Jason Bateman Quotes
Actor
Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.
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.
I think the Internet is a huge positive.
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.
People have often asked if I'm gay because I don't go out of my way to spit and scratch and give people attitude.
You do certain things in your twenties that are just not appropriate in your thirties and certainly not appropriate in your forties. Eventually you even the scales, and it's time to move on and become an adult and start working hard again and going to sleep a little bit earlier. Fortunately, I got a job to facilitate that transition.
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.
In most professions, if you stay at the office an extra four hours every day, you're gonna impress the boss. You're gonna get that promotion; you're gonna get that raise. You're gonna at least have job security. But with acting, if you're really ambitious and you have a good work ethic and are really good at your job, it might not really matter.
I don't worry about people misinterpreting my kindness for weakness.
If I'm enjoying something, I'd like to be able to just have it all. Frankly, that's the way I'm approaching my career now. I'm a total workaholic.
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.
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.
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.
My goal is to get another 30 years out of this business. So I need to figure out the fuel to do that. And so far, I think it's respect and quality and company, not celebrity or box office or stardom. It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.
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.
I have to warn you: I bet horses like a girl.
I was just a lot smarter about not getting caught. I mean, I never stuck anything in my arm, but I certainly enjoyed my youth.
My mother is British; she's from Shrewsbury. She turned me onto 'Monty Python' very early.
I owe everything to 'Arrested Development.' It just shows that everybody is kind of a job away from having relevance again.
I don't have anything to fix! I don't smoke, I don't drink, and I don't eat carbs. My life is just great now. Normal. Vanilla.
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.
Guys like Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Sacha Baron Cohen, they do things you love to watch. I like to do the other half.
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.
I'm in a little bit of a different situation, because working in the business that I do and living in the city that I live in, I haven't had a problem with people who are gay. Since I was 10 I've been working alongside them, and some of my best friends are gay.
I love a massage. I'd go every day if I could. I don't need to be wrapped in herbs like a salmon fillet, but I do love a massage.
Things are going better now than ever, but in 24 months? I could be hearing crickets.
My family is pretty funny. My mother is British, so she's got a very dry sense of humor. That's where I got that from.
I have a tendency to evolve into William Shatner, with my big fat face.
I'd worked so hard that by the time I was 20, I wanted to play hard. And I did that really well.
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.
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.
I played a ton of team sports growing up, and team wins are just incredibly gratifying.
My sense of humor lies a little closer to the middle.
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.
I guess there's nothing funny about a guy who looks conservative and has it all together, but it's satisfying to see a conservative guy crumbling inside, and I think a lot of American comedy has cottoned on to that.
Will Arnett is one of the funniest guys I know. He has seen it all and done it all and come out the other end pretty savvy and pretty strong.
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.
Not many get a chance to hit the career re-set button.
I haven't met a lot of 'Hogan Family' fans.
If it's a good part in a good movie, I'll do it.
I think it's always a good time to be in a political film in America because there's so much material for comedy.
Music is such an incredibly affecting part of any movie-going experience, and it just... it shapes your whole experience.
People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.
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.
Nothing would make me happier than doing nothing but drama for the foreseeable future.
There's this little recipe that you have to hit pretty well to get somebody to laugh. And it's a combination of the way in which you say something, with the facial expression that you have, married with the body language that you have, etc.
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.
I'd much rather have the freedom, and the obligation to use it responsibly, than be put in a box.
I don't feel sorry for people in the public eye getting eyed by the public.
The people at Netflix are extremely intelligent about the way they monitor activity on their platform.
My father was a freelance writer/director/producer, and my mother was a stewardess for Pan-Am. It was very non-traditional.
I'm a pretty normal guy. I'm really good at knowing how a normal guy would react in situations.
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.
I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.
I feel incredibly fortunate I walked away, took care of other business, and then came back to show business.
I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play.
We had, like, the greatest time you could ever imagine doing 'Arrested Development.' And as grateful as we are for the careers we have afterwards, it was - we still miss it.
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.
We had this neighbor who was an actor, and he was going to an audition one day, driving by our house, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. He was reading for the part of the father, and they were reading for the part of the son the same day, and he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing.
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.'
Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium, so a lot of the time, when you're directing a television show, they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined, and you just kind of have to follow the rules.
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.
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.
It was like 'Risky Business' for 10 years. My parents were out of town, they left me a bunch of money, the car, and the house, and I didn't know when they were coming home.
It earns you a lot of snark if you're able to convey vulnerability.
I like to give my daughter some rope and let her make her own decisions.
I try to see everything I do. It's a good learning tool for me. You kind of remember what you were going for when you were shooting it, and then see how it comes across in the context of what comes before and after it.
It's a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.
Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.
I was never at a place where rehab would have been appropriate.
I just think technology is pretty amazing. Like all things that are great, you have to be responsible about how much you use it.
Actors are sellers, and I figured out a long time ago that if you wanted to work a lot, you had to be on the buying side.
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.
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?
My upbringing as a child was very atypical.
I'm never happier than in the bed.
You hit those valleys sometimes and it's really frustrating. It's like getting stuck in traffic on the freeway. But there's not much you can do about it.
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.
People say: 'Why do you want to play the straight man?' Well, it's because he gets to be in every scene.
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.
I enjoy editing when I'm directing, but when someone else is directing, that's their film to cut.
Kids want you to take them to whatever kid movie is opening, and you just hope it's good because you're going to buy a ticket, no matter what. If it's no good, you kind of drape your arm over your kid so they don't get smashed, and you take a little nap.
I can't assume that my kid is going to make the best decision all the time.
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.
Not a lot of people get a second chance. And I think for a while there, my name kind of got in my way a bit, based on all of the television I was fortunate enough to do. But after a while, you sort of wear out your welcome in that genre, in that medium.
I really appreciate comedy a lot.
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.
To have the privileged position of being the guy who is responsible for shaping the entire experience for an audience as opposed to being just one instrument in that orchestra, being an actor, it's all-encompassing.
Acting in something that I'm directing... I'm really enjoying it because, if for no other reason, that particular acting is like reading my mind on every single take. It's kind of efficient, for better or worse.
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.
You want 100% and 100% to make 200, instead of 50 and 50 making 100.
I try to figure out how much of the character I can find in myself because you don't want to get outside of your skill-set.
If you're stumbling out of a bar, and people tweet about it, well, don't be dumb. If you're going to get falling-down drunk, stay at home - which I did a lot of.
It's very difficult to pretend you're throwing a car.
If people are going to complain about stereotyping, it's as likely to be Italian-Americans as gay people.
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.
My father was a director and producer, so when I was a little kid, he would take me to movies and show me what's good and what's not good and why, and often that would take me to a conversation about directing.
I didn't really watch 'Beavis & Butt-head' that much or 'King of the Hill,' but I was a huge 'Office Space' fan.
A straight factor is important in any comedy, because you need something to tee it up and also to ground it.
I really like dramas that have a tone of comedy in them or the opposite, and those are done by people like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman but also Spike Jonze and David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers.