Terence Winter
Terence Winter
Terence Patrick Winter is an American writer and producer of television and film. He is the creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire. Before creating Boardwalk Empire, Winter was a writer and executive producer for the HBO television series The Sopranos, from the show's second to sixth and final season. In 2013, he wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth2 October 1960
CountryUnited States of America
As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.
Eventually we all run out of road.
Any distraction tends to get in the way of being an effective gangster.
I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed.
I'm always amazed by writers who say, "Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit." I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That's my process.
Now, the big box office successes are superhero stories. It seems there's a lowest common denominator mentality, in terms of movies that are almost purely visual, that anyone can understand anywhere in the world. Good robot, bad robot: they fight. You don't need to know anything apart from that. And then we can make toys that look like that robot - and sell those toys or video games.
I guess ... I'm going to get that ice cream sundae they give you on the airplane. I usually pass on that, but I think I'm actually going to get extra whipped cream and maybe even the chocolate syrup. I'm really winging it here. I'm going to be flying. It's really a little too early to start drinking.
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.
Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why.
Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.
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.
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.
During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.
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.