Matthew Weiner Quotes

I love working with young people and young filmmakers, and I love working on first films. I think it's cool. It's fun. I just take it as it comes.

In the world of book writing, there's a few people, maybe, where you have close relationships. In TV, there are so many more relationships, and they're all so critical.

Years ago, Barry Diller asked me to be a judge on a pilot for an inventor show on USA, and when it was over, the producer, Ken Mok, took me out to dinner and really got me talking. It was a long dinner. Afterward, he said, 'One day, I'm going to write your movie'.

I was a playwright who was still learning the ropes when Starz took a chance on me to create and showrun 'Vida.' They nurtured and supported me during every step of the strenuous process, and that is a debt that cannot be repaid.

It just makes you a better artist when you're with people who are great artists themselves. Being around Kanye, soaking up all the knowledge, all the stuff he got.

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good.

It's not just about acting. I love film, I'm a director now, I love writing, I love producing, I love having a company that makes films and to be prolific and have a place to put all the ideas that are constantly bubbling up inside of me and that don't let me sleep at night.

When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.

In the case of 'Blood Stone,' the producers, EON, Michael Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, David Wilson and Gregg Wilson, had an idea for a story and had a lot of it done. And I came in, worked with them, fleshed it out.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.

Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason... to write for me.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

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.

I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.

Since signing with Universal, I have been working closely with Gary Ross, the director, producer and screenwriter. We have spent many hours on the phone, and I've been sending him information and items that have been useful to the writing process.

The writer's room is a really interesting place to be.

I love that first-time feeling that I can't build in myself anymore, where I can learn and emulate other filmmakers. Be it Ayan Mukherjee, Punit Mahotra, Karan Malhotra, Tarun Mansukhani or Shakun Batra, all of them have taught me something or the other.

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick really changed the way one-hour television looked and the depth of how deep it could cut emotionally.

Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative.

TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities - the actors, multiple producers.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.