Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that. – Nic Pizzolatto
I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion. – Nic Pizzolatto
Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life. – Nic Pizzolatto
I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don’t have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it’s their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with. – Nic Pizzolatto
For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of ‘True Detective.’ – Nic Pizzolatto
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of ‘True Detective’ that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart’s voices. – Nic Pizzolatto
Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me. – Nic Pizzolatto
I read ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’ and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster. – Nic Pizzolatto
If there was one overarching theme to ‘True Detective,’ I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by – so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself. – Nic Pizzolatto
If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I’m familiar with it and I already have a take on it. – Nic Pizzolatto
I made ‘True Detective’ like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything. – Nic Pizzolatto
If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don’t think we’ll be doing ‘True Detective.’ – Nic Pizzolatto
There’s never been anything I didn’t love that I didn’t connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it. – Nic Pizzolatto
I don’t think you can create effectively toward expectation. I’m not in the service business. – Nic Pizzolatto
When you’re a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can’t even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius’ ‘The Meditations,’ that changes your life. – Nic Pizzolatto
If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it’s making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too. – Nic Pizzolatto
You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don’t know what they’re talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty. – Nic Pizzolatto
I’d want to bring a flamethrower to faculty meetings. The preciousness of academics and their fragile personalities would not be tolerated in any other business in the known universe. – Nic Pizzolatto
For me, the worst writing generally just ‘flips’ things: this person’s really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced ‘twist,’ I think. – Nic Pizzolatto
For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. – Nic Pizzolatto
I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism. – Nic Pizzolatto
