Movies are boring. It's like watching paint dry. I did a little role in a movie, and it was eight lines. I was there for three days. It's just horrible. Television is 15 hour days. Movies are 18 hour days. And it's 18 hours of doing not a thing.
Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.
Doing a sitcom is like doing a play - you rehearse for three or four days, and then you shoot what you rehearsed on Friday night in front of an audience. An hour-long drama is like shooting a movie. You're shooting 13-14 hour days. The endurance itself is different.
Some days I would work 18-hour days because I was dancing and choreographing.
Surviving the grind of 18-hour days and getting up at four in the morning to work out for an hour so I'd have the energy to do it again the next day. I did not know I had that discipline. I did not know I had the discipline to learn a seven-page scene in three hours to shoot that day or the next day. I didn't know that I was capable of realizing that potential.
I was doing an hour drama on television and a Jackie Chan movie in Toronto, so I was on a plane every three days.
In television, you make an hour-long episode every seven days; we used to make 'Party Down' in four days per episode. It's quick and with independent movies is the same: you gotta keep moving. It's very similar.
An eight-hour movie is definitely not a two-hour movie. An eight-hour movie is really like five independent films, if you think about it, because each is usually an hour and a half. In some ways, it is like making a movie. It's just a lot more information.
When you're nursing and you're working 18-hour days, that's pretty hard.
When you're nursing and you're working 18-hour days, that's pretty hard
TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.
Usually, if I'm coming to Europe, I'm on a boat for seven days, so I spend the seven days doing a bunch of things. I'll do cardio for an hour or an hour-and-a-half and weights, just light weights.
Duets is about six people, so it's like three different movies - three different duets. I was on the set 18 days, spread out over three and a half or four weeks.
To have the opportunity to be creative and clarify the nature of that creativity, there are definitely some long days, some 18-20 hour days with interviews or computer work, but I have a friend who is every bit as intelligent and creative as me who works at the mill.
Ideally, it would be five days a week, spending at least an hour at the gym doing cardio three of those days and resistance training all of those days. My cardio is typically interval training.
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.
Wilson was once asked how long it took him to write a speech. He answered, 'That depends. If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, 3 days. If half hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.'