Emily Mortimer Quotes

I did a network show in the U.S. before, and I loved it, but you have eight days to shoot an episode, and it's just a ridiculous pace.

We worked under a lot of pressure... three days to do an episode, sometimes two in a week, 39 episodes a year.

I love doing TV. It's such a breakneck pace, you know. It's kiss and go with your leading man. You meet them in the morning and go right into a clinch. The filming is over before you know their last names.

You do show after show after show and get them done and on the air. Television devours material. We work a minimum of 12, 14 hours, and often 15, 18 hours a day.

When the show started out, it was like all of a sudden we had to do 35 episodes and we had just a month and a half to write them, and it took me a while to realize that I was in charge.

When you're shooting a TV show, there's not a lot of time to build character.

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.

Network shows shoot so fast, so you kind of have to just go with your instinct.

I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.

We shoot double episodes in 15 days in Los Angeles.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

Ten episodes goes by really quickly, especially when you've got a really tough shooting schedule of seven-day episodes.

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.

I'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.

A lot of times in television, it's incredibly rushed, and you're just trying to get the pace.

'Law & Order' is a six-month shoot. Everything has to be crammed in. I had so much fun, but it wasn't a holiday. We had seriously long days, and we'd finish at 8 P.M. and start again at 7 A.M. We were doing six-day weeks, which sometimes tripped onto the seventh. But I loved it all.

On every show I've ever done, one of the first network notes is, 'You have to put a time clock on this thing.'

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.

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

The pace is different on a film set. It's slightly slower, allowing for a little more wiggle room. Sometimes there is a bit more room to explore and work on the floor. On a TV set, you really have to be ultra-prepared and ready to deliver because time is so tight. Not that you don't have to be prepared for film.

I love the energy and urgency of working in news.

That's the thing about 'The Daily Show' - we're doing four shows a week, so we can't be too precious about what's going on.

I like the energy of doing things fast. We shot 'Starred Up' in just four weeks, and we edited it in four weeks.

'CSI' was an amazing experience, which, looking back, I was very lucky to get. They shoot an entire episode in eight days, so everything has to be totally slick and professional.

There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.