Bruno Heller Quotations

The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?

When I've had hard times in my life, the one thing about being in TV is that it's positive. I withdrew to 'Cheers,' it was familiar in that it was family. It had a kind of realistic positiveness to it.

You always think, no matter how many times you fail, that the next time you will succeed. Otherwise you wouldn't keep trying.

I think when people talk about lighter drama, they tend to use that term, not derogatorily, but 'lighter' means sort of less to a degree, but if you're an actor, light drama is often mistaken for easier drama.

There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network.

It gives me vertigo to watch TV dramas.

Never name a show after a character if you want to be the guy running the show.

You name the TV psychic - they're con men.

A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

he beauty of this world [of comics] is there are so many stories to tell, and there's so many wonderful characters. Wonderful characters we haven't even begun to introduce - it's a world that is infinitely expandable.

You can't be someone you're not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can't hide.

One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I've been on the other end of that.

When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it's really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.

It's easy to leave people wanting more after the first episode, but it's hard to leave people wanting more after the 24th episode. And it's my job, more than anybody else's, to keep that in mind. One season, in TV terms, is nothing. You need to hit it for three or four seasons, and then you're doing well, in TV terms. Then, you've done your job.

Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same .. there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone.

One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing.

The great thing about Gotham is it encompasses so many different worlds.

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

It's like an angel crying on your tongue.

One of the advantages of series TV is that you can change your mind and plan things as you go.

I essentially took the seed of that idea to try to tell a big, historical epic, but from the street level, the everyman's point of view.

(He) must have been a very strange and brilliant man. He ... created a new way of operating a society that lasted for another 500 years.

He's a known character. We designed it so that when you see Caesar, it's through other people's eyes, it's how the people around him see him. Because, to a degree, a character like Caesar is always unknowable.

Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same ... there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone.

I think it was a brutal time filled with people who were strangely sophisticated and uncivilized. Over the years movies tended to take a Victorian gentleman's view of this world ù all marbleized sets and men. But Caesar was a great warrior and writer and a war criminal, by our definition. ...There was a dichotomy between sophistication and viciousness that was specifically Roman.

Film is still an art there, as opposed to an industry.

There he was in the Forum, bellowing at these soldiers, and the whole thing was entirely real. It was a very strange moment. Everyone felt a shiver.

Rome from street level. (It's) Rome from the point of view of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary events of that time.

It was a moment in history that's pivotal in western history. If things hadn't turned out the way they did at that particular point, the world that we live in now would be very different ... It's the transformation of a republic into an empire. I think America is dealing with that issue just now.

It was important to us to get the facts right, but more important the spirit of the times, to be very precise about this moment in history. It was important to get the fine detail right so that you felt that you were in a real world.

It's the transformation of a republic into an empire. I think America is dealing with that issue right now.

The novel aspect is that it's about everyday life in a time of great historical import.

Everyone is on tenterhooks to see how it is received.

If there is an HBO style, it's a merciless attention to the truth and reality of things.

Caesar was frightening to be around ... if ever anyone was born to be a king, he was. But they (the Romans) had an ancestral fear of kings, similar to the American fear to a degree ? pride in their liberty.

You can't understand that period of history unless it shocks you.