Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the Oscar winning actor writer and director Tim Robbins.

His film credits include the Shawshank Redemption, Dead Man Walking, The Hudsucker Proxy and Mystic River.

Brought up in an artistic and creative household in New York's Greenwich Village.

He was always encouraged to sing and perform and after talking politics around the dinner table as a teenager

He would on occasion spend his evenings working the lights for the local drag act

Indeed it was on stage rather than in front of the camera that Tim Robbins developed his own acting style

It gave me a discipline to still the anarchic energy I had he says a rigid discipline to an emotional truth and the ability to have that at my fingertips.

What a very interesting quote that is, Tim Robbins. Can you unpack it a little bit for us?

To have it at your fingertips, you can sort of call it up can you

when you wish on camera this emotional truth? Well it has to do with the specific

training I got from a man named George Bego who is an actor from the Teyatra du Soleil in Paris and I took a workshop with him in 1984 and I was already a working actor at that time and I couldn't get on stage he would

throw me off stage every time I tried to enter and he would not suffer any kind of insincerity.

What were you doing then that encouraged him to throw you off stage?

Well I would be entering without a full image and a full commitment to an emotion.

How tricky is that given that as I understand it, the nature of movie making is that you stop

and you start and the lights right and then the director of photography tells the director

that something else is wrong and then somebody else comes in and then you have to wait a few hours and then you reset the shot.

It seems terrifically demanding the idea that given all of those stumbles along the way, you then have to pick up and give a performance that same sincerity and truth.

You have to have an immense amount of concentration, and you also have to be able to be as loose as you can possibly be because you have to roll with it.

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