I Was Feeling Epic Quotes

“It's all for the love of a show that was not easy to make—what with the night shoots, the complex mythology, and the sheer number of episodes-and was only made more difficult by the passion of those working on it, individuals who were simply unwilling to make anything less than the best show they could. It was that passion, as writers, actors, crew members, executives, and everyone constantly strove for excellence, that solidified The Vampire Diaries' smart, sexy, shocking, scary, sad, wonderful, amazing, and, above all, epic legacy.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Julie Plec: Those episodes are always so fun to do because you know you're building the entire episode around an event. To be able to lean hard into a big, beautiful romantic wedding knowing that at the end of the next episode, half of those people would be dead, was great. We love that; we love taking happiness and then destroying it very quickly.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Julie Plec: It just made me realize: This is the love story right here. Because we knew Nina was leaving by then, so this is the love story; these brothers are the love story.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“To be a fan of The Vampire Diaries isn't just to like it. It isn't just to love it. It's to obsess over it. It's the kind of fandom that still, more than fifteen years after the series first premiered, attends conventions all over the globe just to get a glimpse of their favorite star or hear them talk about Mystic Falls. It's a fandom that certainly launched with the book series but became something entirely new when the show really took off.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Julie Plec: In that scene where she's crying in the Salvatore great room as she's coming out of this memory, I finally found my voice for the show, which was this is a show about the fear of loneliness and the fear of being left behind and the fear of getting to the end of your life and not having loved or been loved in the right way, or losing your love and not ever being able to see them again. Moving forward, every episode had to have that emotional core in it as well. So we're building the formula for Vampire Diaries writing in real time over the course of the third season..... And the ratings started going up, which never happens. That's the moment I took a breath. The ratings, which had been pretty steady for two seasons, started ticking up. We all were like, 'Okay, no one's fired, no one's getting canceled.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Caroline Dries: So much of the show was just about making the mythology make sense, and then the art is making it emotional and compelling.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Julie Plec: She's staring up longingly and you realize this is a character that wants something, that needs something emotionally. She is being driven by a deeply personal want here, and that sort of became the rule on the show that if you have a villain, the villain has to be the hero of their own story, they have to have a deeply personal rooting interest. That's the moment where I fell in love with Katherine as a hero of her own story. I had so much empathy for her in that moment.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Kevin Williamson: I said, 'That's the show. We have to constantly keep defying the expectation of what's going to happen.' Once we'd figured out that he'd come to get Katherine and that he had a greater agenda, once I wrote that line 'That's for me to know and you to dot dot dot,' I was like, okay, that's his journey. He's the dot dot dot. That dot dot dot became so important.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Julie Plec: When [Arrowverse cocreator] Greg Berlanti saw The Vampire Diaries for the first time he said to me, 'I firmly believe that every actor has the role that they are meant to play that opens the lock to the power of their career, and this is that role for Paul Wesley.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries

“Kevin Williamson: I thought, "What is this really about?" It's this young girl who is dealing with death. I went, "Okay check that box." It's about how this dead man comes along and brings her back to life. I went "Okay, wouldn't that be lovely? That's certainly what I need right now." And so I used that metaphor and played against the allegory, and Julie and I sat down at a kitchen table and we wrote it and we just cried over it. We tried to find that part of it that was really about Elena trying to learn how to live again. And it worked. It really worked. And in a weird way, the whole show was my Stefan.”
― Samantha Highfill, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries