We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?

Television production is so insane. There's so many moving parts and flying pieces and you're desperate to make it cohesive and artistic and have something to say about the human condition that feels like it has value to its existence.

If you see the blood, then there's an easy association of the violence. The violence that happens when there isn't blood is actually much more subversive and unsettling.

If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.