Sam Esmail Quotes

Sam Esmail

Profession : Director

Birth : September 17, 1977

I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things.

Sam Esmail

I was a nerd, growing up, I was really into computers and technology, and most of my friends were basically in that world as well.

Sam Esmail

I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, the election of Trump is a national tragedy for multiple reasons. It will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history. But he's not a dictator. This happened because we either allowed it or voted for it.

Sam Esmail

My parents were very strict Muslims, and they weren't shy about showing it.

Sam Esmail

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

Sam Esmail

The story of 'Mr. Robot' is really about this guy who's lonely - who's alone and feels so disconnected from the world.

Sam Esmail

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.

Sam Esmail

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

Sam Esmail

It's not necessarily bad that you have angst or you have anger - it's what you do with it, how you interpret it into something profoundly moving.

Sam Esmail

'Fight Club' is great in its spirit of anti-establishment.

Sam Esmail

I'm a huge fan of 'The Watch,' and I've also been on a few times. It's Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan's show on The Ringer. It's just a great podcast about television.

Sam Esmail

I think there is more cohesion when you have one director on set.

Sam Esmail

I did have friends who have suffered from schizophrenia and mild dissociative identity disorder, as well as more extreme cases of social anxiety disorder.

Sam Esmail

In a weird way, I never wanted - I don't consider myself a very good writer. I consider myself okay; I don't consider myself great. There's Woody Allen and Aaron Sorkin. There's Quentin Tarantino. I'm not ever gonna be on that level. But I do consider myself a good filmmaker.

Sam Esmail

One of my favorite Tarantino films is 'Jackie Brown,' and 'Jackie Brown' does it so well, where I'm watching the back half of that movie, and I don't know which side Jackie Brown is playing. I think it's really ingenious for Tarantino to keep us in the dark on that.

Sam Esmail

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.

Sam Esmail

I always suspend logic for emotion. If it feels real, or it feels like what I'm going for, we should abandon reality a little bit and go for that. I'm not a documentarian. We're not trying to shoot things for naturalism.

Sam Esmail

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.

Sam Esmail

I know when it comes to TV, the writer is king, but to me, the filmmaker is king.

Sam Esmail

We frame things in an off-kilter way because it's unsettling. In the 'Mr. Robot' world, that's the norm, and it's the norm for the point of view that we're looking for, which is Elliot's. With our compositions and our visual language and camera movements, it's important to always evoke that unsettling feeling underneath every scene.

Sam Esmail