Tess Gerritsen Quotes

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

I said from the start I had to be trustful of the Millennium universe. It was not going to be a Stieg Larsson book, but my interpretation of his iconic characters and universe.

I think one of the reasons for the success of 'Breaking Bad,' and now for 'Better Call Saul,' is that we have been blessed by AMC and Sony with enough time to figure things out.

With 'Battlestar Galactica,' we had such resistance from the fan base to changing it. The upshot was, we ultimately won them over.

We've seen from shows like 'Game of Thrones' that the book can become a seed, which you plant in the ground of great TV creators, and it can sprout out into a big tree.

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

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

That's why, when Alias came along, I knew I'd be OK if the show was on for five or six years because the writing was so good and the creative team was so strong.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

'Game of Thrones' is just incredible, what they pull off every week.

I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.

I feel like every first episode of a TV show is bad, you know, and it always improves.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.

I think you just have to take everything that happens on a TV show with a grain of salt. You sign up for a show for six years having zero idea where they're going to go with the character, so you just have to get on the ride of the show and go with wherever they take you.

I think films are bigger than structure.

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

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.

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

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.

But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.

The writers did a great job of adapting the characters from the 'Frozen' story and implementing them into the 'Once Upon a Time' world.

I think that a movie of a TV show is really tricky, and I don't know if it's ever really been done well. Because it's really hard if you have a 22-minute show, especially something like 'Party Down,' where it's all contained at the party.

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.