David Simon Quotes

It is very difficult to make something like slice-of-life interesting. I don't think many people have done the slice-of-life dramas as good as TVF has done it.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

The benefit of having a story that takes place in the real world is that you don't have to invent the real world. It exists.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

I like to keep my films close to reality.

I want my fiction to seem real.

If it's present in the life of the character, I'll write about it. Kitchen, bedroom, church, I'll follow a character wherever they go.

'Slice of life' is not a genre I had experimented with much, and it's quite difficult.

I've been watching a lot of cable shows like 'The Wire' and 'Breaking Bad' and 'Downton Abbey.' I love how real the moments are.

I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.

With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.

In a time when supernatural dramas are taking charge, Dil Toh Happy Hai Ji' is a slice-of-life story. I have grown up watching such shows and I am sure the audience will love it too.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

If you're trying to be realistic and bring real life to the screen, you are going to have different elements. That's what I'm trying to do. As I make the movie, different elements come in naturally.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.

To make a movie about mayhem, sometimes you have to go to mayhem.

I hate it when, in films, the girl looks perfect in every shot. It's quite nice if there's a bit of dark circles underneath the eyes, if we see the reality of the situation that the person is going through.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

There are very few films or plays or anything about really happy people with perfect lives. Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in - figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone.

In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.