David Mitch on “writing” Deadwood:

All storytelling is collaborative in one way or another. Nobody writes an episode independently. Once the scene is generated, we don’t let it ripen particularly, usually the scene was written either the day it’s shot or the day before. No finished script before the shooting begins. If the shoot was an average of twelve days, the script was finished on the twelfth day of the shoot. The idea of being an auteur, I don’t believe in that. I don’t care whose name is on a script. We are organs of a larger organism which knows us although we do not know it. I regard myself as a vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than as the source of the scenes.

I love the romanticism of this approach, and just makes me love and appreciate the series all the more.