We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.

It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.

In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.

Hannibal is very much a secular story, even though we dance right up to the supernatural a few times in the show, and, arguably, you could say we dipped our toe in an instance or two.

I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.

International broadcasters are often dependent on an American home broadcasting network, so it changes the game entirely.