I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.

Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

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.