Quotes from Sam Esmail

Tone is very important to me.

I think technology gives the illusion that you are connecting with people, social media particularly.

The fact you can manipulate people because you can hack them and learn everything about their personal lives - that's an immense amount of power.

Reality, in general, in my opinion, has gotten blurred.

It's strange not to allow the actor some input and breathing room into what was written on the page - it is their job to make it come alive.

I used to want to be a critic. I think it's an awesome job. You get to watch all this stuff and then write about it and analyze it and give insight into it. That's an amazing job. I was terrible at it, though.

I always thought the writing process for movies and TV shows was just a blueprint. The making of it was the thing.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

I've lived a very isolated life.

I have tremendous social anxiety.

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!

I never try and tune anything out. I think that's a mistake. You want to bring all the honest stuff that's going on inside you into your work. Otherwise, you're keeping a lot of authenticity out.

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 rip off of every movie and TV show I've ever seen in my life.

Music is everything to me. It's the heart and soul of a movie or TV show to me because it can be such an injection of tone, and I think tone is everything to a story.

I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.

Movies and television show build on top of each other, succeed one another. In a large way, in terms of filmmaking aesthetics, they evolve because they can't help but be a consequence of all the movies and TV shows that came before it.

When events like the Sony Hack or the news of the Russian hack of our election, we're not shocked by such events, but they are troubling.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

If your loved ones are far away, and they're uploading pictures, you feel like that's enough: these loose strands through email, through social media, are going to supply this connection you have with that person. And I think that's keeping us isolated and lonely in a way that's very dangerous because we're unaware of it.

I never look at twists as a way to trick the audience. Obviously, I think a good story has surprises and unexpected turns, and you always want to do that with an audience. But it has nothing to do with conning them or making them believe so strongly in one thing and then kind of going the other way.

A lot of unexpected things do happen on 'Mr. Robot.'

I'm a film nerd.