All of us are beautiful people, but we walk around just being people. I wanted real human beings.

I didn't want everybody to be pretty. I didn't want everybody to be thing. I didn't want everybody to be a size 4. I wanted it to be like the world. I think that we got there, and that was really special. I wanted texture and grit to everything. And then, you have an actress like Sarah Gadon, where you could rub dirt on her face and she'd look like she stepped off of a Vogue cover, and that's fine.

I read Stephen King as a junior high schooler. My father introduced me to Stephen King far too young, which I'm very grateful for now.

I had been emotionally affected by the story [of Steven King], on my own, and I knew how I wanted to feel watching it because I had felt it already reading it. God bless them, Bad Robot hired me to develop it and I spent the next six months in a room, alone, with a lot of index cards up on a wall, like the guy in A Beautiful Mind.

There was a way that I approached that with the art department and the background players, which was that I didn't want people to have stepped out of a catalogue. This is not a world of perfect beauty. I wanted it to be the real world of the 1960s. I know that some women walked out of the house without lipstick.

All of us are beautiful people, but we walk around just being people. I wanted real human beings.

People want to evolve the idea of the word "mini-series." Mini-series has an '80s connotation to it.