Improvisation

Play everything like a seventh grader. I do love this. Trying to put the knife back in. This was improvised. And it was genius. Put it back. Of course. Why wouldn't you put it back? That's where you found it. And I believe it was written.

9:29 · jump to transcript →

And so he started playing it that way, and then I changed it on him. Because I wanted him to play the character a certain way and get into the character. But I didn't want him to be a drunk. Which, by the way, presented a wonderful challenge for me editorially. I always love when directors change things in the middle of shooting a scene. That shot was ad-libbed, where he picks up the leg and finds the box. I thought that was really funny. John Hanna, originally, he was very nervous about doing the movie because...

16:45 · jump to transcript →

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,

1:01:13 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:24:10 · jump to transcript →

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

1:27:29 · jump to transcript →

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.

27:31 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:23:52 · jump to transcript →

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.

48:51 · jump to transcript →

As Napoleon said, the plan rarely outlives the first shot of a battle. Here, John Hanna 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...

1:05:36 · jump to transcript →

Hey, fuck Tony. He's a scumbag. I swear, Dad, if you let me do this, it's gonna work. This is all improvised from the day we were mucking around. And Jane's like, that's not funny. No one's gonna find it funny. You guys keep doing all this masculine crap. And I was like, Jane, we're doing it. And then Jane saw it and went, okay, it is funny. So, how are things going with Katie? See, this part is far more Jane's writing. Just sleep over and spend the whole night watching the entire Ugly Betty box set.

56:50 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

In Moonlighting, I think-- I mean, I've always heard that Bruce really improvised that role very significantly.

39:57 · jump to transcript →

I remember saying to Charles, "Can you--?" That line is not in the script. He improvised it. - I told Charles, "Can you... ...say something like, 'Stay in your place?" This shot in 3D is my favorite 3D shot in the movie... ...with the chains coming down. Absolutely gorgeous. It works very good. And Charles just came up with, "

42:16 · jump to transcript →

And she was finding herself comfortable in that conversation about never doing the same thing twice. She had spent the previous year being, or longer than that, having to do the same thing again and again and again because that's what being a pop artist requires, that you go out and deliver something that's close to the recording. That's what the audience want to hear. And she was never like that. She always wanted to improvise and do things in a different way.

1:46:35 · jump to transcript →

but certainly it pays off when you see that ocean out there. Sank like a stone was improvised, and Eldar Skarr, who plays Finner, is the first person to have improvised dialogue

21:05 · jump to transcript →

Christien Tinsley

He wanted to continue that to make it feel like the skin's really peeling and just sort of prolong the stages of it. So we had to very quickly improvise how to do all the prosthetics on John because originally we had just done the fake head. So we had some bald cap pieces and an extra wig that we had.

36:20 · jump to transcript →