Primetime Emmy Award Winners

"I didn’t think that I was powerless…But I didn’t think that I was powerful."

"We’re in a time when film is so loud and the audience is looking for shocking. It’s hard to convince people that there is an audience out there that wants quiet stories."

"We took that as our jumping off point for the whole series. What was that culture? What was lost? What was that beautiful Gelfling civilization?"

"What’s gonna happen to us, you know centuries from now? We don’t know. We just kind of have to live our daily lives and win the daily battle. We think this is a really hopeful and inspiring story about heroes who, when faced with a really scary and mysterious threat—which is what the Skeksis are doing to them and threatening their very life essence—you know, they manage to pull together and fight as a team. You kind of don’t expect gelfling—if you know the original film—you don’t expect gelfling to have that kind of gumption. You don’t even know that they have a fight in them, but they do. And we learn that they do in the series."

"I think people, whether they are studied in puppetry or not, are going to love the artistic tapestry that’s up there. Some of the tiniest details in The Dark Crystal like when the Chamberlain’s eyelid starts to twitch, just make it feel so much more real, so much more alive."

"We're so pleased that that is pure puppetry. If you take the puppeteers out, they're still being moved by the puppeteers. We'll have a very simple scene of a character that's doing a normal gesture, and that's many puppeteers to accomplish that."

"In every scene at least I want to do something that has never been done with a puppet. I was coming up with some ideas and concepts, doodles for how the puppets could do these things. I want to see a puppet swim, I want to see a puppet crashing through water, I want to see it run, I want to see it jump."

"We just enhance the eyes, a quiver of the mouth, the eyes fluttering a little bit, glossing over. But it's still the glass eye of the puppet, it's still the skin of the puppet, we move it just slightly, and that made a huge difference. The limits I set were that it cannot be better than what you could do with an amazing animatronic puppet with lots of motors and stuff."

"For me, watching his performances of Aughra and the Chamberlain is incredible and I'm so moved by how he infused life into those characters. That's pure talent to really take an inanimate object and give it life so believably. It's still the core asset of this film."

"Q: Silly question. What do you think will take to kill the Hulk?"

"I love CGI, but we’re not using CGI in this one. [...] Puppets, man. Puppets!"

"[T]here was a whole bunch of elaborated ideas from Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the story that led to the movie, and that stuff was so interesting to me that eventually I was like, you know what? I'd like to take a look at what happened before the movie. It's such a big canvas that it might not even be a movie, it might be a series."

"The prep period for The Dark Crystal was really long, it was literally years because they had the world and the creatures developed before they ever had a firm storyline. The script for The Dark Crystal actually fell in place later than anything else and some of it was only during post-production."

"They just couldn't get their head around the idea that the person who was doing The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie, things that were so light and joyful, that he himself would want to deviate from what he had been doing. It was really surprising to people and they expressed a lot of doubt about it. Then, the film did pretty well commercially and it also did very well internationally. This story has so many universal qualities such as good and evil, the characters are not American and they're not from any place in particular and so it worked around the world."

"We need to serve the fans. But also, we need to create new fans. Kids these days haven't seen puppets. They've seen fuzzy puppets. They haven't seen puppets that look like this. This is quite different. It's quite scary. There's a lot of action, a lot of drama, a few deaths. So, a lot of that stuff, it's multi-generational, but it definitely brings in everything you know about The Dark Crystal."

"[I]t's basically the screenplay adaptation so that is the sequel to The Dark Crystal. We thought, 'Why should we let this story that we thought up not get seen by the public?' We just went a different way with it."

"The Dark Crystal is a movie I saw a little too young, it shocked me a little bit and never left my mind."

"We kind of look at it as the Henson Company's little Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings franchise. It truly has the ability to be explored in different geographical parts of that world, or different time periods of that world, and it's been so fun to expand the canon of The Dark Crystal. Now that we've got the ball rolling on that, it feels like that could continue indefinitely."

"People talk about how look and feel of The Dark Crystal is so much more real than CGI but they also had no choice because there was no computer animation when The Dark Crystal was made. There were some optical effects, there were some composites that were hand done in the lab but there were no computer effects."

"This weird UFO of a movie that didn't belong in the Eighties. It was ahead of its time and a little bit obsolete at the same time because it was done with puppets."

