Kevin Spacey: preference

Transcript context

…And I think that everybody feels like that when they’re in the audience with great characters, they just become part of you in some way, the good, the bad, and the ugly of them. One of the things that I feel that I try to do in my work, is when I read something for the first time, when I read a script or play, and I am absolutely devastated by it, it is the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the most life-affirming or terrifying, it’s then a process weirdly of working backwards, because I want to work in such a way that that’s the experience I give to the audience when they first see it, that they have the experience I had when I read it. I remember that there’s been times in the creative process when something was pointed out to me, or something was … I remember I was doing a play, and I was having this really tough time with one of the last scenes in the play, and I just couldn’t figure it out. I was in rehearsal, and although we had a director in that play, I called another, a friend of mine, who was also director, and I had him come over and I said, “Look, this scene, I’m just having the toughest, I cannot seem to crack this scene.” And so we read it through a couple of times, and then this wonderful director named John Swanbeck, who would eventually direct me in a film called The Big Kahuna, but this is before that. He said to me the most incredible thing, he just said, “All right, what’s the last line you have in this scene before you fall over and fall asleep?” And I said, The last line is, ‘That last drink, the old KO,'” and he went, “Okay, I want you to think about what that line actually means and then work backwards.” And so he left, and I was left with this, “What? What does that mean? How am I supposed to?” And then a couple of days went by, a couple of days went by, and I thought, “Okay, so I see that. What does that line actually mean? Well, that last drink, the old KO. KO is Knockout, which is a boxing term. It’s the only boxing term the writer uses in the play.” And then I went back, and I realized my friend was so smart and so incredible to have said, “Ask a question you haven’t thought of asking yet.” I realized that the playwright wrote the last round, the eighth round between these two brothers, and it was a fight, physical as well as emotional. And when I brought that into the rehearsal room to the directors doing that play, he liked that idea. And we staged that scene as if it was the eighth round. The audience wouldn’t have known that, but just what I loved about that was that somebody said to me, “Ask yourself a question you haven’t asked yourself yet. What does that line mean? And then work backwards.” What is that? Like a catalyst for thinking deeply about what is magical about this play, this story, this narrative? That’s what that is? Thinking backwards. That’s what that does?…

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