I love when a protagonist and antagonist can find common ground.
I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.
Growing up, my parents were very much about the Egyptian culture. They never really wanted to assimilate in American culture.
Do I want a character who just has the best motives and the best intentions, zero flaws, and is doing things for the right reasons? No!
With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.
I think there is more cohesion when you have one director on set.
What resonates with me whenever I watch a great movie or TV show is the balance of inevitability and unpredictability. And it's a very delicate balance.
I love voiceover. I never understood this idea that it was lazy. Well, yes, there are those movies or TV shows that use it as just a way to get out exposition. But you know what? That's just bad writing.
I use voiceover just like I use dialogue. There's a way to give out information or give out insight to the character or give out their worldview, and maybe you have to slip in exposition, but it's all about how you write it.
'Pi' was one of my favorite films growing up because I thought it employed paranoia and voice-over, and also because it used this unreliable narrator in a very fascinating way.
For shows that are hyper-serialized, it just seems to make more sense to follow a feature film model than follow a television model, which was set up more for a procedural type of show.
'Fight Club' is great in its spirit of anti-establishment.
I absolutely don't deny that I was inspired by 'Fight Club,' among many other television shows and films. I completely not only acknowledge it, I own it and love to nod to them as much as possible.
I went to NYU undergrad, then went to AFI for grad school.
The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.
Before we started shooting 'Homecoming,' we were in the writer's room for 'Mr. Robot.' I was also editing Season 3 of 'Mr. Robot' while I was prepping for the 'Homecoming' shoot. So yeah, it's a lot of hats.
'Mr. Robot' is more directly about technology, and 'Homecoming' deals more with the pharmaceutical industry, but I think they're all part and parcel of this growing sense that things are happening behind the scenes at our expense, and we're not aware of it.
I don't cover my scenes. We approach it visually. Sometimes we go out of our way to do awkward blocking so that we can tell whatever the emotional heartbeat is of that scene in the most interesting way possible.
I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things.
When you don't have a main character that's flawed, I don't know how you relate to that person.
