I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things.
— Sam Esmail
I never look at twists as a way to trick the audience. Obviously, I think a good story has surprises and unexpected turns, and you always want to do that with an audience. But it has nothing to do with conning them or making them believe so strongly in one thing and then kind of going the other way.
The fact you can manipulate people because you can hack them and learn everything about their personal lives - that's an immense amount of power.
One of my favorite Tarantino films is 'Jackie Brown,' and 'Jackie Brown' does it so well, where I'm watching the back half of that movie, and I don't know which side Jackie Brown is playing. I think it's really ingenious for Tarantino to keep us in the dark on that.
I've always said that the first season was the first act of my feature, so this is what I meant. I wanted the story of 'Mr. Robot' to be Elliot actually accomplishing his goal, setting the world into chaos. What would happen to society if something like this occurred where, basically, if the consumer-debt industry were to be erased?
I was anti-conformist.
Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.
On 'Mr. Robot,' because I run the writers' room and know every decision behind every line of dialogue, I'm able to be nimble and adapt with the scripts and the moments. I never have to question what I'm doing as I'm directing the actors or going through the scenes.
I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.
I went to NYU undergrad, then went to AFI for grad school.
I love voiceover. I never understood this idea that it was lazy. Well, yes, there are those movies or TV shows that use it as just a way to get out exposition. But you know what? That's just bad writing.
I don't think it's political to dislike Trump. I don't think it's controversial to say he's a bad president. He's clearly a bad president. He's clearly not equipped to do the job.
The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.
I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.
What resonates with me whenever I watch a great movie or TV show is the balance of inevitability and unpredictability. And it's a very delicate balance.
The one thing that I know from the personal experiences that I've had with hackers and from people in tech who are brilliant at this thing, is there's a lot of angst.
I love reading about other people's world view.
Girls rejected me a lot.
I'm very protective of my online life, and I try and take as many security measures.
I'm not saying I'm a control freak, though I'll admit that I am at times.
With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.
Music is everything to me. It's the heart and soul of a movie or TV show to me because it can be such an injection of tone, and I think tone is everything to a story.
You don't even know if the person you're communicating with online is actually that person. And your persona on your social media - your Facebook or Twitter - may not be the person you are in real life. So then, who is the real person? Is it somewhere in between?
With acting, a lot of it has to come from that real, honest place.
With some actors, if I have upward of 10 notes, I don't want to give them all 10 notes and overwhelm them. I usually parse them out three or four at a time.
It's weird; my fascination with tech was kind of combined with the fact that my parents would never pay for anything. It got me more involved because I would have to find clever ways to get things for free.
Do I want a character who just has the best motives and the best intentions, zero flaws, and is doing things for the right reasons? No!
The story of 'Mr. Robot' is really about this guy who's lonely - who's alone and feels so disconnected from the world.
A lot of unexpected things do happen on 'Mr. Robot.'
I never let the technical stuff get in the way of the storytelling.
Sound design is always critical, especially when you're doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.
I've seen shows that start to go down the path of fan service, and it really diminishes the quality.
I had a funny last name, and I didn't look like everybody else, and I got faced with a lot of racism.
You have to have that core creative team around you who's going to support your vision, and challenge and evolve it.
B. D. Wong is one of my favorite actors.
If you think about it, just the psychology of the superhero is, 'Because I can, I should protect people, and I should put bad guys away, and I should defend society.' But you're forming your own justice. There's no judge and jury here: you are it. That, in and of itself, is a very complicated way of looking at morality.
I think there is more cohesion when you have one director on set.
I absolutely don't deny that I was inspired by 'Fight Club,' among many other television shows and films. I completely not only acknowledge it, I own it and love to nod to them as much as possible.
Reality, in general, in my opinion, has gotten blurred.
I think I was told numerous times in the industry that nobody wants to watch a guy on a keyboard.
Tone is very important to me.
Typically, whenever you're envisioning how you're going to shoot something, you have a location or a set that you're going to build, and it's going to be built to specifications.
I went to film school to direct.
I use voiceover just like I use dialogue. There's a way to give out information or give out insight to the character or give out their worldview, and maybe you have to slip in exposition, but it's all about how you write it.
When I started thinking about 'Mr. Robot,' I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I'm going to tell.
When events like the Sony Hack or the news of the Russian hack of our election, we're not shocked by such events, but they are troubling.
I'm a huge fan of 'The Watch,' and I've also been on a few times. It's Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan's show on The Ringer. It's just a great podcast about television.
I think people are more than their heritage or their skin colour or their name or how they grew up.
The world is so heavily influenced by technology, and it has started to feel like it's not on solid ground. The world has become unreliable, unknowable. Facts are vulnerable, and things you have come to rely on are no longer there.
Growing up, my parents were very much about the Egyptian culture. They never really wanted to assimilate in American culture.
