Kevin Spacey: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, that’s great. That’s good to know. You also said interesting line that improvisation helps you learn about the character. Can you explain that? So through maybe playing with the different ways of saying the words or the different ways to bring the words to life, you get to learn about yourself, about the character you’re playing. It can be helpful, but improv is, I’m such a big believer in the writing and in serving the writing and doing the words the writer wrote that improv for me, unless you’re just doing comedy, and I mean, I love improv in comedy. It’s brilliant. So much fun to watch people just come up with something right there. But that’s where you’re looking for laughs and you’re specifically in a little scene that’s being created. But I think improv has had value, but I have not experienced it as much in doing plays as I have sometimes in doing film where you’ll start off rehearsing and a director may say, “Let’s just go off book and see what happens.” And I’ve had moments in film where someone went off book and it was terrifying. There was a scene I had in Glengarry Glen Ross where the character I play has fucked something up, has just screwed something up. And Pacino is livid. And so we had the scene where Al is walking like this and the camera is moving with him, and he is shooing me a new asshole. And in the middle of the take, Al starts talking about me. “Oh, Kevin, you don’t think we know how you got this job? You don’t think we know whose dick you’ve been sucking on to get this part in this movie?” And I’m now, I’m literally like, I don’t know what the hell is happening, but I am reacting. We got to the end of that take. Al walked up to me and he went, “Oh, that was so good. Oh my God, that was so good. Just so you know the sound, I asked them not to record, so you have no dialogue. So it’s just me. Oh, that was so good. You look like a car wreck.” And I was like, “Yeah.” And it was actually an incredibly generous thing that he gave me so that I would react. Oh wow. Did they use that shot because you were in the shot-…

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