During the early stages of a project, actors can improvise. If anything good comes out of the improvisation, that work may be put into the script, or simply kept in the notes for later. So when I’m doing a movie like The King of Staten Island, the writers– Dave Sirus, Pete Davidson, and I— work on the script.
On that project, we spent a couple of years writing the script together. Then we had auditions. Pete read with an enormous number of the people. That was a way for him to play and improvise and figure out who his character was, and to hear a lot of interpretations of the other characters.
We tried to cast the movie as early as possible, so that we could bring all the actors and actresses into our collaboration. We did early table reads and rehearsals. In the rehearsals, first, we would do the scene as written, then we would play and improvise. Based on that, we wrote our revisions. Then, we would do another rehearsal.
So we kept feathering in stuff from these creative sessions into the script. When we get to the shoot, we have all of these ideas. We’ve rewritten the scene as best as we can, but we also have six or seven versions of it from improvisations. We’ve circled all the lines of dialogue we wanted to remember. Maybe there are several completely different versions of the scene we might want to play with.
So, for me, when I get to the set to do a scene, I’m not just shooting the script, I’m also trying to create a loose situation where I can reintroduce some other ideas that we like. And then, at the very end, say to the actors, let’s just play.
We just have to get from this idea to that idea. Let’s just feel it out and see if we can come up with something on the spot. Some days we don’t. Some days we like the script and believe what we have works. Other days, we realize that what we have doesn’t work at all. We go back to the notes to see what else did we did in rehearsal. What are the fresh ideas. And sometimes we get a computer out and we rewrite the scene on the spot.
