Especially as a director on 'West Wing,' I directed a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and really stretched my wings.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've always tried to kind of stretch my wings as an actor and do things that are different.
My experience on 'The West Wing' was, I think, now rare in that I was pretty young, and I walked into this environment where Aaron Sorkin was giving me a script every week, and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells were keeping the studio off my back, at least as best as they could.
Directing is really my favorite thing to do, but if I never directed again, I'd be okay if all the work I did was good.
As a director, I've been able to combine with what I've learned as an actor and as a producer: it melds quite nicely into what I feel like I should have been doing all along.
Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.
I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.
I guess once you've been acting for a long time, you glean the great bits of good directors and the bad bits from other directors, and you know the way that you would like to be directed.
As a director, I get to have a much broader creative expression than as an actress.
I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was.
Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.