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.

I am endlessly fascinated by this notion that everyone has a secret. Some of our secrets are tiny, small things, and some of them are huge. Given that reality of the human condition, that's what our characters will go through. There will be some things where you'll just be like, "What the hell! How the hell did that happen?"

We read novels. We read hundreds of pages of words, when the story is good because we're willing to stay there. I hope the story is good. I'm going into this venture thinking that the audience is really smart and really wants to hear all the nuances of what we're saying.

I've always been kind of drawn to the extremities of human nature. I wrote my first screenplay when I was 16. The initial idea was a friendship between two prostitutes, and I spent time with a vice squad guy in Cincinnati who brought me to a brothel and gave me the rundown on how street prostitution works.

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.

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.