Improvisation

and I wanted a totally new character to fit into that slot of the film. And she gave an incredible audition, made me crack up, she made me cry. But it was really a year into the workshop process, which is the way we created the film, which was through improvisation over two and a half years with all you guys.

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And he's gorgeous. He was hot on you, too, honey, you told me. He was? Why doesn't anybody ever tell me that in person? Well, you know. But he is so beautiful, too. You know, stunning. I love fighting with him. This was the funnest scene to shoot. You guys were so great at improvising here. When his purse spilled out, he had pot, and then all his pot spilled out. That's an...

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wonderful musician and performer. What did your very best orgasm feel like? This scene was really long. The original version was like 15 minutes. And we improvised our heads off for this, right? So it was such a looseness. There's JD there. That was just so comfortable. We have a nice long version on the DVD.

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Ron Howard

Some of my favorite scenes in the movie are just Jim Carrey alone in his cave. Again, it gave Jim such a chance to improvise and play with the ideas.

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Ron Howard

That was actually a line that Jim thought of on the day for Taylor. So he's not only improvising for himself, but it was like having a world-class joke writer on the set with you at all times.

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Ron Howard

There's my dad again. Another improvised line on the day.

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It was interesting to shoot this moment because most of the time Jim was really in the bed and his character was really restrained and he saw those two guys, those two young actors coming in and improvising and

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In between the texts, he would jump on the bed and sing this crazy song called Pecan Pie, which is like a mock-up of Elvis. And he felt, sometimes I think he felt challenged by those guys. But it was funny the dynamic between Mark, Elijah and Kirsten, because Kirsten, she was not so happy to have to improvise. And they were getting so much of the script that sometimes she would get pissed off.

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So here you see the smoke again. Yeah. That's Kate improvising. Remember this line about, do you ever inhale hairspray? Yeah. I stopped because it caused cellulite. Yeah. We didn't keep that, but that was her line she improvised. That was in her apartment, the first time that they're in her apartment.

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Jonathan Lynn

Or when we zoomed in or zoomed out, that's the camera moving, and there's a newspaper just spinning on a piece of black velvet. So we were able to do that sequence for about $1,000 instead of vastly more if we'd done it computer-generated or optically. And it was beautifully cut by my editor, Tom Lewis. That was an ad lib by Bruce, which is pretty funny, I thought. He just improvised that on that take, and only that take.

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Jonathan Lynn

Hey, it's been good. I'm glad we got to know each other. This joke was improvised by Matthew and Bruce on the set. Me too. You can go now. Right. I love it. Oz! Yes, dear? Thank God you're home. Thank God I'm home? I had an idea. I figured out a way we can pay off Daddy's debt. Rosanna's Montreal accent is...

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Jonathan Lynn

That wasn't product placement either. What the hell did you do that for? I felt bad. I like him. I liked him. So you don't like him no more? Well, it's a little hard to maintain a friendship with somebody who wants to kill you. I love the joke at the end of this scene about the gap in his teeth, which Matthew ad-libbed on one take. You know, I can close that gap for you. Really? Yeah, you'd be in that one. You kidding? No, not a problem. Wonderful character touch.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

This was all ad-libbed. The speech was much shorter. We did many takes and had Will say angry, mean things to those people. We combined a lot of different takes. We're sometimes on his back because we're adding additional comedy lines. And we're about to be back actually shooting in New York City. This was at Central Park West

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Barry Sonnenfeld

What time? - Lunch. That section was ad-libbed at the last minute. I wanted a comedic rapid-fire discussion... ...between them to really help us understand... ... there was an immediate connection between them. I love Danny Elfman's score on this part of the movie. He's starting the romance in a lovely way. Elfman did an amazing job on this movie... in terms of comedy, action, romance. Before we're taught how to think... ...

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Dental? Funny joke. The most advanced technologies.... So this globe never existed. This was done in the computer. This is a typical joke for me that I love. That's me, by the way, screaming, "All is lost! All is lost!" I love whenever we can play with scale... ...and play with the sense of things affecting whole worlds or universes... ...because of the dumbest, less-planned... ...not-expected ways to do that. I love that something like your finger going into the sky of a world... ...could create tidal waves. It's, to me, what the whole series is about. This was ad-libbed by Will in a very funny way.

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Fuck you had us doing this scene all day and night. Well, you kept improvising. You kept on coming up with new stuff. Yeah, and I like... You just sort of fed up. Remember Nick Nolte falling over in the chair?

