Alan Taylor

I've been sort of spoiled on the TV end because HBO feels like a small institution making independent movies. There's respect for the director's contribution in a way that mainstream television doesn't really reflect, I don't think.

There's a natural human compulsion to chase after freedom and then to actually hand it over as fast as possible and get away from it.

Compared to TV, 'Palookaville' was restriction-free, except we had no money and no time.

I come out of TV, where you never reshoot, because you don't have time. If you do reshoot, it's because someone really screwed up.

On 'Game of Thrones,' I remember shooting in Croatia, and by lunchtime we'd see photos of what we'd shot online and think, 'My God - people really care.'

Most people aren't lying awake at night worrying about a nuclear threat. But we are unnerved by a lot of how technology is coming into our lives and starting to infuse our lives. And we question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

On 'Game of Thrones,' we always shoot away from the green screen because it's bloody expensive to shoot green screen.

The funny thing is more money doesn't necessarily get you what you think it's going to get you and the way where it does get you more value on screen.

I had been trying to make movies, but they were really hard to get made. TV wound up, by surprise, a much more fulfilling place to work. That said, I've always been drawn to make movies.

There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.