If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.
Food is art, I believe. If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way.
I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.
Horror films have always been quite operatic for me. I always sort of scratch my head at people's offense to them. If you don't get them, and you don't like them, then don't watch them.
If you see the blood, then there's an easy association of the violence. The violence that happens when there isn't blood is actually much more subversive and unsettling.
A poor white woman from the South is different than a poor black woman from the South, and has a completely different experience.
It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.
Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.
It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.
What I enjoy about my work is that it's all things that I wanted to see as an audience member so there's part of me that understands what an audience wants to see in that respect.
I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.
It's such a surreal experience, being shot out of the cannon for any kind of first season show. It all seems very dreamlike.
If I were to remake a movie, I'd love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it's a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night - and I think that's absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call.
Dr. Lecter would have more sustenance on the spacecraft from Alien because there are more people to eat. I think he'd get hungry after a while in the Overlook - I can't imagine him eating canned food.
Everything was so designed by Hannibal to break down Will in the first season, until Will's sanity became questionable. It's so much easier to believe that somebody losing their mind is capable of terrible things than it is to consider Frasier Crane, a charming, fun doctor who invites you to dinner. If you put those two in a police lineup, you're going to pick the guy who's melting down.
Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre.
I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."
International broadcasters are often dependent on an American home broadcasting network, so it changes the game entirely.
