David Hewson Quotes

What's so cool about movies is once you're done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you're there for however long you do the show.

It's the reason I love doing TV - revisiting stories and characters and the length of the story arcs.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

The 'Lost' pilot was wide enough and included enough things so that when Season Five came, and we spent half of the year in 1973, nobody cried foul. It felt like it was already a part of the DNA.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.

I love 'Boardwalk Empire,' but there were moments where I thought it didn't have the constant through-line that 'Breaking Bad' did and 'Better Call Saul' does.

'Twin Peaks' was incredibly slow, methodic, taking shots that were uncomfortably long, with a lot of scenes where there was barely any dialogue. 'Riverdale' has a much faster pace.

In film and theater, you know the story and the journey from beginning to end, but with TV, you can keep peeling away layers and exploring a new world each week.

It's not that I don't enjoy a good mystery that comes and goes in a hour. I do, but God, 'Breaking Bad' and 'Saul' unfold like novels.

The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.

What was important for 'Legacies' to actually be a successful show is that we had to introduce new mythology.

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.

One of the things that set us apart early on, as opposed to other animated shows, was the fact that 'Bojack' was continuous and serialized.

It was a high-class problem burden, but it was still a burden on 'The Vampire Diaries,' in which we had this group of characters that we loved writing for so much and who had so much available story to tell.

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

Television is fantastic because you get to follow a group of characters over time, and their stories can enrich and surprise you. And you get to work with a group of people over time as well, which can be very satisfying with the right group.

We all have great faith in the writing team that puts together 'Heroes.'

'Twin Peaks' is like a movie; 'China Beach' is like a movie. These are two of the most cinematic shows on television, and they belong together.

With 'True Detective,' you have a lot of time. How I like to describe it... it's like you're filming a theater piece.