Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think it's a big part of being a creative person.
It's much easier to say negative things in a review.
Television is so much about continuing to work with people.
Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.
Everybody keeps falling back to the same patterns without doing too much dramaturgy.
The more constraints I have, the more opportunities I have to be creative to fix those constraints.
The people that always impress me are the ones that are curious about what they're going to do next.
Violence has not really been an issue. Even in my wildest hopes, I wasn't trying to get violence in.
One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.
I think of there being two conditions that creative people go through. I think it's fear and curiosity.
If you've never watched people watch television, I don't recommend it. It's not an exciting thing to do.
I have this identity for myself as a writer and the only thing that can happen is that I chip away from it.
The TV industry works in this crazy system where everybody's trying to get the same actors at the same time.
I always liked magic. I was always embarrassed by liking magic because I liked the fact that they're just lying.
There's real peril in trying to repeat yourself, and apply rules that applied to something else to a new project.
Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that.'
Shows don't reunite because television doesn't work that way. There's no profit model and people go off to do other work.
What you'll gain is the macro story. You'll get a good command of that. And what you might lose is some of the fun of it.
My knee-jerk is that it is comedy and, if you watch them all back-to-back, you will gain something and you will lose something.
What's realistic to me is that families love each other and stand by each other. What's unrealistic is that they would ever say that.
The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.
We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.
I joked recently that I thought 30 seconds a day for three years would be the best way to enjoy it, and I'm going to stand by that statement.
There's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.
I hope to take advantage of the Netflix organism and see if there are ways to get in new material and see if there are ways to do deleted scenes.
We started gearing our content more to what makes us laugh and stories we wanted to tell, and we had to decide, early on, to not be precious about it.
Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."
First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling.
When you don't have a laugh track, you can make the clothes funny. We can make a sign funny. We can make the way somebody walks funny. The makeup can be funny.
They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.
Something about not waiting for the laugh of a laugh track allows you to take lines that otherwise might be seen as just direct jokes, and make them seem realistic.
I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.
For the most part you are dealing with jealousy, you are dealing with love, you're dealing with hatred, you are dealing with revenge and all of these sort of classic things.
I think everybody wants to be loved, all the time, but it's not realistic. It's also not realistic, if you're going to be ambitious, in terms of changing the form or evolving.
With 'Arrested Development,' we tried showing the deep disdain that connects a family. We wanted to hold up a mirror to American society. And, just as predicted, America looked away.
Character is what someone does, much more than who they are. I can be sarcastic or I can be fearful, but it doesn't really matter until there's a story - until someone comes in and holds us hostage.
One of the best ways into the business is to get a job with a production, which you can do by cold-calling or by getting your résumé out there, and also through contacts. That's where nepotism really helps.
Even on the old show, we would maybe not all be in the scene. Sometimes there would be a penthouse scene and everyone would get together. But, even in that context, it would be because somebody was missing.
The "executive producer" title either means that you're the person who created, or co-created, the show, or you're the person who's in charge of day-to-day operations. Whereas "producer" is often just a writing credit.
It's like, if I had the luxury of choice, and didn't have to worry about making a living, I would definitely want to get into whatever field it was that allowed me to push further and further comedically. Because that's the joy of it.
As somebody who wanted to be creative, growing up, I remember always thinking that the thing I had going against me was Orange County because it seemed like all of the comedy was coming out of New York, and it still is, to a certain extent.
Television is a very writer-driven business, and it's one of the few parts of entertainment where writers are treated with respect, only because they need you. If they didn't have to treat you with respect, they would be happy to dismiss you.
You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.
We will be looking at things like the confluence of a scene, and we still have all these creative decisions to make. In general, we're going to just try to make these under a half-hour. We're going to try to take that kind of cable TV comedy model.
I had a cookie business there, with my brother, when we were growing up, called the Chip Yard, and that became the inspiration for the banana stand. My father said that he wanted us to develop a work ethic, so we'd sit there selling cookies, all day.
We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.
The revolution is here. It's established that Netflix is a place where you can get premium content. It's a whole new world. It's very interesting. We'll be discovering it together. It's going to be interesting because they don't have a lot to compare it to.
Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development.
There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.
I think that timing is everything. At first, it was too soon. And then, the time was right, but I was busy with other things, and the cast was busy with other things. By the time we sat down to work on the movie, enough time had passed that suddenly a different story emerged.