Ahead of Alan Ball’s upcoming Australian speaking tour, Alan Ball: Vampires, Death And The Mundane, Pedestrian spoke with the Oscar-winning scribe and showrunner about the golden age of television, the burden of killing off characters, and why Rake is his kind of show.
Pedestrian: Hi, how are you? Alan Ball: I’m good how are you doing?
Pretty, pretty good. What have you been up to today? I’ve just done three hundred interviews. Prior to that I had a couple of meetings. And this morning I went to my shrink.
Nice. The meetings go all right? Yep. All good. It’s been a good day.
That’s good to hear. Well I guess we’re talking because you’ll be discussing your work at the Sydney Opera House later this year and I was wondering if you’d ever done something like that before? I’ve done tonnes of things for print and camera but I’ve never done just me, myself and my work in front of a live audience. I’ve appeared on panels and I’ve certainly done a lot of things with the cast of both True Blood and Six Feet Under but it will be the first time for me with it being just all about me.
Does that scare you at all or are you excited by that prospect? Yeah I’m very excited to come to Australia because I’ve always wanted to come to Australia. It’s at a perfect time because I’m right between seasons four and five of True Blood so I don’t really have anything on my plate so I hope to really experience the country and the continent as much as one can in a short amount of time. In terms of am I scared of the event itself? Not really. I’m assuming that everyone coming is kind of interested.
Have you asked Ryan [Kwanten] for any Australian tips? So Ryan told me some places to go and Anna [Paquin] told me some places to go in New Zealand. I work with some other Australians. One of our editors is Australian and I got a bunch of lists. I think Ryan and his family are actually coming to the event at the Opera House. I’ve met his parents and maybe I’ll get to meet his brother sometime
What I really wanted to talk to you about today is the writing process. You’ve written across a variety of different mediums and I was just wondering, for you personally, what is it about television that appeals to you so much? What I love about television is it’s very similar to writing for film except you have a bigger canvas given that, at least in the situation I work in, because I have twelve hours in each season to tell the story. It certainly seems in America at least, I don’t know if this is the case in Australia, because I’ve actually seen some Australian TV that I thought was really interesting and complicated. I think television in America is a much more welcoming place for adult drama or adult comedy or characters that are complicated and flawed and for stories that are ambiguous and nuanced and more reflective of what I think reality actually looks like as opposed to the big mainstream Hollywood movies which come out which are all about telling a very simplistic story so it will appeal to the largest number of people on the planet who I think may not even speak the same language. In America, the target moviegoer is the fifteen-year-old boy so a lot of the movies are made for those people. And I don’t find fifteen-year-old boys very interesting. I don’t think they’re even remotely close to becoming who they are and they want wish fulfillment films that are pretty simple and the stories that I enjoy telling, that I enjoy watching, are more adult and more complicated and at least in America is seems that TV is the place for that right now unfortunately. Or fortunately. I mean there’s no reason to put a value judgment on it.
Do you still have a desire to work in feature films? Yeah, absolutely. I have two projects that are in various states of coming together and I’ve got a couple of other scripts I’m sitting on, it’s just a very tough time for the kind of movies and the kind of stories I want to tell. People just want to make comic book movies or big gross-out comedies. I have nothing against either one of those but those are not the stories that I want to tell and unfortunately it’s more and more difficult to make a little movie that is for a target audience of sophisticated people who are willing to go on a slightly different ride than a traditional movie. Which for me is like ‘check your brain at the top and then just go on this ride for two hours’ then ‘here’s your brain, now go away’ and it didn’t really affect you or challenge you or inspire you in some way. It was just a fun ride, that’s all, great, I just don’t want to spend my life working on that stuff.
Can you talk about the scripts you’ve developed at all? Well, yeah. I mean, there’s a twist to them. I always like to look at the traditional mythology that we grew up with and that we’re currently being told and by that I mean pretty much everything the media tells us both in scripted drama and things we see on TV or at the movies and also in politics and the messages we’re getting. I like to look at the places where it’s not true and pull out the rug and shine some light on that stuff. A lot of big corporations don’t want to make those kinds of movies. They’re making a lot of money doing what they’re doing. So yeah I’m just more interested in stories that are real that take me some place unexpected and really show me the heart and soul of characters in really challenging or difficult times in their lives that don’t judge the characters for their actions no matter how heinous they may seem on the surface and that don’t give us these bad happy endings. Life isn’t that simple.
