Improvisation

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.

30:05 · jump to transcript →

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.

35:44 · jump to transcript →

And we shot it various times. Also with Gary, it's always a little different, what I like. And I just like to watch this guy. So I shot it like six or seven times. And I had six or seven totally different versions later on. So he was improvising? Not necessarily the lines, but the way he said it. You see, this is the phone where he just opened this. This is the whole antenna. And so that's the satellite phone. And here, people sometimes thought it's just your usual cellular phone. But it's not. And this is one of the biggest laughs here.

54:32 · jump to transcript →

I could have done like a second decision or connected to the bottom. I was thinking at that point you can mix the two movies together. We would like to be on our own here. Yeah, you couldn't use that idea, right? Right, right. This is a scene we improvised on the set. I mean, Andrew Marlowe came all of a sudden and came up with this scene.

1:49:13 · jump to transcript →

We straightened it all up momentarily. Oh, yeah. Evie ad-libbed that, and that kind of worked out nice. He stole his minions and stole his scepter. Oh, you're so brave. And Rich. Did I mention Rich? What do you think I'm doing here? Sorry, we must be in the wrong house. This was John Hanna's first day of filming. It was real fun to get back together with him.

26:10 · jump to transcript →

This is just terrific work by Alan 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.

1:41:02 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

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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Richard Curtis

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.

1:06:25 · jump to transcript →

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...

21:17 · jump to transcript →

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

1:37:19 · jump to transcript →

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.

26:04 · jump to transcript →

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.

34:45 · jump to transcript →

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.

23:08 · jump to transcript →

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.

53:42 · jump to transcript →

trying to get a level of naturalism and realism in the performances. And David comes from a documentary background. And so we set up a whole series of cameras and just kind of went in a circle around the table and allowed the actors to improvise as much as they wanted to. And that created a sense of naturalism. And we shot the film in order.

5:29 · jump to transcript →

seeded the most control over in terms of you know the other movies were very hyper stylized and super designed and every shot storyboarded and you know meticulous prep and long preps and long post-production this had none of that and it was a lot more about trying to give the the scenes to the actors and allow there to be improvisation and to feel our way through it and

1:19:07 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Yes, now, this is a special thing because Jeff is someone who is-- Not every actor in the cinema is able to be handed paragraphs and to sculpt them and shape them. When you're going on the stage, if you're used to going on the stage, which, Jeff is used to going on the stage too, but when you call on someone to take a thing like this, bring the whole thing to life, I have noticed the preparation that Jeff... Sometimes takes the form of-- I hear Jeff doing the scene over and over and over. It's becoming like music because Jeff is a musician as well. I say this in front of Jeff, but am I wrong, Jeff? There could be a musical correlation in the process of just how you kind of get the lines into your system and prep-- So that then when you're doing them, you're not thinking about the lines. Do I have any of that right? - [Goldblum] Yeah, you sure do. Yes. Of course, it's a case-by-case basis sometimes, not in this case, but, you know, I like to improvise, and this and that. But this is different. This is different. You're, of course, very-- The document and your writing is meticulous and brilliant, and I'm nothing if not conscientious, and in the time leading up to this, 'cause I had a while, I would do it a lot. I worked on it a lot. Yes, there's a musical kind of-- For me, some kind of, you know, shape that it can take, and it can be informed by sort of my sense of musicality. But I did-- I remember-- I think this is maybe interesting and noteworthy. I had-- After all that work, I came, and on this day, we were reshooting. I remember we did a bunch of takes, but when we started, I did it through, and you said: "You're changing--" I think it was a "the" to an "an" or an "an" to a "the." And I said, "Yes, I know. I've done that not without thought, and here's my reasoning," and I gave you the whole idea. [chuckles] And you said, "Well, that's fine, but I'd rather you do it the way it is."

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Wes Anderson

Well, we had an orchestra from Moscow. And then we had two other troupes, one French and one German, I think, smaller groups to get enough of them, because they don't usually play in such a large group. And we had a great big assembly of them. And then we also had cimbalom, and we had one Hungarian cimbalom player, and we had another English cimbalom player who did different things. In fact, at one point, there's a cimbalom sort of solo in that ski chase. There's one point where it's-- And we had him play it-- We recorded it five times, and each time it had its own kind of thing because it was just an improvised part. And then we ended up just using all five of them at once. And it was a good-- That was the best performance, was playing everything he did all at once. Documents, please. - With pleasure.