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another actor had a ditch dug for them so that they could remain taller. But it's nice to be taller than you in one scene. I loved this day, man. Yeah, this was great. You and I became like film lovers on this day. Yeah, this is where we had some fun in terms of just improvising. Yeah, you pushed me right over the edge. Yeah.

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Well, you did need to get your comeuppance for doing this, right? Hey, I feel it was like karma on the spot. Why you still doing this chicken jaw shit? I have no idea. Neither do I. It's beyond me. It's beyond me. You confused. I am a little confused. I know. That's you improvising with Brandon. But are we cool? Oh, yeah. Not really. You really are not okay. Oh, no, damn. This to me, it doesn't get any better than this. Everybody shut their fucking mouth except Jack right now. Hey, so if it's no big deal, I think I'm just going to hang back here for the mission.

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We straightened it all up momentarily. Oh, yeah. Evie ad-libbed that, and that kind of worked out nice.

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This is just terrific work by Allan Cameron. I mean, there's so many sets. And this set in particular, later on when the two girls fight, he designed that set. And this used to be, well, first we had this set where you could see all the way down there and they had to go in this. And then we just kept moving things around. Alan's so good at just quickly moving walls and statues. And he could make one set appear to be four. And so as big as the movie was and as many sets as we had, Alan kept improvising and giving me even more sets to play with.

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All right. Yes, I'm very busy and important. How can I help you? Don't laugh. That line was improvised. That's the first time you guys have laughed. -/ didn't write that line. - No, it's not the first time we've laughed. It's Hugh's line. - You're just oversensitive. You used to know that Em was Hugh's sister earlier in the film and you used to know that Alan and Emma were married earlier in the film. This is better though. - Clever, much cleverer. The idea was that you should be thinking about the Heike-Alan story, "A fun story, funny, let's see what happens." And then you suddenly realize the flip side of it's not so good. I've always wanted a shot like that where one side of your face is dark and the other side is moody. I can't begin to tell you how critical Emma was of these two dolls. And she said, "I can't lift these up "because they're clearly just Ken dressed up." And I'd told the prop department, "Just dress up Ken." And it's a brilliant idea.

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That'll never make number one. That'll never make number one. That was his own line, wasn't it? - Yeah, I think he might have improvised that. Thomas, where do you stand on Justin Timberlake? Well, he's got a good voice, I think. But his dancing you don't rate? - No, I think his dancing's quite good as well. I think he can move. He's all right. - ls he a bit old-fashioned for you? No, he's not old-fashioned. This was the scene where the guys were the other way round. So you had to re-shoot the whole scene? - No, we'd actually done it tame because we had to do a sort of Disney version. It's the Disney version? - Yeah. There was a lot of that. Did you have to do Disney versions, Tom? Yeah, so when Liam sits on the couch he had to say, "You're banjaxed, then." A famous Irish expression. Oh, my God. This is a good scene to show why we cast Laura Linney. Everything she does here is so beautiful. Who's this? Norah Jones? - Yeah. You had a Norah Jones song in... - Two Weeks Notice. She was actually there playing? - Yes, she was. Although she was up and coming, she wasn't massive at that point when we shot it. So we didn't make enough of her. - Very impressive.

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John just went kind of crazy there. You know, a lot of that's improvisation, which John does so brilliantly well, and that line, God knows where that line, where it came from. Oh, I can tell you. You don't want to know where it comes from. Tell me. It comes from Jaws, and it comes from Captain Quentin, who says, here's to men who go swimming with bow-legged women. Oh, OK. Oh, that's where it came from. In drinking scenes in movies, people often wonder what the...

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circumstances during pickups where because you're just shooting some extra scenes you can't really afford to build big sets or anything so we improvised and just in this little tin shed put a few tents and some trees around and sort of get away with it it doesn't look too bad you know as little of war as that hobbit when the fear takes him

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This joke with Doyle, Jeremy Renner, and Flynn, Harold Perrineau, was a kind of improvisation with Jeremy, which, as an actor, he loves these kind of things. I think it's perfectly matched in the style of the movie, introducing a little touch of humour in this moment, which is necessary to relax the tension of the movie and introducing these colleagues, these friends.

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This is a sequence that was a kind of improvisation because we discovered this trampoline in the location. I think it was a good idea to start with the tension again because now the movie is about to... to start again in terms of fear, horror and tension.

