James Watkins Quotes

Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.

I’ve got lots of friends who would just think, ‘Horror movies – they’re crap, aren’t they?’ I think there’s a cultural snobbery more than an institutional one.

I do love a dark movie.

If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.

If you look at ‘The Sopranos,’ there’s this notion of a criminal element on its last legs.

Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.

Where previously the international underworld was a world of local, often-warring mafia territories, it has become globalised. The criminal has become corporate, and the corporate has become criminal. Organised crime has become very organised indeed.

It helps for actors if you have one director.

As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn’t have taken, so to be able to say, ‘This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I’ll live by,’ I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.

There’s nothing worse in television than what I call ‘poor man‘s Jerry Bruckheimer.’

We want ‘McMafia’ to be a tense gangster story but also a family story. It’s a collusion of those two worlds.

The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.

I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent – it feels fake.

Directing is an act of interpretation.

Rather than a horror film, a ghost story is different because a ghost is what you can’t quite see.