If I were to remake a movie, I'd love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it's a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night - and I think that's absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call.

I'm probably harder on myself than I need to be, but it's important to me if I'm going to ask an audience for an hour of their time that I don't waste their time. I want to give them something significant to chew on.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

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.

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

We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.