I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.
Television moves fast, and you don't have the indulgences you have when you're shooting movies of so many takes because there are tight deadlines.
I love making cheap films. I really do. What I've found is that I work better when it's both a fairly low budget and a short schedule. It focuses the mind, and it's a better atmosphere.
But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.
You know, episodic TV directing is a very long and arduous job. You have very short schedules, short short shooting days, and you have to get lot of pages done.
Working with Moschino, a real high fashion Italian brand, maybe I'm under tighter deadlines, but sometimes under tight deadlines you do your best work.
Sometimes, and I hate to say it, you do feel things are asked for in the most ludicrously unrealistic fashion. The time you are expected to make things in, and the money you are expected to make them for - that is the death of creativity. Just because some things can be made very cheaply does not mean everything can be.
Well, television is grueling. The hours are grueling, it's hard work, and there's a lot of pressure to get it done without a lot of rehearsal time.
I left for Fiji 36 hours after we wrapped 'Lucha Underground' season 4. The producers of 'Lucha Underground' had to bend over backwards to get me wrapped out of the season to leave for 'Survivor.'
A lot of times in television, it's incredibly rushed, and you're just trying to get the pace.
Honestly, it was just tiring going straight from one show to the other. I filmed 'Iron Fist,' and then I had a two week break, and I went straight into 'The Defenders.'
With 'Gerald's Game' in particular, we didn't have enough money or time and it was really hard.
We all lived in the same house, or most of us did. And as far as I can make out we were confined to the property, because at twenty-four hours' notice we'd have to do a gig somewhere. So you couldn't leave the building for more than twelve hours in case a gig came through.
The challenging thing is that we go home after doing the run-through and the writers stay there working, so sometimes I get script changes delivered to me at midnight. It's constantly shifting.
Fashion is harder than the film industry. You have to constantly be able to crank out hit after hit after hit on demand and on a very tight calendar. I've come back, I've lost it, I've come back again. It's really as good as your last collection.
My only problem, and this has been a constant worry on television, is time management. The deadlines on television are killing.
It's not unusual to have only three weeks to score a picture. And that's three weeks from signing on to finishing the last recording session. That's how I did 'The Queen' and, more recently, it's how I did 'The Imitation Game.'
