I've always believed that a good twist is one that, when it is presented to the audience, half of them say, 'I saw that coming.' And half of them are completely and totally shocked. Because if you don't have the half that saw it coming, then it wasn't fair: You never gave the audience a chance to guess it.
Damon LindelofI make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.
Damon LindelofPart of the fun of the movie is understanding exactly why we called it Prometheus. And also, it sounds really pretentious, like Inception, so we were just like, "Yeah, that makes the movie sound really smart!" It's so much better then my original title, Explosion. Well, there might be an explosion in the movie.
Damon LindelofI feel like the big twist shows are now off the table. I think Westworld was probably the last one to Trojan horse this idea of the young man in black. They were doing non-linear storytelling, but disguising it. Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy have spoken openly about how they just didn't think people were going to figure it out that fast.
Damon LindelofI think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.
Damon LindelofI felt like if I said something positive on Twitter, it got no play. But if I said something negative on Twitter, it was a billion retweets and so that was giving me a Pavlovian response to be mean, and I don't want to be mean. We all have mean thoughts. They should not be broadcast on Twitter. You don't need to see mean things.
Damon Lindelof