Performances imitating real feelings

"I have a belief, Gyllenhaal says, "that pretty much everyone -I don't care how happy they say they are, or how great their supposed upbringing was -everyone has enough pain to draw from after they're 4", a fact that took him a little while to realize. "For a long time, I was like, 'Oh I wish someone I knew died, so I could have something to work with". -GQ magazine, June 2004.

``It was pretty intense,'' says actor Shawn Hatosy, who plays the trigger man in the film. ``It wasn't something I would want to go through again.''Susan Markowitz kisses actor Anton Yelchin (who plays her murdered son in "Alpha Dog").

"Alpha Dog" is based on the kidnapping and murder of 15-year-old West Hills boy Nicholas Markowitz in August 2000, and the subsequent conviction of four men and forthcoming trial of a fifth, Jesse James Hollywood.``I was pretty afraid in my bones most of the time'', he recalls. ``But I think that makes the toughness of my character more believable. It's a story about ego -- two guys who wouldn't back down. It wasn't about the money. It was who was going to be the alpha dog.'' Source: www.thefreelibrary.com
How playing Chris gave him new perspective:
"More than any other role I've had, this role did change me as a person... for the better. The role came along at a time in my life when I hadn't worked, probably in a year. I'd been eating and drinking, probably more than I should have. It was just this amazing adventure that came along and woke me up. All of a sudden, Sean's knocking on my door recruiting me for this. And he was like, 'You're going to start running every day, for miles a day. You're going to start reading all these different writers - Emerson, Thoreau. You're going to do this. You're going to go to all these different places and you are going to think about this philosophy. Think about what this young man's life meant and what he wanted and what he didn't get.' Source: www.ugo.com
"I ask Hirsch how he prepared for such a difficult role. “For a commitment like this part”, he says, slowly, “you have to fall in love with the material. You have to be moved in a real way by the story, otherwise as much as you want to commit, and play the character, whoever it is, you just won’t be able to. It’s like being in love. If you’re not really in love, it will show on your face.”
Source: maguiresmovies.blogspot.com
"I was terrified, really really scared but I had to act like I wasn’t. I was really sweating because I was so nervous!’ He may have been the youngest but in the film, and in real-life he’s the one who holds the most power. But then playing the role of someone with such an outlandish name, it was never gonna be simple. ‘I wouldn’t see a guy named Jesse James Hollywood winning the math academic decathlon’ Hirsch jokes.
Hirsch admits that his knowledge of the real-life figure was minimal before he got the script. ‘I had gleamed little pieces from the media but I wasn’t really aware of it’ he tells. While shooting the film, Hollywood was still on the run, becoming one of the youngest people ever to appear on the FBI’s most-wanted list. It was therefore impossible for Hirsch to meet up with him, something his co-stars did with their real-life counterparts. ‘Jesse James Hollywood was gone’ he says, ‘I saw a tiny little video that he was in but it was so short. I kinda just decided to make my own portrayal with what was in the script".
www.thecinemasource.com

-How do you prepare for scenes like that?

-I think the key is good chemistry. Or being interested in the other person. Cause if you're not interested in who they are as a person, you're just not gonna be interested and it'll show on screen. Elisha Cuthbert in "The Girl next door" (2004).

-How do you not fall for your leading lady every time?

-I don't know...-How much are you like your character in real life?-In terms of the naive and innocent part, probably same amount of innocence and not quite so naive. I wasn't the class president or valedictorian or anything like that.
Source: www.joblo.com

"Savage shot her scenes in three and a half days. Preparation was minimal, she recalls, as the character of Vera was written very sharply (by Martin Goldsmith, on whose 1939 novella the film is based). Ulmer had Savage speed up her delivery to make it snap and crackle, and asked her to speak "tough and hard." Each word bursts out of her lips, and the effect is menacing. But how humble its origins were, motivated by a desire to ensure that everything got onto whatever film Ulmer had left."I couldn’t talk from the diaphragm", Savage said. "I was delivering it right out of the throat through clenched teeth to keep that anger. She was very angry all the time. You’re very tense when you’re playing angry. It wipes you out."Savage later channeled her dislike for Neal into her characterization of the venomous Vera. "I had got such mistreatment from him that when I got the part of Vera with him playing such a milquetoast, I had to go home at night and laugh, because that had to be hard for him", she says.
Source: amanoutoftime.livejournal.com

David Weisman talks about "Ciao! Manhattan" (1972), starring Edie Sedgwick:
"I carried on like a Gestapo inquisitioner. I screamed in her ear so that I became so hoarse that in an hour I couln't talk. It was a locking of the horns. She was stronger than me; she broke me. I was determined, but she won".
Michael Post: "It was so ironical. Here she went off to Mrs. Grace's and did this whole bizarre film gig of shock treatments -off there to Hollywood, off  to stardom -and then BOOM, back into Mrs. Grace's to go through real shock treatments. Exactly what she had acted out. It was really a quirk... a weird twist of fate".
"Edie: An American Biography" -by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.