Unscripted Acting Quotes

When I direct - everything I've directed has had improv in it, because I think there's something special in a performance the first time it's said out loud that's hard to recreate.

I do a lot of improvising on movies, actually.

I think doing The Improv is a little more ominous than doing a college campus because it was so different than anything I'd done.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

I've never done an improvised movie as a fictitious character. I think that's the challenge.

I am very much a seat-of-the-pants actor. I will prepare when I have to. But I like being unprepared.

I'm a spontaneous actress, not a studied one.

People call me an instinctive actor. I used to consider that an insult early on, only because I had never studied. Now... I love it.

I work with my instincts. I don't have a process that I learned in an acting class whereby I break a script down or whereby I do a certain kind of research.

Improv is not something I had a lot of experience with, because for a long time, my only experience in front of a camera was all television, which is pretty rigid script-wise, except for the occasional scene where you toss in an ad-lib just to elongate something.

I try not to do scenes a certain way, because then I become conscious of it, and it dosen't come off as realistic. I try to make it so that I'm not really aware of what I'm doing.

'Curb' is 100 percent improvised, which is wild. I'd never done anything like that.

You don't get time to rehearse in film and TV at all.

I'm not one of these actresses like, 'Okay, where's the camera? Is it here? Is it here?' I don't even ask the questions because I don't really want to know. I like not performing for a camera but giving it my best every single time whether you're close or whether you're far.

I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.

Sometimes people don't rehearse at all, but you might have had a chance to rehearse for a few days, or even more than that. Then in the moment when the camera's running is the only time it matters. So whatever you've discussed or thought about or discussed with the director, the other actors, hopefully there's a part of the experience that you've left open so that only in that moment the camera catches it. That's of course the hardest thing to do because everything is planned and you have thought about it in advance.

Scenes change all the time. Scenes will change while you're shooting them, and you just have to roll with it 'cause that's what makes it funny. It's not being stuck in your character and how you're gonna do something, but to react to other people and to really have a real-life conversation.

Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you're not going to be good.

The way plays happen, at least with me, it's spontaneous combustion of things you've had in your head.

I kind of connected the dots, like, 'Oh, we're just saying stuff. We're just saying things that make sense, so let's just say them like you say them in real life.' It was my first and one of my only acting lessons 'cause I never really studied acting.

I always just like to improvise, and that goes for my audition tapes as well.

When I over-prepare, I try to let it all go and forget all about it when the camera rolls, so I can just be present with the other actors and allow what's going to happen to happen without too much preconception.

The great thing about scenes that involve nervous breakdowns - in the little experience I have doing them - is that there's no way to craft it. You just have to do it, and it sort of crafts itself in just being incredibly messy.

On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.

I've always found that acting has been quite a hard thing to pre-manage because so much of it is spontaneous and the circumstances so uncontrolled.