In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.