Howard Gordon Quotes

When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.

I like working in television because it's an evolving story that you tell. That's also one of the things I don't like about it, too. Because sometimes it's hard, and just when I think I've nailed something, it changes or we have to change it or change the joke or the character is evolving in a way that I don't have control over.

Something I've really been wanting to do, ever since 'Six Feet Under' ended, was create my own version of this idealized writer's room as well as the ideal family.

I was running the show on 'United States of Tara' and 'How To Make It In America' where I could say, 'Okay, I'm in charge of everything now.' But it still wasn't my show.

TV is a writer's medium.

Never name a show after a character if you want to be the guy running the show.

I don't think of myself as a producer. In television, it's part of the business - if you progress and become successful as a writer, you're called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I'm just a writer.

Showrunning is when you're the constant creative voice in the show. For a year-and-a-half, you are working on the scripts, you're fine-tuning them, you're the final say on the edit, the music and the cast.

On 'Mr. Robot,' because I run the writers' room and know every decision behind every line of dialogue, I'm able to be nimble and adapt with the scripts and the moments. I never have to question what I'm doing as I'm directing the actors or going through the scenes.

I would say plotting is the most difficult thing for me. Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, "Hey, people want to find out what's going to happen next, they don't want to listen to you spout off about this or that person." But I think even the bad guy deserves to tell his side of the story.

It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters.

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

As a filmmaker, you are going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work.

In television, the creator is really the voice...

Joss Whedon said to me, 'If you think you are taking over the show, you have got another think coming.' He said, 'You are here only because I don't want to kill a villain off every week. I want my villains to be more interesting and multifaceted and then die.'

I'm very interested in starting to produce, and direct, and have an umbrella over an entire project in the future. I'd like to have control over what the characters do. I think as an actor, you get a little too caught up in the moment-to-moment, beat-to-beat stuff to have perspective.

I think that television has become really, really interesting, in terms of character development. You can have 13 hours to develop a character, as opposed to 25 minutes in a movie. That excites me.

Noah Baumbach writing is really wonderful. I think the way he plays out each character with a unique voice is really impressive, and rhythmically his dialogue works.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I think that's the fundamental thing - you can go anywhere you like as long as you're following a character that the audience likes and understands.

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.

It's weird: I was in a conference room, shouting out story ideas in the voices of different characters, and it was something I had to learn because I'd never been in that atmosphere. But I think I had a quick learning curve, because this is the job I was supposed to have.

So, it's a delicate thing, but at the same time our producers and writers are very much aware of the potential downfall that could ensue so I think they're going to be very careful about how they do that. At the same time I don't think they want to leave the characters in the same holding pattern that they've been in for a while. I think that they're all trying to put the characters in a different situation.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.