Atom Egoyan Quotes

I stopped getting films. So I had to move to television. I kept myself alive with stage shows.

I was doing an hour drama on television and a Jackie Chan movie in Toronto, so I was on a plane every three days.

Having gotten TV shows on the air, that's so much less work that trying to get the 'Veronica Mars' movie made.

I think your average fan probably just assumes that the same person directs every episode of their favorite series, week in and week out.

Well, I'm directing a lot of television these days.

I did 'Red Riding,' which is TV in the U.K. It became a feature project in North America, but we're in a great era of TV. We all know that, and we hear it all the time, but for filmmakers, it's just a godsend to have your television writing and work to do on television, and the means to do it properly.

Thank goodness I started getting movie roles and then television shows came along. So I was very fortunate to be able to do all three and I like all of them.

I'm envious of actors. You shoot a movie or you do a season of 'Big Love,' and then you're on hiatus and you have a bunch of free time.

Pretty soon we will no longer have movies. We will have television series only.

I started directing on 'The Wire.'

I am a creator of TV shows. 'Lifestyle' ran for 14 years... that was pleasurable. We also had 'Runaway' for eight years. We did two years of a show called 'The Start of Something Big', and we did a network series called 'Fame, Fortune and Romance.'

I had a prior deal in place to do a miniseries for HBO, so I'm not done with TV. But I basically want to stay in movies.

I am in Toronto, shooting a movie for NBC.

The friendships I made on 'L.A. Law,' with the cast and Steven Bochco and David Kelley were really wonderful.

We shoot 'Hustle' for 12 to 16 weeks, so that's how long I'm here each year. I've always loved London. I lived here for three years back in the Seventies, when I did a TV series, 'The Protectors,' for Lew Grade.

I've always lived in New York; I never moved to L.A. I was developing and producing and writing a pilot for a year. That took me out of everything for over a year. When that sadly didn't go forward, I shot 'Black Mirror' right after that.

I feel like I don't have much of a preference. With TV, it's just a longer process, so you need to be more sure that you really want to be involved in it for a longer time than you would be with film.

TV isn't like films; you can't rest on your laurels.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

In fact, most good television is better than most movies that are out.

Everything you look at now, the scripts that come in that you look at, the television scripts are way better than the movie script. The talent is going to television.

Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.

As far as the difference for me between television and movies, I really thrill to the pace of television. As exhausting as it can be - there was actually one day when we never went to bed.

I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.

Television is what we're all very attracted to because that's where the best writing and the best characters are.