As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.
I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It’s that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing – and I’m fascinated by that balance.
My feeling is there’s a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.
I’m not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, ‘I don’t get it,’ it’s worth looking at.
If there’s one thing that television doesn’t really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.
One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about the ‘X-Men’ style of storytelling versus other Marvel stories is how fluid the line between good and bad and right and wrong is.
There’s a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that’s really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.
The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.
In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie ‘Fargo,’ when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it’s a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn’t be there. I took that to heart.
I think that we’re pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there’s no puzzle pieces left over.
I don’t think we have to suffer personally to make great art. If you’re prepared and organized, and you know what you’re looking for, you can make great art and then go home.
The ’50s and the ’70s are sort of similar in that they’re both times of major paranoia in America.
The anthology format is completely normal to me. That’s just how TV works in my experience.
The first conversations I had for ‘Legion’ were right as the first year of ‘Fargo’ was ending. ‘Daredevil’ hadn’t even begun then, so when signing on, I had no real sense of the onslaught that was coming.
What makes something tragic is that it could’ve been averted at multiple points.
Experimental film by the ’70s had become much more mainstream after ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and stuff in the late ’60s, when you were seeing bigger movies where people were exploring the medium a lot more.
My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It’s getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.
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