Actor Improvisation Quotes

We opened a theater in 2006 called Loft Ensemble in Sherman Oaks. And we write our own plays and do goofy characters and pack a whopping 20 people per night to watch our work.

I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.

In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.

People always said, "I can't believe you made a movie that had no script." Yeah, but here's the thing, if you've got actors who are used to that, and that's what they like to do, they're all good improvisers and they're all people that feel comfortable doing that, then you know, it's not that big of a deal. It's what you do.

Often in films there's more of allowing the actors to make the dialogue fit better in their own. Also, you get to a location and the geography is different, so the lines don't line up the right way, so you do have to change stuff.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

The majority of the filmmaking process is in pre-production. The more you've planned out the more freedom there is on set to find new stuff, to play around, find new jokes and let the actors kind of breathe - but it needs to come from a place where it's completely structured.