Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.
D. B. Weiss
When I put a quarter into an arcade machine or call up an emulated game on my computer, I do it to escape the world that is a slave to the time that makes things fall apart. I have never played these games to occupy my world.
I think that everything starts to go to hell when you start smelling your own farts and complimenting yourself on how great they smell. We're not going to turn into fart-smellers.
There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.
Would I have watched another season of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. Would I have watched another two seasons of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.
I think the main reason is that people binge watch because they can. We're like dogs, really. If we like something, we tend to gorge ourselves on it until there's no more left. And as bingeing becomes possible and commonplace, it's only natural that shows should start to take it into account.
I was reading scripts, doing coverage, for CAA. Reading hundreds and hundreds of scripts across the board, from blind submissions to 'Brokeback Mountain'. It was not always a pleasant task but something, in hindsight, I'm glad I did.
I was in Kenya when I read 'Catch-22,' and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya - whenever I think of 'Catch-22,' I think of Nairobi.
I remember when my first child was born, and I had a script that was due, and I asked the guy I was writing it for, a guy who I'm now friends with but at the time was not friend with, 'Can I have some extra time? I had a kid born.' He's like, 'No, we need it now.'
We've learned a lot about how information needs to flow effectively amongst a group of people. They need to be fed information, and it needs to be on this constant conveyor belt.
We ended up realizing that's not an economical way to create creatures, putting people in green leotards and figuring it out later. You can maybe do that if you're making 'Avatar,' but we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.
If a superhero knocks over a building, and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they're not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction.
We've been given this great gift, this huge canvas of these beautiful books by George Martin, and the idea of telling this whole epic through to the end is incredibly compelling.
Your pupillary muscles relax when your body gives up.
I like to think of myself as a 'Mord the jailer' type.
Being away from home for six months of the year and seeing your kids grow up on Skype all that time - I think I saw Molly walk for the first time on Skype. That's not good.
We do have pictures on the wall, in our office in Belfast where we spend half our time. All the head shots are on the wall. So yeah, we just throw darts at the ones we don't want anymore.
I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
The Classic games were Classic because, like classical music or architecture, they strove to give life and weight to ideals of order and proportion, to provide a vision of timelessness. In 'Double Dragon,' we can see the cracks in the brick, the mold growing on the drainage pipes, the unmistakable deterioration of the world we live in.
A lot of people go in and have to create their own characters, and they do fine with it.
One of the trickiest things about 'Game of Thrones' is just seeding those first couple of episodes with that basic information that people need to know, both about the world and the ground rules of the world, and the relationships between the characters, as far as who means what to whom and why.
Man, 'Hill Street Blues' was on when I was 12, and I remember feeling I'd never seen anything like it. It was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved. I remember Ed Marinaro, the football star.
Writing can be a very isolating profession. By its very nature, you spend a lot of your time barricaded in your house or office, typing on your own.
I would watch the remaining 12 or so episodes of 'Breaking Bad' I haven't seen by noon tomorrow, but my wife would kill me. I watched all five seasons of 'The Wire' in a month, and she was not happy about it.
I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.
Man, 'Hill Street Blues' was on when I was 12, and I remember feeling I'd never seen anything like it. It was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved.
After you do this for a while, you get used to things not working the way you want them to. There's a job you want, and you don't get it. There's a movie you'd like to get made, and it doesn't get made. You become inured to it.
Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa, and suddenly we couldn't bring him to Belfast anymore.
Who doesn't love 'Frogger?' It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being.
There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.
I would never try to invalidate someone's opinion of something or the feelings something makes them feel.
To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way.
You realize, no matter how great, books are not shows or movies; each operates on their own different rules. 'Game of Thrones' is no different. Being forced to come up with those scenes on short notice helped how we were viewing the show and forcing it to come into its own.
'Confederate,' in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It's a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.
We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.
I don't know how people do this job collaboratively if they don't really get along. You're spending all day every day for months and years on end with somebody.
