Lars von Trier Quotes

On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it.

With comedy, you really want to work things out beforehand.

The day before I work, I don't like to even look at the script and let whatever happens happen on the set. But I do prepare a lot. I'm a big believer in that.

On film, when you're driving home from the set, you realize what you should have done, but it's too late. When you're taking the subway home from your play, you realize what you did wrong, and you go back the next night and you do it better, or you screw it up again in a different way. It's a different thing altogether.

All I can do is keep my nose down and shoot the scene, shoot the scene, make it funny, make it funny, make it funny.

Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising.

I try not to think about any of the production side of things. If you do, you tend to get unfocused and distracted. I just try to think about the character and the scene and what I'm doing.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

In a way, as an actor, you do all the preparation and then you want to forget it and just play the scene. As a director, you can't forget it because somebody will remind you that you forgot something. But you can know your plan well enough that you still have a certain amount of freedom.

Sketches have characters, exits, entrances and are vastly different.

Once we got the scene down, we were told to improv.

I love the process of working on a play. I love rehearsal so much. New York can be so tough, but the community in the theater is so warm and glorious.

I love acting. I want to act as much as I can without interfering with the music.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.

The theater has kept me alive, and it's allowed me to work at my craft.

More than anything else, I love to act and leave the rest to my director.

I like to have the actors do their thing. And then brief them what to do differently in take two.

I rehearse my script with my co-actors and take their tips quite seriously.

I don't think I'm anything like the improviser. I'm not. I do better with at least an outline.

Comedy and drama are both challenging to me.

I definitely don't want to do drama. I'm not looking to branch out into that world.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

The theater was my first training ground. It taught me discipline, dedication and appreciation of hard work.

People know my background and for people who need an improviser, I'm one of the people they think to use if I'm appropriate for the part.