If you had told me in the Seventies and Eighties that TV would be as edgy or edgier than most films, and more intelligently written than most films, I wouldn't have believed it. There's great stuff out there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've done a lot of films that all have been pretty edgy.
In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.
I believe that movies are fast becoming antique and dinosauric as a medium. Film is a medium for the over-40s and television has gone the same way. If you're going to look towards the new generation, then of course you're going to have to be a lot more random, spontaneous, irreverent and provocative with your programming.
With the advent of cable and such, you guys are calling it the golden age of TV in terms of the writing and stuff. But it's like different branches of a big tree that TV has become.
Television has changed. Some feels like good old-fashioned TV, and some of it feels more filmic and more natural and more nuanced. I don't think there's any clear line any longer between film and TV.
Television is where the great movies that used to exist have gone.
Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.
Television is much better crafted today then in the 70s. The content is less positive but I'm one of those that feel our entertainment reflects our world, it's not a driver - art imitates life.
I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.
I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.