Jay Ellis Quotes

There's no enemy in the auditioning process. Everybody wants you to be the right person when you walk in the room. We're all just trying to make a soup here, and they're trying to figure out the right ingredients for the soup.

I feel I should defer to the writers and the directors because they're the ones who have the complete vision. They see things through from the beginning to the end. I'm responsible for one small part, so my scope is much more limited than theirs.

The funny thing about directing is that you have your own opinions, but it's a collaboration. Directing is a group effort. Even though you might think something works, the smartest thing you can do as a director is try and weigh the opinions of the people around you.

I work with a group of actors, and whenever one of us has an audition, we all get together, and we all work together on it. I think it takes us back to our film school days, our drama school days, us just working together and figuring it out because somebody else is going to see something in the material that you won't see.

I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.

At Pixar, of course, we have all these people, and they're just used to our process now where it's a discussion; it's a discovery. It's not individual artists going and fussing off by themselves in isolation and then handing their work in.

I'll always work with my collaborator in the room so I have a reaction on a note-by-note basis. I know in my gut when something works for me, and I'll fight for it, but I'm a very easy re-writer.

My job is really to... everyone is reading the script, and my job is to make sure we all interpret it in as much the same way as possible. And then I give them the freedom to sort of - to get their performance across and then make suggestions where things are not working and accentuate and push things where they really are working.

No actor can give his best performance without the help of the director.

Some artists don't want to be involved in anything outside the performing. They'll say, 'You make the decisions and tell me what to do.' I want to be in on all of it. If there's a meeting where commitments are made that I have to carry out, I want to be there.

I know it sounds earnest, but I do really feel in my bones that acting is just a small part of the equation when you are making a movie. The director really is in charge. Actors are as important or unimportant as the rest of the people around them.

Two people making a beat is really like one person making a beat. But you have another person's brain. So what might sound good to you, they could flip it a different way. It's really a collaborative effort, really.

In our band, we had such an interesting democracy, and it worked really well.

Any film is a collaborative process, you've got thousands and thousands of people working on it.

I grew up doing theater, so I'm used to working with people where you can definitely ask another person a question or advice or say, "Hey, let's try it this way," or "What do you think if I did it this way?"

My writing process is very feedback based - I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting... and then rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Chris Gethard and I have been on the road a lot together. When we get on the bus at night, we talk about the jokes that didn't work and the joke possibilities that could work. I think this is a little different from other writers.

I think I learned a lot about collaboration and about joint creativity with other people. It is honestly so much fun and I don't think that I would have had the same album if I had just written it by myself.

You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.

For me, the greatest kind of success that I've had on a particular project or in exploring a role does come through collaboration. I wouldn't want to do a movie where everything I do the director just says, "Good job" and I'm under directed.

Anybody who knows how to make a good movie, knows that it's a collaborative undertaking. To deny that its really dangerous.

I love working with actors. If you cast the right person in the right part at the right time, they make you look like a better writer and director than you really are.

A director is what a director wants to be. If you want to force something, you can fight to the death and maybe get fired, but it's your job to help push things along.

Even when you're acting with a producing hat, when you're in every scene, you're really conscious of trying to make everybody as good as they are, because ultimately you're trying to make the best movie possible.