Scene Quote
1. Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.
2. No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.
3. I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
4. I like a lot of ratchet, trap music. Definitely 21 Savage. We need some music like that. ManMan Savage. A lot of the Atlanta scene. But Philly, too.
5. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene.
6. Humor is so important to the American scene throughout history.
7. One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
8. Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.
9. The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.
10. I don’t like to know exactly what I’m going to do in a scene, because the most interesting moments as an audience member are moments of truthful spontaneity.
11. If you can’t move and talk to people that you see, it’s not really my scene.
12. I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.
13. The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.
14. I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
15. Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
16. When you go to your local police officer, your police chief in the town you live in, big or small, he will tell you the vast majority of the weapons recovered at a crime scene are either stolen weapons, and/or they have been ‘lost’ or stolen.
17. Actors know, with me they aren’t going to be allowed to rehearse a scene for a couple of hours and then get away with doing 25 takes before we get it right. So they come with their full bag of tricks.
18. If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain’t – take two!
19. I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.
20. The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
21. As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.
22. In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.
23. I couldn’t get a job to save my life. That’s why I wrote ‘Road to Paloma.’ That got into Sundance and got into that scene, and that’s how I got the role in ‘The Red Road.’
24. If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.
25. Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are. We’re creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy.
26. I didn’t know of any rappers in Charlotte. Not to sound like I’m bragging, but I brought the music scene alive and shed the proper light on it. I took it to a whole other level when I started rapping.
27. The only way to make a scene realistic is to do it the way you know it would really happen.
28. Most of the time I’m thinking, I’m glad that scene was improvised.
29. There was this moment when we made ‘Superunknown’: the Seattle music scene had suddenly ended up on an international stage with huge success.
30. Woody Allen likes to do a lot of master shots. He likes to get the whole thing in one take, and so you could be going along doing a scene, and then the next to last line, all of a sudden, you stumble, and you have to go back to first base.
31. If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
32. The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.
33. Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.
34. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
35. Seattle very much benefited from this geography where it was a town nobody had really heard of in terms of a music scene. So we had that factor of being a new discovery.
36. There are times when I’m driving home after a day’s shooting, thinking to myself, That scene would’ve been so much better if I had written it out.
37. When I’m on set, I don’t really think about what an audience is going to think about a scene. I’m just thinking about how I can make it best. And how I can enjoy myself most.
38. There was a little less pressure to be fit on ‘The Avengers’ than ‘Captain America.’ I had just finished ‘Captain America,’ so I was already built. Plus, ‘Captain America’ has that one scene dramatic scene where my transformation is revealed. ‘The Avengers’ has not one shirtless scene.
39. Oftentimes, when we think of 3D, we think of things coming out of the screen, but actually, you’ve got this zero, this negative space, what they call the negative space, which is the scene, what’s being filmed in the positive space of the audience. As you can have things come out, you can have all of this depth.
40. I struggle to watch myself in any scene, to be honest. What’s done is done. I wish I was able to watch myself, as it would really help me develop as an actor. But I’m not brave enough. It’s a difficult thing to do – looking at yourself as this utterly different person on a screen.
41. I saw ‘Taxi Driver,’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying, ‘You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Who the hell else are you talkin’ to?’ That’s the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.
42. I felt very proud to be part of a music scene that was changing the face of commercial music and rock music internationally, but I also felt like it was necessary for Soundgarden – as it was for all of these Seattle bands – to prove that we deserve to be on an international stage, and we weren’t just part of a fad that was based on geography.
43. I was going to be a musician, no matter what it took. I supported myself with blue-collared jobs so I could write music and be in a band and play shows. I even got into an underground art scene. I was going to do whatever.
44. On the first ‘Indiana Jones’ movie, I tore an ACL in one of my knees – can’t remember which knee. The scene in which I was fighting the big German mechanic on an airplane called a flying wing, I was run over by the landing gear and injured my knee, but I can’t remember which one it was. Lots of bumps and injuries along the way.
45. When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn’t acting. It’s following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.
46. Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
47. Growing up in Houston, the music scene is super boring.
48. The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.
49. Definitely, when you get into something where bands are playing for 30,000 people, it’s not like the post-punk, U.S. independent scene.
50. I started as a straight actor. I’d go onstage, and I’d think, ‘Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don’t care – I’ll do it again.’
51. I learned that the best way to work is to allow the scene to live on its own before making major adjustments, whether in rehearsal or on film.
52. I dreaded the dance scene in ‘Love Actually’ more than having my teeth extracted.
53. ‘West Wing’ was huge. Like ‘Hamilton,’ it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up.
54. When I met Elvis, we didn’t really have a conversation. I was introduced by my uncle, and he sort of grunted my way. What stays with me is the whole scene. I had never seen a real mob scene before. I was really young and impressionable. Elvis really did look – he looked sort of not real, as if he were glowing.
55. I have this absurd syndrome where I get these out-of-the-blue, pathetic panic attacks. It’ll be in a very easy, simple scene when everything is going swimmingly, and then suddenly, bang, I’m shvitzing and can’t remember my lines.
56. My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn’t audition. It was nepotism all the way.
57. I can’t go into a mob scene and sense the mood and the attitude of the crowd. I can’t conduct man-on-the-street interviews or even get reactions that I can be sure are honest, because they know who I am.
58. If the director says you can do better, particularly in a love scene, then it is rather embarrassing.
59. Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.
60. Have you ever seen me knock somebody out and make a big scene? Hell no.
