Hiro Murai Quotes

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

I like the idea of a TV show. You take time to get to know your characters. You can introduce a lot of characters. You don't need your three-action set pieces that you usually need for movies.

Any important series like 'Game of Thrones' or 'The Walking Dead' base their product around the characters and their background.

I know 'Dabangg' has some pre-requisites. Every film has some requisites that you have to fulfill. I sat down with my writer and discussed what as an audience I want to see in the second part of the film. We worked towards that and we hope what we thought connects with the audience.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character.

The real challenge in doing a TV show is in what I would call the maintenance energy. You take that creative energy and you use it every week, of course. But you then need to maintain the quality of the stories, and it's harder to do.

You know what I would really like to do? I'd like to do a half hour drama with comedy in it.

'Law and Order' is completely story-driven and completely characterless, really. If you do that format for five years and you're an actor, you're bound to get bored. It wears on you. And it was really wearing on me.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

Every story has its demands.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

I have things planned for every character like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations but I don't have how they overlap.

'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.