Sissy Spacek

“I was just fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time. I got to ride the wave of 70s film. The filmmaker ruled at that time, and I was on the receiving end. I got passed from one wonderful director to another. I think I represented something in a generation as opposed to being some great trained actor. That was the magical thing about the Seventies: artists ruled. Because films were relatively low-budget, nobody cared. We could just go off and work. I just surrendered to the process. And I think that’s a real important word: ‘surrender’. I knew nothing; I wasn’t sophisticated; I didn’t know about the world. And over the years, it’s dawned on me that when we get older and we think we know things, that’s when we really get blocked. That’s when we’re trying too hard. I just want characters to work on and explore, because in doing that, you’re really exploring yourself. What I always do is just carry a little notebook, keep it in my pocket, so whatever I was doing, daydreaming about these characters in the course of my day, I’d just pull it out and jot down little notes. You know, sometimes I’ll just make a little drawing of the way a character sits or stands. No big deal, just little throwaways. I used to over prepare. If they were shooting at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I’d start at 9 o’clock in the morning saying, ‘O.K., I better start getting into it. And I’d stay that way all day. Jack Lemmon told me to relax in my preparation. I could start to prepare right before the scene, not early that morning and wear myself out. I’ve always thought of it like a railroad track. You know the train’s coming. If you can run along and get yourself up to speed, you can grab hold of the train and jump on and it’s like the scene takes you away with it. Sometimes the train hits you and runs over you. You have to expect that will happen sometimes. Everyone has an inner voice; you just have to listen to it and trust it in order to be led by it.”- #SissySpacek