Words matter. These are the best Jason Bateman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I wanted to be Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor, but comedy sort of started out first, and I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll find some more drama later on in my career.’
The directing is something that is incredibly satisfying to me and challenging to me because it’s asking me to draw on everything I’ve been able to absorb over all these years of acting and having all this set experience.
Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.
I don’t feel sorry for people in the public eye getting eyed by the public.
I enjoy editing when I’m directing, but when someone else is directing, that’s their film to cut.
I think I’m actually much too shy to do any performance art. I admire the big swings those guys take, but I’m not a one-man band.
As disciplined as I am, I’m also a huge hedonist.
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. That’s what we’re doing it for.
I wasn’t really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they’d pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.
I never looked at fan mail, for some reason. My mother and grandmother handled my mail – although it’s not like I was ever in the stratosphere of Kirk Cameron or Scott Baio.
Starting at age 10, my personality and my identity all stemmed from employment. I had a set to be at. I was a certain way with the cameraman, a certain way with the makeup lady – a normal, routine environment.
My sense of humor lies a little closer to the middle.
Nothing would make me happier than doing nothing but drama for the foreseeable future.
I really empathise with some of my peers who had success in the early years; then it dries up, and so there’s no reason to get up in the morning.
Pre-production and post-production is something that I’ve never been exposed to. I was pleasantly surprised that you could accomplish a lot during pre-production.
I became an adult before I had a kid, which I highly recommend. I just like to throw her around. She’s a really good snuggler, and she likes to give kisses and hugs.
The kids can’t watch ‘The Wire,’ but there’s great educational stuff for them to watch on TV if it is TV time. There are great apps on the iPad that are interactive and educational.
It earns you a lot of snark if you’re able to convey vulnerability.
I would rather do three or four small parts every year as opposed to some of the lower-hanging fruit that might get my name above the title.
If people are going to complain about stereotyping, it’s as likely to be Italian-Americans as gay people.
Our kids will never have to remember things, because it’s all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There’ll be video of it on your phone.
Not many get a chance to hit the career re-set button.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting my kindness for weakness.
I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.
If it’s a good part in a good movie, I’ll do it.
Tony Hale is a devout Christian and is a complete retard when it comes to swearing. The script called for him to swear for about 30 seconds and he just couldn’t do it.
Meeting my wife Amanda was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. She wasn’t going to let me screw around my life anymore, so I stopped drinking and started behaving like a decent human being.
People say: ‘Why do you want to play the straight man?’ Well, it’s because he gets to be in every scene.
Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.
It was a blast. I was doing everything that teenagers do and everything people in their twenties do. I was playing as hard as I was working, which was an effort to really balance my life.
I was doing everything that a kid would be doing anyway, but on top of that, I was able to fly to different cities.
That’s kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.
If the goal is to be believable when you’re acting, I’ve got the best idea of what that believability might look and feel like. And because you need a normal guy in a comedy so that the eccentricities can pop, that’s a good part for me.
I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.
If you laugh, we just do another take. Laughter is too rare nowadays. If you can bust a gut, let it go, and we’ll just go back to one.
I don’t want to be obnoxious with my ambition or sound like I expect any sort of entitlement here. Hollywood is not in the business of humoring people.
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 wanted to marry somebody who wasn’t someone I had to be in any particular mood to want to be around – with close friends, you can be with them no matter what mood you’re in.
I just love doing sitcoms. I’d be in them till I was gray if they’d have me.
I only wanted to get married once, so when I felt I was ready to handle it, I looked at my relationships and noticed that boyfriends get tired of girlfriends, and vice versa, but you never get tired of your friends.
A straight factor is important in any comedy, because you need something to tee it up and also to ground it.
I’m not talented enough to drop everything and become somebody different.
I just think technology is pretty amazing. Like all things that are great, you have to be responsible about how much you use it.
If you make a mistake, people are going to know about it really fast – and I was making a ton of them when I was a kid.
My father was a writer/director/producer, so instead of throwing a ball around, our bonding was going to see movies. And at an early age, I knew if I wanted to impress my dad, it was not going to be by throwing a ball real far.
There are worse things than being constantly hired to do anything.
The comedy community is very friendly right now. I think that’s why you see all the synergy and people doing each other’s movies.
Things are going better now than ever, but in 24 months? I could be hearing crickets.
I think NBC got a little reluctant to get behind single-camera shows after ‘Scrubs’ didn’t do what they thought it was going to do following ‘Friends.’
I feel incredibly fortunate I walked away, took care of other business, and then came back to show business.
Acting has always been very comfortable for me, so it allows me to pay attention to other parts of the process literally while I’m acting.
Obviously, I did a couple of things right on the old casting couch.
I owe everything to ‘Arrested Development.’ It just shows that everybody is kind of a job away from having relevance again.
It’s not about the script: it’s about who the director is and who the other people in the cast are. Because you can look at a great script and execute it in a very sophomoric way, and you can look at an OK script, and you can execute it in a very sophisticated way and come out with something really good.
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.
My upbringing as a child was very atypical.
Music is such an incredibly affecting part of any movie-going experience, and it just… it shapes your whole experience.
Jennifer Aniston and I have always just really gotten along well… I was just fortunate to be a good fit for parts in her films.
People still come up to me and say, ‘Hey, ‘Teen Wolf!’ ‘Teen Wolf Too’ closed a week after it opened. Where did they see it?
I can’t assume that my kid is going to make the best decision all the time.
I played a ton of team sports growing up, and team wins are just incredibly gratifying.
I’d worked so hard that by the time I was 20, I wanted to play hard. And I did that really well.
It’s not new: In the ’70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on ‘All in the Family,’ but it was all in Carroll O’Connor’s performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.
That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don’t play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.
By definition, gay is smart. I see plenty of macho heterosexual idiots, but nine times out of 10 you can have a great conversation if you find a gay guy.
It’s very difficult to pretend you’re throwing a car.
And I’ve always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand’s message into the writing process. It’s like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
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