On Set Quotes

This is the best film school there is, just to make movies and be there on set.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

To do a romantic scene is the most unromantic thing to do on screen.

I want to be an old lady, with my cane, shouting, 'Action!' and 'Cut!'

Toni Collette has been a huge influence. She was my absolute number one idol, and then I got 'United States of Tara.' I was pinching myself. I couldn't believe the first day I was on set, and I got pages of dialogue of real stuff to do with her.

I am the kind who is always on time while shooting.

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.

When I on set as a director I crazy. My temper is not that good.

When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.

When I started acting, my mom said, "If you want to go to film school and eventually direct, being on set is probably the best film school in the world." I'm incredibly grateful for the career I've had, but I was an actor to be a part of movies and TV, not the other way around.

At the end of the day, making 'Monster' was unbelievably hard, as making any movie is. And the only thing that made it worth it is not those awards and all those kind of things that I can barely remember because I was so overwhelmed. It was really that night in the editing room, that day on set. It was those things.

When we were doing 'Criminal Justice,' they were filming 'Clash of the Titans' nearby and we kept nicking off to their catering tent and going, 'Look what they've got!'

You can't really explain to anyone the experience onset, you actually have to see it to understand what we're all going through. Some days we can be on set 15 - 17 hrs. Plus then there's training.

I was on 'Murder She Wrote' with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic... she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn't know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards... he hardly said two words to me all day.

Every day of the show, I'd have about 100 of those rollers all over my head, and I'd have to wear them for hours. I even went to dinner like that a few times! I swear, half of my 'Boy Meets World' pictures have me wearing rollers in them.

In the old days, all the movie songs were recorded right there on set.

It's notoriously difficult to get actors to go on record speaking about other actors. Such requests are usually met with terse replies from publicists explaining that their clients are on set and too busy to reply.

She [Virginia Madsen] and I had a really long relationship after that movie ['Class'] I love her, and I can imagine it was not much fun to do that big sequence with a bunch of laughing, ogling frat-boy actors. I mean, can you imagine putting up with me, [John] Cusack, Alan Ruck, and Andrew McCarthy at 18?

I think it makes a difference when the actors are enjoying it more than anything because we have a real blast on 'Torchwood.'

You're not allowed to mess up in theater, and if you do, it is going to be embarrassing. But in film, if you make a mistake you just do it over again. You can just do another take.

I was busy welcoming a new experience. I had never done a movie before.

Jen[nifer Lawrence]'s main goal in life is to get me to laugh while we're filming sad scenes. And it's the HUNGER GAMES.

I went to NYU for acting, for six years. I thought acting was the easy way out or in because I didn't put in enough effort in school, being a crazy kid in college. But, I was good at it, so that was the other side of it. I would love to direct. What I've learned from being on set is more how to deal with actors than even the visual part of it all.

Yeah! I went to the set of Monuments Men.

I don't think it's unusual to spend time with your castmate.