Production Constraints Quotes

When I'm making an American film, it's more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, 'What are you doing!? Tell me first!' There are so many restrictions.

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.

The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That's a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it's impossible.

A lot of independent films try to pull off a 14-day shooting schedule, which I think is ridiculous. No matter how big or small you are, it really kills whatever sort of time you get to allow the actors to find their characters, and to spend time to think about what they're doing.

Independent films now, they want to give you $2 million to make it, 21 days to shoot it and they want 10 movie stars in it.

The ship's transporters - which let the crew 'beam' from place to place - really came out of a production need. I realized with this huge spaceship, I would blow the whole budget of the show just in landing the thing on a planet.

It's a very stressful thing, directing a movie. You have the budget, you have the schedule, you are in certain confines, and you have everybody giving you advice about what to do.

The movies I did before were movies with a lot of characters, a lot of locations, and low budgets, which meant that I was running all over the place and never had the chance to build a relationship with an actor. I was always having big, strong relationships with the cinematographers or editors or production designers, but not with the actors.

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.

I would love to shoot on film, but you can't really shoot a lot of footage on film, and you can't print a lot of it.

As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important. However, you have to go by the script because it's related to production, otherwise you will not finish your project.

We have to produce a high-quality show, but we have less and less time and money to do it. If you are using the tapeless approach to save money, you will.

We get a successful television series or something, and next season they give you less time and less money, which is something I've never really understood. That doesn't happen with Game of Thrones.

They've got to deliver twenty-six episodes a season and they're not going to beat their heads up against a wall if they feel something didn't, like, pan out the way they had hoped.

On film, you can't do it over again. And you do have to stop shooting at a certain point.

The difference between film and TV, for me, is just that huge thing of knowing that there's a script that is not going to change and you can go really deep into that. With TV, you're just constantly on a high-wire, making sure you don't fall.

I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.

'Ruined' was a play which was somewhat of an anomaly in that I did not take a commission until it was finished because I really wanted to explore the subject matter unencumbered. Otherwise, I felt as though I'd have the voice of dramaturges and literary managers saying, 'This is great, but we'll never be able to produce it.'

Acting is more creative and liberating than production.

You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.

It seemed like there were so many options in filmmaking before. If they don't want to make it, well okay, there's a hundred other places we can try. I'm not a producer and I don't even know the places my producer goes to, thankfully. But I think there are far fewer options now to releasing a movie theatrically or to getting the financing.

I don't know how that budget would have been worked out, but that was the initial idea. Obviously, we couldn't have had a show with nine expensive actors in it. It was very nice that they were even interested in doing that. But, I was so proud of what we'd done that I couldn't think of a compelling reason to do a lesser version of it.

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.

Each production has certain circumstances that will bring you to a certain way of making it. It is not intentional, it is not an artistic decision, the way we make films, it is the way we address to our problems.

When you shoot a movie so quickly you can't really afford to shoot a bunch of extra footage because you don't have that luxury.