A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Mike NicholsRead
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating a safe environment for creative expression in acting.
Mike Nichols highlights the role of a director or artist in facilitating deep emotional expression in actors. By using the metaphor of 'opening a vein', he conveys the idea that true artistry involves vulnerability, and it is crucial for the director to ensure that this process occurs in a safe and supportive atmosphere, thereby fostering genuine performances.
In practice
During a theater workshop, a director could quote this to encourage actors to connect with their emotions.
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.
One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations.
If you want to be an entertainer, then go be an entertainer and give people what they want. If you want to be an artist, then you have to be true to yourself, and you have to be prepared to confront expectations - and you have to be prepared to disappoint your fans, too.
When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.
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