For me, I've always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.
— Lisa Joy
The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.
For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you're choosing that people don't consciously pick up on, but that they feel.
Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.
Working on 'Westworld' has been an incredible experience in learning to make something with the scope of a feature on a TV timeline with a budget nowhere near what you would expect for a feature film equivalent.
I've always had a problem with over-identification with inanimate objects.
When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.
Holding women to the idea of 'write what you know' subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it's also a chance to celebrate who we could be.
I personally am not so obsessed about immortality for myself. The human body has been designed that way, obsolescence is OK.
How many of us have these demons or habits or things we don't like about ourselves and understand the loops that we're in and yet are unable to break out of them and create lasting change within ourselves?
Don't just sit there dreaming; dreaming is the luxury of the rich.
I've tried to always be incredibly overprepared in everything that I've done.
I had a lot of college debt. It's very difficult to go to a university that is as expensive as Stanford and then blindly follow your passions when they don't immediately make money out of the gate.
What does the future of 'Westworld' look like? I don't necessarily think that we've seen the last of these artificial worlds that are central to the concept of our series as a whole. But the major lens that we will have is going to be the real world.
When we were thinking of 'Westworld' and doing it with HBO, what they really showed us is that they have the ambition in their network, and they value production value as much as we did, and that that would be a perfect place to do a show of this scope and this ambition.
Part of what you try and do when you're writing is to just transcend politics and the moment in a way and talk about something, those fundamental building blocks of building nature.
If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.
Our memories, the way we tend to experience them, are sort of fuzzy around the edges, like a watercolor that has bled into the past and is not totally clear.
I don't see much of myself in the traditional Western hero.
The sad thing is I don't think I've seen 'Jurassic Park.' Not that it's not an amazing movie, I literally didn't watch film or TV until I was 23 or something.
Fiction has always been a way of examining society and its flaws and trying to expose them.
Another writer might question whether you're feeling competitive. But if I talk to Jonah, I know that he truly values my success more than his own. And I truly value his success more than my own. There's a generosity there.
I would say that, between us, I tend to be a little bit more philosophically optimistic. Jonah, I think he sees things as more finite.
Being a lawyer, it's like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it's lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.
The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.
I feel like there is just never a good time for taking a chance and following your dreams - whatever those dreams are.
No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.
Since time immemorial we've explored these ideas of tragedy, the things people do for love, the great weight that occurs when love is taken away and the great length and the heroism that people will exhibit to fight for the ones that they love.
You see in moments of duress not only the darkest parts of human nature but also the brightest, the most noble.
One of the many delights that I found in directing was that you plan so many things so meticulously so that they go smoothly. But you also have to leave time and space for spontaneous emotional moments to arise.
I've always been fascinated by memory and I remember Jonah, when we first started dating, was working on something involving memory. It was early on in our relationship and I was like, damn it, I wanted to do a movie on memory. That was 'Memento.'
I do love Westerns. But, in a way, traditional Westerns, for me, have been hard to love viscerally and personally.
If you play a game like 'Grand Theft Auto' you don't go home afterwards and cry because you ran over a couple characters, because you do not give them personhood.
It's important to have people who will question you occasionally.
I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.
We can understand both our nature and our nurture, but understanding is only the first step.
A lot of times, people say, 'My work didn't suffer with family.' I would go a step further: My career only flourished upon having children. It got better.
The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not 'dream big,' but strive big.
I wanted to go to Harvard because it felt like it would be the Hogwarts Academy of law schools.
I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.
