Genndy Tartakovsky works. He emerged from art school in the late 1980s, at a moment when film and television studios threw money at the next generation of animators. He hustled. By the age of 25, he had clocked time Batman: The Animated Series and Tiny Toons, and was on the cusp of selling his own creation, Dexter’s Laboratory, to Cartoon Network.

Nearly 30 years later, Tartakovsky still wakes up every morning eager to put pen to paper. His resume is littered with success, from The Powerpuff Girls to Samurai Jack and Sony’s blockbuster Hotel Transylvania trilogy. His newest show, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, which debuts on Oct. 7 on Adult Swim, is a prehistoric action drama that roars with the raw potential of hand-drawn animation.

Primal is exactly what Tartakovsky wanted to make. And yet the animator’s still hungry. He wants to put more sublime imagery on screen. He wants to push the limits of the medium. He wants to command respective. He’s a little competitive. He’ll admit it. He also works like hell.

At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Polygon’s Chelsea Stark sat down with Tartakovsky for an hour-long chat, exploring his entire career through the lens of Primal. You can read the full transcript below, or listen to the recorded interview on The Polygon Show podcast feed.

Polygon: I want to dive in right and talk about Primal. Can you explain the series in your own words?

Genndy Tartakovsky: So it’s basically a kind of a pulpy type of action-adventure story of a caveman and a dinosaur who share a similar tragedy and it bonds them to survive the primordial world together.

I would describe the first episode as bleak. Why did you want to take a show in this kind of direction?

Well, I think it went there naturally where we wanted it to be very unique. And because there’s no dialog, we want it to be visceral. And also, you just want to take your time. That was the biggest thing that I wanted to do. I didn’t want to rush through everything because if you watch modern-day animation, it is an assault on your senses.

There’s talking, everybody is yelling, there’s a lot of music and I feel like, maybe it just comes I’m an old man or something, but I can’t relax. So this cartoon is really done in a classic sense where you really get drawn in and it sucks you in. And one thing that started to happen because of the lack of dialog, people are forced to pay attention. Half the time, I know people are texting or whatever they’re doing. So you could hear the radio show and you could still keep up, but if you don’t watch the show, you’re not going to understand it at all. So we’ve had screenings where people are watching it and they forget that they’re eating lunch or whatever and they’re just sucked in. So I think the bleakness as you say, I’d like to say that it’s clean. Through the years of doing everything, we’ve been able to focus in our storytelling better and let things relax and unfold.

I like that you say relax and unfold, yet this is very much a violent cartoon. You’re saying that it is a relaxing thing?

Yeah, but we didn’t want to do just violence for violence. There’s not that much violence, but when it does come, it’s very intense. We keep you in it the whole way through. There’s no relief point where you’re like, “Oh, everything is going to be fine.” You’re like, “Oh crap, this is still going.”

I think to get the energy, right, because you want everything that you do to have some kind of energy. If it’s just black, it doesn’t mean anything. So the rawness is the execution of the ideas. They’re very simple ideas but it takes 22 minutes to fully realize them and fully communicate them.

And there’s a big difference between animation and live action, but when you watch live action timing, you can hold on somebody’s face and that actor’s face can emote for 20, 30 seconds. In animation, we don’t have a camera, we don’t have a character, a live action person emoting. So suddenly, you want to just get off of him or her really quick, right?

So our holds might be two seconds, three seconds at the most. And I’ve worked with other studios in my early days and everything is just zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, like a normal establishing pan, it’s going to be 3.5 seconds, that’s the formula and get out. And I’m like, “But you don’t feel it. You just get it over.” So from Jack, from Dexter, I started to really work on trying to communicate ideas, since my job as a director is to communicate and to make you feel something.

So if you’re watching a horizon, it’s slow enough and the music is right or the sound effects is right that you’re really feeling the wind and you’re feeling the softness. And good cinema does that, but it’s very rare in animation.

Why do you think nobody else does animation like you?

