Take Selection Quotes

My job, as an actor, is to give the director options. You can only hope that the takes that you thought were the best were chosen. But, then again, if I don't watch it, I'll never know.

When you're an actor, you often feel victimized - you see the end result, 'Oh, they didn't use this take; they didn't use that take. How come?' There's no 'How come?' with the director. There's only one person to look at. Walk over to the mirror if you want to know why. But I prefer that.

When I made 'Eight Below,' they wanted me to shoot digital, and I didn't want to do it because that's just what I need, to get a great series of takes and then find out the camera was frozen.

As an actor, you are sort of only in charge of yourself. All you can really control is your performance. You don't know what they're going to do with it in the editing room, what they're going to cut out, which take they're going to use. You know, your control is very limited. As a director, it's ultimately your piece. You have a lot more responsibility, but you also have a lot more creative control. It's scary, but also liberating in a way.

When I first see the dailies, I look only at myself, but then you start to see the scene.

Filming is repetition and many takes.

I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.

What I learned very quickly is that if you get it right in the first two or three takes, it's not going to get that much better.

Every single director-actor I talked to, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood to George Clooney, said the biggest mistake they made is not shooting enough footage of themselves.

In theater, you're in charge of your performance, and at the end of the day you're the one who gets credit because you're in front of the audience doing it, and in film and TV it's the director who gets to decide when to cut to you on a line, which take he uses.

I like to shoot a lot of choices. I like a lot of stuff - and so I push to go faster, to shrink the time between the takes so that the takes are what you're spending all your time on.

You can do 12 great takes, but if the director is no good, he'll end up picking the wrong one.

What I do is whatever it takes, it takes. Sometimes you see a scene right away and a take looks great so you might print that and you might print a couple more and take elements of all three. It just depends. You're looking for the highlights. You're looking for the best elements of the scene, but preferably you'd like to have one good take that would go all the way through.

In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.