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.”

“'Pi' was one of my favorite films growing up because I thought it employed paranoia and voice-over, and also because it used this unreliable narrator in a very fascinating way.”

“When I started thinking about 'Mr. Robot,' I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I'm going to tell.”

“Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.”

“You don't even know if the person you're communicating with online is actually that person. And your persona on your social media - your Facebook or Twitter - may not be the person you are in real life. So then, who is the real person? Is it somewhere in between?”

“I think I was told numerous times in the industry that nobody wants to watch a guy on a keyboard.”

“I went to film school to direct.”

“I love when a protagonist and antagonist can find common ground.”

“I've lived a very isolated life.”

“The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.”

“That's what I did growing up. Other than being on the computer, I was watching TV and movies. I make no apologies.”

“I absolutely don't deny that I was inspired by 'Fight Club,' among many other television shows and films. I completely not only acknowledge it, I own it and love to nod to them as much as possible.”

“I'm not a huge fan of very plotty shows. I'm much more of a fan of character-driven stories.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.”

“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 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.”

“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.”