Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued; Olympia had bagels! We didn't have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me - a place with so many...
The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and...
Having written both comedy and drama, comedy's harder because the fear of failure's so much stronger. When you write a scene and you see it cut together, and it doesn't make you laugh, it hurts in a way that failed drama doesn't. Failed drama, it's a...
I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don't want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there's a good chance that you are going t...
TV is so different from the movies. It takes a lot of stamina because you work such long hours. It is really challenging. You are learning the next day's lines while you are shooting today's scenes. I found courage I never realised I had. I hope to d...
Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came...
I laugh at it now, but one time I had an agent tell me I would never work in TV if I didn't get a nose job. People tell you to change yourself to fit into the L.A. scene, but the advice usually doesn't make any sense. The next agent told me my nose w...
I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to...
Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a pos...
I find that kid actors are great reminders of the simplicity of acting. As you get older, you can sometimes complicate things a little more. You can become too aware of, 'Okay, this is the scene emotionally. This is where we need to be. We've got the...
I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see ...
Every time you do a take on a movie, you're not sure if it's going to succeed. Even if you have a great cast, like we had, every scene you're kind of waiting for the release. 'Oh, yes; it happened. We got it!' There's always the possibility that it's...
If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.
I believe how you measure a good movie is how many times you can see it. With comedies, I like to be a producer, because comedies can get corny and go off track real fast. I'm always the 'less is more' guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one...
If you've been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who's in and who's out changes by the year. It's really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn't having it a ye...
What I enjoy most with acting is when it's a good scene with one or two other actors, and you feel a strong connection, and you don't know how you're going to respond, and everybody is listening to each other and getting affected by each other, and e...
In the States, this type of jam-band phenomena has opened it up for groups to improvise, admittedly more in the groove area, as opposed to the straight-ahead jazz thing - which is good for me, as that's one part of where I'm at. It's been so great pl...
I would always prefer radio or working behind the scenes where I don't have to be seen. I don't like how appearance oriented TV is (especially now that I'm middle aged!). But I am developing a show revolving around animal rescue which will hopefully ...
I'm proud of 'The Hidden.' I feel like we took a B-movie and kind of turned it into an A-minus action movie. We kind of elevated the material a little bit. It's got a great car-chase scene at the very beginning. It has some terrific moments in it, so...
But I've always felt that the less you know about an actor's personal life, the more you can get involved in the story in which he's playing a character. And I don't like to see movies where you know about everything that happens behind the scenes. I...
I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining...
