Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre.
For Hannibal, it's really about food as art and also, Hannibal's specific brand of art. And I guess I'm a bit of a foodie.
International broadcasters are often dependent on an American home broadcasting network, so it changes the game entirely.
We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.
I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."
I think Eddie Izzard is one of the brightest minds of our generation. I don't see him as a comedian as much as I see him as a philosopher. I hope I get to work with him on everything until I die, because I think he has a great mind and is a very talented actor.
I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.
I'm incredibly proud of 'Hannibal' and the cast - I feel like we're doing really good television.
Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.
The idea of suggesting that Hannibal Lecter - in the book, he has a sixth finger and red eyes, and so there is a devilry in Thomas Harris' presentation - so it felt like it was completely honest and appropriate for the character. And we often talk in the writers' room, "Okay, there is the Hannibal as the devil explanation of that plot point, but we also need to ground that in a reality that is answerable to the physics of the storytelling."
I only eat meat, if I go to a nice restaurant and there is an exceptional dish, or if I'm at somebody's home for a dinner, I'll eat whatever is in front of me. Otherwise, I don't eat anything that walks around and has a face.
I think the progressive audience that loves Star Trek will be happy that we're continuing that tradition being progressive and all-inclusive. Star Trek's not necessarily a universe where I want to hear a lot of profanity.
One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.
Silence Of The Lambs is a fantastic film. It's a horror film, and it's an incredibly well-told film that is about point of view in such a unique way. The way that film is shot, the way the eyelines are so close, if not directly into camera, betrays an intimacy with the characters and the audience.
A poor white woman from the South is different than a poor black woman from the South, and has a completely different experience.
I love actors, and I love the casting process. It's funny, like, some writers don't like actors because, I think, they are the faces of the show, and so you feel sort of secondary, but I love actors because they elevate the material; they make it better.
Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.
That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story.
It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.
Growing up, there were a lot of funerals that I attended, and the adults at the funerals went out of their way to make sure that I wasn't traumatized or overly depressed by them. So death is always a celebration of life for me, and it's also hugely dramatic.
Hannibal is very much a secular story, even though we dance right up to the supernatural a few times in the show, and, arguably, you could say we dipped our toe in an instance or two.
I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.
I love the supernatural in storytelling. The Twilight Zone was a huge influence on me, in terms of writing and storytelling, where you're not restricted to the parameters of reality to tell your tale.
I've never been one of those to kind of like, 'I want somebody to do something against their nature to titillate me.' That never holds any interest. And I always want people to be who they are and if they're being not who they are I feel like it's false and, therefore, less easy to connect to. I don't need them to kiss or to display physical intimacy. I think that almost becomes too obvious. I love playing in the suggestive.
We only really, deeply consider what our life is when we're faced with mortality on some level.
Upfronts are all about ad sales.
As a horror movie fan, I was very obsessed with horror films. Still am. I love the genre. For me, horror films are opera, and they are... instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it's Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. It is when the stakes are at their absolute largest in a story: whether somebody is going to live or die. In a way, it's just holding up a mirror to life.
It's such a surreal experience, being shot out of the cannon for any kind of first season show. It all seems very dreamlike.
We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death.It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.
I love that India has declared dolphins non-human people with all laws that apply to human. I'm fascinated with the alien-ness of that.
Television production is so insane. There's so many moving parts and flying pieces and you're desperate to make it cohesive and artistic and have something to say about the human condition that feels like it has value to its existence.
Food is life. Food is also very sensual, and in Pushing Daisies, pie being reflective of life and a man who was disconnected from the living but could bring the dead back to life being a pie maker felt like I got the symbolism of food as life.
It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.
What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie.
Relationships are now off-kilter.
Anybody who is capable of doing terrible things, you don't want them out in the world, but you can't help but respect their ingenuity and their savvy and their intelligence as they go about their dastardly deeds.
I think you have to write what you want to watch.
I'm not always successful, but I take my job as a storyteller very seriously and want to make sure the audience has as much fun watching it as I am creating it.
I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.
Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.
What I enjoy about my work is that it's all things that I wanted to see as an audience member so there's part of me that understands what an audience wants to see in that respect.
The more real the murder is, the less interested I am in seeing it. It's hard enough to watch the news.
I think there's often a negative associated with being passionate or geeky about entertainment, but for me, entertainment has always been a greater, psychological escape, so I think it's unfortunate when others don't appreciate the depth of passion entertainment offers.
We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.
As an insecure writer, I'll finish a scene and worry there's a better version of it. Or it could be elevated somehow.
In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.
The definition of horror is pretty broad. What causes us "horror" is actually a many splendored thing. It can be hard to make horror accessible, and that's what I think Silence of the Lambs did so brilliantly - it was an accessible horror story, the villain was a monster, and the protagonist was pure of heart and upstanding so it had all of these great iconographic elements of classic storytelling. It was perceived less as a horror movie than an effective thriller, but make no mistake, it was a horror movie and was sort of sneaky that way.
I'm probably harder on myself than I need to be, but it's important to me if I'm going to ask an audience for an hour of their time that I don't waste their time. I want to give them something significant to chew on.
I think accessibility is what often denies horror its deserved attention. So it all depends on the execution and whether mainstream audiences can accept it.
People who have passion for horror stories, their appreciation/my appreciation is looking at it as opera.
It's very interesting to blur the line between eating human beings and eating animals, because I do think people should think more about what they put in their bodies, whether it is nutritionally or philosophically.
Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.
As an animal lover and as a sometime-meat-eater, I've read so much about the emotional sophistication of pigs and cows and sheep that I do think twice when I do still eat them on occasion.
You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?
If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.
I'm very hard on myself when it comes to writing.
If you see the blood, then there's an easy association of the violence. The violence that happens when there isn't blood is actually much more subversive and unsettling.
I like working, and my brain sort of keeps going whether I like it or not.
There's usually a few people who are like, "Say... what would that look like on our channel?" Interest can be expressed without directly expressing interest.
Molly Shannon such an interesting actress that portrays vulnerability and danger at the same time, because she seems brittle in that role.
When I'm at home and I'm preparing my own food, it's all gluten-free, or fish and it's healthy, but when I go to someone else's house, I'll eat what they put in front of me because I don't want to be an asshole.
Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category - and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship.
You can't measure a dog's intelligence by giving him a verbal test 'cause it's not on their scale, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent creatures.
We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.
Dr. Lecter would have more sustenance on the spacecraft from Alien because there are more people to eat. I think he'd get hungry after a while in the Overlook - I can't imagine him eating canned food.
Horror films have always been quite operatic for me. I always sort of scratch my head at people's offense to them? If you don't get them, and you don't like them, then don't watch them.
If I were to remake a movie, I'd love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it's a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night - and I think that's absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call.
Our idea for Hannibal Lecter is that he's very reactionary - he's somebody who can adapt really well to circumstances.
I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.
If it is true that if you believe in something, you manifest it, there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus.
Food is art, I believe. If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way.
I think because it is a very well-saturated story,episode of Justified in Hannibal, and we've all heard it in some frame of a story, we've heard the urban legend of waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing. It felt like if we are telling an organ-harvesting story, it was really about quickly selling the iconography of an organ-harvesting story, and then being able to mask that as a perfect way for Hannibal Lecter to go shopping for his menu.
Everything was so designed by Hannibal to break down Will in the first season, until Will's sanity became questionable. It's so much easier to believe that somebody losing their mind is capable of terrible things than it is to consider Frasier Crane, a charming, fun doctor who invites you to dinner. If you put those two in a police lineup, you're going to pick the guy who's melting down.
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