Katey Sagal Quotes

Directing television is really hard - it's so fast. You shoot an hour show in seven days.

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

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.

I kind of want to learn how to direct TV. It's interesting.

In TV, you have no time and sort of just carpet bomb the scene with as many angles as possible as quickly as possible and find it in the edit.

Especially as a director on 'West Wing,' I directed a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and really stretched my wings.

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.

Normally, a TV show shoots episodically.

On TV, you have wardrobe fittings, you have four cameras on you at all times, and you're worried about your angles and your lighting and your shots.

For an actor working in television or film, I think it's important to understand how the medium works - how the camera and lenses work and how the sound and the editing works.

With episodic, kind of one-hour directing, they always have guest directors come in, so they don't have the same person week after week. You get a break.

I come out of TV, where you never reshoot, because you don't have time. If you do reshoot, it's because someone really screwed up.

With film sometimes you're thrown in there and you literally hit the ground running, taking your best shot and just leave it up to the editing.

When you're doing the work, film and TV are exactly the same. TV is just film in reduced pieces.

Well directing TV is very time-consuming, so if you are going to direct TV, a season will take a year out of your life.

The craziest thing about TV directing is I turned in a version, and then they made their final changes - so I don't know what they are. So I'm like, "Ooo, I'm dying to see the final print."

Television is such an evolving medium. When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

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.

And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

I was a directing student and a production design student at Carnegie Mellon. I went in as a production design student and became a directing student.

You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.

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.

We had an amazing experience shooting the first season of 'Leverage' with such a talented cast and crew and with the full support of TNT behind us.

Going into live action, the perception I had was that to be a director, you had to be loud, you had be physically fit, wear cool hats, have a beard, and yell, 'Action!' really loud. And I'm none of those things.