Eddie Cahill Quotes

What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.

For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.

I find that on serialized television it's wiser to hit the ground and look forward, and take the cues from the writers and the events happening, otherwise you just tie yourself in knots.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

When you're doing a movie, it's finite - you have a trajectory of where your character's going, and you follow that. Then the storybook closes.

I always thought of 'Lost' as a psychotic opera. Because there were so many characters, it was important for me to track them with themes.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.

A long-running TV series is a beast in that it demands you stick to one character over a long haul.