A Quote by Gerard Way

I don't know if I could [do a TV show]. I would if it had nothing to do with the comic. It would be really weird and maybe not feature any of The Umbrella Academy characters.
I don't think anyone who runs a TV show would ever say to you, 'I have a grasp on running a TV show.' Maybe that's not true. Maybe there are people that do. I don't know.
I was living under a desk in West Hollywood. It was a closet that I shared with another comic. I was shocked when they called me to come in to try out for the show. The chances of me getting on a TV show and winning it is like one-in-a-million. I had only been doing comedy for six years at that point, so I was basically considered an open mic-er or maybe a feature act once in awhile.
One of the great things about The Umbrella Academy' and its TV version is that there are 10 hours of footage, so characters are a lot more fleshed out and further developed.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".
When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.
I was thinking about what would it be, what would the characters be like, and it just suddenly dawned on me that, hey, nobody is doing an underseas show. So I started drawing these weird invertebrate animals, various characters like crawfish and starfish and squids and sponge.
I don't believe, in a show like ours, that you really want to see character growth. That's just my opinion. Maybe to a small degree, but nothing serious. To that end, it doesn't have the same importance that it would have, if you were on an hour-long show. I think an audience gets really hungry for a character to grow and change on an hour-long show, and I think I would be more antsy.
To me that really would be the essence of kindness, to have one's awareness so developed and refined that you could tell just what was needed, and not do any more or any less, and maybe not even be aware of what you had done, except it would be a helpful thing because of how fully present you were. Well, as Aerosmith once famously said: Dream on.
My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house.
I mean, my understanding is that the live-action and the comic book versions of the Umbrella Academy' will parallel with each other while still keeping their distance, so that fans of the comic books who have already read the storyline has something new to look forward to and in approaching a new season.
I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.'
When I was thinking about what we could do in terms of what production values of Broadway might be able to add to the show, I had this thought that it would be really cool if we had a coup de théâtre. What would they want? And then I was like, an amazing, enormous tuna puppet that was like 30 by 40 feet would be pretty incredible. So I called up Basil Twist, and he got really excited immediately and started sketching out his idea, and I think it's a real highlight of the show.
If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves.
Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called 'Cement Shooz.'
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