They’re not good enough [laughs]. Directing is something that I’ve been learning through my whole career and making a lot of mistakes and watching something and realizing what makes it good and trying to dissect it. Especially like when we were doing Clone Wars. We had to ask ourselves, what is Star Wars? What is the essence of Star Wars and what is that feeling that we’re trying to communicate? We were trying to give you the same feeling as we did when we were younger. So directing is that thing, is trying to communicate a feeling.

Filmmakers in animation, they don’t, a lot of times, come from live action and so we’re doing a caricature. So number one, nobody is doing storytelling like [Primal] where you can really take time to breathe. Number two, it’s nobody else in this industry would make this cartoon besides Adult Swim. And the only reason they’re making it is because I have a huge relationship with them dating back from the beginning of Cartoon Network.

So there’s this trust, right? So maybe people want to make stuff like this, but they just can’t because making films, making TV is a brutal fight to get your ideas across, right? And everybody’s job that you’re working with besides your team is to water it down and to change it even though they hire you, and this is just the reality, because they’re worried about the business, you’re worried about the creative. So your job is to have enough conviction to sell your ideas, right? And that is my job.

How do you sell a show like Primal? It is violent and unique. How do you get someone to take a chance on that?

I did it with visuals. My boss, Mike Lazzo, who I’ve known since Dexter, he’s the one who greenlit Dexter. So we’ve had that whole relationship of trust and building together, right? I didn’t just tell him. I storyboarded the first episode and I pitched it. I can beatbox my way through the pitch.

And then he watched it and he was like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” And this was coming off of the last season of Samurai Jack where we already were successful with more of the visual style of storytelling and from our core audiences and there was an audience for it.

I’d actually like to dive back all the way back to Dexter, or back to that time before Adult Swim, when Adult Swim didn’t even exist. I first saw you on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. You and Craig McCracken and other animators were pitching your cartoon to Space Ghost, which was so weird and surreal. I re-watched just to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it. It seemed like a Wild West days with Cartoon Network really wanted to support young talent. Tell me about that time.

It was a great time. It was very ... I was very, very lucky to be there. Before Cartoon Network was Hanna-Barbera so we just did 2 Stupid Dogs, which was a slog and it was not that original. We’re just trying to do what we do. And then they were starting the network at the time and they had the idea to basically say, “Okay. We’re going to do 48 [episode] shorts and you do it, we’re not going to give you notes, or we will, but it’s up to you to listen to it. And if you succeed, you’re going to succeed on your own. Or if you fail, you’re going to fail on your own.”

That was their thought, to find the new creators. Now, this is 1994, 1995. So back then, there were obviously no Steven Universe, no Adventure Time, nobody young. Everybody was in their 40s, 50s making shows. And probably besides maybe like Ren and Stimpy or a few exceptions like that, it was a very different time in the industry. I had a student film that I made. They said, “Can you pitch as a seven-minute cartoon?” I was like, “Sure.”

There is no sacrifice that I’m making in the show. It is pure.

I pitched it and they wanted to make it and of course, right after they said they want to make it, I got taken to the head executive’s room and he gave me half an hour worth of notes on a seven-minute cartoon, and all of the notes were breaking what I wanted to do. And I was coming from where the producer of 2 Stupid Dogs was changing all my stuff. So I was like, “I don’t know if my things are going to work”, the more cinematic camera, the melodrama, all that kind of stuff.

He gave me all the notes, I walked out and my producer, and I said, “Do I have to do all these notes?” He’s like, “Well, he’s been in the industry a long time. You should probably listen to him.” And I said, “Well, I don’t have to do them.” And he goes, “No. You don’t have to them.”

So I didn’t do one note and then basically, the rest is history. And the great thing is that they supported me and at the same time, it was the best timing as the network was growing, they’re trying to figure out what Cartoon Network is. Dexter premiered to 12 million people. It was nothing.

Before that was all old Turner shows or Hanna-Barbera shows that were taken from the vault, basically.

Yeah. The number one shows were Scooby-Doo and Tom and Jerry and it took Dexter ... once it got green-lighted, it took him like two or three years to actually beat them in the ratings, which is hard to swallow. It was like, 40-year-old shows beating our new show. But there’s obviously an emotional bond to those old shows and it takes a show a while back then to really grow on you.

