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By it, because it means each actor feels in possession of something that only he or she has, and apart from anything else, it means that the actors can the actor doesn t have isn t distracted or inhibited, or in any way affected negatively by an overview. he or she, each actor or actress, sees the whole thing from the point of view of the character, but it mostly means that we can explore situations in a completely truthful and organic way and arrive at the dramatic material. so the rehearsal process, the rehearsal room, then, and on set, are you ever writing down the lines and putting them on a piece of paper? no, i don t write and give to the actors because we don t need to. it comes out. they know it. one of the things that always amuses me and is, i think, interesting is that every time i ve ever made a film, after a few days, you hear an electrician or somebody say, i don t understand it. there s no script, but they know the lines. ....
That person they know, and then we meld them together and the character is created. but of course, the two famous myths about what i do with actors is, one is that the actors come with ideas, and the committee is formed as to what the subject, that s not the case at all. in fact, it s very it s essential that they. ..when i say to an actor, participate in this piece of work, this play or this film, we can t talk about a character, because there isn t a character. you and i are going to collaborate to create a character, and you will never know anything about the whole thing, except what your character knows. so they don t know about the other characters? not until, not until and unless they meet them in the context of the work. are they banned from talking to the other actors about. absolutely. but it works totally. everybody enters into the spirit of it, and there s never been a case where anybody has, as it were, broken the rules or cheated. people, they. ..actors are highly stimul ....
I m talking about primary school and, you know. salford grammar school was, of course, later, and there i was in all the school plays and did art and all that stuff. and your father was a doctor, wasn t he? he was, and we lived over the surgery until i was about 13, in a very working class area. my memory of coming home from school during the surgery hours, i could go in through a sort of pass door by that end of the house. ..and all you d hearfrom the, from the waiting room was. of community and character, but character is what it s been all about, from the word go, just observing people. so it s a sort of a cultured upbringing, to an extent. your creative. your own personal creativity, encouraged by your parents? well, that s a very interesting question. i mean, it would be very difficult not to say, that in many respects, my folks weren t philistines, because they kind of were. there s culture and there s culture. ....
From being a great draughtsman he was a fantastic observer, and his style of drawing influenced my style. my handwriting to this day is influenced by ronald searle s style of handwriting. and what was he doing? i mean, just to evoke a sense of his style? well, there are two things, really. one is his observation of character, and his expression of character. but the other is his line. you know, he had a great. ..he had a range of different kinds of line, but he had a great facility to allow the pen marks to be themselves. in other words, it was polished in his own terms, but it wasn t it didn t affect to have a kind of gloss finish. you actually studied art, didn t you, at camberwell school of art? idid. did you ever think of becoming an artist, a visual artist? you think about the characterisation that ronald searle comes up with in those drawings, those kind of quite spindly characters. ....
They re sort of etiolated figures. is there a link, do you think, in those characters, between those characters and some of the characters that you create in yourfilm? i think the important thing about searle being an inspiration, or, if you like, an influence on me, it s not so much about specific characters. it s about a way of looking at the world. i mean, if you look at my characters in my films, and indeed plays. ..it s never i never allow it to be described as naturalism, it s realism, it gets to the essence of what s real. i mean, you have to believe in it being absolutely real when you see in the moment when you see it. but there s a certain, there s an edge, there s a distillation. there s a heightening, which is a natural thing for an artist like ronald searle to do. and that s what i do. so i can t talk about a direct correlation between this ronald searle character or that character in one of my films. it s about a way of ....