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Roman Coppola

I really liked this temple. We went many times to this temple in the center of Jodhpur. I think we brought the cows ourselves. Okay. Spray in face. - Spray in face. This was shot much later, as I recall, actually at the location where we had the final convent, if I remember correctly. Yeah. - Yeah, outside of Udaipur. I remember when we were scouting, there was a day when it looked like this. It was all women. And I don't remember what the occasion was, but we recreated what we saw there. We invited back all the people who had been there on this day that we had scouted at the location and this ceremony was happening. This is a scene I remember we rehearsed in the temple itself and really kind of found the scene, the three of us sort of improvising it and acting it out. And we had a little text we were reading from, but sort of, you know, realizing it just the three of us. Yeah. When we were writing the script and we went to India on our reconnaissance mission, it was like a writing session and it ended up being a location session. And we found this temple and went back and shot there many months later. But as Roman said, this is-- We were walking around, we found this, we went in, we took our little micro scripts out, we rehearsed the scene to see if it was working and saw what worked and what didn't. And then we actually became so attached to this place that we went back and shot the real scene there.

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Roman Coppola

Well, remember when he came to--? When we actually met him, he-- We did this sort of improvised 45 minutes together that was really more like we were-- We just acted like other children and played for 45 minutes... Yeah. - ...pretending to be goat herders or something? Remember that? - Yeah. We went for a walk around the Balsamand pretending to herd goats and deal with some different problem. Maybe the monkeys there surrounded us. He had a very vivid imagination. He was just totally in the moment in the scene, I remember. Yeah.

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I usually like to give them a lot of creative freedom. And I like them to improvise their dialogue and changing, you know, something. And I respect their ideas, you know. And I try to find a way to work it out, try to find a way to work into the scene. And I like instincts. I like they do everything by their own instinct. And I hate rehearsal. You know, I've never liked to do any rehearsal in advance. On a set, all I need is just a rough,

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Every act of violence had to have its consequence. There was actually, Ryan, before the shooting started, in one of the takes, improvised a line where he said, shoot the doctor, I hate that line. And it got a big laugh, you remember, at the test. We left it in. And as soon as people laughed at it, I cut it out. I just didn't want to have... This is great. Is that American audiences that just don't give...

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garden again oh yeah that shot yeah that's um I shot that in the back I had I just spent a few days looking for planes all the planes go overhead my house and I just shot them through the trees that's the one of the great things about DV cameras is that you can do a lot of you can improvise a lot of stuff and bring it in and if you've if you've done it well enough it'll you know you can use it in the film you don't have to have a whole film crew out doing stuff like that yes sir

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Noah Baumbach

Bill Murray, one thing about Bill, there's kind of two parts of working with Bill. I feel like the two of us have a very similar understanding of how to approach the scenes in terms of what we each have to do. He's easy for me to communicate with. He's quick to grasp what I'm thinking of. He's quick to come up with his own interpretation that gets at what I'm hoping for, what I might not be able to describe to him in words that made any sense, he can somehow make sense of. There's another part of Bill, which is this sort of wildness that he brings to the set because he's somebody who can walk into a room and immediately command it, and he can always think of something great to say, and he loves being around people and getting them behind him and getting them following him. I've never met anybody else like him that I can absolutely certify. He really has an effect on people, and he has an effect on a group of actors, and he has an effect on a crew of people who will just never forget him. This scene, I really like how they play this. Yeah, this we did with the... Cate brings a lot out of Bill, and I think she has a real effect on him. Bill has a wildness about him. - He's really on the edge here. When he points the gun at her, that was improvised in his off-camera. In one take, I saw something black pop into the bottom of the frame, and the camera bumped, and afterwards I suddenly did a... "Did you just point your gun at the pregnant reporter?" It was a nice touch. Yeah, it was such a nice touch that I think I thought we wrote it.

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Andrew Niccol

where some of them would have to be rejected. So I just spent the money to fake it. Coming up, there's a great improvisation by Nick Cage. He actually pulls the gun to his own head. And even though the gun isn't loaded, it scared me on the day.

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I could really thank him a lot. It would have been impossible to improvise that or to solve it in any other way than designing it very thoroughly beforehand. This is a very cruel sequence too. Also quite typical.

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Rob Cohen

As Napoleon said, the plan rarely outlives the first shot of a battle. Here, John Hannah improvising like mad. You know, I would give him situations, I'd give him the essence... ...but I wouldn't let him have a script, so...

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