Gary David Goldberg Quotes

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

Writers are not always right however, but then again, I've been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it's terrible.

That's the great part about television: It's alive, and it changes and evolves with the way the characters evolve. Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show.

One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very descriptive picture of who the characters are while still letting us have freedom to put in our own ideas.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I allowed the scriptwriter to come to my parties for research and it's a good thing he did otherwise I don't think Personal Services would've been so good.

For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.

When you have a performer as talented as Bill Murray or as Harold, that can write as well as they can perform, you can do a final draft on the set if you think of it that way.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

They're naughty, all those writers - they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on 'The Sopranos': if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

There's one great script that hit my desk that I didn't change at all, and that was True Romance.

These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

Good scripts have always been, I think, hard to find. Good storytelling, good writing - it's just not easy. I have made it a point that - if I'm going to put the energy into doing this work - I will wait until I find something I'm really happy with.