Have patience. Wait until the mud settles and the water is clear. Remain unmoving until right action arises by itself.
I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted.
But for the most part, for the majority of a stand-up audience, you better have new stuff they've not heard. And if you put an album out, just consider that material gone. At least that's how I see it.
With a comedian, it's the opposite. You put that album out, and they've heard it. If they're coming out to see you, you'd better be doing new stuff. There's always a tiny part of the audience that want to hear certain bits of yours, or they've brought friends to see you, and they've told them about some of your bits. Then maybe you should do them.
The process is to me is going onstage night after night after night after night until I get a new hour. And then once that hour is solidified and recorded, I move on.
I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.
I'm going to continue to try to strike a balance, because I really, really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And again, I'm not going, "I've got to become a dramatic actor now. " I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different.
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Once I started working with the Polaroid, I would take a shot and if that shot was good, then I'd move the model and change the lighting or whatever. . . slowly sneaking up on what I wanted rather than having to predetermine what it was.