We used to say it takes six episodes to figure out what the heck you have, and then it takes a few years in replay and people really trying to find it to start falling in love with it.

Do you remember the note that you didn’t take for Dexter?

From the original Dexter short? I remember some. So there was one where the mom is walking upstairs. I don’t know how many of you guys know the pilot for Dexter. It was the one where they change into all the different animals, right? That was the first one. So when the mom is walking upstairs at the end of the cartoon, they were changing each other. So you lose track of who’s who, right? So they’re just different animals and the guy’s idea was, her hair should change color because it’s a side effect of all the magic upstairs. And I was like, “What does that have to do with anything?”

And she’s supposed to be the drama coming up to catch them in the act, and the humor is between them changing. So it has nothing to do with anything. And it would drive me insane.

I actually have a really good quote from you from 2017. You talked about all the changes they tried to force on Samurai Jack [to make it a movie]. And you said they wanted a comedy, a sidekick, twists, less action, all of these things that didn’t fit.

For a little while, they wanted to make Samurai Jack either a live-action movie or an animated movie and they came in with the movie rules. That’s what that was about. And basically, you have to follow the formula when you’re making a movie. And I said, “But everything that brought you here to want this project, you want me to get rid of. So how does that make any sense?”

We saw Jack’s final story play out in a series of 30-minute episodes. Was that format challenging in its own right?

Well, 10 episodes, 30 minutes each, yeah, it was challenging and not challenging and it always was going to be a bittersweet end. There was no way a samurai is going to receive a happy ending. And I know a lot of people were upset or whatever, but this was my intent and that’s the great thing about having your own show, I could do whatever I want. And I take the negative criticism and I take the positive criticism. I wouldn’t have done anything different.

You want to go through your life without regrets, right? Even with something like doing these shows, and I’ve always wanted to work as much as I possibly can to make it as great as I could and so I could never look back and go like, “Oh, I wish I could have worked a week extra on this.” It was impossible. And I can say that all the way from the first short of Dexter.

Animation isn’t a stepping stone for me, it is what I love.

Looking back, you’ve had things that were either false starts or shows that just didn’t make it longer, like Sym-Bionic Titan. What do you learn from those kind of failures?

I think I’m not learning the right things from them. I get angry and I’m very competitive and I feel like it’s disjustice and disservice and I never take it the right way. Sometimes, a show doesn’t connect. Sometimes it’s our fault as filmmakers, like we didn’t do something right to have that show click.

Jack didn’t really become popular until after [it aired]. It grew its audience so slowly. And they used to tell me when the DVDs came out, they were like, it’s so weird every month, we sell more DVDs, and that’s very unusual. And then basically, I think what that meant is there was a word of mouth, like some people discovered it, they told their friends and they did ... and they bought and so it went on and on like this.

So by the time we get to 2011 or ’12, there’s like a fever. And no matter where I went in the world, it was all about Samurai Jack.

I remember you doing a Reddit AMA in 2012 and every other question was, “Where is Jack? When is Jack coming back?” Was there any point where you felt like the fan expectations were too high? It seems like criticism doesn’t bother you.

No, it was never a lot. I’m limited to what I can do and because for probably five or six years, we’re trying to make a movie with four different producers, each time, it got into that same problem where they wouldn’t let it be what it wanted to be. And I didn’t need it to be a movie, right? I didn’t pay my mortgage because of it. I always had a job.

So that way, I wasn’t pressured to sacrifice everything.

You could say no. You had the ability to stop if something didn’t fit your ideas.

Exactly, yeah.

Was the original idea that people wanted to make into a movie the same story? Did you always have this kind of love story, emotional arc for Jack where he comes from the bottom and climbs up?

It always a love story because I haven’t really done it for real in my career and I wanted to see if we could succeed in having it be guttural, like you really felt for them, you really felt for his loss and I want it to be really emotional. I don’t know if everybody has seen Love Story with Ryan O’Neal way back in the day. But there’s something very visceral about that story and it’s like it’s gut-wrenching. And that’s what love is, kind of, right honey? [Ed. note: Genndy’s wife and family were sitting in the front row of the Q&A, and he turned to address her.]