In the writer’s room when you’re blocking out and breaking a season where does it start for you? What are you trying to achieve and where is the usual starting point in the writer’s room for a new season? For True Blood? Well we start with the book, with the source material. And when we come in for the season we’ve all read the book, we talk about what works, what we feel doesn’t necessarily work, and then we start going from there. The books are all Sookie’s story because Sookie is the narrator of the books, we have a lot of free reign anyway because of all the other characters that we have on the show. And then it’s me and five others and we just sort of very slowly map everything out. We spend a lot of time just talking about what we want the season to be about: Who’s the big villain? How is it going to engage our characters in a way that we haven’t seen before? We have two columns and we start giving little one line descriptions of what happens to each character in each of those episodes and then we start breaking those episodes more individually and we come up with two or three beats for each character or each collection of characters or whatever way they are combined at that point in the story and then we map those out chronologically and then we make an outline and somebody goes off and writes the first draft.
For you, what kind of writing do you find more rewarding? I guess something like American Beauty, which was an original screenplay, all those ideas would have been internalized over a long period of time. Whereas this is quite a collaborative process – what are the main differences and benefits for you? Well, I mean, when you’re writing something original by yourself, you’re in a room by yourself. You’re staring at a computer. It’s a very solitary journey. There’s something about that which is fantastic, there’s something about it that’s very lonely. There’s something about it that, if you hit a stumbling block, it’s very easy to go, ‘well now it’s suddenly the perfect time for me to re-arrange all these filing drawers, a task that I’ve never wanted to do in the last five years. I would rather do that than sit here and figure out this problem’. There’s something kind of great about having been the sole person on the ride of discovering what that was. When you’re in a room with six hundred people there’s great conversation and when you have someone saying ‘we need something to happen here, and it needs to be something like this but not this’ and then you have five other people who are going ‘what about this and what about this and what about this?’ and so it’s a little simpler, it’s a little easier to come up with something. But then you lose that personal thing you have when it’s just you but you gain this other thing. I don’t feel like either one or the other is better. Again, even working from source material and working on your own, there’s something great about having all the heavy lifting done in the source material. And there’s something great about having just a blank page where you can just do whatever you want.
You mention mapping out the character beats and relationships and the different permutations that you can work with from season to season. Is it hard to unravel those threads then connect them again over a season arc? If it was just me by myself it would be incredibly hard. But because I have five other people thinking about it, and I have someone whose job is just merely to keep a Bible of everything we’ve done and he’s the same guy who sits there and transcribes our thoughts during the writer’s meetings. There’s a whole organization in place so that you can say, ‘did this ever happen?’ Or when such-and-such was made vampire, what exactly happened? and then within minutes he’ll have an answer because he has a database he goes into and pulls all this stuff.
So there’s a True Blood encyclopedia somewhere out there? We call it The Bible. The True Blood Bible [laughs].
There’s your mythology right there, that Bible. Yeah, exactly. Right there.
Is there a logical end for you for True Blood? I’m sure there will be, I just don’t see it yet. I mean, everything ends. And I don’t want it to be one of those things that goes on for more seasons than it actually could. You know what I mean? But I do feel like there’s definitely a fifth season. I’ve signed my name on a piece of paper committing to it. And I would imagine that it could go beyond that. Whether or not I will be a part of that is another question because there’s only so much you can do and I’m not as young as I used to be…On the other side of that I’ve never had as much fun on a job and it just keeps being fun, so, who knows?
Are there any rules in the writer’s room with regard to the logic of the universe – stuff we will never do, stuff we should always do, stuff we should consider… I think we try not to repeat ourselves as much as we possibly can. I think sometimes you have to do that. If we were a presidential campaign, we would have a sign on the wall that said, ‘Emotions, Stupid’. We work really hard to keep everything grounded in characters’ emotions and desires, their loves, hates and revenge and all that stuff. If we don’t do that then we just run the risk of it being arbitrary weirdness. And I think what makes the show so watchable is that weirdness, definitely, but there’s an emotional component to it too. At least there’s one of these characters that you identify with, that you’re concerned about, and I think that if we didn’t make that the foundation of everything the show would just be ridiculous chaos. That’s certainly not what any of us want to do. We all take the show seriously and we definitely have a cast of actors who are actually very good at playing out these outlandish situations – in a way we have to treat it like it’s real. And I think I’m less interested in focusing on the mechanics of the supernatural stuff and more about what it does to a character’s emotions. I would say that’s sort of our rule of thumb.
