Jon Hamm Quotes

I look at each episode in two ways - from a design standpoint and from an entertainment standpoint - this is TV, after all. We usually succeed on at least one of the levels.

I love good TV shows, but it's not what I do. I kind of sculpt my films as I go along. And TV is all about writing, so you just shoot, shoot, shoot what's written.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you.

When I do a movie, I have the script. I know how it begins and how it ends. I know what my character does and where he's going. If I have ideas I want to express or changes I want to make, there's one guy: the director. It's different in television.

Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

I love TV, don't get me wrong. But with film, you're just banging out this one product and you're not waiting on another script. You have your script. It's great, in that way.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.

In TV we've used something that I love... it's called process. I love process.

There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.

To me, the director is the most important, rather than the story.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.

The rules are: The only ego is the film, and you have to serve the film.