Daily Dialogue — October 26, 2018

Sam: I think I’ve just been too slow to realize that people our own age with histories just like ours having gone through all that same stuff could be dishonest, unprincipled, back-stabbing sleazeballs.
Michael: I could have told you that a long time ago.

— The Big Chill (1983), written by Lawrence Kasdan, Barbara Benedek

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Kitchen.

Trivia: Of the marathon improvisation period during the rehearsals period, director Lawrence Kasdan said: “It happened kind of spontaneously. We were working at the house and everyone was in costume and we decided it might be great if we all cooked a meal. That way they’d have to split up the tasks and approximate a group of close friends putting together a dinner. I chose to leave at that point and all I said was, ‘You should do this in character’. I left and for five hours they remained in character without any authority figure, without any director to tell them if they were behaving or reacting in the correct way according to the writer’s or director’s ideas. They had to live in those characters’ skins and instantly deal with input from each other character. It became a very intense experience and they all came out of it exhausted and drained. I’m not sure it would have developed as fully had I been there during that time. A rehearsal period goes through stages like a life cycle and we had already had three and a half weeks of rehearsal. But that happened at a crucial, crystallizing moment and it turned eight individual actors into an ensemble”.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The ‘dancing in the kitchen scene’ to the strains of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” is one of the signature moments in The Big Chill.