One of my favorite things about 'Star Trek' wasn't just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face; there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality.Collection: Humor
What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything - the moment the lights go down is often the best part.Collection: Best
It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.Collection: Faith
When I was a kid, among the other embarrassing things I would do, and there's a list of stupid things, but I would make these dumb comedy tapes. I would often make prank phone calls, but I would also do it with friends.
Robotics are beginning to cross that line from absolutely primitive motion to motion that resembles animal or human behavior.
As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.
I have no style. There are certain people who just have a visual sense that defines their work. You could probably watch 30 seconds of anything they do and you'll know exactly who directed it. I don't have that skill.
I don't try and write strong female characters or strong male characters, I just try and write, hopefully, strong characters and sometimes they happen to be female.
The Internet now provides an immediate and very clear consensus of what it is that the audience is experiencing. It's something that you should never let lead you, and yet at the same time, you should never ignore it.
I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.
What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.
All the times I've been lucky enough to be a part of a show that's actually gotten on the air, it's always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.
The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you've got to take advantage of.
I think that even if you're wondering if two characters are ever going to kiss, drawing out the inevitability is part of the fun. Whatever the genre happens to be.
People never know what they want, though everyone says they do. If they did, nobody would ever be surprised.
I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.
I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.
Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously, but I don't think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.
When you go to commercial, you want something to call the viewers back, and if you don't have a decent act out, the audience probably won't be there in the numbers you want when the show returns.
We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.
Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.
Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
When I was a kid going into the movies, you weren't force-fed information everywhere you looked about what the movie was going to be.
I love working with the right actor, and if the right actor happens to be unknown, that should be allowed, too, I think.
I have nothing against 3-D in theory. But I've also never run to the movies because something's in 3-D.