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I did have friends who have suffered from schizophrenia and mild dissociative identity disorder, as well as more extreme cases of social anxiety disorder.
With some actors, if I have upward of 10 notes, I don't want to give them all 10 notes and overwhelm them. I usually parse them out three or four at a time.
When I started thinking about 'Mr. Robot,' I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I'm going to tell.
I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.
Music is everything to me. It's the heart and soul of a movie or TV show to me because it can be such an injection of tone, and I think tone is everything to a story.
I'm a huge fan of 'The Watch,' and I've also been on a few times. It's Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan's show on The Ringer. It's just a great podcast about television.
The one thing that I know from the personal experiences that I've had with hackers and from people in tech who are brilliant at this thing, is there's a lot of angst.
'Pi' was one of my favorite films growing up because I thought it employed paranoia and voice-over, and also because it used this unreliable narrator in a very fascinating way.
Typically, whenever you're envisioning how you're going to shoot something, you have a location or a set that you're going to build, and it's going to be built to specifications.
I don't think it's political to dislike Trump. I don't think it's controversial to say he's a bad president. He's clearly a bad president. He's clearly not equipped to do the job.
The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.
For shows that are hyper-serialized, it just seems to make more sense to follow a feature film model than follow a television model, which was set up more for a procedural type of show.
I could watch 'There Will Be Blood' all day long, and Daniel Plainview is a terrible person - but he's still compelling to watch. That's what makes me want to engage and see what happens next.
I never try and tune anything out. I think that's a mistake. You want to bring all the honest stuff that's going on inside you into your work. Otherwise, you're keeping a lot of authenticity out.
I absolutely don't deny that I was inspired by 'Fight Club,' among many other television shows and films. I completely not only acknowledge it, I own it and love to nod to them as much as possible.
I love voiceover. I never understood this idea that it was lazy. Well, yes, there are those movies or TV shows that use it as just a way to get out exposition. But you know what? That's just bad writing.
It's weird; my fascination with tech was kind of combined with the fact that my parents would never pay for anything. It got me more involved because I would have to find clever ways to get things for free.
Before we started shooting 'Homecoming,' we were in the writer's room for 'Mr. Robot.' I was also editing Season 3 of 'Mr. Robot' while I was prepping for the 'Homecoming' shoot. So yeah, it's a lot of hats.
I used to want to be a critic. I think it's an awesome job. You get to watch all this stuff and then write about it and analyze it and give insight into it. That's an amazing job. I was terrible at it, though.
I don't cover my scenes. We approach it visually. Sometimes we go out of our way to do awkward blocking so that we can tell whatever the emotional heartbeat is of that scene in the most interesting way possible.
I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.
Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.
I always suspend logic for emotion. If it feels real, or it feels like what I'm going for, we should abandon reality a little bit and go for that. I'm not a documentarian. We're not trying to shoot things for naturalism.
I did not love going out to parties or even get-togethers, really - I went to the movies, which, if you think about it, is an isolating experience anyway - and this was because I had anxiety about interacting with people.
I use voiceover just like I use dialogue. There's a way to give out information or give out insight to the character or give out their worldview, and maybe you have to slip in exposition, but it's all about how you write it.
'Taxi Driver' is one of those films that is groundbreaking in how much you're inside this character's head. It uses voice-over in a revolutionary way where the audience is invited as a co-conspirator to the whole story line.
The world is so heavily influenced by technology, and it has started to feel like it's not on solid ground. The world has become unreliable, unknowable. Facts are vulnerable, and things you have come to rely on are no longer there.
Movies and television show build on top of each other, succeed one another. In a large way, in terms of filmmaking aesthetics, they evolve because they can't help but be a consequence of all the movies and TV shows that came before it.
I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.
'Mr. Robot' is more directly about technology, and 'Homecoming' deals more with the pharmaceutical industry, but I think they're all part and parcel of this growing sense that things are happening behind the scenes at our expense, and we're not aware of it.
You don't even know if the person you're communicating with online is actually that person. And your persona on your social media - your Facebook or Twitter - may not be the person you are in real life. So then, who is the real person? Is it somewhere in between?
On 'Mr. Robot,' because I run the writers' room and know every decision behind every line of dialogue, I'm able to be nimble and adapt with the scripts and the moments. I never have to question what I'm doing as I'm directing the actors or going through the scenes.
One of my favorite Tarantino films is 'Jackie Brown,' and 'Jackie Brown' does it so well, where I'm watching the back half of that movie, and I don't know which side Jackie Brown is playing. I think it's really ingenious for Tarantino to keep us in the dark on that.
In a weird way, I never wanted - I don't consider myself a very good writer. I consider myself okay; I don't consider myself great. There's Woody Allen and Aaron Sorkin. There's Quentin Tarantino. I'm not ever gonna be on that level. But I do consider myself a good filmmaker.
I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, the election of Trump is a national tragedy for multiple reasons. It will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history. But he's not a dictator. This happened because we either allowed it or voted for it.
I never look at twists as a way to trick the audience. Obviously, I think a good story has surprises and unexpected turns, and you always want to do that with an audience. But it has nothing to do with conning them or making them believe so strongly in one thing and then kind of going the other way.
With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.
If you think about it, just the psychology of the superhero is, 'Because I can, I should protect people, and I should put bad guys away, and I should defend society.' But you're forming your own justice. There's no judge and jury here: you are it. That, in and of itself, is a very complicated way of looking at morality.
If your loved ones are far away, and they're uploading pictures, you feel like that's enough: these loose strands through email, through social media, are going to supply this connection you have with that person. And I think that's keeping us isolated and lonely in a way that's very dangerous because we're unaware of it.
We frame things in an off-kilter way because it's unsettling. In the 'Mr. Robot' world, that's the norm, and it's the norm for the point of view that we're looking for, which is Elliot's. With our compositions and our visual language and camera movements, it's important to always evoke that unsettling feeling underneath every scene.
I've always said that the first season was the first act of my feature, so this is what I meant. I wanted the story of 'Mr. Robot' to be Elliot actually accomplishing his goal, setting the world into chaos. What would happen to society if something like this occurred where, basically, if the consumer-debt industry were to be erased?
I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.