But I wanted to do it. I want it to be a caricature of love. And to try to do it, it was really a big goal because to do it in animation, and especially with Jack, it’s so stylized. Could I do it? Could I get away with it? So that was our challenge.

At what point do you feel like you can finalize an idea with a new series? What is the process? Do you start with the kind of story you want to tell or do you start with a bigger idea, the characters?

The process is I think figuring out the tone and the field, like what am I trying to say, then I’ll often start thinking about how am I going to say it? Is there a visual that pops into my head when I think of it? And generally, it’s a feeling that I want to experience watching the show. So everything starts from there. So for Primal, I wanted it to feel like you’re reading a pulp novel. It’s brutal, it’s raw, it’s emotional, it’s visceral, it’s very drawn, it’s very 2D.

I started from there and then the storytelling and filmmaking, it informs you. It talks to you. And then your gut says like, “This is not feeling right.” Actually, I started with ... Everything looked more like Tezuka designs. I reread all the Astro Boy comics and it was amazing and so I started drawing very cartoony and as the story started to develop, I’m like, “This just isn’t right.”

You needed those heavy lines and the very vivid backgrounds to tell that kind of pulpy story?

Yeah, I wanted to be just more gritty and dirty. It’s still very beautiful but there’s a level of beautiful grit, I guess, to it that you want it to be. It’s like watching Sergio Leone. Their faces are so sweaty and disgusting but it’s almost poetic the way it is.

You’ve obviously talked a lot about your influences of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, amazing animators that understood timing, but that timing was all comedic. Do you think comedic timing can informs a pulpy show like Primal?

Well with comedic timing, it’s all about read. Read and rhythm, right? And that is the same thing with action. It’s rhythm. So if an action sequence is done really well, like if you ever watched Bruce Lee, he has a rhythm. So you watch a fight that he choreographed, it’s very rhythmic.

If you watch something else, like some normal kung fu type of stuff, it just goes, but his stuff is very rhythmic. So you start to realize like, yeah, good action has good rhythm. You watch the beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road. That is such an amazing, beautiful sequence, but it’s very rhythmic. There’s short things and there’s long things.

The worst action is when it’s just fast, there’s no rest and you’re just obliterated. Everything is at 11, right? Like Jaws of course, the highs and lows just ebb and flow, and it’s just beautiful. The chase in French Connection and all these things — they affected me. And I remember how I felt about it and I’m always trying to capture a feeling with what I’m doing. It’s never just about how simple it is or whatever it is, it’s just about this feeling.

I want you to sit down and watch it and I want you to feel this. And if I can get away with that, then I have succeeded.

It’s not action for action’s sake, it is to evoke an emotion.

For sure, and you’re storytelling during an action sequence. We’re always telling something. We get carried away sometimes, but generally, we’re after a goal.

You storyboarded action scenes in Iron Man 2. Would you ever storyboard action movies again to try to bring live action to the standard that you want to hold it too?

I’m looking for the right project and it hasn’t come around. I don’t really see much of it. So to do what I want to do, I need somebody to believe in me. That’s really what it is. There’s so much you can fight for without people finally saying like, “No, you’re crazy.” Samurai Jack worked, it got me to the next level. Clone Wars worked, it got me to the next level. If Primal works, I don’t know where that level is.

But to be clear, I do love animation and I’m not hunting for that live-action project. Animation isn’t a stepping stone for me, it is what I love. So that’s a big thing. I remember I had this meeting where I was getting a live action offer and the executive said, “All right. You’re ready to graduate?”

Wow.

And I was like, “Fuck you.” Sorry.

That makes me very mad.

And that’s the way people, especially I think in features, think about animation even though it makes more money than most live-action movies. And the superhero movies are like cartoons basically. So there’s not a level of respect for what we do and so I’m always very tentative with live action because this is what I love.

