Jennifer Jason Leigh Quotes

I think every time you take on a new role, you're trying to help find that voice and you add your own bits and pieces along the way but with Noah [Baumbach] it's already done.

I basically put myself into directors' hands and let them tell me what to do, and the more they told me what to do, the more I liked it.

Nothing makes an actor feel freer and more inventive and more creative than being trusted.

I think it seems to be when I'm trusted, and someone just lets me have free rein - 'Do what you want, man' - that kind of confidence that directors instil in me always gets my best stuff out.

I follow the director's lead because they generally know more about the big picture, but I also trust that the director will give me enough freedom to play.

Clint Eastwood expects you to know what you're doing. He's going to take two giant steps back and let you do it. I have such appreciation for that part of him.

When I give over to somebody's vision rather than have an idea of what I need to do, it takes me to places I wouldn't have got to by myself. I'm always attracted to a strong director.

I find that all great directors, and I would include Ben Affleck and Clint Eastwood in that, they have great confidence. And with great confidence comes great freedom for the actor.

Kubrick ate it up. He loved it. He just let me go crazy.

Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control.

People will only follow you if they see you're ahead, are convinced you know the route, trust you, and want to get there too.

It varies, but in my experience, directors who are the most comfortable with themselves and confident in their work give you and everybody on the crew the freedom and the space to create.

Leadership is more about clarity than it is about control.

Ekta Kapoor believed that I would do good work and allowed me to explore. I had that support system.

Being a director it's mean - digging deep in yourself as well. I think the deeper I understood the material and the script and the themes and the characters, I felt the more confident I was and the more I could bring to the movie. So I was lucky to have my actors because they were right there with me in the deep end.

Leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think possible.

I get so much energy and I learn so much through collaborating with other people. Ultimately, I think the best music will always be created through collaborations - pooling together skills to create something bigger than any individual. I like to use my own SOPHIE material to present ideas in their most extreme, un-compromised form. I really use those opportunities to express exactly where I'm at in terms of production and writing ideas, as a document of my thoughts and feelings, as well.

I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.

Working with Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Stealing Beauty was my first experience of being able to communicate with someone whom I'd think of as a mentor, who'd ask me my opinion and trust me, and believe in me and allow me to do the things that I wanted to do. The film itself was also rare in terms of character most of the scripts I've read are the story of some man, and there might be a love interest or a big woman's part.

I think what's great about that relationship between an actor and a Director is you have to really blow away all your thing, the safety things that you put up.

It's quite liberating to have a director stand beside the camera and say: "Do this now, and do that now..." It's also a bit sordid but it liberates an actor, I think.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music.

I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.