Shiri Appleby Quotes

Housewives' is real, yes. We say what we're thinking at the time. But filming our real lives is a huge production that takes a long time. Sometimes you have to sit there for hours and hours while the show is being produced.

I was fooled a bit during 'Laguna Beach.' I was 17, 18 years old, and I thought they just wanted to shoot a documentary, and that it probably wouldn't end up anywhere, anyway. Little did we know about the power of editing. I had no idea that it was going to be the soap drama that it was, but I picked up on that pretty quickly.

The only time producers fed me lines on 'Laguna Beach' were more fake phone calls or pickup scenes. We'd film for nine months out of the year, and then they would start cutting episodes together, and they would realize that they needed a specific scene.

I wish my real life could be as simple and scripted as it is on television.

It's in the nature of television to restrain the spontaneity of a live event. Things become more and more prepackaged.

I was a production assistant in the post department on 'The Surreal Life.' And it's been reported before that I was an assistant editor on 'The Surreal Life.' That is not true.

When you're working with film, you can only shoot one angle at a time, and then everything has to stop, and you re-light it and shoot everything else from the opposite side, so it's really important that you stick exactly to what's written.

So what I do is supervise the boarding process trying to get the shows the way I'd like them to be. And in some cases I've completely redone a board myself even though I'm not credited for it.

I have a thing against reality shows. I think they are so fake. I think they are produced before they begin. I think people know where they're going, what they're going to say, what the situation is. These things just don't happen and you know that.

What has reality shows got to do with reality? It is beyond unreality; there is nothing real about it.

Reality TV finds talented people. There are no scripts. The editing is what it's all about. Great editing makes those shows.

You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.

Working on 'WAGS' is obviously very different than working on wrestling television. It's very different in the way that there is not nearly as much to do for 'WAGS.'

The way I'm used to telling a story is by looking through the viewfinder and being really close to the actors.

I do like 'The Truman Show.'

It's about story; it is a social experiment, and people take that into account when they're watching 'Big Brother.'

Having to walk and talk and hit a mark and open a door proved nearly impossible for me. I suppose that's why we're on a reality show and not 'Mad Men.' Because we don't act.

We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.

If a person is in front of a camera, they're acting. It's not possible to live in front of a camera.

'Bigg Boss' was not a house, it was a house-like situation and being an actor, I had to take care of the way I looked on screen.

I do not create events for the sake of television.

I really just drew off of where we are now, with reality TV. You can't help but see a lot of it. You choose to watch some, but with some, you just can't help but hear it and see it. It's just piercing in your brain. That piercing is what I was tapping into , with whatever they were doing to pierce into the minds of everybody. It takes a certain kind of person to shut your mind off to the consequences and just try to get results. That's what I was going for - results.

We thought Donald Trump was leaving that world of entertainment and climbing over the wall into politics. In fact, what he did was he pulled the world of politics into the world of reality television.

Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.