Martha Plimpton Quotes

'Law & Order' is a six-month shoot. Everything has to be crammed in. I had so much fun, but it wasn't a holiday. We had seriously long days, and we'd finish at 8 P.M. and start again at 7 A.M. We were doing six-day weeks, which sometimes tripped onto the seventh. But I loved it all.

'Days of Our Lives' was an insane schedule. You're doing a whole one-hour show in a day. You do a very cursory run-through with the director telling you where you're going to be standing, then you do a quick rehearsal on camera and you shoot it.

It's an interesting thing to come to New York and do a television show. You're doing 10 hours of content in four and a half months. Eighty-hour weeks are par for the course.

An hour series is a killer. It's hard on you physically.

When you're shooting a TV show, there's not a lot of time to build character.

Normally, a TV show shoots episodically.

I'm very humble in terms of knowing that television is an extraordinary collaborative medium and that one person alone cannot make a great TV show.

I've been banking my holidays, which means I take time off later in the year. It makes it a lot easier to fit filming in; it can be quite challenging to study and film at the same time.

A 'Friends' shoot night could extend well into the small hours of the morning.

'Grey's Anatomy,' that was a great show to be part of, but they work really long hours. They were all just really tired. Just worn out.

We shoot double episodes in 15 days in Los Angeles.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

A hit show takes Hollywood magic indeed, but it also takes a lot of math and science, plus the study of polls and trends to make and sell a TV show.

I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

Running a TV show is always running a TV show; it's never not running a TV show.

'Longmire' is an incredibly hard shooting schedule because the locations are usually an hour away every morning, and I come home every weekend. I fly back to L.A. for about 26 hours a weekend, just to touch base back at home. It's a lot of work. It's four really intense months.

Directing on a 90-day schedule, whether for a TV series or a feature film, it's crazy; it's a marathon.

Most of the cast and crew on 'Mama's Family' have been together since the 'Carol Burnett' days, so we work really well together. It's like I'm being paid to pretend I'm in show business.

'Battlestar' was 22 episodes - 9 to 10 months a year - and we were exhausted. You finish shooting, and the last thing you want to do is go back to work. You want those 3 months off because you're tired - it's a grueling shooting schedule.

It's pretty surreal to be doing a show on HBO with pals.

I think the public doesn't understand the rigors of shooting a show for an actor, much less when you're on location and away from home.

Single-camera is more relentless because it's eight 14-hour days no matter how you slice it.

With 'Lost,' some members of the cast would literally open the script and find out that they were dead. I mean, that's quite sad, really.