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" Any distraction tends to get in the way of being an effective gangster. "
Terence Winter
Effective
Gangster
Way
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" TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs. "
Terence Winter
Playing
Field
Competing
" I was a big fan of the show 'Deadwood' on HBO, which was created by David Milch. And as soon as I heard that all of those characters on Deadwood were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody. "
Terence Winter
Big
Real
People
" J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s. "
Terence Winter
Know
Interesting
Me
" I think that 'Vinyl''s faster-paced. I think 'Boardwalk' was much more luxurious in its storytelling. "
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I Think
Much
Storytelling
" I'm not exaggerating when I say 'Taxi Driver' was the movie that stopped me in my tracks. That was the first time it got me thinking about movies. "
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Time
First
Me
" There's nothing funnier for me than taking two characters and throwing them into a pressure cooker and letting them turn on each other. Especially if they already tend to be loud, aggressive, alpha types. That's sort of everything from 'The Honeymooners' to 'Goodfellas' to 'The Sopranos.' "
Terence Winter
Everything
Pressure
Nothing
" I wrote for 'The Sopranos' and worked on big, blustery characters for quite a while. "
Terence Winter
Characters
While
Wrote
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Morning
Conversation
Early
" When Prohibition was first enacted in 1920, most people stockpiled alcohol, thinking they'd have enough to last them for years. By 1923, that was starting to run out, so your average person started to rely more and more on criminals. "
Terence Winter
Run
Thinking
People
" Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel. "
Terence Winter
Like
Who
Absurd
" 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. "
Terence Winter
You
Paint
Humanity
" 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. "
Terence Winter
End
Control
You
" I think people, whether they realize they're doing it or not, seek out distractions to take their minds off what they know is bad behavior. "
Terence Winter
People
Think
Behavior
" I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed. "
Terence Winter
Market
Department
Crashed
" First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller. "
Terence Winter
Storyteller
Truthful
Want
" I think I sing a few songs, and I sing them well, and one of them is the mob genre, you know, as a writer. "
Terence Winter
Think
Sing
Know
" With an interesting character, there's always something to say. "
Terence Winter
Interesting
Character
Say
" I was always interested in the 1920s and the gangster world, in general. "
Terence Winter
World
General
Gangster
" It's challenging, in a way, but if you depict anyone with all the colors of human emotion and show those moments - with their families, with their children - the worst of us have elements of real humanity. "
Terence Winter
Moments
Children
Colors
" People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away. "
Terence Winter
Your
Away
People
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Myself
Time
World
" I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get. "
Terence Winter
Knowledge
You
Ignorance
" I look at the feature films that come out, and by and large, 85 percent of them are things I wouldn't in a million years sit down and watch. The more interesting storytelling is happening on television by a long shot. "
Terence Winter
Television
Look
Interesting
" If you're truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don't finish sentences. They don't say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people's ideas. "
Terence Winter
Ideas
Say
You
" I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life. "
Terence Winter
Story
Someone
You
" My favorite thing to write is people under pressure in high-stakes circumstances. "
Terence Winter
Write
People
Circumstances
" To get to work with my idol, Martin Scorsese, has just been lovely - the highlight of my career. "
Terence Winter
Lovely
Career
Idol
" I've had ideas for romantic comedies, but it would be a much more darkly comic version than what usually sells tickets. "
Terence Winter
Ideas
Comic
Than
" If you lose your house and your life savings to a broker, you'd probably throw them in the same category as the worst gangsters in history. Everybody's definition of carnage and evil is different. "
Terence Winter
Life
Evil
You
" One of the nicest things I ever read about our show was that a critic felt 'Boardwalk Empire' could be the beginning of the blur between television and cinema, because the production values are so high and the storytelling is so compelling. "
Terence Winter
Blur
Empire
Cinema