Long-Term Projects Quotes

It's the business of movies, it's the fights that go along with the level of budget, and more than anything, it's the creative constipation of having to live with one idea for two or three years. It's just not that fun.

My temperament is not the adventuresome sort that enjoys starting new projects every six months. I love ensemble, nine-to-five stability. There's a family dynamic in making a television show that you don't get on a movie, where you're a hired gun for a few months.

We must remember, elections are short-term efforts. Revolutions are long-term projects.

I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.

I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years.

I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.

Capitalism is a wonderful economic engine, but it assigns little value to long-term projects or societal problems.

I really like working in television and I like exploring a character over a longer period of time, and I like the consistency of television.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

I do a lot of work that's permanent. The drawings, the sculptures, they're permanent.

I think auditions are set up for failure because they're not really the set experience. There's no time to develop the character. You're just looking at someone... if someone's really good in an audition, sometimes they're not good in the film. It's something you learn when you're doing short films. It's the same way that some people do well at taking tests and some people don't. But when you're on a long-term filmmaking process it's a completely different feeling.

I've actually been in situations where I've turned down a lot of money to continue on, in certain shows, or to do something that would have lasted years when I didn't even like it. I didn't want to be in any one spot for years, unless I really believed in it, and I really believe in 'Being Human.'

Look how long it took to build the Freedom Tower, and we wanted that. It took 15 years.

I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.

I can do movies maybe that have already been written, but I can't do anything for months at a time.

As an actor, you can show up on a set and be on a TV show for three or four years, or whatever it is and, by the end of it, you just want to do something else.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.

If you look at photojournalism, it's largely driven by current events... always chasing a crisis or disaster. I follow a narrative that is much looser than current events.

I used to take acting so seriously, but after we did the Quest pilot and the show sold, Kurt Russel said, "You know, you work too hard. You'll make yourself sick. You can't work that hard doing a series, because it goes on so long. It's like a baseball season. You've got 162 games. You can't just go all-out the first week or two. You can't maintain that pace." And it's true.

What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.

I want to be happy while I make movies and not just do things just to work. I want to do things I spend years on.

It's funny because TV wasn't something that I wanted to do. I wanted to do movies. I'd said a lot of no's to a lot of shows previously because I couldn't fathom being on a show for such a long time and only doing one thing.

For me, it's always been very essential to work on projects that one can work on almost for their entire life.