Bryan Konietzko Quotes

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

Reading a play, you view yourself as part of a whole. You see where the whole thing is going, and so you're willing to go to the very ugly place that your heart may go in order to serve the whole.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.

I don't know what's coming down the pike in 'Gotham.' Part of me goes, 'Man, I just wish I could be in the writers' room. Do you need someone to make you guys coffee?' I just want to be a part of the flow of it.

I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.

On 'The Deuce,' the writers' room gets like group therapy.

I care more, and I think readers do also, for characters in a state of transformation.

It's much easier for me to think in terms of character movement and emotion and story rather than, 'What are some wacky hijinks we can throw together?'

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

A lot of what you're seeing these characters go through is something that either is a story one of the actors told in the writers' room or one of the writers themselves told in the writers' room.

I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I try to avoid planning in too much detail. The best endings are those that emerge only after I've thought long and hard about the various ways the story might end. Then I choose the ending that seems surprising yet somehow inevitable.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

On 'Mr. Robot,' because I run the writers' room and know every decision behind every line of dialogue, I'm able to be nimble and adapt with the scripts and the moments. I never have to question what I'm doing as I'm directing the actors or going through the scenes.

All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

We kept moving forward, kept pretty particular about certain things. Don Handfield is really great with story, so we kept working on it from that angle and developed a lot of IP over the years, which we became very proud of.

The only thing that I always do - is once I've taken on a job, even just to do one scene in a movie, I ask myself, "What's happened the moment the kid was born, until page one of the script?" To answer that simple question, I have an infinite amount of work to do. And I enjoy that part as much as I enjoy any part of making movies.