Free The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol

right into his acting to say, "I want to say thanks, thanks to my wife—" and he was doing a "meaningful moment" scene. He was having a ball. I started thinking what a big fantastic moment getting an award like that must be for a person who can only turn "on" when he's in front of people. If that's what turns him on, when he gets that chance, he has to be up there feeling fine, thinking, "I can do anything, anything, ANYTHING!"
    So I guess everybody has their own time and place when they turn themselves on. Where do I turn on?
    I turn on when I turn off and go to bed. That's my big moment that I'm always waiting for.
    "Good performers," I think, are all-inclusive recorders, because they can mimic emotions as well as speech and looks and atmosphere—they're more inclusive than tape recordings or videotapes or novels. Good performers can somehow record complete experiences and people and situations and then pull out these recordings when they need them. They can repeat a line exactly the way it should sound and look exactly the way they should look when they repeat it because they've seen the scene before somewhere and they've shelved it away. So they know what the lines should be and the way the lines should come out of them. Or stay in them.
    I can only understand really amateur performers or realty bad performers, because whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can't be phoney. But I can never understand really good, professional performers.
    Every professional performer I've ever seen always does exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment in every show they do. They know when the audience is going to laugh and when it's going to get really interested. What I like are things that are different every time. That's why I like amateur performers and bad performers—you can never tell what they'll do next.
    Jackie Curtis used to write plays and stage them on Second Avenue, and the play would change every night—the lines and even the plot. Only the name of the play would stay the same. If two people saw the show on different nights and started talking about it to each other, they found out that nothing was the same in the two shows. The runs of these plays were "evolutionary," as the play kept changing all the time.
    I know that "professional" is fast, and it's good, and people are on time, and they show up, and they do it right, and they're on key, and they do their numbers, and there are no problems. You watch them perform and they look so natural you just can't believe they're not ad-libbing—it looks like the funny line just occurred to them at the moment they said it. But then you go to see them the next night and the same funny line is just occurring to them all over again.
    If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something.
    The wrong people always look so right to me. And when you've got a lot of people and they're all "good," it's hard to make distinctions, the easiest thing is to pick the really bad person. And I always go after the easiest thing, because if it's the easiest, for me it's usually the best.
    I was doing a commercial the other day for some sound equipment, and I could have pretended to say all the words they gave me that I would never say that way, but I just couldn't do it.
    When I played an airport person in a movie with Elizabeth Taylor the lines they gave me were something like "Let's go. I have an important date," but it kept coming out of my mouth, "Come on, girls." But in Italy they dub everything in afterwards, so no matter what you don't say, you say it anyway.
    I did an airline commercial once