I had to work at everything. Learning to draw was like learning to weld for me. It wasn’t anything that came natural.

You’ve got two movies in the works with Sony, and Spider-Verse broke big for them, like it proved that animation could still do well and be experimental, right?

Yeah. Definitely, it helps. And they did have Spidey to hang on. I think if there was an original idea, I don’t know honestly if they would have gone through with it all the way because it’s Spider-Man. There’s a lot of story behind the story, right? But yeah, it’s definitely opening up the gates a little bit and we’ll see. The success also of Hotel Transylvania, the third one, was huge for them. So everything that’s successful is a little building block.

And you keep building these blocks and hopefully, nobody is going to knock them down before you get to do something, especially in the feature world. Like I am doing what I want to do in TV. There is no sacrifice that I’m making in the show. It is pure. It’s our vision of what we want to do. I don’t know if anybody wants to watch it, but if this was a 14-year-old Genndy or 12- or 16- or 18- or now, I would be glued to the show.

It’s going to be amazing to see how people react to something that doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now.

Yeah. In this day and age, that’s what you want, right? We’ve got so much competition, there’s just shows everywhere, and what stands up? That’s the thing. So I don’t know people even are doing shows that look like other shows. Everybody should be shooting for something different, something new to stand out.

What stands out to you? What cartoons do you watch for fun or inspiration?

...next question.

Whoa.

I am such a snob. I’m so picky about what I watch and what my animation needs to be.

If you were 20 right now and had to restart your career, what would you do? How would you approach animation today starting out?

I would develop my own shows. The market is so huge, why not give it a shot? And that’s all that’s getting hired are young creators. A lot of people my age are getting hired as ... I call them the grandfather roles. They get matched with a young creator who doesn’t know what he or she is doing and they guide them through the production process. And for me, I would create shows and try to sell them because that market is open.

Do you think that stories like Primal or other kind of more evocative stories can be told in CG animation?

Yeah, absolutely. CG is just a medium. It’s just a different pencil. So we could do Primal equally well in a different way, you know what I mean? This is our choice. We could have tried to get a bigger budget and tried to do CG and we could have done all of those things, but this is our choice. So CG in television, it’s just a choice, you know what I mean? Sometimes, it’s an easy way out because you just have the puppet and the puppet does what you want it to do. While drawing you have to draw it, you have to figure it out and it’s you.

You’ve said before: you like to break stuff. And it seems like drawing allows you to break things more easily than having a puppet.

Hotel Transylvania was that experiment. Can we do Tex Avery-type of stuff? Warner Brothers-type stuff with these puppets? And we did it. And Imageworks, they changed their whole system to get into this type of style and that’s what makes me really think like if you have the right person in charge guiding the way, you could do whatever you want. There are no limitations to it.

I do still prefer watching drawings on screen. There’s something that’s so satisfying emotionally and maybe it’s just a personal experience. I think when I was like, 13 or 14 and they used to rerun the Disney films, the classics, every seven years. So Jungle Book came out and I never saw it. And I went to a movie theater and it was a sea of crazy children. And I was by myself. All of a sudden, the lights came down and the movie started and it was like one of the best drawn draftsmanship movies. And I just got captured by the drawings and by the art and I love that feeling. I felt the drawings move. And I think that was like the beginning. I already loved animation secretly, I didn’t tell anybody, but that was like what’s sealed the deal for me. It was like, yeah, I want to do this if I could.

What was your first moment you’re like, “I am on the right path. I am doing the thing I want, and I can do this”?

Well, the right path, and “I can do this,” were two separate things. The right path is when I got into CalArts. That was like, because you just heard stories back then, 1989, ’90, where once you get into CalArts, you can get into Disney or you get hired right from the school, right? It’s like the NFL draft from college. You just get plucked out back then just like that and you start working.

So once I got into that school, I knew that I was good enough. Before that, I had no clue if I could do it.

Hollywood is hard. Hollywood is all about, “You work for us, here’s a certain amount of money, and then we’re going to tell you how to do it.”

That was the path, but when were you like, “I can do this. I feel like I’m making something that people are responding to and it’s resonating with them”?

