DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
Phoenix is one of those actors who makes what he does seem effortless. Part of that comes out of how he approaches acting. He explains, “Just be in the moment. Don’t overthink it, let it be what it is. If you keep trying to find what’s unique in the moment, then the danger is that you miss that very thing.” In fact, Phoenix later reveals what he thinks is one of the advantages of acting on screen: “The great thing about film is that you get to make mistakes.”
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“There’s not one approach. It depends on the scene. The important thing with this movie was — and I acknowledge I probably do this a lot — to feel comfortable enough to make a lot of mistakes. To be able to say there’s not one right way for him to behave. Again, it seemed like the key was not knowing what his reaction was going to be. I’m sure that sometimes we used just a really straight version of a given scene, but we filmed so many different versions. You just dive head on into that feeling. But sometimes, when you’re making a movie, yeah, your nerves wear off and you grow accustomed to it, or you get tired, or whatever. Maybe it’s a million things over the course of the six weeks. So you just go, ‘OK, well, this is fuckin’ shit,’ and you go outside and you sit and you talk about it, and you try to connect again to what is meaningful about this moment — to try and uncover something that you can latch onto. I guess. I don’t fuckin’ know, man.”
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