James Salter has been a fighter pilot, a rogue, and a climber. He counts Robert Redford as a friend.
The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.
I got my first pilot license, an airplane private pilot license, in 1997 for the purpose of going to pick up my kids, who were living with their mother in Arizona, and I was in L.A. It was easier than to put them on a commercial flight. It was purely practical.
I, as prime minister, never went to Washington. Certainly never went to a presidential ranch. I hate to say this, but I wasn’t going to be the pilot fish to the shark, whereas Australia quite happily bobbed along like a happy little pilot fish with a shark who was a messy eater, and I just couldn’t feel like that.
The moment when you find out when you shoot the pilot – getting the pilot is a small victory. You shoot the pilot, and when you get picked up, that’s a huge victory right there.
In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.
I work really, really hard and it’s challenging going through all of those time zones and having to be awake when you’re supposed to be asleep. I literally fly more than a pilot.
On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background – the commander and the pilot.
For someone making a pilot, assuming the talent is there and you can maneuver the system properly, it’s just a matter of standing your ground and trying to make something great until you are making enough money for the studio that they let you keep making it.
Literally, my first audition after ‘The Life Aquatic’ was for the ‘Criminal Minds’ pilot.
I’m a medevac pilot. I have spent time suppressing wildfires and things like that. And as a combat pilot, I tend to find the biggest bucket of water I can find and put it on the biggest fire I can find, right?
‘Boldface’ is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that ‘boldface is written in blood’ because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren’t.
If I was a guy, based on how I performed in pilot training, I would have been able to have selected a fighter. I mean, I have always said unemotionally, if we want the best fighting force, why would we have 50 percent of our population not competing for these positions?
Like, to do a pilot, you don’t know what’s going to happen with it.
My father was a pilot in WWII and I have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who answers the call to serve our country.
Look, there might not be a whole lot of people that really can relate to being a fighter pilot. Let’s just be honest. But there’s a ton of people that can relate to being a mom, because I am doing it right along with them.
By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot.
So already, you go from not having a job and thinking you’re going to get fired after the pilot, to knowing that you’ve got a guaranteed job for 4 years.
I’m at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show – so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.
One of the best decisions we made on the ‘Arrow’ pilot was to have the Deathstroke mask. Within 30 seconds, you knew you were watching a DC comics show.
I kind of joke that creating franchises is a lot like directing pilot episodes of TV series. You set a look and feel and kind of pass it on.
I remember, when we started ‘Leverage,’ we were all in Chicago, and I read the script for the pilot and thought, ‘Boy, this is just a real interesting place to begin a character.’ I had to figure out how to go about playing someone who had hit rock bottom.
Pilot season isn’t perfect, and it certainly is a very difficult time. But pilot season does work for us.
Now that I know what goes into making a pilot, keeping it on the air, and keeping your fans, I’m at a point now where I do a pilot and just hope for the best. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.
There were no surprises, because when you sell a pilot based on a pitch, no matter how great the script is, it’s going to look different and feel different from what someone imagines in their head. There will always be varying degrees of disappointment or confusion.
Whenever I pick a script, I make sure I’m choosing something I would want to watch. And ‘Quantico’ was something I’d definitely want to watch. As soon as I read the pilot – and I read 26 this season – I knew this was it.
Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done – like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.
My first inclination was toward flying and being a pilot.
I have some eye problems from when I was a pilot.
As probably is known, I did not want my husband to join politics. He was not keen to join politics. He was very happy as a pilot.
The funny thing is that making a pilot is sort of an audition, at least for me. There’s something psychological there, where you’re sort of asking for the job while you’re acting. And then when it’s been picked up, it’s a completely different psychological dynamic.
My grandmother was a flight attendant; my mother had a pilot’s license, and my grandfather was a pilot. That’s how my grandmother and grandfather met.
A lot of people think Formula One isn’t a sport because everyone drives a car when they go to work in the morning. But we’re pulling up to six G on a corner or during breaking, which is almost like being a fighter pilot. So we have to do a lot of work on our neck muscles.
Brimstone was great. That was another occasion when they called me in to do the pilot and it turned into a regular job, which made me quite happy. It was another really good experience and we were all so surprised when they pulled the plug on it.
I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
I think a lot of actors, we underprepare emotionally for how intense pilot season can be. And we underprepare the people around us, our support system. So when it starts taking up more time than you expect it to, we feel guilty.
After the success of ‘Empire’ and ‘How to Get Away with Murder’ and ‘Scandal’ and ‘Power’ and ‘Black-ish’, which all had characters that were genuine, authentic, and had the language of real people, I found myself coming into pilot season and every network just wanted to have their version of one of those shows.
When I got the first e-mail suggesting we cast Zooey Deschanel in ‘New Girl’, I thought, ‘That’s exactly right.’ In the pilot of ‘Modern Family’, when Cam is holding up the baby with the ‘Lion King’ theme, it was very clear we had something special.
I still love a great pilot as much as I did the day I started at NBC.
Nothing’s worse than telling your family you got a pilot, hearing the pilot got picked up, and then finding out it’s not in the fall lineup.
Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.
I have one brother, John, an airline pilot, who is seven years younger. He’s adopted, though we’re still blood related – he’s my cousin. My parents couldn’t have any more children after me, so when Dad’s brother died, they adopted John, then just a baby.
The script that I fell in love with and adored was ‘Jane the Virgin’… but every line in the pilot was essentially, ‘Why did you keep my daughter a secret all of these years?’ I didn’t know any direction my character was going – was it going to be a dramatic character, a comedic character? – I didn’t know.
The reason I’ve never gone for pilot season even as a younger actor, and wouldn’t entertain that sort of thing now, is the idea of signing a piece of paper that binds me for six or seven years.
In the future, you’ll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet, turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot, and the car will drive itself.
One of my best friends was the first U.K. female fighter pilot.
I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events – that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.
I came to L.A. for pilot season, and it was so brutal. So brutal. But still, I just want to be making forward progress. There’s lots of ideas about being a superstar. But my idea of being a superstar is just going forward and having new challenges and trying out new things.
