Don Scardino Quotations

A good film to me is like lightning in a bottle.

I can speak to actors in their terms. Knowing I was an actor, they relax. You can have the best shot in the world - but, at the center of it, you still need a good performance.

I grew up in Queens, and on Sunday evenings, my parents would drive my brother and me past the factory. We could smell the week's supply of bread baking. I always connected the 59th Street Bridge with that scent. Who woulda thunk, years later, I'd be there, directing and producing a hit TV show?

It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.

Studios are so used to digital now, and there is a mythology that it's cheaper. But it's really not cheaper. For instance, digital is great for night exteriors; everybody knows it's a video tap, so it's very responsive to light. So you can go out at night, shoot with digital, and it's gorgeous, beautiful to look at.

We ask actors to come to work ready to open a vein, to be emotionally thin-skinned. If someone screams, 'What about my coffee?' it's not about the coffee; it's because they're working in an emotional state. It ain't easy being an actor.

He was hurt when people didn't either embrace Yoko or his love for Yoko, but finally he didn't care.

Just like every kid who comes into show business on some level, I used to put shows on in my basement. I even started with doing tricks and having a ventriloquist dummy.

Studios are so used to digital now and there is a mythology that it's cheaper. But it's really not cheaper. For instance, digital is great for night exteriors, everybody knows it's a video tap, so it's very responsive to light. So you can go out at night, shoot with digital and it's gorgeous, beautiful to look at . Conversely, you go out and shoot day exterior, and it slams you, just like you know from your own video recording.

A good film to me is like lightning in a bottle. I used to think that meant hit and run. [But then] I've changed my definition about what lightning in a bottle means. I think it means that you wait for that surprising moment that you really didn't expect would happen, as good as it may have gone in rehearsal.

Edgar asked me, 'Do you know anything about John Lennon,' ... I said, 'I know everything about John Lennon.' And he told me, 'If you can come up with a concept, you can come to the meeting.' So I had three days to think of something, and my starting point was, what would I, as a die-hard John Lennon fan, want to see?

People hated him for leaving the Beatles or for falling in love with Yoko ... they wanted him to be a Beatle and he fought that all his life.

It's tough; John Lennon is a huge icon now ... everybody has their own expectation of how to present the story of John Lennon.