Alex Kurtzman

When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.

The bad guy in any good storytelling is always, in some weird way, a mirror for your hero's journey and for the challenges that they are facing and is some weird physical externalization of that fear that the character is holding onto and has to overcome.

With a series, keeping the quality high and writing incredibly fast, that's the first lesson you learn. You can't be real precious. When you're doing a feature film, you have 2 1/2 months; you sort of take your time. It's a different animal.

Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.