Michael McKean Quotes

Television offers a range and scope, and a degree of creativity and daring, that the bottom-line, global-audience-obsessed, brand-driven movie industry just can't compete with.

There's a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.

If you do television, and it's great, it's the best job there is. Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. I love that it's like theater too, and the audience, and it's so short, like twenty minutes... It's like a Haiku or something.

I'm probably not creative or talented enough to create an especially compelling piece of content, but I really do enjoy watching a great movie or TV show.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing.

I get to experiment with a lot of looks with my character so that's really fun for me. It's like getting to paint a new canvas everyday.

I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.

From the very beginning, I started doing music performances with a lot of theatrical aspects to them, where humor was a part of it but not necessarily had to be. Humor is just another tool to make the palette more rich and interesting for myself and eventually for the public. It's a great way to break out of convention.

It's incredible to see the creativity, beauty and hardships people capture when filmmaking is opened up and shared with the world.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

What I've learned is sometimes it's good not to have all the same actions and have all the same takes. The variety you provide gives the director later on in post-production the ability to construct a more interesting performance as he puts the movie together.

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

I just want to make TV that I want to see.

Make movies that you want to go and watch in a theatre.

The thing about TV is you kind of have an endless canvas. You can always keep going.

I'm actually a big fan of having all the different types of voices on television. I think it gives people a nice little buffet that they can just pick and choose how they want to get their news and entertainment, I guess.

I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others.

Each medium has its own beauty and way of working. While television offers immense reach and long-running shows, films are shorter and they are presented differently. With theatre, it's the thrill of instant feedback.

It's just nice to do something a bit different, and I guess when you're an actor, you have the license to do that.

Whatever field you can do that, that's where you want to do it, and I think that's why people like David Fincher and Ridley Scott are interested in it, too, because when you sit down on a meeting in HBO and they're like, "More, more." You're just like, "Oh yeah, I love this." Sometimes it's a little harder in film. I think also it's a great audience, take advantage of it. It's a great audience.

Whatever you do, whether you're doing a television drama or a romantic comedy, you want to be relevant, to some degree.

Each musical finds its own way.

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.

I don't ever want to do the same character twice. Variety excites me.