Zoe Kazan
I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.Collection: Movies
I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.Collection: Patience
Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.
Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.
Historically, art and music and writing and film have been one of the only tools that is effective against tyranny.
There's something really earnest inside me all the time. It's not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who's not wired the way I'm wired.
I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.
That moment in 'Broadcast News' where Holly Hunter is told how great it is to be the smartest person in the room, and she cries and says it's awful - I definitely have moments like that sometimes, moments when introspection and drive can be lonely-making. And it doesn't help that I have a partner who is very work-oriented.
And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.
My schedule is completely different doing a play than it is doing a movie, and I actually think it's a much harder schedule because you've got to do it eight times a week and you've got to do it good eight times a week and with different kinds of audiences who are cold or drunk or tired, whatever it is.
I love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.
I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.
I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
I never wanted to be a playwright.
I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.
And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never... I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.
I really love people. I love to meet people. I'm curious about people.
When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.
I'm used to very low-budget situations. In 'The Exploding Girl,' we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.
I think most actors jump at the chance to do something where the camera's on them all the time.
I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women.
I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.
I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.
In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.
I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.
I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.
Well, I have a sister that I'm very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period.
You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.
When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.
People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.
If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.
I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.
But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.
I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.
If I'm not working, I don't feel complete.
I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to 'This American Life' more times than I can count!
My hero is Michelle Williams, who I grew close to when we did 'Meek's Cutoff.' She's an extraordinary actor and mom.
I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.
Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.
I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.
You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.
I almost never write because I want something from my audience. Almost everything I've ever written, I've written because I feel like I have to write this or I'll die. Like, this has to come out of me.
I can work a lot faster when I'm writing a screenplay than when I'm writing a play because, if I'm having a problem with a scene or something, I can just be writing it in a way where there's no dialogue, or find a way to make sound do the work that I want to do or a close-up do the work that I need to do.
I encourage everyone to read James Baldwin and Malcom X and Aldous Huxley. To read Primo Levi. To read 'Silent Spring.' To read Toni Morrison. To read Zora Neale Hurston.
Turning 30 changed me in ways I didn't expect. For the very first time, I felt like my life is valuable. Not my life because I'm putting something good into the world or I'm well-respected in my field, but my life as a human being on this planet for a limited amount of time.
I want to derive pleasure from this planet and put pleasure back into it.
I will be a broken record for justice.