A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.
It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.
'Curb' is 100 percent improvised, which is wild. I'd never done anything like that.
When I first moved to L.A., I didn't have a lot of money to join a gym or take classes, so I improvised. My sister and I went to the library and looked over their DVD collection and discovered Neena and Veena, these Egyptian twins who have a whole series of belly dancing routines. We did them all.
Do you remember a scene with Ryan and Ali playing in the snow? Well, that was improvised.
The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.
When I was coming up, a freestyle wasn't a freestyle unless everything was completely improvised, in-the-moment and right there, and you had to incorporate various elements of what was going on in the room on the day.
On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.
I learned one thing from De Niro: He taught me to listen. Nobody says anything strictly from the script. It's improvised. It was the best piece of advice I have ever gotten in my life. It has helped me through the past thirty years.
Improvisation is an important part of bluegrass, and I would hasten to add that classical music wasn't always such an improvisational void. Back in the day, everyone's cadenzas were improvised, and improvisation was taught in conservatories.
