Amy Sherman-Palladino Quotes

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

The director is the ultimate creative arbiter of what's going to happen. And as a director myself, you really appreciate collaborating with people who are trying to help you find what you need and what you want.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

I have a very clear vision, and I come from film, where director is God, so if there's a clash, it's painful.

It's really hard as a screenwriter, you feel like you have a vision and then you turn it over to a director and you have to let it go.

I think there's a tendency with actor/directors to imagine themselves playing every part and trying to get people to follow their rhythm, their tempo, their pace. I've learned now to just love being at the center of this creative swirl.

I'm worried a lot of our work day as artists is a producer's creation - not an artist's creation.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

When people slave over those scripts and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, they don't usually want you to add farts.

I was the only person at Univision who had complete creative control of my own show, by contract. They didn't like that. I was the executive producer; I owned the studio where we taped. I decided who went on my show and who didn't.

It's good to please the network, but you really just have to tell the stories you want to tell, and if you try to please other people, it ends up starting to water stuff down. Those decisions we have to make are hard, but we usually just err on the side of 'What would we want to see?'

When I did 'Stardust,' I was fighting the studio for things I believed were right.

The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.

I believe in Danny Boyle. I really do. I know that he's not going to pull the trigger on something if it's not right.

What's so great about DreamWorks is that it's run by filmmakers who believe that if it's not broke, don't fix it.

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there'd always be beats where I'd go, 'Oh... well, that's skilful, in a way, but it doesn't get the flavour I'd intended in the script.'

I'll put it this way: with the kind of films that I do - creatively driven, with interesting directors and writers - I don't feel the need to work with the super established, top-tier directors that are out there.

I just want to make TV that I want to see.

When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.

I'd love more production houses to encourage artists to create what they want and not just churn things out.

Television offered me the opportunity to do new things; I had written a lot of scripts other than scary movies. I had actually written some romantic comedies and stuff that I really wanted to try my hand at, and nobody would let me do that. Television allowed me to do anything I wanted.

You have to fight to get your show not only on the air but then to keep it what it is and make sure that it doesn't get manipulated into something else.