I need to be believe that dragons are real. I want them be a real thing.
— Lisa Joy
It's wonderful to work with actors we haven't worked with before.
The appealing thing to me about Wonder Woman is the question of, who is this woman in tights and leotard walking around? What's her story and how does it resonate with women today?
At first, 'Westworld' was a project we had declined to do.
When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.
What's so bad about Google knowing I need Kleenex? Look at it in the aggregate - see how information... can be used to target people based on their profiles and change the course of human history, as I believe it is already beginning to do. This knowledge that I need Kleenex has bigger complications than just needing Kleenex.
One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not.
I try not to look at press. However, I have a mother, who will gladly tell me what's going on out there.
I didn't need a harassment scandal to break out in Hollywood or misogynistic people in government to know they exist. Anybody who's a woman, a minority, or a thinking, perceiving male can see that it exists.
Westworld is an examination of human nature: the best parts of human nature... but also, violence, sexual violence have sadly been a fact of human history since the beginning of human history.
The sensibility I brought to directing was similar to what I bring when I write.
We subverted the entire premise of 'Westworld' in that our sympathies are meant to be with the robots, the hosts.
And I think the greatest danger that AI poses isn't so much these anthropomorphic beings who look like us and are beguiling are going to fool us. It's the fact that a intelligence without a body or corporeal form will fool us into trusting it with data, which we seem to think is... it has no repercussions.
For me, writing became a way of processing not just my own experiences, but the experiences of other people, and their pain.
I was actually born a robot, so 'Westworld' is just autobiographical.
But I'm the child of a tiger mom.
I think it's a very powerful notion, the notion that our personal views, although closely held, are not necessarily right. That part of what is noble is making sure there are checks and balances and a plurality of opinions.
There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.
Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there's a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can't get rid of violence.
I've been looking for a superhero I could tune into and relate to for years, and when nobody stepped in to take the place of 'Buffy' in my poor soul, I thought, 'Maybe I can create somebody!' That's how 'Headache' came to be.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't think it would really be possible.
But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.
I log on and there are so many cookies embedded in my computer - it's like they know what I need before I do.
The most damaging part of pervasive bias, whether it's implicit or complicit because sometimes it can be well-intentioned, is when that bias gets internalized and women start self-centering and stop thinking that they're incapable of achieving what they want and achieve empowerment.
Feeling trapped in identity isn't just the purview of women and minorities.
The reality is that 'Westworld' is designed so that guests can indulge with impunity their every fantasy - be it light or dark. So the hosts experience the extremes in human behavior, good and bad.
I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.
You have to be very specific with the suggestions of how you want to show things, not just with dialogue but also place and mood. I write all of that as very vivid guidelines so directors can come in and do what they will with them.
I grew up in Asia, and I remember as a little kid being in Taiwan watching films there and being so awed by these new worlds of entertainment.
I think the thing that will endure about Westworld will be the questions it poses.
Even though I grew up in America, at home we spoke mostly Chinese, because my mom is from Taiwan.
Nobody ever has a problem if a man writes a woman. I wanted to be able to say, 'Well, I can write your men and your action, too. You don't just have to give me the love scenes, which I don't even think are my strong suit.'
You know, both my parents aren't really from this country, and the emphasis was really on education and studying, and TV seemed like it was not the best use of my time for my parents. So ironically, of course, I rebelled completely and now it's how I make a living.
America is built on the labors of the oppressed.
There's nowhere that looks like Singapore; it's absolutely beautiful on a purely aesthetic level.
I think that sense of wonderment, where you walk out expecting the ordinary and are confronted by the extraordinary, is something that has always interested me, whether in TV or comic books.
In 'Lost,' they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. And that's absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.
When I used to watch Westerns, I could admire the craft, but I never really loved them; they never spoke to me. Maybe because I'm first-generation American, I'm a woman, and I just didn't see myself reflected.
In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.
Audiences are just like us as writers - we grow attached to characters. In certain ways you don't want them to change.
And nowadays, the idea of AI is not really science fiction anymore - it's just science fact.
Traditional westerns typify some of the hardships men face: you have to be rugged, silent, stoic. It's a man against nature, against the world.
We drive a Tesla.
When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.
There are no coincidences in 'Westworld.'
The ways in which mankind tends to invent technology is because we have this drive to create and to innovate, and we don't necessarily pump the brakes when we're doing it.
When I play 'Grand Theft Auto,' I'm such a nerdy little law abider because I've always had this active imagination in which I sympathize and empathize with things.
Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I'd wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I'd sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.
I represent opportunities for other women and other people of color, and I'm trying to start my own kind of movement.
There are very few video games where there are - like, completely pacifistic - and if there are, I tend to play them - 'Dance Dance Revolution,' there was a game called 'Flower' that I really enjoy.
