John Wells Quotes

I was a directing student and a production design student at Carnegie Mellon. I went in as a production design student and became a directing student.

You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want, and I'm sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns, and that leads to all kinds of decisions.

My experience has been that actors always want to be directed.

I love working with actors, and it's all been based on my being trained in the theater.

You want to mix acting styles correctly. People approach the work in different ways. You want to make sure no one wants to kill each other because the approach is different.

As people, we're generally optimistic, no matter how disabled our lives are, and we find the humor in the darkest situations.

It is harder to get adult, character-driven material on television than it used to be, but there are lots of other places that you can go to sell it. If you can do it for basic cable or pay cable, we have those outlets.

You have to have wonderful actors for material, particularly difficult material that requires complicated performances.

Producing small films, you usually have four or five people you want, and you hope one of them will say they'll do it.

A show like 'True Detective' is definitely a drama.

I think we all are kind of colored by whatever we were raised with or what we came up believing in.

People say to me, 'Well, how do you direct Meryl Streep?' You're not wandering over to Meryl telling her how to act. She's an extraordinary talent and unbelievably hard working; she works harder than anyone I have ever worked with before.

One of the great things and one of the horrible things about the American character is this extraordinary optimism and arrogance that everything will continue to be great and keep looking up.

I was very fortunate in all of my career in television to have a lot of things that received a lot of awards recognition.