It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It takes a lot out of you to do a one-hour episodic lead of a show. I don't think actors realize that when they take the job.
There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.
It seems extraordinary to have waited so long into one's life to have found the part that actually uses your basic rhythm. And I think that's always sort of what actors connect up with - their own sort of world.
We have a full writers' room, and with something like 'MyMusic,' we've scripted it out with professional writers. There is some very basic improv from the actors, but everything is very to the letter, so it's easy to edit down to an episode. There are fun little things an actor might throw in there.
In general, I don't even have the luxury of rehearsal time on most films that I make. It is just a scene-by-scene full cast read through. It's very much just doing the rehearsal sometimes the day before, at the end of the day, but just on the spot as the scene unfolds.
My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.
As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.
The thing as an actor is you get a sense of what a show is like the minute you walk on the set.
I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.
I've been on shows where they're just setting it up, and they're trying to find the tone of the writing and performance. That's always a really chaotic period on shows.