I’m really liking the new show Poker Face, and I adored this quote from an interview Natasha Lyonne did to promote it:
(She’s the star of the show, but the question was about directing; she directed one episode of the show, and several other episodes of other shows)
I’ve been obsessed with movies, like — OK, this is weird, but if you actually, for reasons unknown to me, slowly took all the skin off my body, and you’re curious what I was made of on the inside, you’d just see a bunch of images, clung together from all these classic films. And that’s actually how I’m still walking, despite all those cigarettes, is that the images, they don’t experience the downside of nicotine. And so the tar keeps them glued together. That’s what celluloid means. And I love problem-solving. And I love improvising. And despite my seemingly maybe wacky nature, I’m a deeply obsessive workaholic, who’s a very precise perfectionist. So I love heavy preparation and exactitude. I like very clear parameters, and then filling the frame within it with as much information as possible. But I don’t actually like lawless chaos. If you’ve been to my house, my bed is always made. I don’t know how to describe it. I just have big hair — that’s the best way I can put it. And I think it’s potentially misleading to people. But I really, really love directing. All my heroes are really, directors. I love acting. The thing that I love with acting, though, is, it’s almost like being a musician. I like the idea that Rian’s a composer, and he’s letting me know what part of the song I can play in service to his album. And I want to do it as best I can for him, and it makes me happy to do it. But with writing and producing and the way it all kind of comes together with directing now, it’s very fun to have pages on set and be correcting them in real time with the actors, as things are adjusting. I also love looking at the schedule obsessively and figuring it out. I love being in the edit, and the feeling of when a song or score lands correctly over a sequence to tie it together is such a joyful experience. I feel very alive when it’s all happening. And I like to not feel dead inside.
Read the rest here: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/natasha-lyonne-poker-face-accent-tripping-acid-new-york-city-rian-johnson-1234659240/