Kevin Spacey
speaker
258 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Kevin Spacey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he goes, we do the first take. And George Cukor comes up to me and he says, Jack, I said, yeah. He said, could you do, let's do another one, but just do a little less in this one. And Jack said, a little less, a little less than what I just did. He said, yeah, just a little less. So he goes, we do another take. And I think, boy, that was it. I mean, let's just go home.
And Cukor walked up to him and said, Jack, I'd like to do another one, this time just a little bit less. And Jack said, less than what I just did now? He said, yeah, just a little bit less. He goes, oh, okay. So they did another take. And Cukor came up and he said, Jack, just a little bit less. And Jack said, a little less than what I just did? He said, yes.
He goes, well, if I do any less, I'm not going to be acting. And Cukor said, exactly, Jack, exactly.
Yeah. And also because I so well remember I think the work that Brad did, and also Morgan did in that scene, but the work that Brad had to do, where he had to go. I remember rehearsing with him as we were all staying at this little hotel nearby that location, and we rehearsed the night before we started shooting that sequence.
And I just, I mean, it was just incredible to see the levels of emotions he had to go through. And then the decision of what do I do Because if I do what he wants me to do, then he wins. But if I don't do it, then I'm, what kind of a man, husband am I? I just thought he did really incredible work. So it was also... not easy to not react to the power of what he was throwing at me.
I just thought it was an extraordinary, a really extraordinary scene.
In terms of the writing and in terms of what the characters had to do, it was an incredible culmination of how this character could manipulate in the way that he did. And in the end,
Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's literally he has a stopwatch, and he's timing how long a scene is taking. And then he'll say, you need to take a minute off this scene. Like a minute? Yeah, a minute off this scene. I want it to move like this. So let's pick it up. Let's pick up the pace. Let's see if we can take a minute off.
Which is, you know, we don't take Big dramatic pauses. Yeah, right. You know, before we speak. We speak. We say what we want. We, you know.
They didn't always like the dramatic pauses. I mean, look, you go back, any student of acting, you go back to the 30s and the 40s, 50s. The speed at which actors spoke. Not just in the comedies, which, of course, you know, you look at any Preston Sturges movie and it's incredible how fast people are talking and how funny things are when they happen that fast.
But then, you know, acting styles changed. We got into a different kind of thing in the late 50s and 60s and – A lot of actors are feeling it, which is, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just that if you want to keep an audience engaged as Fincher does, and I believe successfully does in all of his work,
pace timing movement clarity speed are admirable to achieve and all of that he wants the actor to be as natural as possible to strip away all the bullshit of acting yeah and become human Look, I've been lucky with other directors. Sam Mendes is similar.
I remember when I walked in to maybe the first rehearsal for Richard III that we were doing, I had brought with me a canopy of ailments that my Richard was going to suffer from. And Sam, you whittled it down to like three, like maybe your arm and maybe your leg. But let's get rid of the other 10 things that you brought into the room because I was so excited to capture this character.
So very often, Trevor Nunn is this way, a lot of wonderful directors I've worked with, they're really good at helping you trim and edit things.
Those are two very interesting descriptions. When I think, I guess when I think performer... I tend to think entertaining. I tend to think comedy. I tend to think winning over an audience. I tend to think that there's something about that quality of wanting to have people enjoy themselves. And when you saddle that against
what maybe he means as an actor, which is more dramatic or more text-driven, more... Look, I've always believed that my job, not every actor feels this way, but my job, the way that I've looked at it is that my job is to serve the writing. And that if I serve the writing, I will... in a sense, serve myself because I'll be in the right world. I'll be in the right context.
I'll be in the right style. I'll have embraced what a director's, you know, it's not my painting. It's someone else's painting. I'm a series of colors in someone else's painting. And the barometer for me has always been that when people stop me and talk to me about a character I've played and reference their name as if they actually exist, that's when I feel like I've gotten close to doing my job.
To me, that's the greatest compliment for me as an actor. I love being able to go. I mean, when I think about performers who inspire me, And I remember when I was young and I was introduced to Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn. I just, I believed who they were. I knew nothing about them. They were just these extraordinary characters doing this extraordinary stuff.
And then I think more... recently contemporary, when I think of the work that Philip Seymour Hoffman did and Heath Ledger and people that, when I think about what they could be doing, what they could do, what they would have done had they stayed with us, I'm so excited when I go into a cinema or I go into a play and I completely am taken to some place that
I believe exists in characters that become real.
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