Jason O'Mara Quotes

Working on being creative in the TV world is endless. It never stops. It's a challenge that never disappears.

I suppose the biggest strain was that Hoodwink is a high-octane character and he's up there like all the time. Once he's on his journey there's no let up for the man, so I actually found it a massively exhausting job to keep that level up.

So then I started doing a lot of episodic TV, just car chases or helicopter chases or whatever.

Any director, if you really ask them, will tell you that the toughest thing to do is like a dinner table or a dialogue scene, because you need to keep that electricity maintained throughout the course of the film.

A lot of the TV shows, they do long hours, and they do a lot of days, and you don't get a lot of time. But the good thing is, if you get one that's made in L.A., or made in a place you want to be, you get to go home every night.

There's great stuff out there, but I prefer doing a TV show, going to work every day with the same people, and a lot of stuff is not being shot in Los Angeles and I don't really want to do that because my loved ones are here.

I don't want to be in a movie with 20 minutes of dialogue and then stand around while the robots start explosions.

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

I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.

The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven't started yet.

I'll always be attached to telly in one way or another, whether it's a character or producer or director, I just love the medium.

I've directed bits of action and so I know that it's long and it's very detailed. Editing action is a good deal more exciting than shooting action. Shooting action is very, very meticulous, it's increments, tiny little pieces.

You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.

I was talking to Shonda Rhimes the other day and I said, "I. Do. Not. Know. How. You. Do. This." While we're writing episode 10, episode 6 is shooting, episode 3 is in the edit, and episode 2 is in its color session...You've got seven episodes in different parts! It's a wild, wild, wild ride, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was badass and amazing.

I'll do more than the average actor, but I'm smart enough to know why stunt guys exist.

Television is where I cut my teeth.

I've always really made my living in television. Television has always been so good to me.

One of the things I would love to do, by the time I die, is be in every single genre. That would be really fun. I get to shoot guns and jump out of a helicopter.

Working on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.

After more than twenty-five years in television, there are days when I feel like I'm just beginning, because I'm learning new things. I want to be better all the time.

And so out of the blue the call did come and said, you know, "Would you be - would you consider turning this [The Starter Wife] now into a series?" And so obviously that was a shock. And all the conversations began. And, you know, and now we're here. Now we're finishing up our last episode right now.

I'm actually an impatient person. I'm very suited for television because with the process, it's six weeks from the time you come up with an episode until when it airs. We can't drag it out that long. With film, and this is not a profound observation or an original one; it can go on endlessly unless the movie's like incredibly topical. That's the challenge for me, as an impatient person who wants see things come to life. ... I mean, it's just this feeling I get when I see a movie I love.

I hope to keep working with television. I wouldn't mind doing more.

I'm a different writer now. You don't sit in a room with Sopranos creator David Chase and writer Terence Winter for four years and not learn something. And just watching the way the show was done, and watching the way that David encouraged the imagination.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.