Words matter. These are the best Nic Pizzolatto Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.
I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of ‘True Detective.’
Nothing in the television show ‘True Detective’ was plagiarized.
If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don’t think we’ll be doing ‘True Detective.’
The conspiracies that I’ve researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it’s necessary to have a conspiracy.
I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There’s a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.
I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.
We’re all born storytellers. It’s part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.
I made ‘True Detective’ like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.
I read ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’ and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.
Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.
Whatever story you’re telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.
I’d want to bring a flamethrower to faculty meetings. The preciousness of academics and their fragile personalities would not be tolerated in any other business in the known universe.
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of ‘True Detective’ that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart’s voices.
I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.
If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it’s making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too.
There are websites of ‘True Detective’ artwork out there now, and it’s beautiful. And I don’t want to take that away from anybody. I know what it means to me. But I don’t want to take away anyone’s interpretation of the show.
We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they’re told something is fiction.
‘The Atlantic’ really gave me my writing career – even just the conviction to be a writer.
TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.
As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn’t have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don’t think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.
For me, the worst writing generally just ‘flips’ things: this person’s really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced ‘twist,’ I think.
Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.
Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.
I didn’t come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else’s vision.
The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for ‘True Detective’ was one of them.
You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don’t know what they’re talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.
If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I’m familiar with it and I already have a take on it.
The work is where I tend to feel pressure – not so much in the reaction to it.
When you’re a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can’t even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius’ ‘The Meditations,’ that changes your life.
‘True Detective’ is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That’s what we shoot for.
