Jodi Balfour Quotes

With TV, you have so much to get done during the day that you don't really have a lot of time to feel your way through it. I know before I walk on the set exactly what I'm going to do. With film you can kind of find your way in it a little more, play with it some.

I don't know much about making films or TV programs, but what's cool about being in the studio is that you have more time.

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.

Often times people complain about the lack of time in television, but I have to say, you don't have any more time to film in feature films then you do in television. It's just a question of how many scenes you'll be doing in the course of a day.

Well, there's much more time to do a weekly show, and much more coverage - as it turns out, it was all preparation for the stuff I'm doing now - but it was interesting to see how much time was spent on how little airtime, compared to knocking out a show a day on the soaps.

I think what you learn, working on a film or TV set, is how to tune certain things out. You've got 60-100 people swirling around you, each of them with a very important job to do.

I worked with Steven Spielberg on 'AI,' and his level of preparation was extraordinary. He told me there was a time at the beginning when he was a bit more spontaneous and went over budget, and it absolutely wrecked his head. When you look at the power and assuredness of his movies, it makes sense that he works out so much in advance.

The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and only twelve hours to do it. But with 'Serenity,' we could shoot one scene all day long.

One of the things that's fun about TV is it grows, and you set goals and aim towards stuff, and one of the writers has an idea, and you say, 'Ooh, that's so much cooler. Let's do that instead.' It's so much more fluid and organic that way, and that's the most fun part about it.

I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

I think everyone who makes movies should be forced to do television. Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are a lot of decisions made just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the story told and it connects to the audience.

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.

I've been lucky enough that in the U.K., I've done shows that have aired once a week. I make a show there that runs seasonally, and we make one episode a week, and that is great - the value of time. You can really think and finesse what you want to do.

I think I was never home when I was directing, because you're either prepping, shooting, or editing, and then acting at the same time. It's really time-consuming, but it was great fun.

There are times where we are shooting a TV show, and it goes very fast. But everybody has this freedom to still be artists.

Most film teams usually come with a tight deadline, which doesn't leave us much time to compose.

I was in the middle of filming Season 3 of 'Grace and Frankie.' Then the writing process for 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' was happening at the exact same time. And then the pre-production for 'Fatherless' was happening at the exact same time as well.

I imagine when you're making a reality show with a whole crew, it's bound to get complicated.

Television is an excellent training ground for a director. If you work consistently in television, as I did, you have to come in on time and on budget. What you are allowed in feature films are, fortunately, more time and a larger budget.

Before we started shooting 'Homecoming,' we were in the writer's room for 'Mr. Robot.' I was also editing Season 3 of 'Mr. Robot' while I was prepping for the 'Homecoming' shoot. So yeah, it's a lot of hats.

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

I always wanted to direct. Directing is a lot more of a commitment though, a lot more time. I like directors who do very few takes, they know what they want.

You always want to do something different. I enjoy the process. I like making movies, and it's increasingly hard to find a movie you'd want to make.

Ever since I was little, I've felt very comfortable on a set. The time is stressful - being creative under time constraints. But there is an excitement and energy that you only have a certain amount of time to get what you want.

If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.