A Quote by Sam Esmail

Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.
I'm working on a cooking show; I'm going to do some of it at Dallas Page's performance center. I'm going to do a cooking show called 'Dude Food,' where I show young guys how to eat good and clean, cheap.
Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.
An older guy, he's going to show you things that a young man can't show you. He's going to show you how to stay alive. He's going to show you how to turn corners where your young friends will show you how to turn right into that wall, you know what I'm saying?
My approach to newspapers was based on the idea that when you looked at the front page you said: 'Good heavens', when you looked at the middle page you said: 'Holy smoke', and by the time you got to the back pagewell, I'd have to utter a profanity to show how exciting it was.
I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.
My son craves picture books about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and the Hulk; they show one fantastic creature smashing or zapping another into smithereens on page after page. They are dull and ugly and show no interesting stories or models of conflict resolution or character building.
I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.
Just before I began doing this show [The Last Word ], a dear friend of mine, Karen Russell, asked me what I was going to do with the show.She meant how was I going to use this platform to do something important, something that I wouldn`t be able to do without an hour of real estate in cable news prime time.The K.I.N.D. fund is my answer to Karen Russell`s question, what are you going to do with this show?
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.
I was kind of scared at first to do that [vice-over] because when you're on set, a lot of the things going on around you - the environment and playing off other actors - and that's what makes it easier and helps you to be in your character. So, realizing you're not going to have that and you're going to be secluded in this booth, it's like, "How am I going to be a character when I'm just in these walls?"
Whether it's a lower or higher budget project, a TV show or a film, the words on the page are the same to me and I approach the work in the same way. My job is to lift the character from the page, whether it's a TV or film script.
Robert Gober, for example. He doesn't seem like somebody who is just going to show in a gallery that asks him to show. He's just making his work, and when he's ready, he's going to show it.
I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.
I'm always going to have the puppets, probably not for the rest of my life, but I'm not going to stop doing ventriloquism anytime soon. I'm just going to add singing, recording songs, and maybe playing in a TV show.
Oh my God, nothing compares to the pre-horse show jitters! It's like going on 'American Idol' or 'The Voice' all the time, because you're just going and getting judged for your entire show.
I remember going to the audition for 'Corrie.' I wasn't an actor - what they're often looking for in these rooms is a character, not what's on the page. They want to see what you are going to bring. So somehow, I got the job on 'Corrie.' For the first time in a while, someone really believed in me.
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