Greetings carbon-based lifeform,
warning; this is a special issue. Past specials are this way.
“Every single time I start a movie I feel like I have no idea how to act. It only really seems to come together. You need the adrenaline… You need to feel like a total failure. You feel your absolute worst the day before. Your confidence falls out. It only seems to come to you when it needs to.” — Robert Pattinson, actor
“Most of it is just surviving. We end up in the positions we’re in not by formal training, but just by the ten thousand hours. Most of it, still to this day, I begin; ‘I don’t know what the fuck to do’. But I’m going to learn the footage, I’m going to start working out what pieces are essential. And what bits can I definitely make decisions around.” — Kirk Baxter, editor
“If you do a thing for a really long time you can get into… Anything can be by rote. You can get to a place where you’re doing scenes beautifully unconsciously and you can get to where you’re maybe on auto-pilot. The right kind of instinctive and unconscious is wonderful. And then there’s that thing where […] you’re too familiar with a set of moves. I definitely am approaching a place where I almost feel that I’m not really sure I remember what I’m supposed to do. And I’m kind of happy about that.” — Edward Norton, actor
“Even today… after so many years in animation… Every time I sit down to animate something, it’s almost as if I never ever animated anything before. It’s a brand new thing. And I don’t remember how I did it the last time because I don’t remember how I did it the last time. I do it every time the way it just comes.” — Tissa David, animator
“For me when I draw, it’s sometimes as if I’ve never drawn before. I feel like I go through the same struggles a lot of people go through. I’ve just learned how to just do it.” — Lynda Barry, cartoonist
“It always feels like I’ve never done it before. In a way it’s good. You know they talk about beginner’s mind? That’s something kind of cool about that but it is a little bit disconcerting. “What? What am I supposed to do?” — Jeff Bridges, actor
“You really have to keep on going back to the beginning in every project you have. And luckily, I have a defect or a gift that every time I start a project, I can honestly think ‘how the hell do I do this?’ And I welcome that because you always have to start over again. And once you start thinking that you have to uphold something, or you have to be a certain way, that’s when you die. That’s where corruption comes in.” — Willem Dafoe, actor
“Rebecca Miller has made several movies and she said “I’m going to tell you what Mike Nichols told me”. Which is, “do not rob yourself of not knowing what you’re doing. You only get it once. After you know what you’re doing, you’ll know what to be afraid of. You’ll never make those mistakes again but you’ll also never be able to stumble into something that’s great that you didn’t know again.” — Greta Gerwig, director
Until another Friday soon (or Saturday?),
Gergo