Landgraf Quotes & Sayings

I read a lot; I tried to understand the mechanisms that made the books I liked successful, and I went that route. So, as for readers - when I think about them I like to think they read the same books I do. — Kevin Keck

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting. Even some of our best shows have had substantial re-shoots and reworking before they've gone on the air. — John Landgraf

It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy. — John Landgraf

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX. — John Landgraf

I wanted to get more serialized. I had this idea for an event that would click onto everybody's mortality. I said, "I want somebody to die." Fortunately for me, when I was toying with that idea, John Landgraf, who's the head of FX but also a very smart executive, came up with the idea of the ashes in the maracas. He called me up and said, "Listen, what about this, they get the ashes in a box and when they get them, they shake them and they sound like maracas." And I was like, "Okay, now I've got my throughline." — Denis Leary

I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since. — Miles Davis

I think a shotgun or a handgun that has a six-round clip is a very good, perfectly adequate weapon for self-defense, in the home. You simply can't create that kind of mayhem, if you have to reload. — John Landgraf

The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big. — Marya Hornbacher

Reality television was in some ways being unimaginative at that time. We were excited about the possibilities of the form, to use real people as your stars, to not be about winning, to be about going on complicated, challenging, funny, dramatic journeys. — John Landgraf

For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character. — John Landgraf

I think maybe the most important thing that I or anybody at my company and any of my colleagues can do is establish a trusting, productive, collaborative relationship with creative people. — John Landgraf

I think the possibility of continuing on a comedy is greater than a drama. — John Landgraf

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised. — John Landgraf

If you think about how broadcast mini-series approach historical events, there is a hagiography. There has been a soft, very glossy idea about history. And one of the things I like about Game of Thrones, for example, is just the grit and the authenticity. — John Landgraf

When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before. — Nat Turner

The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives. — Anthony Bourdain

Murder! Sex! Violence! Hardships! Mayhem! Struggle! Love! Camaraderie!...what's not to like? — Larry Landgraf

There are no characters in the limited series Fargo that are derived from the characters in the film Fargo. It's hard to describe how remarkably true to the film the show is. — John Landgraf

The amount of competition is just literally insane. — John Landgraf

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. — Steve Jobs

We also have a piece about the Mayflower, but it's just a very different, very gritty, very character-driven version of why those people were on that boat and what the experience was like for them, emotionally, physically and spiritually, and also the Native Americans and what the state of Native American society was at that time. — John Landgraf

I don't think I ever had any relationship with any showrunner, over time, with whom I didn't have conflict. — John Landgraf

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti. — John Landgraf

All my life I had been living. How to imagine any other state? — Leila Aboulela

One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new. — Jennifer DuBois