Bryan Fuller Quotations

The more real the murder is, the less interested I am in seeing it. It's hard enough to watch the news.

I love actors, and I love the casting process. It's funny, like, some writers don't like actors because, I think, they are the faces of the show, and so you feel sort of secondary, but I love actors because they elevate the material; they make it better.

When you are developing something, you have to look at it individually. You can't compare and contrast it to the projects around it, because that way madness lies.

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. Where if you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things.

I got into writing to become a 'Star Trek' writer. I was a rabid fan. I had shelves and shelves and shelves of action figures in my bedroom that scared away more dates than I care to admit to.

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.

What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie.

For me, nudity and strong language have never been huge loadbearing elements of how I like to tell a story. Graphic images certainly are.

I like working, and my brain sort of keeps going whether I like it or not.

I love horror, fantasy and sci-fi. Those are my genres of love and devotion.

I was such a huge fan of 'The X-Files.'

I'm incredibly proud of 'Hannibal' and the cast - I feel like we're doing really good television.

If I go to your home, and you're cooking me a meal, I will eat whatever you put in front of me.

If somebody is mean or rude, I just, I don't engage - just block and say, 'Well, that's not very polite.'

If you're trying to make a recipe that you're not even going to bother tasting, you're doing something wrong.

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.

I felt, selfishly, that if there was going to be a TV show about 'Hannibal Lecter' whether I was going to be involved or not, I'd rather be involved. I wanted to make sure it was something I wanted to watch.

I read 'Red Dragon' back in high school. I love Thomas Harris' approach to the crime thriller that crossed over into horror in a way that nobody really tapped into.

I think one of the things that was a huge surprise to everyone with 'Silence of the Lambs' was that that was an Oscar-winning horror movie. It struck such a nerve with audiences that it was a very particular, special experience.

One of the things that's important for anybody adapting source material that is primarily a male buddy picture is to find ways to latch on to strong female characters in the piece and bring them to the forefront and celebrate their point of view alongside the men; otherwise, it becomes a sausage party, and it's a singular point of view.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you see the blood, then there's an easy association of the violence. The violence that happens when there isn't blood is actually much more subversive and unsettling.

There's usually a few people who are like, "Say... what would that look like on our channel?" Interest can be expressed without directly expressing interest.

You can't measure a dog's intelligence by giving him a verbal test 'cause it's not on their scale, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent creatures.

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

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.

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.

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

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

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.

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

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."

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.

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.

I think accessibility is what often denies horror its deserved attention. So it all depends on the execution and whether mainstream audiences can accept it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People who have passion for horror stories, their appreciation/my appreciation is looking at it as opera.