Were you able to get into the flow of things right away?

For me, the learning curve was pretty steep. I'm used to coming up with a lot of ideas and then just doing my ideas. So having to pitch ideas and realize that not everyone in the room has written nearly as much stuff as me and I need to dial back how often I jump in on conversations—it was a little bit of a learning curve. It was a lot of fun. And it was amazing to see the show become this huge, cultural phenomenon. But by the time I was done, I was just so exhausted. I was trying to write The Fade Out at the same time, and it was just like juggling so many things. I don't understand how Brian Vaughan can be a showrunner and do three comics at the same time.

And his comics are great!

The last two years really taught me more about screenwriting than the previous twenty years that I've been doing it. I've been trying to break into this field, filing TV shows for ten or eleven years now that haven't gotten made. But, when you're actually getting stuff made, you hit this moment where there's just so much work that needs to be produced that you just stop getting in your own way and just start writing. And on Westworld, there was just constant rewriting and changing things and chasing the changes.

So I learned a lot about what screenwriting really is. And I also feel like I learned why a lot of writers go into that field and feel like it's not a field for writers. A lot of it feels technical. When you're doing draft eleven of something, it starts to feel very technical. But it's just the way the business runs because it's a factory system. You get in there and you can make a name for yourself and you can make good money and good stuff, but ultimately everything needs to happen quickly once it starts happening, and that's really the most important thing.

You get into these meetings with people and everyone's trying to tell you what they want the thing to be. And you have to walk away from that and figure out how to make it the thing everyone wants it to be, and something that you still like, and still make it good. Someone like Vince Gilligan or Noah Hawley toils away for years and years and then suddenly has a hit, it's only then they're able to figure out what their voice is.

You're more involved with the genesis of Too Old to Die Young than you were with Westworld. What's that process been like?

Nick and I created the show together. He directed the entire thing. And 60 percent of it is shot by Darius Khondji, who is my favorite living cinematographer, probably. He shot Seven and City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, and invented a style of cinematography that other people have been aping for twenty years.

What's the elevator pitch for this series?

It's about two different guys in Los Angeles, a young Mexican guy whose mom is a cartel leader, and a cop whose partner is corrupt. Their lives intertwine and sort of bring each of them separately into new worlds where they sort of see the dark reflection of 21st-Century America. It's the most Nick Refn-y thing that has ever existed.

With the way Nick works, where he rewrites on set with the actors, it was a ten-month shooting schedule. I think it's a record? Nick managed to get Amazon to agree to that, somehow. But, yeah, it was just exhausting. It started out very much like a crime show, and then it became something else entirely as it was being made and I think it's going to be very shocking to a lot of people. I don't know if Nick even knows this, but I feel like it was all sort of a subconscious reaction to him moving his whole family to America for a year right before the election.