"My challenge was working with puppets, but their challenge was working with Louis Leterrier. I was non-compromising, "this will not look like your grandfather's puppet show, and this will look like The Dark Crystal, that broke the mould then, so let's break it again and bring puppetry as far as it can get", and that's really what we did."

"I wanted him to use all his experience and intuition and empathy with people who'd grown up around him in Sheffield and put that into the movie, and I would be [...] the alien force, who was the voice of what science can do, and I would kind of foist these horrible indignities and horrors on these people, and he would try and get them to behave the way they would. So there was an innate conflict in that. We had many shouting matches, really passionate things, totally necessary for doing this."

"He hated coming on the set and despised me because I wore white shoes."

"He did hate doing it. It was alien to his nature. He reluctantly let himself be drawn into this thing, thinking what he would have done would have been a very passionate politicised scream of emotion, and what he was being pushed into was this box he didn't feel at all comfortable in."

"Barry came up with the idea of the two families – one working class, the other lower-middle – and what their lives were like. Sheffield seemed a good place to set it, and Barry knew it well. It was bang in the middle of the country, and a good way from London. Strategically, it also made sense: there were industrial and military targets nearby. Both of us were interested in the idea that none of these characters would ever have a god’s-eye-view of events, and never find out what was happening outside their immediate experience, certainly not outside Sheffield. That seemed to be the way most people would have to deal with a nuclear apocalypse, with most forms of communication vaporised."

"From the point where the bomb happens, the whole nature of the movie changes. In the first half of the movie, I hope, you have a very full soundtrack. You have all the soundtrack of TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts, the sound of birdsong in the country, the sound of musical things happening, the sound of traffic and city noises. And from the moment that the bomb drops you don't have anything. You don't even have the teletype, all these things, they just type out in silence, and all you hear is wind. [...] You hear voices of people screaming, coughing or whatever. You hear wind, you hear no birds. [...] It's gone. That world is gone."

"What worries me at the moment is President Trump and many in his administration are using the same kind of language about winnable [nuclear war and] bloody-nose strike against North Korea without realizing the consequences of that. [...] They have a failure of imagination. They can not believe that it could be anything other than surgical. The lesson of everything in nuclear policy through the Cold War is that we’ve come so close to so many times to stumbling into war by miscalculation, by not knowing what the other side is thinking."

"There's the hospital sequence in The Day After and there's the hospital sequence in Threads. [...] In The Day After people are being wheeled in on gurneys and everybody's stressed, but they're coping with it as they would do on ER or something like that. In Threads, the floor is covered with muck and shit and blood and people don't have anything they can work with. [...] We see people having their legs amputated without an anesthetic, just something stuck between their teeth for them to bite on. That's what it's going to be like! And I wanted every part of this movie to be "That's what it's going to be like"."

"What we’d depicted and its implications stayed in the minds of every actor and crew member for a long time. I’m sure there were some nightmares. There are some things so far outside our experience or comprehension that they are unthinkable. Nuclear war is one."

"People tell me how relevant they find the movie to what’s happening now. It’s comforting, at a time when so many films are being remade, to find that people still appreciate – and are scared by – the original film."

"In this movie, from the outset, I wanted to put it in the scale of people that you might know, people like yourself, your immediate family, relations and so on, and no bigger than that, and not really to show anything except how it would happen to them. So, there's no God's eye view in this movie. You don't actually get to look down and get the overall picture and see maps of Europe and maps of the world and so on. You just get what's happening to these people, and it's all really done from ground level. There's no cinematic crane shots or anything like that. It's just very, very documentary."

"The real effect of a nuclear weapon is not what it does to things, to buildings, to cities: it's what it does to society, what it does to people, what it does psychologically. I was very struck by the work that an American writer called Robert Jay Lifton had done on the psychological effects of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on the survivors and I talked to him a lot. It seemed to me that the story that needed to be told was the story of what this does to society as well as what it does to physical things, and you could only really tell that with a drama, with people that you identified with."

"It is unthinkable for most people. Nuclear war is so outside your everyday experience it’s hard to get your mind around it. And if you can’t get your mind around it, you can’t talk about it and have a meaningful debate."

"The idea was to take a movie which was about death...and use the iconography of life to tell the story."

"This sense of things...getting out of control very quickly is a lesson that we’ve forgotten. [...] I hope we don’t learn it in the wrong way. This is what you’re risking when you talk about fire and fury."

