I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

I am a salesman, I am an executive, I look at budgets, I think about power politics, but then I am also a creative person.

The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That's not the case at FX.

'Legion' is meant to be a show that is a state of mind. But the problem with TV is that there are commercials. There's a hypnotic quality to the way we put it together. I need to get you out of your life in the first seven minutes of that show.

TV is all about learning to write in someone else's voice, so if you do it long enough without selling your own project, they assume you don't have your own voice; you're just a good mimic.

The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.

What makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points.

People, they don't know how to bend; they just break.

I'm on a lot of airplanes. There are definitely times when I just vapor-lock. I'm on the plane, and I have so much to do, I just don't know what to do. It never lasts for very long. It might last for the flight.

One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.

In 'The X-Men' world, one can be a hero one day and a villain the next, which means there's a constant battle for a character's soul that's dynamic. I find that really fascinating.

I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world.

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.

If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.

What success has done is present me with a lot of opportunities, and I haven't necessarily learned to say 'no' as well as I should have.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

Obviously, when you do something with drama and comedy in it - and by that, I mean a scene that has drama and comedy in it - you know the minute you introduce music, you're either scoring the drama or you're scoring the comedy, and therefore the scene becomes either dramatic or comedic.

Tension is all about, 'Why is this taking so long?' The interesting thing about that is that it's also the tension of comedy. The tension of drama and comedy is similar, and that's why usually you can get a big laugh in a really tense moment because people need that release.

I'm attracted to ensembles: you get a lot of really good moving pieces. It's sort of like a horse race in a way, especially when you know that everyone is on this collision course. It's like, 'Who's going to make it?' And you can put people together in unexpected pairings.

The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there's no such thing. There's just actors.

Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president.