A Quote by Aaron Sorkin
Larry David called me and said, "You can never watch The West Wing again. Either the show is going to be great without you and you're going to be miserable, or the show is going to be less than great without you and you're going to be miserable." So I had them send a tape of the first episode that I didn't do. I put it in the VCR and I don't think I got 15 seconds in before I leapt up and slammed it off! It felt like I was watching somebody make out with my girlfriend. I've never seen a West Wing episode in seasons five, six or seven.
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When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to lose as much as they win, but we're going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good?" That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.
I'm going to go do a Netflix series. It's straight-to-series, 10 episodes, probably go for three seasons. I'm going to direct the pilot and hopefully the last episode of the first season. The show is 'Seven Seconds.'
I think that knowing where you're going is important, and it's not like, when Robert says that, it's not like we know what every episode of the next five, four, five, six seasons of the show is going to be. I think Matt Weiner knew how Mad Men was going to end. Vince Gilligan knew how Breaking Bad was going to end. Marc Cherry knew how Desperate Housewives was going to end. Along the way, the process of crafting those stories ... You don't know what the road, what twists and turns that road is going to take to ultimately get you there.
One journalist said that everybody in Russia is miserable. Russia is a terrible place. And I'm going to end up miserable and I'm going to be a drunk and I'm never going to do anything. I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my life. And they talk about Russia like it's the worst place on earth. Russia's great.
I remember running into Aaron's Sorkin office and going "The show's West Wing going to work! I know it's going to work!" And it was literally that moment: the energy, the place, the feel. I didn't know the show would be successful but I thought it was going to be good and I don't have that feeling very often. And we were rehearsing all of that not knowing who the President of the United States was!
Some of the guys in the Eastern Conference, I had never been on their teams - like Larry Bird: even though you make the All Star team, you're going to be in the West; he's on the East. So you're never going to be teammates.
Actually, if I had to do it over [leaving the show the West Wing], I'd do the same thing, because lost in the shuffle of it is that Aaron [Sorkin] left the same year I did. And I would not have wanted to be on The West Wing with somebody else writing it.
For Democrats, nothing is any less complex than a 'West Wing' episode.
When I was only in the first episode of Orange Is The New Black, I'm thinking by lunchtime I'm ready for my contract, like, "What's up?" I finally just spoke up and said, "What's the deal? This is the first episode. I'd love to be on your show." And they said, "Oh, Lori, we filmed out of order, we already filmed the whole season two." So I had to wait six whole months to come back again.
The universe works in mysterious ways and for me it worked out perfectly. With all respect to everybody else, Aaron Sorkin is and was The West Wing, full stop. There's no West Wing without him.
I'm not done yet making people miserable. If they're going to make me miserable, then I'm going to make them miserable.
Because if you remember - and people forget this - the first two years of Game of Thrones everybody was going, "I don't know what's going on, but I really like it." And you really didn't know what to make of a lot of people, and now it's changed and people aren't really talking about that. Now it's like you're watching West Wing or Friends, you know the characters and you're like, "What in the world is going to happen?"
I'll never forget the first time Elisabeth Moss kissed me on screen. It was season one of the West Wing and she had to pin me up against a wall in the lobby of the White House. We didn't rehearse it at all and when we did it, she sure enough laid one on me, boy. I was like, "Well, ok, this is going to work out just fine."
Saving the world via medical research or going off to Gobi Desert to dust off dinosaur eggs is what I thought I might be doing when I was a kid, and I'd love to bring those interests to a show like 'E.R.' or 'The West Wing,' or a movie like 'Jurassic Park.'
Saving the world via medical research or going off to Gobi Desert to dust off dinosaur eggs is what I thought I might be doing when I was a kid, and Id love to bring those interests to a show like E.R. or The West Wing, or a movie like Jurassic Park.
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