John Wells Quotations

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

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 grew up in a family that was very barbed and difficult, and there was a lot of humor. None of it was painless humor. All of it was at someone else's expense. It was kind of always about power.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn't go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that's because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents' faces.

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

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.

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

As an adult, you think of yourself as being someone else when you're away from your family, but when you come back to your family, you suddenly find yourself back in the exact same role that you always had in your family as a child and as a teenager.

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

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people.

I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about.

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

I'm interested in working with groups of actors to tell complicated stories about what's happening to people, and that's because I came out of the theatre where I worked in ensembles, and I really loved that.

If you don't have nerves and a little trepidation about any new project, then I don't think you're really alive.

I come from labor country. My mom was a teacher and was very involved in the teachers' union.

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.