Whit Stillman Quotes

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

Working in MTV's development team, my days would consist of pitches and deciding which concepts we wanted to buy. We would then develop those into a pilot. Very few ended up making it to a full series, but if they did, I would manage the project alongside the show's creators.

If you go to pilot then you are probably going to go to series. That's my feeling about it.

We couldn't pitch the show without having created one, at least one 20 to 25 minute version of 'Broad City.' We wouldn't know how to describe it.

Doing a series of 'Facejacker' takes about nine months. It's pretty intense.

The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.

For 'Breaking Bad,' it was like, that's one of the best pilots, probably the best pilot I have ever read.

I did a pilot for Anything But Love in 1988 that didn't sell.

'Game of Thrones' is shot on a very similar kind of schedule to a TV show, but there's a lot more time and focus put into the script.

I don't know much about writing a show or being a show-runner on a show, but I can only imagine that when you first cast a show and you first do a pilot, there are so many components that you're throwing into the mix and you're not sure how they're going to develop.

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.

Now that I know what goes into making a pilot, keeping it on the air, and keeping your fans, I'm at a point now where I do a pilot and just hope for the best. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.

It's so hard to make a comedy pilot and have a cool idea.

I had done a directing producing job before on 'Big Day' and 'Jake in Progress,' and those are two shows where I directed the pilot and stayed with it in series.

It's kind of interesting when you sign on to a show because you're basically signing on to play a character because you only really see the first episode of the show.

I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'

I didn't know 'Homeland' was going to be 'Homeland.' I just did it because it was a terrific script, and they pitched me the story line, and I was like, 'Huh, that's interesting.'

Usually when you're doing a season one, you're trying to find the show.

It's always interesting for me to watch the pilot of an established show because you see how the writers and actors weren't really sure what the show was and what the dynamics were. If you look at the pilot for 'Seinfeld,' for example, it's practically unrecognizable.

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.

I just wrapped a new show for Amazon called 'Transparent.'

It's pretty surreal to be doing a show on HBO with pals.

'The Fosters' is such a fun show to shoot, and I always look forward to getting the new script because we keep pushing the boundaries.

It's a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It's certainly not fun.