I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.
Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.
Someone said to me the other day, 'Oh, you're really jhujhi.' What does that mean? Fancy? Fabulous? Some people think I can only do fancy, I don't know why. I'm a pretty easy person really. Low maintenance. I get on with things and I'm comfortable anywhere.
We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
I asked, "What are words?" The tenzo said, "One, two, three, four, five." I asked again, "What is practice?" "Nothing in the entire universe is hidden."
[W]ords are fine, but it has to be what a generation reads into those words.
I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.
Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only good can live, and good has not been theirs; but how durst men forge our Saviour's words "eternal death " into so horrible a meaning? And even if he did use other words, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them (and what witness have we that He did, except that of men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have interpreted these words wrongly as they did so many others?
The simple fact is, offense is taken, not given.
It's up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
Normally my process is to sit in a room and read a script and talk about it and ask questions and just create a dialogue. That goes all the way through shooting. All kinds of thoughts and ideas can find their way in there. As long as you're all on - We're just all trying to tell the story so my job as a director is just to find out what this film wants to be based on, it's just words on a page at some point but then it just needs to go to some level of believable storytelling. I'm discovering the film as I make it, to some degree.
Words are as they are taken, and things are as they are used. There are even cursed blessings.
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
You'd be surprised how much you don't understand what other people see your actions as; how other people view the things you say and the things that you do. And a lot of times just clarifying what your intentions are with people makes a huge difference.
Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.
