I go to a lot of events morning, noon and night when I'm not in Washington.
You learn so many different skills on the show «Merlin». You're constantly asked to do green-screen, horse riding, comedy scenes, dramatic scenes, everything. The ability and the skill to adapt under a tight schedule is one that I'll definitely take away.
As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule.
When you do a low budget movie, you get a little over-ambitious.
I have to be at work every day at six in the morning and then cover premieres and parties that go late into the night, so a 12-hour workday is the norm.
When you're shooting super-low-budget - we had 20 days to shoot 'Diary,' and a little over $2 - time is money.
We've been involved in a lot of albums that were really rushed at the end.
It was almost like I was in the army: school, work, homework, fly to New York, get in at 2 in the morning, do a morning show at 5 A.M., then another one at 7, then a radio interview at 10, you know?
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 am up at 3:30, reading the op-ed pages and getting ready to be on the air by 6 A.M. on the set of 'Morning Joe,' and after three hours of TV and two hours on the radio, it is only 12 noon.
There really isn't a day when I wake up and DON'T have to be someplace.
I wake up at 5:30 in the morning, get to the Pawn Shop at six, work out for two hours, film until seven at night.
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.
In film, you get to take your time and make it right. In TV, it's all about the schedule. The train is moving and you sometimes just don't have time to make things right, which is painful 'cause you know it could be done better and you just have no choice.
'CSI' was an amazing experience, which, looking back, I was very lucky to get. They shoot an entire episode in eight days, so everything has to be totally slick and professional.
'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.
No movie has ever got enough time. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, and it doesn't matter how much money you've not got. You never finish on time. You're always up against it and you're always working up until the end.
It's hard to prep a movie in five days and shoot it in five days and cut it in barely any time. You don't get quite enough time to make the thing, let alone tell the story.
I think the advantage we had with "MacGruber" is the speed we had to put it together. We had a such a short period to write the movie and such a post-[production] period, it was almost like the way that the show worked, where everything is happening so fast you have to go with your gut.
Because of the nature of monthly comics and deadline, I pretty much have to work on whatever's on fire, I'm afraid.
Anybody in television lives under grinding deadlines.
When I'm shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday - lunch and wrap.
To shoot a movie that takes place in three decades in 30 days is a lot on the hair and make-up team.
My schedule is always tight. But I like to have the pressure of having to finish doing something; it gives me an added edge.
You may work under incredible pressure over two hours in a day, but you're often around that studio 14 to 16 hours of that day.