Maybe it was at the first screening of the very first Dexter short where we screened I think 10 or 12 of the shorts we made. Everybody was doing it. And when the Dexter short came out, people were laughing at the jokes and I was like, “Yeah, I’m doing it.” It works, and I think that was a very satisfying, big confidence boost for me, that my ideas, properly executed, could emote a laugh. It’s like I’m doing stand-up but I don’t have to be here. It could all be through my drawings and the movement and ideas.

What is something that would be your opus? What is the biggest goal? Primal obviously seems like one.

To get this type of show on the air and hopefully it’s successful and people will have a giant reaction to it would be great. And I think doing something on an equal level and features would be fantastic. And not just to repeat, just do something different every time and see where it goes. Like I want to have a career like Miyazaki or whatever. He’s got 11 films and they’re all incredible in their own unique way.

So I want to be a director that’s respected, and you know if you’re walking into a Genndy show or movie, you would expect a certain thing whether it be comedy or action or drama or whatever, but it’s going to be something different. And I think I have to keep making shit and try to get better at everything. And then that one will hit in a huge way and see what happens.

The infinite path forward is just keep making, right?

You’ve got to work. I’m super fortunate to be in this industry where I would be working for free and because this is what I love doing. I get up every morning and I am so excited to do this. And each drawing is exciting. It’s definitely been easier because I’ve gotten better through the years. I struggled so much from my first, whatever, 15, 20 years just drawing. Drawing is hard and I hold myself to a high level than I try to get to.

And sometimes, you just can’t get there. And it was the most frustrating thing. Now I’m turning 50 and I’m starting to get it a little bit. And it’s so frustrating because some kids I see who are 17, 18 can draw circles around me. And it’s incredible and I never had that. I had to work at everything. Learning to draw was like learning to weld for me. It wasn’t anything that came natural, it was just brutally beating myself up and trying to again and trying to draw twice as much as everybody else just so I can get better and learn. It was a giant process that’s still happening.

It sounds like you’re relentless, is a good way to say it.

Yeah. I’m a very driven person for sure. I want everything to be at a certain quality. I want to be respected. I’m super competitive. I want to be the best. I want everything else to suck. I don’t want anything to succeed besides anything that I do and I have that spirit going into everything. So yes, I want Primal to be higher ratings than Rick and Morty. And I want it to be just as loved and it’s never going to happen because it doesn’t work that way with action. But that is my goal.

That is the inner me is yelling at the outer me saying, “You better make this the best you could be or I’m going to be really upset. And if people shit on it, then I’m going to make you cry.” This is my love. This is my passion and it’s been since I was 10. And it has relented. Is that right? And it still drives me and I feel like I’m just starting my career. That’s the crazy part.

That’s amazing.

Yeah. It feels like this is one of our first new shows.

Do you plan to have a second season?

I don’t know. We want to. It definitely ends on a second season type of idea. And we will probably do it eventually, hopefully, but I’ve got a lot of stuff lined up, like with Sony and everything. But who knows? We always talk about in Hollywood, you’ve got to have seven projects that you’re juggling. And sometimes, it feels like all seven are going to go. You’re like, “Oh, my God. We’re going to ... How are we going to do all these?”

And then tomorrow, everything drops out and you’re like, “Crap.”

Jesus.

It’s brutal. So I have these things juggling. The year we did Samurai Jack, the last season, everything went. We had four projects that we were juggling and it was scary because we did the Luke Cage comic and we did Jack and I did some other development thing that went through, and Hotel Transylvania 3 at the same time. So it was too much.

Now, I’m trying to juggle, well ... if we want to do a second season or everybody is on board a second season, you’ve got to get the audience reaction first. You’ve got to get ratings and how are we going to do it if we’re into this new movie thing? So it’s hard.

What do you sacrifice to get all this done? What is the thing you do less of?

I don’t know. Family? No. No. My wife says no. My kids are here. You guys feel like I’m around, right?

So sleep?

