In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film.
The logistics of blood is something that I didn't even understood as a first-time director. Not just actors and make-up, but once a set gets bloody, you don't un-blood it. Once something gets bloody, you either rebuild the set, or you just don't get the shot.
If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle.
Theater is a dance of a different kind, a dance of rawness and characters stripped down.
When you're with another actor who's also been through five hours of prosthetic makeup, and you're eating another person's neck, and fake blood is being spurted out at you for two minutes, it's incredibly fun, and you're in character for that time. You can't really believe that that's your job.
In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.
Most theater tells you what to think.
To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.
To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.
Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.