I asked a director once what the secret of it all was, and he said you have to be so prepared that you are willing to throw all your preparation away in the moment when you see something better. That's a phenomenal piece of advice. It's been my compass through the process of making films. But you can really only do that if you're prepared. You can't wing it.
Alex KurtzmanI think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.
Alex KurtzmanWhen you're working on a scene, both in the script phase and also in the moment, you look around and you wait for the lightning bolt to strike you and based on your instincts tell you what the right thing to do is here. And that can result in anything from a change of dialogue to the realisation that what you thought was a dramatic scene should actually have some humour. And maybe if you stage it this way it's funnier, or if you put the camera here it tells a different story. That stuff is kind of everything when you're a director.
Alex KurtzmanI think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.
Alex KurtzmanI asked a director once what the secret of it all was, and he said you have to be so prepared that you are willing to throw all your preparation away in the moment when you see something better. That's a phenomenal piece of advice. It's been my compass through the process of making films. But you can really only do that if you're prepared. You can't wing it.
Alex Kurtzman