I’m a five-, six-hour-a-night person of sleep. I’m not obsessed about sleep if I miss it. I work in the mornings, I work at night after dinner. I just work. It’s not a secret. You just put in a lot of time and somehow, the shit gets done. I don’t know what I’ve sacrificed. I want to say I haven’t, right? My wife agrees, so no sacrifice.

Now that you’ve learned so much in your career, what would you never do again?

I don’t want to say on the grounds that it will incriminate me [laughs]. I’m never going to put myself in a situation where I’m not in control, let’s put it that way. My decision is the last decision. Unless, that somebody over me [is someone] I so respect that I trust their decision wholeheartedly. Even then, I would have a hard time with it because when everything that you’ve done for the most part works and gets you to the next step, and then all of a sudden, somebody tells you, “Nope. You’re doing it wrong” ... how do you accept that? You’re like, “But the last 20 years have gotten me to this point. Why am I doing it wrong all of a sudden?” Not that I don’t make mistakes, of course, but we’re talking about in the big sense of mistakes. And that’s what I couldn’t deal with or I can’t deal with. And I’m not going to put myself in a situation.

Hollywood is hard. Hollywood is all about, “You work for us, here’s a certain amount of money, and then we’re going to tell you how to do it.” Like Mike Lazzo, he was looking over one of the Primal episodes and I do these video pitches with the storyboard and I click through it in real-time so it’s the full 30-minute episode in real-time with me talking over it, doing effects and music and everything.

And he watched it and he goes, “I have nothing to say. You’re going to be a lot harder on it than I ever will.” And that’s probably the first time any executive has said that ever. And that’s the thing. Because there’s a trust and then there’s a respect. And I’m not going to certainly tell him how to program a show, I don’t know what all the ins and outs of programming is, and he respects what I do. That’s how I want it to be.

You are who you are.

Right. So that’s the thing. I’m a fighter and that’s what it takes. It takes the strongest amount of will and conviction to get something through and made. And it’s hard because sometimes, you’ll get fired. Sometimes, the people respect you. You’re always walking that line between fired and respect. Like I fought with people for three hours and I’m like, I’m literally going to get fired after this meeting. And then they come back with, “Okay, we believe in what you’re doing. No notes.”

I was like, “What? Then why did we spend three hours fighting about this?” And I started to realize, they were testing me on how much I believe. Because when you’ve got $80 million or $100 million riding on something, they want to believe that you know what you’re doing. I totally started to understand it later. For them, it’s a business.

So here’s $20 million for Dexter. And I had to meet with the guy who’s running all of Turner back then and I said, “I’m going to spend all of his money.” And I better know what I’m doing so I better come off not like a buffoon, but somebody who knows what I’m doing. And I was 25 and I’m sure I was half buffoon, half know what I’m doing, but that’s the reality.

So when you go to features and it’s $80 million, $100 million movies, that is a lot of money for one weekend, that opening weekend, and if you don’t communicate everything, you’re gone and that money is gone, plus publicity, plus marketing, all that stuff. It’s a brutal amount of pressure that they’re under that that comes down to me. But at the same time, because I have all the conviction, I’m like, “You let me do it my way and you’re going to make money.”

And you have to be that much of an asshole and that so much confidence so they’ll go, “Right. Well, this guy knows what he’s talking about. Kind of, does he? I don’t know. All right.”

So the lessons we’ve learned from here, that you do have to learn to draw, but you also have to learn to be a huge asshole?

No.

No?

You have to believe. The truth is you have to somehow convince other people to believe. I’m still learning how to do it. And sometimes, artistic integrity just shines and you’re like, “Wow, that is a creative person and I’m going to give him money.” Other times, you fight tooth-and-nail for it and if your one thing makes money or gets ratings, then you’ll get the next thing.

We call it “director jail.” Like if you have something really bomb, you’re like, “How am I going to get another job?” And it’s rough. So anyway, I just stay on point. Yes, you want people to believe in you, if you want to be a director or somebody who’s creating their own your own content, believe in yourself, believe in what you’re doing, and have other people believe in what you’re doing.

Stay true to your gut and fight your way through. There is a fight coming.