Quotes from Jason Bateman

I played a ton of team sports growing up, and team wins are just incredibly gratifying.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 don't worry about people misinterpreting my kindness for weakness.

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.

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'm not talented enough to drop everything and become somebody different.

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've been fortunate, but I'm also not very precious about making sure I'm the star of a film.

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.'

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

I think things that are really, really not good are easy to see. But films that are decent can either be made good or great based on the execution. At the end of the day, it's always a crapshoot about the execution, the level of taste, in any department.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.

Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.

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

As disciplined as I am, I'm also a huge hedonist.