A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.

Bruno Heller

Categorized in : Character Stories Challenges

Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same .. there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone.

Bruno Heller

dignity live-life years

The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?

Bruno Heller

guy evil trying

I think when people talk about lighter drama, they tend to use that term, not derogatorily, but 'lighter' means sort of less to a degree, but if you're an actor, light drama is often mistaken for easier drama.

Bruno Heller

drama mean thinking

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

Bruno Heller

differences real stories

You always think, no matter how many times you fail, that the next time you will succeed. Otherwise you wouldn't keep trying.

Bruno Heller

matter trying thinking

There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network.

Bruno Heller

avant-garde visionaries world

It gives me vertigo to watch TV dramas.

Bruno Heller

giving drama watches

One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing.

Bruno Heller

design memories school

You name the TV psychic - they're con men.

Bruno Heller

psychics names men

When I've had hard times in my life, the one thing about being in TV is that it's positive. I withdrew to 'Cheers,' it was familiar in that it was family. It had a kind of realistic positiveness to it.

Bruno Heller

hard-times tvs cheer

The great thing about Gotham is it encompasses so many different worlds.

Bruno Heller

gotham different world

One of the advantages of series TV is that you can change your mind and plan things as you go.

Bruno Heller

advantage tvs mind

It's like an angel crying on your tongue.

Bruno Heller

alcohol angel drinking

It's easy to leave people wanting more after the first episode, but it's hard to leave people wanting more after the 24th episode. And it's my job, more than anybody else's, to keep that in mind. One season, in TV terms, is nothing. You need to hit it for three or four seasons, and then you're doing well, in TV terms. Then, you've done your job.

Bruno Heller

mind jobs people

When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it's really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.

Bruno Heller

levels violence years

One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I've been on the other end of that.

Bruno Heller

running fun giving

You can't be someone you're not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can't hide.

Bruno Heller

tvs

he beauty of this world [of comics] is there are so many stories to tell, and there's so many wonderful characters. Wonderful characters we haven't even begun to introduce - it's a world that is infinitely expandable.

Bruno Heller

stories character world

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

Bruno Heller

tvs blessed years

Never name a show after a character if you want to be the guy running the show.

Bruno Heller

name never you character