John Fusco

“I was interviewing an elder, Chief Fool's Crow, who was the ceremonial chief. He was 103 years old. I was getting his information on the history of Lakota horses. He told me the story of Hidalgo and Frank Hopkins.”

“He was an Italian kid traveling in China, and I'm of Italian decent with a fascination for China. So, I always felt this connection to him and lived vicariously through the travels of Marco Polo.”

“In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.”

“I have spent time in Mongolia, in China.”

“I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.”

“'Horse thunder' is what I call the sound of galloping hooves.”

“As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.”

“We searched around the globe and looked at well over a hundred 'Marco Polos,' came down to the wire, and went back and looked at our Italy tapes, and we realized that we had overlooked someone. That was Lorenzo Richelmy.”

“Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.”

“Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for 'Thunderheart,' I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.”