Damon Lindelof
Damon Lindelof
Damon Laurence Lindelofis an American television writer, producer, and film screenwriter, most noted as the co-creator and showrunner of the television series Lost. He has written for and produced Crossing Jordanand wrote for Nash Bridges. Lindelof also co-wrote the science fiction films Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Tomorrowland. He co-created the TV series The Leftovers for HBO, adapted from the novel by Tom Perrotta...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth24 April 1973
CityTeaneck, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
What's in the hatch is so intense/cool/complicated that it actually takes three full episodes to fully understand it. Fortunately, these are the first three episodes of the show, so the wait is over!
If you're constantly hamstrung by worry that people aren't going to like it, you can't do your job.
Lost is a mystery show, so I think that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature.
At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.
You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.
Part of the fun of the movie is understanding exactly why we called it Prometheus. And also, it sounds really pretentious, like Inception, so we were just like, "Yeah, that makes the movie sound really smart!" It's so much better then my original title, Explosion. Well, there might be an explosion in the movie.
I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I've seen all the shows, I've seen all the movies, but ultimately I just want a 2-hour movie that takes me to another time and place - something that entertains me.
If you do something awesome, you should be proud of yourself.
I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.
I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium.
As a storyteller, you also don't want to make people feel like they're left out, like other people who have read the book have an interior knowledge of this show, and the degree of difficulty in watching it is much higher.
Hire people you get along with, and then let them do what they do best.
Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?'
Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.