Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by Jason Bateman - Page 3

I enjoy editing when I'm directing, but when someone else is directing, that's their film to cut.

I look at whatever the finish line is for the character and then kind of act backwards from that and play him in such a way so that that finish line is more rewarding.

My family is pretty funny. My mother is British, so she's got a very dry sense of humor. That's where I got that from.

On the whole, a director who make the set a comfortable place to work is really important, whether it's a comedy or drama.

I'm looking forward to playing Michael Bluth many, many more times.

It's a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.

I was very surprised to get a reading for 'Arrested Development' because it really seemed to be the opposite of that which I was known for doing.

Actors, by very definition, we want people to pay attention to us, and so usually, that comes in the package of insecurity. So if we're not comfortable, we don't really show you a lot.

I really like dramas that have a tone of comedy in them or the opposite, and those are done by people like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman but also Spike Jonze and David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers.

Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.

Not a lot of people get a second chance. And I think for a while there, my name kind of got in my way a bit, based on all of the television I was fortunate enough to do. But after a while, you sort of wear out your welcome in that genre, in that medium.

I really appreciate comedy a lot.

The people at Netflix are extremely intelligent about the way they monitor activity on their platform.

Music is such an incredibly affecting part of any movie-going experience, and it just... it shapes your whole experience.

To have the privileged position of being the guy who is responsible for shaping the entire experience for an audience as opposed to being just one instrument in that orchestra, being an actor, it's all-encompassing.

As an actor, you only get to work 15 minutes an hour; as a director you're fully immersed. It's incredibly more complex and challenging and I love it. I'm sort of a glutton for work and to direct something that I'm acting in feeds the vein.

I'm not much of a party guy anymore.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there's so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director's medium. Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium so a lot of the time when you're directing a television show they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined and you just kind of have to follow the rules.

I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play. I get that. And I don't shy away from those parts.

Our job, as actors, is to just try to be as accurate and as mindful of what the audience is going through and receiving and processing. If it's a situation where the character should look a little bit out of control or do something stupid, it's your job to act into that, in a believable way.

I play around with my Japanese Garden. Since Im half way to 70 today I need to start pruning trees and sharpening plants like an old fart.

I've always felt bad that I never had more information to give people when they asked me about it, but I guess people kind of got frustrated by that and they just started kind of making up their own sort of "well, we haven't heard that much" or "news hasn't changed so it must be going away".

My hobbies have varied over the years. There were a whole set of new ones before I got married. Now I spend as much time with my wife, who is my best friend.

I like being hired to do more and more stuff. Carry more and more responsibility. It's nice I'm getting that trust.

The longer you stay in the job that you do the more you learn about what those around you do. As an actor I've always nosed around apologetically about: "oh wouldn't it be interesting if I could do that?" I can't imagine not wanting to do this everyday.

I can be on a telephone call, and be emailing or texting somebody else, as well. I would imagine everyone appreciates that efficiency of communication. I see it as a huge positive.

My comedic instinct, is a little bit more rooted in - my mother's British so I've always been more of the dry receiver of the crazy as opposed to the initiator of the crazy. I'm kind of predisposed to be the straight man.

I don't get a chance to cry that often on film, so I was hoping that talent would come my way, that day. I cheated, I guess, when I just started looking at my technology device - my iPhone - to look at pictures of my kids, before I did the scene where I had to cry. That was a good trick that I found.

It takes some intelligence and insight to figure out you're gay and then a tremendous amount of balls to live it and live it proudly.

I don't really find a problem with technology or television, or anything. I'm a product of it. I grew up watching TV, and I don't think I'm too dumb or too crazy.

I'm not a Hollywood party guy.

I'm not a 'celebrity'. I'm not a big huge star and so when people see me it's usually to talk about something I've done and that's a great conversation to have.

I'm in bed by nine. Let's get on with it.

I love a massage. I'd go every day if I could.

I actually enjoyed changing diapers and I enjoyed swaddling. I don't mind being swaddled either, on occasion.

It is one of the few elements in the process that a director really, really can't control: an actor's performance. If you have a director that understands that, it's comforting to an actor. You're starting the relationship more as a collaborator, rather than as an employee or some kind of a soldier trying to execute something you don't organically feel.

What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.

Improvisation, for me, is when the cameras start rolling, we don't know where we're going and let's just waste people's time and money.

Directing a movie is the greatest job in the world. I could not be more envious of the guys who get to do it all the time.

As an actor, you get hired for what you last did. And I guess it just becomes your choice or obligation to do different things.

When you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that's not the healthiest thing at that early an age.

I'm a guy who is a little bit complicated and is a little bit in his own head and is not the most free-spirited, fun-loving kind of guy.

When you're actor, you have no idea how much work goes into pre-production. We're just sitting in our trailers waiting for someone to knock on our door to go to the set.