People get on a show and they fought tooth and nail. Almost 95% of the actors out there want to be on a television series. Then as soon as they get onto one, no, no, I want to be a movie star. This television series stuff, no, no no.
If I have my way, I want to go start making really interactive television. Stuff where you can sit and watch real actors do a real series and they can get into some kind of gun battle and all of a sudden your television prompts you to pick up your controller and all of a sudden, you're playing a first-person shooter.
In our day we went from - we went into saloons. We couldn't cross over like you can today, get a television series and all of a sudden you're a major movie star, you know.
When I sit down, I find that it's much easier for me to want to consume a movie than to dip back into 20 or 40 or 60 hours of a television series. I think a great movie is really amazing. But, television does give you a larger canvas.
The challenge with all television - all series television as you get into later seasons to give people what they have come to, what they've become familiar with and what the qualities of the shows that they recognize without letting it get staled.
It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.
When you're working on a television show with actors, what you hope you're doing is playing jazz with them all the time. You see what they're giving you, so you try to write back to that, and then they play with that, and you get a sense of what is going on. That's just a natural way in which TV series usually work.
Today I said to the calculus students, "I know, you're looking at this series and you don't see what I'm warning you about. You look and it and you think, 'I trust this series. I would take candy from this series. I would get in a car with this series.' But I'm going to warn you, this series is out to get you. Always remember: The harmonic series diverges. Never forget it."
I'm married now, so I have a life. I had to get a life. That's one thing I really had to do, you know. You do that kind of work on television series after television series and you don't have a life. So, that's part of what I did while I was gone, I got a life.
Coming back to a television series puts you back in the limelight and gives you a platform for your ideas. If you're not acting on a series, you don't get the ability to communicate to people.
Television series always have a lot of characters because you want people to identify with someone on the show, who will be your eyes.
I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria.
Every film is a remake of a previous film, or a remake of a television series that everyone loved in the 1960s, or a remake of a television series that everyone hated in the 1960s. Or it's a theme park ride; it will soon come to breakfast cereal mascots.
Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."
Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn't do television - they certainly didn't do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.
The term 'web-series' has a stigma attached to it because it was created at a time when the only web-series that were being created were being created by people who would have loved to have a television show, but they couldn't. So they created a web-series instead, on their own dime. And those series look cheap because of it.
I watch a lot of television. The stuff that they're putting on television, series like 'The Americans' and 'Game of Thrones,' it's so superior to most of the films that are coming out of Hollywood in terms of drama, certainly in terms of what we're interested in.