Justin Hartley Quotes

Working on a soap opera is such good training for the novice actor. No rehearsal, 120 pages of dialogue per week, and one take to get the scene right. No room for error.

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work.

It's a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It's certainly not fun.

On a television show, you basically make a movie a week. Movies take three months - it's crazy. They're so slow, it's like vacation to me.

A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it.

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

Doing a TV show, you're on an assembly line and it's as cut and dry as that. There are some shows that are exceptions. There are producers that want really special things.

Television moves fast, and you don't have the indulgences you have when you're shooting movies of so many takes because there are tight deadlines.

And Seinfeld is so quick: we crank out one show a week, and the hours are very reasonable.

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

Part of making TV is the process - you just have to churn it out.

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

Every job you have, there are days that are more difficult than others. I worked on a daytime soap opera, where the volume at which you're producing this medium is incredible.

I guarantee there's people who watch television who have no idea how complicated it is to make a television show.

I guess I'm used to TV where we don't really rehearse. You block it out, and then you just start shooting.

TV is a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to get a show.

If I was going to direct an episode of 'Younger', I wanted it to look like an episode of 'Younger.'

We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.

When you're making a show or a movie, there are a million people and things in your way. As an actor, you're like a glorified session musician or player. You really are.

When you're a TV star, you pretty much set the tone, and on 'Police Woman,' we goofed around all the time.

When I was a teenager, I worked on a show that was about a family.

In television, you make an hour-long episode every seven days; we used to make 'Party Down' in four days per episode. It's quick and with independent movies is the same: you gotta keep moving. It's very similar.

The thing about the four-camera shows is that it's kind of a great combo of theater and film. You have an audience, but you have a camera to capture things, so that's a great thing, too.

In a movie, you work three months to tell a story that happens in two hours. In a Mexican soap opera, you work one day to make a story that's an hour and a half. So you can see the difference in the quality of the project.

With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.