Quotes from Alan Taylor

I come out of TV, where you never reshoot, because you don't have time. If you do reshoot, it's because someone really screwed up.

On 'Game of Thrones,' I remember shooting in Croatia, and by lunchtime we'd see photos of what we'd shot online and think, 'My God - people really care.'

'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.

The weird thing is, 'Game of Thrones,' people go to Iceland for three weeks, and it'd be like a small guerilla operation. 'Thor,' we went there for, like, five days, because we couldn't afford to be there any longer, because we were airlifting the entire contents of Hollywood into this country.

When you direct a movie that makes no money whatsoever, there is no rush to your door for the next one.

In 1786, Jefferson pitched a secular and public system of education for Virginia. He reasoned that "the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more that the thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

On the one hand, Puritans hinted that God would reward the diligent and godly with prosperity. On the other hand, they cautioned that wealth must not be an end unto itself lest carnal temptations overwhelm the ultimate purpose of human life: preparation for salvation in the next world.

Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.

There's a very devoted fan base that really loved 'T1' and 'T2' and felt burned by 'T3' and 'T4,' so when we said, 'We're going to do it again!' the reaction was, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa - what do you think you're doing?'

On 'Game of Thrones,' we always shoot away from the green screen because it's bloody expensive to shoot green screen.

There's a natural human compulsion to chase after freedom and then to actually hand it over as fast as possible and get away from it.

Coming off 'Sopranos' and 'Mad Men,' I was starting to feel like I was being spoiled creatively. I wanted to move forward as a director in TV and get more involved in the process. After having those two great experiences, doing regular episodic TV wouldn't be quite the thrill.

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.

When I was going to film school, before film school, my hero was David Lynch.

Most people aren't lying awake at night worrying about a nuclear threat. But we are unnerved by a lot of how technology is coming into our lives and starting to infuse our lives. And we question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I had been trying to make movies, but they were really hard to get made. TV wound up, by surprise, a much more fulfilling place to work. That said, I've always been drawn to make movies.

There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

I think calling for more women in every aspect of this industry is a sensible thing.

I used to play with model trains when I was a kid, and then I used to study history.

I have this thing for anything Italian.

My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.

It's been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.

There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.

The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post, it turned into a different movie.