I was a fan of 'Six Feet Under' and was very sad when it ended, so I was not ready to switch my allegiance to another show. So I was like, 'I'm not watching this 'True Blood.'' Then a friend got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes, and by the third one, I was irrevocably hooked.

Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century.

I was a big fan of 'Six Feet Under.' So, I got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes on videotape, watched them and was instantly into it. During the first episode, I was like, 'Eh.' By the time I got to the second one, I couldn't watch them fast enough. I got on the phone that night, called Time Warner cable and ordered HBO right then.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

We live in a world where we're all on computers and tablets and phones, all the time, so something as odd as computer hacking or a virus is really scary because it gets to the heart of our security.

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That's more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they're really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There's something deeply psychological.

I guess I didn't even know the word 'genre' until I did 'True Blood.' That's how naive I was, and I didn't realize that there was a point of view about certain types of TV. And so I guess I found it disappointing that there is a segment of the critical community that looks at genre as something that is separate, less than.