Abbi Jacobson Quotes

Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

I know what it takes to go from the point where someone's looking at a newspaper article, and thinking, 'Oh, this would make a great TV series,' to the point where you're actually on a set and there's a camera aimed at someone.

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

I don't believe in development. I believe in pre-pre-production, so when I sit down with an idea for a movie, I'm thinking I'm going to make this film. I don't think about anything else.

With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.

On the 'Tom and Jerry's,' Joe and I would sit across a desk from each other and develop the story. Joe would do the storyboard and I'd do the timing and the direction of the animation.

Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you've written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that's actually real.

Mike and I figured out a lot about the world, characters and story in the initial two weeks between creating 'Avatar' and pitching it to Nickelodeon.

Every animated film that I've worked on - whether it was as a story artist or as Head of Story or even as director - where we originally started out with our story and where we eventually ended up were often very different places.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.

Part of making TV is the process - you just have to churn it out.

I think on 'ER,' my other long-running show, I had some ideas about what's going on. 'Stargate Universe,' they were kind of secretive too a little bit about what they wanted to do, but I kind of liked working this way. I like the surprises, and I like knowing just enough to work on the character.

The dream, I think, with any project is it starts with an idea, and then somebody writes it, and the writer hopes that a director comes on and makes this piece of material visual, and both the director and writer hope that they can have actors come in and bring something to it that neither one of them expected, elevating it along the way.

It was somewhere in doing the last season of 'Leverage' that John Rogers and I became confident that we had developed an all-new production technique where we could put more on the screen with very little money. So we started to get more comfortable with the idea of trying to tackle 'The Librarians.'

If I were to write a book about the progress of getting to a third film, it would be a long one.

There is a variety of different kind of producers. I'm a very hands-on, creative producer. I find material that I think would make a good movie or TV show, find the right financier/studio/network, hire a writer, get a good script, find a director, and collaborate with him/her to cast the movie and hire department heads.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

My creative team filters the scripts before they reach me and a few others. We evaluate them, ponder over the budget, and think of various possibilities to get the viewer excited.

I always thought the writing process for movies and TV shows was just a blueprint. The making of it was the thing.

Every show finds its groove, I would say. The first season is the season to figure out the dynamics, the workflow.

I definitely storyboard, but I only start once I have cast and location. I like to find the world first.

When I was doing 'Baahubali 2,' the story was being discussed with many people. The story evolved over 9-10 months in that way.

We got together as a group to come up with the idea for 'Toy Story 3' in the same cabin where we dreamed up 'Toy Story.'