 'Cause if I remember what I thought John wanted at this point was just how we would all entertain ourselves, which is what it became. - Yeah. What would we be doing in that first hour, where we're just driving ourselves nuts and yet, not engaging each other.

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She's wailing. I had that big yellow raincoat on. Oh, yeah. It had a hood. Yeah. Yeah. It was over my head. Yeah. Your hair's different. And she improvised. She improvised that line with one of the most gifted comic actors of his time. Hi, Dad. Did you see it? I'll send you a tape. Yeah, I'm sorry I haven't called. Thing's got a...

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John McTiernan

This shaving scene, we were talking about Bill Duke, and how he is good with improvisation. He asked to use the razor as a part of something that had to do with his character, and I said, "Sure, of course." And I think, somehow out of the discussion, whether he came up with it, or I came up with it, the notion would be that he, he is gotta cut himself and break the razor.

1:03:28 · jump to transcript →

20 seconds left. There's a line and a couple of lines coming up that these two guys, Chainsaw and his buddy, ad-libbed, and I thought it was as good as anything written. And... 20, 20 more seconds. 20 seconds. Stop. Hetzel's done. C, C, C... Drop them! Just stay seated until Anna Maria has a chance to pick up her tissues.

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Barry Levinson

We got to know each other. It was actually fun to do because we did a lot of, again, some improvisation. Because I knew the characters, because I knew the relationships between the two of them, I was able to provoke Tom on some occasions and get certain responses from it. So it was fun to do because it was very loose and we tried a lot of things to ultimately put the scene together.

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