Bruno Heller
Bruno Heller
Bruno Helleris an English screenwriter, producer and director. He is known for creating the HBO television series Rome and CBS television series The Mentalist. He has recently produced the TV series Gotham based on the Batman franchise for FOX...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
evil guy trying
The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?
running
Never name a show after a character if you want to be the guy running the show.
art opposed
Film is still an art there, as opposed to an industry.
entirely felt strange
There he was in the Forum, bellowing at these soldiers, and the whole thing was entirely real. It was a very strange moment. Everyone felt a shiver.
brutal caesar dichotomy filled great movies people sets strangely time victorian view warrior writer
I think it was a brutal time filled with people who were strangely sophisticated and uncivilized. Over the years movies tended to take a Victorian gentleman's view of this world ù all marbleized sets and men. But Caesar was a great warrior and writer and a war criminal, by our definition. ...There was a dichotomy between sophistication and viciousness that was specifically Roman.
beauty dignity full italians italy life living
Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same ... there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone.
historical point seed street took
I essentially took the seed of that idea to try to tell a big, historical epic, but from the street level, the everyman's point of view.
brilliant created lasted man operating society strange
(He) must have been a very strange and brilliant man. He ... created a new way of operating a society that lasted for another 500 years.
caesar character designed known people
He's a known character. We designed it so that when you see Caesar, it's through other people's eyes, it's how the people around him see him. Because, to a degree, a character like Caesar is always unknowable.
character challenges stories
A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.
blessed years tvs
One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.
character stories world
he beauty of this world [of comics] is there are so many stories to tell, and there's so many wonderful characters. Wonderful characters we haven't even begun to introduce - it's a world that is infinitely expandable.
tvs
You can't be someone you're not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can't hide.
running fun giving
One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I've been on the other end of that.