Is it important for the non-antagonist characters to be likeable? Someone like Tara for example, who can be quite self-loathing and spiteful, is it important to balance a character’s likeability with how they serve the plot? I mean I am much more forgiving with characters than a lot of people because I like them all. There is not a single character that I don’t like. I know that a lot times when I was working in TV like the question would be, if she does that then she’s unlikeable or if he does this thing then we’re not going to like him, and I’m like, ‘really? I like him, I think he made a big mistake and he screwed up but that’s the story’. I think it’s important for me for the characters to be strong and to be recognizable and I guess that’s just different wording for likeable. If you can understand why people are behaving a certain way, the seed or the root cause behind it, I mean, it all falls into the Buddhist notion of compassion, and the idea we should have compassion even for our greatest enemies, that we should be able to see their human side, the pain and the suffering that they feel. That’s a tall order. That’s a tall order for most people, including me but I do feel that it’s important to treat fictional characters with the dignity of being a genuine human being and not just like, ‘we need someone to come in and be evil’. I don’t think anyone gets up in the morning and thinks, ‘wow, today I’m going to be evil. I am so hurt by everything that’s happened to me and I’m going to make somebody pay for this.’ And they may very well do something that is easily classifiable as evil but I think ultimately, everyone’s a human being and that’s part of the joy in the work that I do. Even though they’re fictional characters, I get to peel back the layers and see what it is that screwed them up or that turned them dark or made them a bitch. It’s hard to deal with, but for me that’s the interesting thing.
Across your writing career, who has been the hardest character to kill? I would have to say Lester Burnham [from American Beauty]. Because when I was writing that script I was surprised at how much that affected me emotionally when he died because I had grown to love him so much. And I actually went into a little bit of a funk that lasted a handful of days. And then I would have to say, probably, the whole last episode of Six Feet Under. I’m not sure that that was hard, because I feel like it was earned, and it was also part of what the show was about: the fact that death is for everybody, nobody escapes it. When I wrote it I was up at my cabin at Lake Arrowhead and I had taken a couple of my dogs and as I was writing that final sequence I just started weeping. It was a good kind of crying, it was cathartic. I remember each dog just sitting on the floor and staring at me with my laptop just crying like a baby thinking ‘what the hell is wrong with him?’ [Laughs]. True Blood is different, I mean, it was certainly hard to kill Gran, but Charlaine had killed Gran in the book so I knew that was coming. And True Blood exists in a different world. It’s got such a gigantic body count and death doesn’t really, I mean it’s a very pulpy, heightened story so it doesn’t have quite the same emotional effect as Six Feet Under when it comes to death.
Having said that, once a True Blood character dies, it seems as if they enter some other kind of pantheon in the audience’s mind. Godric comes to mind as an example of that. Oh yeah. And they can always come back in flashback. After season four, people will know there’s a different way for them to come back. I guess True Blood can exist in this world where nobody really dies, ever. [Laughs] You can blow them up and behead them and explode their guts across the screen but they’re not really dead.
In a way it’s the exact opposite ethos of Six Feet Under. Yeah exactly. In a way Six Feet Under was like, ‘let’s look at death and mortality and just live with it.’ And True Blood is like, ‘Mortality? Fuck mortality!’.
Spoiler warning: Saddest series finale of all time.
Which shows do you watch religiously? Well right now I’m watching Breaking Bad, I won’t miss it. I love Breaking Bad. I love Mad Men. I’m a huge Game Of Thrones fan. There’s a show on Comedy Central called Workaholics about three loveable loser slacker dork assholes that makes me laugh like nothing else since South Park. And I just recently started watching this Australian show called Rake. I gotta say I’m pretty intrigued by it. I just watched an episode where a former prostitute was telling this girl that she needed to forgive her father for having a three way which included a dog. People can be good parents you know? Everyone has something about them that’s weird but it doesn’t mean they’re not good people. That’s my kind of show. You would never see this on American TV, at least not on a network.
When Six Feet Under came out the internet was nowhere near what it is today. On True Blood, how has the internet changed the way fans engage with a television show? Well, we create content specifically for the internet now. We definitely use the internet in our marketing plans and if we create a website for the show then we create that real website for the internet and stuff like that. The way that it works that interests me is that it becomes a platform for additional content that makes the world of the show that much more real. I know when they first rolled the show out they used the internet a lot because they created this viral website where you could go and there was a gatekeeper and it was very mysterious and they would ask you questions and you wouldn’t be allowed in and somebody finally figured out that it was about vampires. It was a fake website about the fact that this great revelation was coming and HBO did this amazing job of creating false documentaries, faux documentaries about what happened when the vampires actually came out of the coffin and we would never have done anything like that during Six Feet Under.
Have you met many other showrunners? I know who some people are. I know the ones that I really respect and admire. I know the ones I met on the picket lines during the writers’ strike four years ago. Then there are others that I’m remarkably ignorant about because the industry is so big and there’s just so many shows that I don’t know about. You know, for example I met Matt Weiner [Mad Men] on the picket line and we went out for dinner and sort of formed a friendship. I met Vince Gilligan [Breaking Bad] at some critic’s award night and shamelessly gushed about how much I loved Breaking Bad. It’s not like we’re all great friends and hang out together because none of us actually have any time because we work all the time.
