Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A sociopath is not just someone who doesn't care about human emotion. They're someone who understands people to the point that they can manipulate them to an extraordinary degree.
When you watch television shows, as good as they are, like 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'Touched by an Angel,' everything is this kind of mishmash of faith but not any specific religion.
Paramount Pictures is a perfect partner for Electric Entertainment, with the most stable group of executives in Hollywood and unparalleled global promotion and distribution reach.
But here is the single greatest thing about the 'Vanity Fair' party: There are uniformed In-N-Out Burger employees circulating the room with trays of cheeseburgers all night long.
When they put out the sales brochure when we eventually went to series, they carefully rounded Spock's ears and made him look human so he wouldn't scare off potential advertisers.
I'm just this committed dilettante. I think what I've found is that I've tried to do a lot of different things in my life and discovered I'm not as good at them as I'd want to be.
We always have a take that's 'one for fun', so once you've got what you need, you can do what you like. Something does occasionally pop out of that tree. I'm always open to ideas.
Egotism is not a good quality. It's not something to be admired or even tolerated. It wouldn't be tolerated in a field commander and it shouldn't be tolerated in a movie director.
The thrill of doing 'Good People' is I love those kinds of stories, and I'm good at them, and it's wonderful to see that material given to a terrific director and a terrific cast.
Haven't two hundred years of failed missionary work overseas taught anybody anything? You can't convert people to anything - whether religion, or something as inane as our flicks.
I like emotional horror. I don't like horror movies. I hate them. But, if you can make emotional horror movies, I'm in. If I can care and root for the main character, then I'm in.
There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.
So 'The Last Airbender' 's philosophy and culture feels like a beautiful idea to me: That we inherently have connections to the elements and what they teach us, and to each other.
What I want is to be the highest grossing screenwriter, or to have some other woman be the highest grossing screenwriter, instead of being number nine on the list. That's my goal.
People want to get immersed and lost in a world. They want to lean in and figure it out, and that's true of both of these shows. You don't know quite what it is, and that's great.
There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.
Perfect is boring and dreams are not real. Just... do. So you think, "I wish I could travel." Great. Sell your crappy car, buy a ticket to Bangkok, and go. Right now. I'm serious.
Frankly, the idea that we need to be beautiful, if you really think about it, it's odd. But if you can turn it inward and see yourself as beautiful, that's what changes the world.
For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn't expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you.
I think it is best that if you are the writer you just leave the director to it. With the caveat that you state, 'Be gentle with the script. And if there are changes, consult me.'
There's no writers room, or any other writer involved. I write everything from beginning to end. Maybe it's just me not being able to let go of something, especially with 'Peaky.'
How do we not rue the many unchosen paths in life? A blessed lack of imagination. There are enough real glories along any path to swamp our meager ability to picture alternatives.
A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.
It's one of the great gifts of having so little money that you are able to make these kinds of radical conceits that you could never afford to do had you had a reasonable budget,.
If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.
As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.
Scary is time passing and sickness and dying and regret and isolation and loneliness and relationship problems - as opposed to a guy in a hockey mask, which didn't seem that scary.
Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
I find Los Angeles to be a place of great physical beauty, in which you have the oceans and the mountains, and there's a vertical sense and a desert light that you can see forever.
John Rogers has an encyclopedic mind. Having John as our showrunner is the gift that keeps on giving. He knows more trivial information than anyone I've ever met in my entire life.
The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them.
I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.
I know what it feels like to carry a lot of weight in a society that's very image-conscious. It's a thin person's world, and we try to navigate within it without being made fun of.
Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they're mostly pretty crappy.
Each of the 'Toy Story's are telling an emotional story, but they're comedic. They're so successful creatively in terms of the stories they're telling. And they're pretty grounded.
My paid gigs allow me to pay for my documentaries, like a drug habit, I suppose. If I'm lucky enough to be working steady, however, it leaves little time for the documentary hobby.
In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.
I do work with a lot of women in my company, and I write a lot of roles for women over 40. I think, in 'Feud' alone, we have 15 roles for women over 40, which I'm very proud about.
All drama is conflict. Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character. Without character, there is no story. And without story, there is no screenplay.
This idea that you can watch a show like 'True Detective,' and it was awesome, but is it really ruined for you if the finale is not your favorite episode of it? It's just odd to me.
There is a natural progression to 'Lost,' and as the story goes forward, it's going to change. It's not a static story. The franchise of 'Lost' is not characters sitting on a beach.
I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.
I do a lot of things intuitively. I'm not often consciously aware of what I'm doing. It's like in a dream: There's something going on that's powerful but you don't know exactly why.
One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.
And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.
I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, 'thou shalt not,' or 'thou shalt.' I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.
The challenge, and also what I like most about a big ensemble movie, is that all actors have completely different processes and all of them prefer scenes to be done a different way.
The only moment I become aware of being the only woman in a meeting is when actresses are being discussed. If someone's critical of how a woman looks, they turn to me and apologize.
Most of the good executives do pretty well. Because to be a good executive you have to be strong, and you have to have a simple attribute that people have forgotten about - courage.
I think Francis at half form is better than anybody else by 50%, you know? I think it's just that he has never... he has a late pick of the things that are ambitious enough for him.