Mitchell Hurwitz Quotations

Character is what someone does, much more than who they are. I can be sarcastic or I can be fearful, but it doesn't really matter until there's a story - until someone comes in and holds us hostage.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

I had a cookie business there, with my brother, when we were growing up, called the Chip Yard, and that became the inspiration for the banana stand. My father said that he wanted us to develop a work ethic, so we'd sit there selling cookies, all day.

Netflix will know everything. Netflix will know when a person stops watching it. They have all of their algorithms and will know that this person watched five minutes of a show and then stopped. They can tell by the behavior and the time of day that they are going to come back to it, based on their history.

The revolution is here. It's established that Netflix is a place where you can get premium content. It's a whole new world. It's very interesting. We'll be discovering it together. It's going to be interesting because they don't have a lot to compare it to.

I will tell you that we're all human beings, and we all care about what people think of us. But in general, their outlook is, "We're not looking at opening night numbers. We're not looking at opening night box office. We want this to be part of the reason you come to our service."

If you've got a restaurant, you definitely want the line to be out the door the first night, but you're more interested in people continuing to come to the restaurant. And that's their outlook, a little bit. I think it allows for more creativity, in the process. It allows people to make interesting programming that maybe wouldn't have a place on broadcast networks, if you were just counting people.

I think that timing is everything. At first, it was too soon. And then, the time was right, but I was busy with other things, and the cast was busy with other things. By the time we sat down to work on the movie, enough time had passed that suddenly a different story emerged.

There were a couple times when we started working out the stories - and I was doing this with Jim Vallely and our friend Dean Lorey, who was on the show originally - and we were working on a movie. There would be some fan fiction things that would scoop us. It happened a couple times, where I thought, "Well, we can't do that!"

One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.