If it is true that if you believe in something, you manifest it, there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus.
Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.
We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.
Molly Shannon such an interesting actress that portrays vulnerability and danger at the same time, because she seems brittle in that role.
Growing up, there were a lot of funerals that I attended, and the adults at the funerals went out of their way to make sure that I wasn't traumatized or overly depressed by them. So death is always a celebration of life for me, and it's also hugely dramatic.
We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.
I've never been one of those who is attracted to straight men. Like I always said, 'you're straight, so there's no point' and I have friends who are pursuers of the heterosexual men. They see it as conquests, which I think is a different thing and a more narcissistic thing. And not necessarily a healthy thing.
Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.
We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.
Hannibal is very much a secular story, even though we dance right up to the supernatural a few times in the show, and, arguably, you could say we dipped our toe in an instance or two.
Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category - and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship.
I think the progressive audience that loves Star Trek will be happy that we're continuing that tradition being progressive and all-inclusive. Star Trek's not necessarily a universe where I want to hear a lot of profanity.
We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.
I think because it is a very well-saturated story,episode of Justified in Hannibal, and we've all heard it in some frame of a story, we've heard the urban legend of waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing. It felt like if we are telling an organ-harvesting story, it was really about quickly selling the iconography of an organ-harvesting story, and then being able to mask that as a perfect way for Hannibal Lecter to go shopping for his menu.
For Hannibal, it's really about food as art and also, Hannibal's specific brand of art. And I guess I'm a bit of a foodie.
Food is life. Food is also very sensual, and in Pushing Daisies, pie being reflective of life and a man who was disconnected from the living but could bring the dead back to life being a pie maker felt like I got the symbolism of food as life.
I think Eddie Izzard is one of the brightest minds of our generation. I don't see him as a comedian as much as I see him as a philosopher. I hope I get to work with him on everything until I die, because I think he has a great mind and is a very talented actor.
Silence Of The Lambs is a fantastic film. It's a horror film, and it's an incredibly well-told film that is about point of view in such a unique way. The way that film is shot, the way the eyelines are so close, if not directly into camera, betrays an intimacy with the characters and the audience.
That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story.
You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?
I'm very hard on myself when it comes to writing.
I only eat meat, if I go to a nice restaurant and there is an exceptional dish, or if I'm at somebody's home for a dinner, I'll eat whatever is in front of me. Otherwise, I don't eat anything that walks around and has a face.
Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.
When I'm at home and I'm preparing my own food, it's all gluten-free, or fish and it's healthy, but when I go to someone else's house, I'll eat what they put in front of me because I don't want to be an asshole.
As an animal lover and as a sometime-meat-eater, I've read so much about the emotional sophistication of pigs and cows and sheep that I do think twice when I do still eat them on occasion.