What’s the hardest aspect for you personally about being a showrunner? The managerial aspect of it. I’m not that crazy about the amount of time that I have to spend planning and organizing but ultimately it’s not that bad because the way I run the show is I really try to empower the people that work for me. Every one of the writers is the producer of their episode. I’m not a control freak. I work with really good writers. Nothing makes me happier than when a script comes in and I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t really have to do anything. I can have a weekend!’ I would say probably the hardest though is just the amount of time it takes. It’s like directing a movie for 9 months, because you really do work from the start of the day to the end of the day and there’s just that much stuff that has to be done. I love all the stuff I’m doing but the amount of time it takes – it’s a struggle to maintain your job and your personal life. It’s tricky but it’s not impossible.
Since you’re constantly surrounded by all these supernatural elements, do you ever get scared? Not really because it’s all so fake. Or do you mean do I ever think late at night, ‘oh my god, I wonder if supernatural things are real?’
Yeah the latter. I just thought the work might lend itself to having morbid thoughts… My morbid thoughts are more based in mundane concerns. Like, I recently had an infection and I ran a high fever and I thought, ‘this is because I have cancer, I’m going to die.’ But I never worry so much about the supernatural elements. I get worried that the coyotes in the canyon are going to eat my dog.
So when it comes to fear you’re quite pragmatic? I guess so. I like to keep all the crazy and the weird in front of the camera. People ask me about the kind of characters I like and I like characters who are really screwed up and struggling to make sense of their screwed up lives instead of people who have it together and know how to deal with every conflict and stay calm. Then I was thinking, I would actually like to have those kinds of people in my life. The characters that I write, I wouldn’t necessarily want to live with any of them but they are definitely the kind of people I want to watch on TV.
Who was the hardest character for you to get a handle on? Like, whose voice and point of view was the hardest to work out? I think Rico On Six Feet Under was a bit hard. Like, I didn’t really know who he was in the beginning. Generally, character is the entry point for me. I’m pretty quick to understand it and be empathetic with them without judging them. I think the harder thing for me is sometimes plot.
And I guess with something like True Blood they’re already fully drawn in the source material. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the time when you have the right actor, the character becomes really obvious so when I’m casting I’m looking for someone who’s going to bring that character to life in a way that feels really real and really organic. And luckily I work at HBO and they’re not saying ‘you have to cast recognizable stars, you have to cast somebody who’s been in an MTV show before.’ So without that pressure it’s really nice. I mean, sometimes it takes a while to find the right person but once you do and it all clicks it’s like ‘okay.’
I think the casting of the show is amazing and the audience is obviously very engaged with these characters and the actors who play them. When you are casting what kind of things do you look for in an actor? There are two kinds of actors in LA. There are people who are trained and who have technique and there are people who don’t but they happen to be really gorgeous and charismatic and you can’t take your eyes off of them. If I had a movie schedule and I was going to spend an entire day on one person’s coverage, I might lean towards casting people out of that second group. But I work in TV and I work on a TV schedule. I need people who can come in, know how to play a scene, and who know how to play the details of the scene as opposed to ‘I’m just standing in a line.’ It’s like, that’d be great if I had 90 takes of you and I could cut together a genius performance. I need someone who can give to me a very solid performance on take one. So I definitely lean towards people who are trained. I don’t even think you have to be trained, I just think you have to have craft. Some people are born with it, some people just have an innateness about it. A lot of people out here don’t have it. Then I look at it like, here are these words on a page, make them come alive for me and if you can do that then that’s fantastic but if you can do that in a way that surprises me, maybe shows me something I never saw in the material, you’ve got the job.
So what are you going to do during your downtime? Well, this trip to Australia is a big thing for me because I’m going to be in Australia for almost a month. We’re going to go to Sydney and Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef and New Zealand and all different places, the cities and then seeing nature, so I’m really looking forward to recharging myself physically and spiritually before I get back into the trenches for season 5. My company is producing a new show for Cinemax called Banshee, which is probably going to start shooting in Spring. It’s a really interesting show written by two novelists, Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler, so that’s pretty exciting. There’s also a couple of feature products I have that may come together at any moment, but you know how the movie business is, it may never happen. I think that’s enough to have on my plate at one particular time.
Alan Ball in conversation with Wil Anderson
Thursday 8 September, 7pm
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
Purchase tickets here
Alan Ball in conversation with Alan Brough
Saturday 10 September, 7.30pm
Wheeler Centre, Melbourne
Purchase tickets here
True Blood season four airs Thursdays at 8.30pm on Showtime (Foxtel).
