I don't think you can catch lightning in a bottle twice.
Mark Frost
There is still a wildness inside people that we've spent millennia trying to tame.
The sport was right in the center of these changing social dynamics. It was a game invented by blue-collar people in Scotland but adopted by the elite in England and America. All of those conflicts were coming into the open. I was amazed to find out how much was played out in golf as well.
I have traveled down this path before - 'List of Seven' and 'Twin Peaks' both have thematic similarities - but 'Paladin' took me much deeper into the intuitive underground. Always bearing in mind Joseph Campbell's Rule No. 1: When entering a labyrinth, don't forget your ball of twine.
The whole mythological side of 'Twin Peaks' was really down to me, and I've always known about the Theosophical writers and that whole group around the Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century - W. B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and a woman called Alice Bailey, a very interesting writer.
Dear Internet: You are very good at spreading rumors. Truth is more valuable and much harder to come by.
I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.
Since I've worked in film and television for so long, I've acquired the ability to let the version of the characters that lives in my mind make way for the living, breathing humans who are going to play them on screen. If you cast it right - and casting is about 80% of directing - they will eventually replace or exceed the imaginary image.
Anybody that has had a brush with what feels like undiluted evil often ends up asking themselves the same questions - whether it's something that was a consequence of their own actions or actions that were taken against them or actions that they were caught up in.
My point of view has always been a bit more offbeat.
In the fun house of today's metastisizing sports-entertainment megaplex, when every day brings another story revealing how these 'heroes' we create are fashioned from base clay, a pause might be in order to reflect on athletes who actually embodied the qualities we think we admire in the too-easily deified.
I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.
My fridge is full of super foods to keep my brain operating at maximum efficiency!
'Twin Peaks' is a continuing story; that comes from David Lynch and myself.
Wooden was the coach for the UCLA Bruins, arguably the greatest sports coach we ever had.
Criminality is a basic part of human nature.
I think you can safely say that the mystery in 'Twin Peaks' as we started to explore more is very large, there are many aspects to it and the hope is that people will find things that they are interested in in all sorts of things related to the larger mystery.
There's so much information and journalism on television. We have too much to absorb.
One of the things that's unique about Louisiana politics is that people here have a much more realistic attitude about who their politicians are. They know they are human and not saints or Mormons or Eagle Scouts.
'Hill St.' was very good, but it was very impersonal work for me. I wrote about that place as if I was a visitor. It wasn't what my life was like. It was a great place to learn the craft of how to shape a scene, but I wanted a chance to write about more personal themes and obsessions.
The superhero genre speaks to a vast swath of humanity these days, and studios are in the business of constantly renewing their money-printing licenses. I sense we're nearing a saturation point with some of these icons, where it becomes more about the action figures and Happy Meals than it does the mythological heartbeat of the core ideas.
It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.
As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can't just live in the present.
I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn't occurred to them recently.
I've always said that 'Twin Peaks,' to me, was like a novel we filmed every page of.
In a business that's driven purely by economics, the fact that one or two unique shows happen to get on and reach a public for a brief time doesn't constitute a trend.
There's such a thing as being a little too perfect - a little too shiny. I know I prefer things that have room to breathe and give you a story, a world, in which you have the room to move around.
The architecture for 'Paladin' - given that it's at least three books, with the possibility of more - turned out to be bigger than anything I've ever created, with multiple levels of reality, interlocking mysteries and a terabyte of time frame.
A lot of people always look back at 'Twin Peaks' and say that was the start of this explosion we've had in good television drama, but we did it in a time when there were still only three networks.
As a boy, I found myself drawn to Arthurian legends, and then to Celtic mythology, and then further east into the mysticism of Asian religions.
The fact that people still talk and obsess about 'Twin Peaks', more than twenty years after the fact, is a great validation for what we thought we had going at the time.
I don't know if I'll have a better friend than Bill Paxton.
I went to high school in Minnesota.
There's a part of 'Twin Peaks' that is sort of a hinged doorway to another, stranger place, if you can imagine such a thing.
My grandfather was Scottish and just loved the game. My grandmother was a great golfer and a club champion. Whenever I was visiting them, I got a double barrel of golf lore. I guess it was always in my blood.
People forget that in the early '70s, Saturday was the most-watched night of television of the week. It was where you found 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'All in the Family.'
True violence, not the kind you usually see in television or movies, touches something very deep and primal in people.
I've always been interested in what passes for what we call religion, what other cultures call their spiritual life.
I'm a realist about how the networks work.
I don't want to get stale. I'm always interested in new things.
There is a design behind the world that we are living in, which is veiled to most of us most of the time, but every once in a while, you catch a glimpse of it.
To David Lynch, any film or television show should be life casting a shadow.
It's best to know a little about where you're coming from and why you've arrived where you are.
Americans are notoriously ill-equipped for self-reflection. We're usually a very boisterous, outward-moving bunch of people, but we don't understand that much about ourselves or how other people perceive us.
Censors, the whole idea of it, is so childish. You feel like you're talking to hall monitors in school again.
Easy answers are never really useful ones, so hopefully we're not trying to peddle easy answers.
When you're writing about one community, in a way, you're writing about all communities.
I got to know Coach Wooden at the end of his life.
I can remember being fascinated by what people really thought about each other and what they were really doing to each other behind people's backs.
At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?
