Alan Taylor Quotes

On ‘Game of Thrones,’ we always shoot away from the green screen because it’s bloody expensive to shoot green screen.

I’ve been sort of spoiled on the TV end because HBO feels like a small institution making independent movies. There’s respect for the director‘s contribution in a way that mainstream television doesn’t really reflect, I don’t think.

I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.

Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.

Compared to TV, ‘Palookaville’ was restriction-free, except we had no money and no time.

I come out of TV, where you never reshoot, because you don’t have time. If you do reshoot, it’s because someone really screwed up.

When I was going to film school, before film school, my hero was David Lynch.

When you direct a movie that makes no money whatsoever, there is no rush to your door for the next one.

The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post, it turned into a different movie.

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that’s a thrill for me.

My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

It’s been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.

I had been trying to make movies, but they were really hard to get made. TV wound up, by surprise, a much more fulfilling place to work. That said, I’ve always been drawn to make movies.

I love things that have one foot in history – I was going to be a history professor before I sold out and went into TV.

I’m not a shouter, but I like to put my stamp on things.

There’s a very devoted fan base that really loved ‘T1’ and ‘T2’ and felt burned by ‘T3’ and ‘T4,’ so when we said, ‘We’re going to do it again!’ the reaction was, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa – what do you think you’re doing?’

Coming off ‘Sopranos‘ and ‘Mad Men,’ I was starting to feel like I was being spoiled creatively. I wanted to move forward as a director in TV and get more involved in the process. After having those two great experiences, doing regular episodic TV wouldn’t be quite the thrill.

I think calling for more women in every aspect of this industry is a sensible thing.

There’s a way in which filmmaking is a director’s medium and television is a writer‘s medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it’s still guided by the writer.

The funny thing is more money doesn’t necessarily get you what you think it’s going to get you and the way where it does get you more value on screen.

I have this thing for anything Italian.