Ryan Murphy
I formed this thing called the Half Foundation, and what I tried to do is quantify hiring practices in Hollywood. Half the population is women, so half of the storytellers should be women. Fifty percent of all the directors in my company are women, and it will forever be that way.
All the big successes of my career have been ideas that, on paper, you think, 'Well nobody's going to go for this because that genre is so dead.'
All the things I have done at one point or another have fallen out of fashion, and there's nothing better than trying to bring something back to life.
I wanted to create a culture that allowed my children to see the world differently, if only from a strictly visual perspective: to have a child see a room where half of the people are women and minorities is so powerful. I think everyone wants for their children a world that's better than the one they came up in.
If you look at 'American Horror Story' or 'Crime Story,' these are visceral, action-packed, sometimes bloody episodes of television. They're not 'feminine.' They're not about sexy women sitting around looking beautiful, drinking lattes. These episodes are calling cards to show companies like Marvel, 'Look, women can do these kind of movies.'
At the end of the day, a divorce is a divorce, and a break-up is a break-up. They are essentially small matters of the heart. They are human stories.
I love Olivia De Havilland. She is forever a lady.
I was an altar boy, with a very strict father. And movies were always my escape.
I do work with a lot of women in my company, and I write a lot of roles for women over 40. I think, in 'Feud' alone, we have 15 roles for women over 40, which I'm very proud about.
The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.
What I'm interested in doing now is to go and give voices that are not being heard a platform and to sort of bring people into people's homes that you think you may hate or despise.
I only wrote two fan letters in my life. One was to Bette Davis. And one was to Ron Palillo, who played Horshack on 'Welcome Back, Kotter.' And Ron did not write me back, but Bette Davis did.
For me, growing up in Indiana with cornfields and churches, I was always very intrigued by the Academy Awards - they were a big event. That was the one night of the year when all of the glittering movie stars got together, and I used to love that night because, as a child, it was a way to dream for me.
Sometimes in entertainment, when people have done the Academy Awards - like, for example, in 'The Bodyguard' - I just didn't believe it; it didn't feel authentic.
I'm fascinated by the whole clown phobia thing because I personally don't have it.
In television and the movie business, the people who are promoted and the people who are mentored always look like the white guys.
I find that women are much more comfortable showing their emotion and inviting you into their emotional landscape.
I'm not interested in anything but emotionally driven stories; that's why almost all of my work is exclusively anchored by women.
I love actors, but I really love actresses, and I really love actresses whose work touched and informed my coming-up years.
When I started, you couldn't do anything. A gay person trying to write a gay character in 1998 - it was so difficult.
One thing I always do is just tell actors that I'm as afraid as they are, because I can sense that, and I feel it, too.
I think that the work that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did was truly extraordinary, and that's their legacy. Not the other petty stuff.
One of the unique things about 'American Horror Story' is, it's very respectful to actors. Actors in many cases don't want to be tied down to a seven-year contract. So my deal with the cast is: you're free after every year: you can come back, or you cannot come back.
It's a weird thing, my shows. I don't know how to describe it, but I feel because I go about the casting process so slowly that it does feel like an instant family.
I love Sarah Jessica Parker; I've worked with her. I think she's amazing... She's a great producer and has a great business acumen.
I think the great thing about a television set is that it can be turned on and off, and you don't have to watch it if you think it's going to be something that you're not going to like or learn from.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they're icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.
Larry Kramer wisely realized so early on that to change the world, people have to know you. If they know you and see that we are all the same - that we all have normal hearts - that's the first step. I'm both amazed at the progress and amazed at how far we have to go.
Here's the thing: When you tell somebody, 'I love you. I have always loved your work, and I want to show people a different side of you,' it's sort of an interesting thing that in my case, I've been very lucky, where they're like, 'OK.'
The Hollywood thing is - like, it feels like the biggest thing in the world, and yet it's the smallest town.
And everybody has the motivation to be that killer.Collection: Motivation
I knew I wanted to work with Brad [Falchuk] and Ian [Brennan] again on something comedic, and we are having a blast writing SCREAM QUEENS. We hope to create a whole new genre - comedy-horror - and the idea is for every season to revolve around two female leads.Collection: Queens