On-Set Dynamics Quotes

In my experience in series TV, if you have a good crew and a great cast, it's going to be a great group - similar to the theater where it's a bunch of people who are really talented and go to work each day and challenge each other, and if you are lucky enough to get a hit then it's five or six or seven years of this kind of work.

I think being a guest star on an ongoing TV show can be a nightmare, and I've done it a lot. You're walking into this family who's very comfortable where they are, and you have to jump on the train and be artificially comfortable. That's a very hard thing to do.

Things move so quickly on set. When you're about to do another take and you have a minute to figure out what you're doing, you just kind of determine how you're going to do it on the spot.

In retrospect, I went to Jane Fonda for literally everything. During Mermaids, we were staying in the same building, so she was right upstairs from me. I was in my first relationship, so I got all sorts of advice. She became famous in her late teens.

In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.

You know, honestly, acting in film is remarkably independent. You're doing your thing and someone else is doing their thing.

My greatest strength as an actor is that I follow my director's brief completely. The film is always the director's visual baby.

I have realised I am a director's actor.

What's interesting is that you can have a set that's very calm, very smooth, very cooperative... and end up with a terrible movie. And you can have a set that's really horrible as far as relationships and volatility, and come up with a great movie. Sometimes that energy gets infused into what ends up on film - it's interesting in that way.

If there's one thing that I know how to do, it's talk to actors. From what I have experienced working with so many different directors in so many different things, a lot of them don't really know how to talk to us.

Acting is a weird, kind of alienating job because you're in an isolated place. Even if you're working with a lot of other people, you're kind of alienated. Actors say that a lot, and I kind of find that to be true.

I noticed while working on Green Lantern that the actor - albeit forefront in the film, obviously, and the key focus for the audience - is kind of the smallest cog in the machine when you're shooting.

As an actor, we can only do what the director wants. Only the director has a vision of the entire film.

Seeing someone you know be good at something is really appealing. Seeing how Darren Aronofsky behaved on set, it was another aspect of him, the director. He'd never directed me at home in the kitchen before. It was just seeing a whole other aspect of someone. It was really, really exciting. I loved it.

The crew and cast at Castle becomes more of a reality than the people I've known all my life

I've worked with little kid actors before, and when they start crying or anything like that, it makes my job so easy, because you react. A little kid crying, there's not much else to do.

James Franco is a Method actor. I respect Method actors, but he never snapped out of character. Whenever we'd have to get in the ring for boxing scenes, and even during practice, the dude was full-on hitting me.

Any director who's also acted understands the fact that every person has a different process and has to be approached differently.

I forget about the relationship between myself and any actress when working with her.

As an actor, I love working with directors. As much as I love working with other actors.

After three days of shooting with Donald [ Sutherland], I was the only one he worked with for the first three days of the movie [The Winter Of Our Discontent] because of the crazy schedule. We [shot] a lot of this stuff, some of it incredibly intense and emotional. We had never had a conversation during that whole time. We didn't have time.

I would say that maybe directors who act as well are easier with actors. I'm not saying that all directors have this, but sometimes you'll come across a director who sort of looks at an actor a bit like a kind of untrained horse that's been let out of the stable, like they might buck him.

I know what actors fear, what they like; I know how to get things out of them and I listen to them better, since I've been there.

Don't fall in love with your leading man. Of course, that's just what I did.

Usually, you don't really end up lifelong buddies with your co-stars.