"We're not in the 1980s anymore to remember how terrified everybody was, how paranoid everybody was about the end of the world being nigh. In the year that I had prepped this movie in 1983, the Korean airliner was shot down by the Russians, Reagan gave his "Evil Empire" speech, Strategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars" started and people like Herman Kahn in the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica [...] were talking about "winnable" nuclear war and game theory, and I just thought "people who talk like that, and people who behave like that, politically, and make speeches like that, they're doing that because they have no real sense, no physical sense of what a nuclear war would be like.""

"I remember a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project said to me "you know, when I hear people talking about winnable nuclear wars, I just wish I could take them to the Mojave desert, the Nevada desert, wherever, strip them down to their underwear, and let them watch an actual nuclear explosion from miles away, feel the blistering heat pulse on their skin, and feel the blast wave sweep over them and shake their heart and their lungs around inside their rib cage. Then they would have a sense of what it was they were talking about and they wouldn't talk about a winnable nuclear war.""

"I can't tell you how much that affected me, in the wrong way. I was, in 1983 when it came out, I was planning Threads, I was in pre-production. And I thought "Oh my God, they will tell it. [...] I hope to God they tell it well. If they tell it well, I'm going to stop what I'm doing". [...] I didn't want it to become something that everybody did. I wanted it to be one thing that was done once and done well, and done with no punches pulled at all. I wanted something you could hardly bear to look at and you can hardly bear to look away from , so something that was totally uncompromising: You didn't look away, you didn't flinch from things. So, I waited for The Day After to come out, [...] I looked at it and I thought "Oh my God, they didn't, they missed it". They missed it! They made a TV movie, they made something like a soap opera because they had to, because they didn't have a genre in their head that they could copy and or invent. And I thought the underlying thought of this is it would all be manageable. At the end of the movie, where everything is ruined, you've got Jason Robards still there and you know that just out of the frame, about to come in, there's all the bulldosers and relief efforts, rescue and help, and it's going to be okay really. And I thought "That's not telling the truth, that's not really the way it would be.""

"That period had seen Reagan starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, the downing of the Korean Airliner by the Soviets, and [Reagan] calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. [...] It was perhaps the most dangerous time for the world since the Cuban missile crisis and...there was this feeling that BBC wasn’t dealing with this in any way. Everyone was very paranoid. The world was on the brink of nuclear war and no one knew anything about it."

"People have often asked me, "If you weren’t in show business, what would you be doing?" The truth is, I don’t think there’s anything else I could be doing, so the answer would have to be, nothing. Then again, there's nothing I love more than making people laugh, so I guess you could say I’m in the only business I could be in. I was born to enjoy life and I've always wanted everyone to enjoy it along with me. That's why I can't see myself any place other than standing in front of an audience with one purpose in mind — to make people feel little bit happier than when they came in."

"I could use my imagination and I read a lot about mental health. And that puts you in the perspective of just how difficult it is to live in a mind that that doesn't always feel like your own and how…I mean, just, that's brutal in its own way. And that can be a very lonely, difficult place, and a very difficult frame of mind to articulate to anyone, to even want to share with anyone."

"Someone took a selfie with me today on the street, and to see them plug in their passcode right in front of you — it’s not something I would ever do, and it’s borderline creepy, but my show just makes me so much more aware of how to conduct oneself in public. It’s little things we take for granted, like holding your passport out while you wait in line at an airport, and someone can screenshot that in a heartbeat. The amount of information that we arbitrarily extend to the world is very mind-boggling to me. It’s like we’re saying, “Go ahead,” Clint Eastwood-style, “make my day.”"

"I know Elliot does not come across as charismatic, but to me he is."

"Malek has about three facial expressions in his arsenal, so his eyes do a lot of the work on Mr. Robot."

"Please tell me you're seeing this, too."

"It's sad! Some really tragic moments have happened in my life and I found myself not getting emotional. Subconsciously, I was saving the grief so that, down the line, I could layer pain on top of pain. Because I want to feel that throughout my life. I want it to be easily accessible."

"My brother was like, We're going to have to change the locks and put bars on the windows! But I thought about it for a minute and I thought, Here's a role I could look back on and say, Man, I played a vampire. In, like, Twilight. I mean, how many people get to do that?"

"Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis."

"One word: Mischief."

"I really wanted Elliot's clothes to feel like it was a bit of an urban combat uniform. We needed the wardrobe to reflect his desire to disappear from the world. So I suggested a hoodie. Well, maybe I shouldn't say 'suggest.'"