Scott Ellis Quotes

Being an actor helps me direct a little bit, when I do that, which I haven't been able to do that much, but I plan to in the future. There are a lot of reasons for that, but certainly because I feel like you know how to talk to actors, and you know what they need from you if you've been one yourself.

Actors have their own processes, and if you want to be respectful of their process, you've got to communicate with them in the language of their process, and keeping that all straight is a little bit of a head-scratcher.

Working with actors is something I've never done before. I find it tremendous. It's hard work.

With acting, it was really more of a general kind of experience of really just loving being in the theater.

My experience has been that actors always want to be directed.

I've always loved acting with adults versus like the whole High School feel.

I took an acting class at Cerritos Junior College and I did a handful of plays, maybe five or six plays.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I love actors, and I love the casting process. It's funny, like, some writers don't like actors because, I think, they are the faces of the show, and so you feel sort of secondary, but I love actors because they elevate the material; they make it better.

I learned so much about being an actor by being a director. More than I ever thought I would.

The best way to learn how to work with actors is to have had experience of trying to act yourself - it will teach you humility if nothing else.

My dad teaches me. He teaches me everything. He's been acting for over 30 years, so he knows a lot.

Television and film acting is really fun because you are working with other people and you are not completely responsible for the outcome of the project.

I never went to drama school, but I did learn a couple of things along the way.

So many people have said this, but it's true: 95 percent of what I do as a director is casting and getting people who can bear the load of what you're asking them to do and creating this emotionally safe environment.

A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

With acting, there's a certain amount of independence you have within the framework of the storytelling. When it's done well, it's a collaborative medium.

As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.

If there's one thing that I know how to do, it's talk to actors. From what I have experienced working with so many different directors in so many different things, a lot of them don't really know how to talk to us.

That's one of the great things about being an actor. You get to learn all these things normal people don't get to learn.

I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.

After being signed for 'Madras Cafe,' I joined Jogi Singh's acting classes, where I learned the basic nuances.

In the beginning, it was quite challenging because I had zero acting experience, and delivering dialogues was the most difficult thing for me to do. But after I began to act, I grew as an artiste.