A Quote by Ayelet Zurer

TV is the place that writers want to be. When you don't have a very strong indie market going on, talented writers want to have their voice heard, so they'll go somewhere else, and everyone goes to TV because their voices are heard.
TV is the place that writers want to be.
I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
It's understandable why TV hasn't been diverse because a lot of TV writers are white dudes from Harvard. And white dudes from Harvard aren't going to immediately want to write about trans issues. They're not immediately going to want to write about a Filipino family.
In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer will turn in a script and never be heard from again.
Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. Norman Mailer and Vidal, the same thing. The bestselling writers now, there's no great animal energy with them.
Everybody has a say, everybody has a voice, because everyone that comes to the House had about 750,000 people they're representing . And you want those voices heard.
Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.
Whoever we are here, we might be princesses somewhere else. Or writers. Or scientists. Or presidents. Or whatever the hell we want to be that everyone else says we can't.
We have heard projects with some of the writers, who we've been in business with for a long time at the studio, that we've heard as a studio - often, pitches that are still in their formation stage where we or the writers have wanted our input on developing them. We've probably heard more pitches with the network hat on. Certainly all of the outside pitches are that way, and many of the pitches that have been in great shape coming out of the studio we've heard from a network perspective.
I think everyone has a story to tell. Part of what I do is help artists find their voice, not only their vocal voice, but their writing voice. Every artist that I worked with who has those records that everyone talks about, they are also writers. I like to say I helped support whatever their writing was so people heard the song clearly.
In TV, it's so much more about the writers because they're the ones creating the universe. The writers are the ones who know what's up.
Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.
TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.
I started to hallucinate and hear voices as clear as crystal. I heard my family in a casual familial conversation I heard Koran readings in a heavenly voice. I heard music from my country. Later on the guards used these hallucinations and started talking with funny voices through the plumbing, encouraging me to hurt the guard and plot an escape.
The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.
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