Bryan Fuller Quotes

As a horror movie fan, I was very obsessed with horror films. Still am. I love the genre. For me, horror films are opera, and they are... instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it's Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. It is when the stakes are at their absolute largest in a story: whether somebody is going to live or die. In a way, it's just holding up a mirror to life.

In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.

I love that India has declared dolphins non-human people with all laws that apply to human. I'm fascinated with the alien-ness of that.

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

I've never been one of those to kind of like, 'I want somebody to do something against their nature to titillate me.' That never holds any interest. And I always want people to be who they are and if they're being not who they are I feel like it's false and, therefore, less easy to connect to. I don't need them to kiss or to display physical intimacy. I think that almost becomes too obvious. I love playing in the suggestive.

I'm not always successful, but I take my job as a storyteller very seriously and want to make sure the audience has as much fun watching it as I am creating it.

Relationships are now off-kilter.

It's very interesting to blur the line between eating human beings and eating animals, because I do think people should think more about what they put in their bodies, whether it is nutritionally or philosophically.

I think you have to write what you want to watch.

The idea of suggesting that Hannibal Lecter - in the book, he has a sixth finger and red eyes, and so there is a devilry in Thomas Harris' presentation - so it felt like it was completely honest and appropriate for the character. And we often talk in the writers' room, "Okay, there is the Hannibal as the devil explanation of that plot point, but we also need to ground that in a reality that is answerable to the physics of the storytelling."

I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."

It's such a surreal experience, being shot out of the cannon for any kind of first season show. It all seems very dreamlike.

Dr. Lecter would have more sustenance on the spacecraft from Alien because there are more people to eat. I think he'd get hungry after a while in the Overlook - I can't imagine him eating canned food.

I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.

Everything was so designed by Hannibal to break down Will in the first season, until Will's sanity became questionable. It's so much easier to believe that somebody losing their mind is capable of terrible things than it is to consider Frasier Crane, a charming, fun doctor who invites you to dinner. If you put those two in a police lineup, you're going to pick the guy who's melting down.

The definition of horror is pretty broad. What causes us "horror" is actually a many splendored thing (laughs). It can be hard to make horror accessible, and that's what I think Silence of the Lambs did so brilliantly - it was an accessible horror story, the villain was a monster, and the protagonist was pure of heart and upstanding so it had all of these great iconographic elements of classic storytelling. It was perceived less as a horror movie than an effective thriller, but make no mistake, it was a horror movie and was sort of sneaky that way.

What I enjoy about my work is that it's all things that I wanted to see as an audience member so there's part of me that understands what an audience wants to see in that respect.

It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.

I'm very hard on myself when it comes to writing.

Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre.

I've never been one of those who is attracted to straight men. Like I always said, 'you're straight, so there's no point' and I have friends who are pursuers of the heterosexual men. They see it as conquests, which I think is a different thing and a more narcissistic thing. And not necessarily a healthy thing.

Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.

We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.

International broadcasters are often dependent on an American home broadcasting network, so it changes the game entirely.

Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.

Molly Shannon such an interesting actress that portrays vulnerability and danger at the same time, because she seems brittle in that role.

Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.

If I were to remake a movie, I'd love to remake Halloween 3 Season of the Witch because even though it's a very flawed film, at its core is a brilliant idea: An evil toymaker is set to kill all the children of the world on Halloween night - and I think that's absolutely fantastic. So whoever has the rights can give me a call.

That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story.

If it is true that if you believe in something, you manifest it, there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus.

Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category - and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship.

I think the progressive audience that loves Star Trek will be happy that we're continuing that tradition being progressive and all-inclusive. Star Trek's not necessarily a universe where I want to hear a lot of profanity.

We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.

Our idea for Hannibal Lecter is that he's very reactionary - he's somebody who can adapt really well to circumstances.

For Hannibal, it's really about food as art and also, Hannibal's specific brand of art. And I guess I'm a bit of a foodie.

Food is life. Food is also very sensual, and in Pushing Daisies, pie being reflective of life and a man who was disconnected from the living but could bring the dead back to life being a pie maker felt like I got the symbolism of food as life.

I think Eddie Izzard is one of the brightest minds of our generation. I don't see him as a comedian as much as I see him as a philosopher. I hope I get to work with him on everything until I die, because I think he has a great mind and is a very talented actor.

Silence Of The Lambs is a fantastic film. It's a horror film, and it's an incredibly well-told film that is about point of view in such a unique way. The way that film is shot, the way the eyelines are so close, if not directly into camera, betrays an intimacy with the characters and the audience.

You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?

I only eat meat, if I go to a nice restaurant and there is an exceptional dish, or if I'm at somebody's home for a dinner, I'll eat whatever is in front of me. Otherwise, I don't eat anything that walks around and has a face.

A poor white woman from the South is different than a poor black woman from the South, and has a completely different experience.

Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

When I'm at home and I'm preparing my own food, it's all gluten-free, or fish and it's healthy, but when I go to someone else's house, I'll eat what they put in front of me because I don't want to be an asshole.

As an animal lover and as a sometime-meat-eater, I've read so much about the emotional sophistication of pigs and cows and sheep that I do think twice when I do still eat them on occasion.

If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.

Food is art, I believe. If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

Horror films have always been quite operatic for me. I always sort of scratch my head at people's offense to them. If you don't get them, and you don't like them, then don't watch them.