Jonathan Nolan Quotes

The whole thing of doing a TV series, I find it very daunting not knowing where the story's going.

I know what it takes to go from the point where someone's looking at a newspaper article, and thinking, 'Oh, this would make a great TV series,' to the point where you're actually on a set and there's a camera aimed at someone.

Now that I know what goes into making a pilot, keeping it on the air, and keeping your fans, I'm at a point now where I do a pilot and just hope for the best. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.

When you're making a television show, it's about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.

With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.

Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.

I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.

If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.

And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.

As a storyteller, I think where working in television can almost be like lifting weights - you really have to know what your story is about.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

The director of the [Grimm] pilot called me in. I had worked on a pilot called Love Bites with him, and the producers I worked on with on Hot In Cleveland, so they knew me from comedic worlds, and they wanted someone who could be light too. Because it is pretty heavy.

A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

I always wanted it to be multi-cam from the beginning. In the first seeds of the idea, I wanted a live audience, multi-cam show. That was very important for me.

Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it’s about finding him; he comes in in the third act.

Every time I do a movie, I'm reading the script, or if it's something I have coming up, I'm reading the script, and I just spend hours and hours and days and weeks and months going over the script and just writing a lot of different ideas down, finding a little dialogue or just coming up with ideas for scenes and moments and all that kind of stuff.

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.

Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around.

There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.

Why this character [Doctor Strange] is being introduced, to open up the next chapter. A

Generally I try to be on set as much as possible, especially during the early part of a season. I read all of the outlines and scripts and look at the auditions and the cuts for my other shows and give notes on all of that. There's a lot to do, but I enjoy nothing more than being on set because that's where the magic happens.

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.