Jason Bateman

When you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that\'s not the healthiest thing at that early an age.

It is one of the few elements in the process that a director really, really can\'t control: an actor\'s performance. If you have a director that understands that, it\'s comforting to an actor. You\'re starting the relationship more as a collaborator, rather than as an employee or some kind of a soldier trying to execute something you don\'t organically feel.

I\'m in bed by nine. Let\'s get on with it.

I\'m not a Hollywood party guy.

The longer you stay in the job that you do the more you learn about what those around you do. As an actor I\'ve always nosed around apologetically about: \"oh wouldn\'t it be interesting if I could do that?\" I can\'t imagine not wanting to do this everyday.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there\'s so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director\'s medium. 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.

I\'m not much of a party guy anymore.

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.

Music is such an incredibly affecting part of any movie-going experience, and it just... it shapes your whole experience.

The people at Netflix are extremely intelligent about the way they monitor activity on their platform.

I really appreciate comedy a lot.

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.

Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.

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.

Actors, by very definition, we want people to pay attention to us, and so usually, that comes in the package of insecurity. So if we\'re not comfortable, we don\'t really show you a lot.

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.

It\'s a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.

I\'m looking forward to playing Michael Bluth many, many more times.

On the whole, a director who make the set a comfortable place to work is really important, whether it\'s a comedy or drama.

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 look at whatever the finish line is for the character and then kind of act backwards from that and play him in such a way so that that finish line is more rewarding.

I enjoy editing when I\'m directing, but when someone else is directing, that\'s their film to cut.

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.

There\'s a bunch of different flavours of funny. It\'s all about the execution of it.

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\'d much rather have the freedom, and the obligation to use it responsibly, than be put in a box.

I feel incredibly fortunate I walked away, took care of other business, and then came back to show business.

I\'m a pretty normal guy. I\'m really good at knowing how a normal guy would react in situations.

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.

Ideally, that\'s what you\'ve got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films.