1:28:58 · jump to transcript →

Pure Jeremy Renner. These two are so great together. They're so fabulous to work together. And I'm humbly admitting that any time Jeremy gets a laugh in this movie, it's the improvisation of Jeremy Renner. He's a brilliant improvisational actor. And the Kremlin after.

10:18 · jump to transcript →

And this was lovely. This is pure improvisation by Sean. Originally, he just touched her with one finger. And each time he touched her, he touched her in a different way. And this one was just so wonderful. This is some of my favorite music by Joe. I know. And I love this transition here. Okay, this...

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Either using or blank, you know, slates to say. Her off-camera dialogue. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, look at this. Again, this is just so well composed. And here's a line improvised by Hayley. It's really wonderful. She was sitting on the steps of her trailer. This one. We were talking about her character. Can't blame a girl for making an honest living. Yeah. And that was one of the key understandings of Grace. That was kind of the beginning of that.

54:13 · jump to transcript →

Yes, this was all Pom just doing her thing. And in fact, every actor in the movie has some flourish, some great little bit of behavior that's entirely improvised. How to get backlot in a shot and knock a lamp on the floor. And this... We should give credit to Mark Taylor, our sound mixer, for coming up with this idea of having the entity on this mask. That was added in post. Yeah, because people were...

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Alan K. Rode

Despite his off-the-wall antics, the hulking six-foot-four Carey was a singular actor. He improvised crying and wailing about not wanting to die as he was being marched to be shot by a firing squad in Kubrick's Paths of Glory and squirted beer in Marlon Brando's face in The Wild One. In addition to Kubrick, directors including Francis Coppola and Quentin Tarantino sought Carey out. $5,000 is a lot of dough, and that's what I'm paying it for, so nobody has to know my business. All right, John, I got no troubles with you. I'm with you.

34:34 · jump to transcript →

A touch of peck and paw in the close proximity of explosive charges and live animals here. McKinney would later say that his choice to speak as though he had a cleft palate was an onset improvisation encouraged by Eastwood. An aggressively grating scene, indecipherable yammering and the sound of a souped up big block car growling away. The movie for a minute just turns into like pure noise music.

35:42 · jump to transcript →

to Tiresias et al., but that's too heavy even for me. I was only involved in certain changes in dialogue in a very minor way. Some improvising, mostly I think in the fight scene where I get killed. As an actor, I just say what they want me to say. If they want me to improvise, I'll improvise. If they ask me for a better way of saying it, I'll try and find a better way of saying it. But I don't approach a part as an actor

36:32 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

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

1:24:14 · jump to transcript →

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, Jane Soren 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.

1:26:08 · jump to transcript →

Exactly what happened this past week, Raymond. 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.

1:58:14 · jump to transcript →

There's a tremendous amount of improvisation because he knows the parameters of what he wants to say and do. So that allows him to change things as people come up with ideas. Whether it's a cameraman or a prop man, a set designer, he'll take all this and very often put it on film and then decide later on what he wants to do. Don't forget, Marty was originally an editor. So that's the process he likes to go through.

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Fred Dekker

Well, this is just a steal from the first movie. Yeah, but I do like the reactions to, oh, we screwed up here. Oh, sorry about that. Oh, yeah. Don't yell at me. Well, don't do it. They made that up. That's totally ad-libbed. I said, just go. Do it. Whatever. Now, here we haven't talked about Pacific Data Images. Is that it? Pacific Data. Yeah. They did this, PDI. We're also coming up on one of the first uses of the Morph software.

57:15 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, this is, but you also, I mean, with all these actors, I mean, it was just really, it was great. I mean, the outtakes, I mean, although they didn't necessarily serve the whole film, if you can get a hold of them sometime, they're really, it's like an hour of just really great improvised material. But most of the stuff you see in this was the script. And especially Pollock here, completely making fun of my weight and making fun of my family. Yeah, you were trying to get under him and he just... Yeah, he was really...

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