Best 13 quotes of Alex Kurtzman on MyQuotes

By actually taking Sleepy Hollow and the Rip Van Winkle story, and finding the spirit of what was great about both of them and putting them together. So it felt, actually, like one of those ideas that clicked for us, right away, on instinct.

I asked a director once what the secret of it all was, and he said you have to be so prepared that you are willing to throw all your preparation away in the moment when you see something better. That's a phenomenal piece of advice. It's been my compass through the process of making films. But you can really only do that if you're prepared. You can't wing it.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

In fact, we actually listen to fans all the time. It's helpful because you want to get a sense of what people are looking for and what they disagree with.

I think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.

I think what all the Universal monster movies are defined by, and what makes them very special, is that it's really the only genre entirely unto itself, in which you fear the monster and fear for the monster. That's a very hard thing to do. To fear for and fear at the same time is extremely unique.

I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.

We were such fans of Sleepy Hollow, in all of its iterations - growing up with the Disney show, and then Tim Burton's and, obviously, the most important being Washington Irving's short story. It evokes and invokes a very specific feeling and tone.

When you're a kid and you're a superhero lover, the holy trinity is Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, so to be able to take any of those and play with it is a huge joy.

When you're working on a scene, both in the script phase and also in the moment, you look around and you wait for the lightning bolt to strike you and based on your instincts tell you what the right thing to do is here. And that can result in anything from a change of dialogue to the realisation that what you thought was a dramatic scene should actually have some humour. And maybe if you stage it this way it's funnier, or if you put the camera here it tells a different story. That stuff is kind of everything when you're a director.

When you start a script you aim to hit a note you know you want to end in general.

You always go by your gut. That's the best you can do. You go by what you feel, and you say yes or no based on what it inspires in you.

You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.