One of the things I've learned by working on the 'Walking Dead' and other TV shows is to be more tolerant of other people's process.
If you're going to run a small business, you need to know what everyone is doing, be the first one in and the last one out, and work weekends.
Sharing information with employees makes them feel invested.
I usually dive head first and am really excited about that changes.
It's better to grow your employees, steer them into a place that they can learn and succeed, and want to work hard and be loyal, than to have a revolving door of employees. That's demoralizing.
When you're managing an emergency department, you're trying to keep everybody calm, so when an emergency comes in the door, everyone can do their best work.
I think horror films always have to be as simple as possible.
Nobody can survive alone, in this world. People have bonds, and sometimes those bonds are broken. And then, that person goes spinning off and connects with someone else.
The key things I learned as a hospital administrator are to be organized, communicate, and be flexible.
Don't forget, I've been fired by studios; I'm not the studio's guy. I'm a guy who can work with studios, but if you ask any studio, I stand up to these people.
I created a show called 'Crash' for Starz, which was their first original drama, and that was not a good experience. I had a great time working with the cast and crew, but it was a young network and an intrusive studio, and to be honest I didn't really enjoy the movie 'Crash.
The comic book, and I've said it before, is a treasure trove. It's a grab bag. We certainly have characters and story lines that we really want to do - but to get there in a TV series, you have to take your time. Sometimes you can't get right to it. They're two different mediums. So we make it our own and really own the material. I like to think of it as an alternate universe.
I went to NYU undergraduate, then for a Master's in English, and got a summer job at St. Vincent's. I was a ward clerk handling everything in an intensive care unit.
My time as showrunner on The Walking Dead has been an amazing experience, but after I finish season three, it’s time to move on. I have told the stories I wanted to tell and connected with our fans on a level that I never imagined. It doesn’t get much better than that. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey.
That's the holy grail as a TV writer, to work on a story that you care about and to put it out there and for it to find the audience and connect with fans and connect with critics.
In TV and film, a little goes a long way. I see the show as horror so a lot of the [violence] is suggested. But it is violent. It is gory. I don't see any need to up the gore. Just to keep it as real and visceral as possible.
A lot of what I do as a showrunner is anxiety control. People get nervous when they don't know what's going on, so a big part of my job is making sure everyone has all of the information all of the time.
I lot of the show's I do are low tech. This is low tech. There's a bit of high adventure here. There's difficult emotional choices. So actually this feels like a natural progression of everything I've been doing before this.
People tweet me all the time and tell me how much they love it, how they can't wait for the show to come back on, that they're addicted to the show. So that's really rewarding. As an artist, we're all looking for that connection to an audience and when you find people as diehard as our fans are - it's sort of like finding the holy grail.
There are very few horror shows, where you have a long running arc. Most horror shows play as a sort of an anthology. Buffy - a terrific show - had the-demon-of-the-week. Twilight Zone - X Files - these things had an anthology approach. Our show is a long running drama with the same creatures every week.
You really have to do your job as a writer and push people to be as creative as possible. What's nice about the TV medium is you have such a connection to the characters that when somebody dies, the audience cries. They really feel it. You really don't cry when someone dies in a horror movie.
