A Quote by Giovanni Ribisi

It's an interesting thing to come to New York and do a television show. You're doing 10 hours of content in four and a half months. Eighty-hour weeks are par for the course.
Certain people want to binge-watch stuff, and they want 10 solid hours of whatever, not realizing that writing 10 hours of quality television is a exhausting experience. Writing an hour and a half is a warm hug compared to writing 10 hours of television.
If you're doing an hour-long show, you're working movie hours, doing a 12-15-hour day. We work three or four hours a day, and get every third or fourth week off to give the writers time to write. It's the cushiest job in Hollywood.
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
When you consume a half hour or an hour of television, you can talk about what happened as opposed to consuming ten hours of content, and then you don't remember everything you want to talk about.
It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.'
I did nine months in 'Mrs. Klein' in New York, then four months on the road. Then I did a movie directed by Philip Haas, who did 'Angels & Insects'. We shot 'The Blood Oranges' in Mexico for six weeks.
But the idea behind French hours is that instead of doing a 12 and a half or 13-hour day with a lunch break in the middle, you do a 10-hour straight day. Everyone kind of eats food throughout the day anyway on the set.
And the whole Oscar thing, that is just surreal: you spend months and months doing promotion, and then come back to reality with this golden thing in your hands. You put it in the office and then you just have to look at it sitting on the shelf. And, after about two weeks, you go: 'What is that doing there?'
I do my show half-hour a night four nights a week. I haven't seen my kids in 18 months, and I am losing calcium in my bones. Doctors say I should stop. I'm not going to.
Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Some years ago, not long after I moved to Los Angeles from New York, I attended a television industry party. When a man asked my profession, I told him that I was a writer. He sipped his drink. "Half-hour or hour?" he inquired. There was a long silence. "Lifelong," I replied.
I like to do a movie, to be on it 8, 10 weeks. It evolves as you're working on it. Little things come to you every day. It's a slow process, and when you have to pack it into a short period of time, which you do for television, the experience is not one that I cherish. So if it's going to be television, it's really got to be the right thing.
One good and bad thing about New York is there's so much exciting stuff and so many people doing something interesting. I actually find in New York that you become more careerist and more focused on what's the newest, hippest thing.
I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.
The fact is that daytime television is less valued than nighttime, and its partly because of the product that we produce. We do a one-hour show in 12 hours. Nighttime produces a one-hour show in seven to nine days.
The fact is that daytime television is less valued than nighttime, and it's partly because of the product that we produce. We do a one-hour show in 12 hours. Nighttime produces a one-hour show in seven to nine days.
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