By not foretelling the ending to yourself, as a writer, you're able to open up the canvas and say, "I'm going to go here. I'm going to go there." It's just a little bit more freeing than a stand-alone procedural, where you work backwards from the end.

It was a very, very intense and long casting process [for The Killing] because we really had to find the right people who could carry the weight of this story, who had the chops and who had the spirit, where they could bring in so much of their own selves to these characters. So, the casting process took many months.

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light.

The most surprising thing to me is what an incredibly intense effort it's been to create a world from the ground up. I had run a show that had already existed and had been created by the show-runner, Meredith [Stiehm]. It's a very different experience to come in at ground zero and meet people and assemble the cast and crew. As a group and as a family, we're creating this world.

Creating a world that reflects the inner voyage of our characters was really important. Also, because this isn't a black and white show, and this isn't about bad guys and good guys, but it's about good men being capable of bad things and vice versa, I wanted to be in a city that had contradiction.

I used to live in New York and now I live in L.A., and somehow I've become a different person because of the air and what I see every day, and I think we all do.

I'm really trying to just keep this internal, and be faithful to the story and the characters, and keep 99.9% of my brain there, serving the story. It's a great network. It's the golden network of cable, so it's totally an honor to be there and tell this story, but I try not to think about anything beyond that.