A Quote by Aaron Sorkin
There have been times - and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... - where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.
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Having such a diverse cast and crew is what makes the 'Fast & Furious' films so unique to all the other studio tent pole films that just have a very singular look to them.
I know, just from directing television, where you have a huge support system of producers and writers and a script supervisor - not just the cast but a crew of 100 people - there are, as a director, hundreds of questions that you have to answer every day.
What I found most fun is just trying to get other people to crack up. That's always something that will help a movie and I've been lucky enough to have been able to work with some incredibly talented, collaborative comedy people in all of the stuff that I've been in. If you can get people laughing, cast or crew, you're going to have a good end product.
TV and film both attract me equally. In both, you do search for a role that would be enjoyable to do, that has a great storyline and then, secondly, you look at the cast and the crew - are they respectable? How I look at it is my character - has the character got enough substance? It can't just be a one faced character, which is there to fill a gap. He has to have a purpose, so if it ticks all of those boxes then generally it's a good choice.
I knew with The West Wing that that wasn't going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.
At MGM there was a script cage in the basement where they’d show rushes. And I thought to myself, “How do I get into the script cage and find out what my future is?” I climbed into the script cage one night and spent the whole night in there. I saw the bowels of MGM. I saw the studio scripts that the producers had seen; the writers had just handed them in. And I started thinking this is a chance to pick my own roles.
The script was given to me by one of my agents and they didn't tell me anything about it. My first reaction was, "The West Wing? Is it about a squadron of fighter jets?" Then I turned the page and saw, 'by Aaron Sorkin' and I knew it was going to be something good.
I've never had to pitch a movie to a studio. I usually just let people read the script, then I cast it. I always think pitching is for baseball.
The formula for a successful film is simple: good script, good direction, a dedicated cast and a fantastic crew. If you have all of these elements then the rest will fall into place.
My absolute favorite thing about working on 'Liv and Maddie' is my cast and crew. The people that I spend almost every hour of every day with. Your cast has great influence over the quality of your life, and I've been blessed with not just a cast, but a family.
You look at driving down the road, night after night, tryin' to make a town, getting $25 - that's hard times. It's our duty to make it good times for the fans that pay their money to see us perform each and every night.
'Southern Accents,' I think that's one of my best, really. That would have been 1984, and I wrote that on the piano in the studio at home. I had a studio, and I just happened to be down there in the middle of the night. It was quite late, probably early morning, and I just started to play, and a song just started to appear.
What we're doing on 'The West Wing' is fictional. It's not a place to learn about politics or government. Has there ever been a fundraiser on 'The West Wing?' No. So right there, you're in Disneyland.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
I haven't done it by myself at all. I've been surrounded by a really, really good crew of all ages. I think it's important to have a good age range in the crew so that some of us have experienced that period, or something close to that. But the script, of course, is really inspiring and you just have to trust that. Sometimes on film a glass can be as big as a car, so if the details are right, then they take up as much space on screen as the streets that we didn't have a chance to show as London really has changed since then.
But I've always been hard to cast, I've never been an ingenue, I've never been the romantic lead. I'm an actor; give me the script and I do what I do and hope it's good.
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