Television has always been a conversation. Movies come along and they're kind of like three-ring circuses, and there's a new one next week.

They [movies] don't really have the cultural impact - other than "Star Wars," of course - that they used to because television is something that week to week people invite into their homes. It's a relationship that in success can go on six, seven, eight years. I think certainly in the early days, you definitely want that engagement.

And having those mystical elements you see in Asian cinema and certainly Asian martial arts cinema, it's something that we wanted to begin to introduce - the idea of spirituality and the idea of there being something else out in the world besides people who are great fighters.

Whenever you do something that's original, not based on a comic book or a novel or an old movie or a franchise, you definitely learn a lot and for I think it was very gratifying to see the people embrace the world.

Some of the key components, we wanted it to be so far into the future that you weren't talking about our time. I was joking that the AMC cinematic universe is after the zombie apocalypse by hundreds and hundreds of years.

We liked the idea that it was a low-tech future. But everything always repeats the past. If you look today and look at something in the middle east where you got people getting beheaded it's like the crusades with Twitter. It's crazy, human nature does the same thing. In a way, even though you're in the future people wanted order so this sort of system rose up.

With a television show, it's about fighting to get it on the screen every week. It's like going into battle, and you have to fight these fights. Some are big fights, some are skirmishes, some you can come to detente on, but it's always a fight.