Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.
'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.
The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy.
For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of 'True Detective.'
I made 'True Detective' like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.
When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.
If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it's making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too.
Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.
I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.
If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'
If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.
Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized.
There are websites of 'True Detective' artwork out there now, and it's beautiful. And I don't want to take that away from anybody. I know what it means to me. But I don't want to take away anyone's interpretation of the show.
I knew 'True Detective' wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop. But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.
