Patrick Wilson Quotes

It's hard to make a good movie in four weeks. It's hard. I've done it, but it's not easy.

The biggest challenge was that we had to shoot so quickly and with such a limited budget.

It's hard to prep a movie in five days and shoot it in five days and cut it in barely any time. You don't get quite enough time to make the thing, let alone tell the story.

I think the advantage we had with "MacGruber" is the speed we had to put it together. We had a such a short period to write the movie and such a post-[production] period, it was almost like the way that the show worked, where everything is happening so fast you have to go with your gut.

'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

On 'B&B,' we shoot so fast and eight episodes a week, so we have to always be on our A-game. There's really no time to make certain adjustments. We usually shoot a scene in one take, maybe two or three only if needed.

I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.

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

Acting in TV as opposed to films is really difficult. What a film gets two months to do, we get eight days to do.

The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

'She's Gotta Have It' was shot in twelve days and two six-day weeks.

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

When you're working with a script and you have three pages for that day, you have to shoot that. It can become sort of like a prison, because by the time you've shot what you need to shoot, you don't really have time to think or shoot anything else.

Even when a pilot goes, you shoot it in March or April, and then you have to rush it through post-production by May. If they greenlight it, then you go and there's no time to think about it. And then, you've gotta start shooting in July, so you're off to the races.

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

In television you don't have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it's even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

After I directed for the first time, I wanted to call every director I'd ever worked with and apologize. In television you are tasked with shooting 42 minutes, or whatever, in eight days. That's not a lot of time.

When your in the movie business you have a start date and a stop date.

I love how you can shoot a movie in a month or two or three of four, and it's this encapsulated story that you box up and ship out into the world, and what it is, is what it is.

Soaps have a schedule where you have to be done in 15 minutes. With an hour show, there's no way to get off schedule. On a movie, it's a lot easier to go back and reshoot scenes. I wasn't used to that at all... taking the time to really make each scene as good as it can be, which you can't do on soaps.

So we got there at 6 a.m. We'd be shooting by 6:45. We wouldn't break for lunch, we'd just pass food around all day. And we would just rock and roll 'til 4, then Matty Libatique, our great cinematographer, would say, 'Outta light, guys' - and that was it.

There's time enough, but none to spare.

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

It's not that there aren't people who care creatively in the world of television, but there's always a bit more time in making a movie. I always feel films are more of a creative journey.

What happens is that with difficult processes on a film, they get very intensely compressed because a clock is ticking.