Terence Winter
Terence Winter
Terence Patrick Winter is an American writer and producer of television and film. He is the creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire. Before creating Boardwalk Empire, Winter was a writer and executive producer for the HBO television series The Sopranos, from the show's second to sixth and final season. In 2013, he wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth2 October 1960
CountryUnited States of America
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.
As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.
Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why.
People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away.
Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.
I tend not to read reviews; there's too much out there in cyberspace.
First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.
Very often at the end of 'The Sopranos' you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it.
For me, I need to fully immerse myself in a script to the point where I'm literally locking myself away for weeks at a time and I just write it. So I can write twelve to fifteen hours in a day, with breaks in between, obviously, but I need to just sort of live within the world of the script.
During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.
One FBI agent told us early on that on Monday morning, they would get to the FBI office, and all the agents would talk about 'The Sopranos', having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side.
The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.