How did you feel entering season two when you started the preparation for it?
For us there really wasn't a whole lot of time between the two seasons. We segued from one season into the next and for me personally, you could tack another year onto that because I'd been on the project for a whole year before, coming up with the idea and then writing the script, producing the pilot before it was a series. So I guess I was pretty tired by that time. A normal season allows for a hiatus that is usually a couple of months off and I think we took about a week off and went right back into the writers' room. So because of that it was a tough transition.
But we presume you had written treatments for season two episodes, even before the first season started?
Not at all. The show can't be written that way. There's too much story to tell and I've often said that it's a big mistake to know too much about where you are going in advance with a show like this because the danger is that you'll arrive there way too quickly. We built an entire show around a simple philosophy of storytelling, telling a story based on a simple query: ‘what happens next?’ It's a very interesting way to tell a story because it allows for a tremendously dynamic form of storytelling, for accidents and coincidences. All those things become elements in the storytelling that provides the audience with a kind of thrill-ride quality.
We heard that the actors don't get the scripts until you're shooting. Is that true?
No, we prep an episode between seven and ten days before we shoot and production and directors all get the early drafts and then what's called a production draft comes out. A production draft goes wide to everybody and that's almost always several days before we shoot. But this is not a show where scripts come in late because here, prep is everything.
Is there much writing done while you're shooting? Are lines revised as you're shooting?
Oh sure, a script is always a really dynamic thing but the truth is on this show, it's not usually because it's unfinished. Often in series television because it's like an assembly line, you can get behind and scripts start coming in later and later. We’ve been disciplined enough to get scripts in time enough to prep them. But the dynamics of making a show mean that you have to constantly juggle and move in different directions based on things like locations, actors' availability and for example having to change a script if a prop looks like shit.
There wasn't much of a gap between the first and second season but some of the dynamic changed. Bryan Fuller left, who was one of your writing team, and obviously the cast and the structure of the show changed. Did it throw up any particular problems with these changes?
You know, there's always changes along the way. Bryan actually left before the end of the season; he went off to do his pilot for Pushing Daisies so while it looked like it was a clean break to the rest of the world between seasons, he'd already left months before.
But you did have some new blood in terms of writers for the second season…
Yes we had two or three new writers but everybody folded in fairly seamlessly. One of the problems with joining a writing staff on a show like this is the amount of story that has been told already pales in comparison with the amount of story that's been thrown out and so the sheer numbers of hours that have been spent just discussing things can never really be made up by a new person.
But in terms of the writing team, when you're sitting down and you're forward planning for a season, is the choice of particular writer for a particular episode quite conscious?
One would think that it works in a more selected way where each writer is chosen because of their particular strengths but it's not really done that way. The show is so mercurial and so fragmented and because of that, we write together as a group almost exclusively. The writer of record of each episode is really just based on your turn in the roster.
How big is the writing team? Is it about a dozen people?
It's under that; it's ten. There's a writing team and there are ten writing entities. But it was determined really early on; the style of group writing was based on necessity because we needed to crank out a lot of script in a short amount of time. The lag time between the time we got picked up to go to series and the time we had to be on the air was so short that we determined that the best way to attack the problem of needing to have that many scripts written – because when you go into production, you're not just shooting one script, you're often shooting two scripts – was to have several in the pipeline when you start. There was a lot of: “You take this storyline and I’ll take that storyline” and because of the modular aspect of the storytelling, it worked out perfectly. People could go off on their own and write separate storylines and when you put ’em together, lo and behold, they sort of fit together like pieces from a jigsaw puzzle. We decided that style of writing really helped us for many reasons but not the least of which was that it added a kind of camaraderie to the staff that can't be replaced with any other system. I think there is a real sense of ownership by every member of the staff that's hugely important on a show like this. I have to admit that in looking at our first season and now at our second season as well, there was a tremendous amount of continuity in quality from episode to episode that really helped with the serialised aspect for the viewer, especially when watching it on DVD where you see them back to back, that I think was really benefitted by this group approach to writing.
Would a particular writing pair write the scenes for a particular set of characters or is that perhaps a little bit too simplistic?
It's a little bit simplistic because it's usually just by necessity that it gets all mixed up. Once a writer has written an episode, they're lost to the room for a few weeks because on this particular show, writers also produce their own episodes. So the writer goes into prep on his or her episode, goes into production, goes into post-production and so often when you're up and running on the series and you have a show in prep, a show in production, a show in post-production, the room can dwindle down to four or five people because writers are off in meetings, and so having that guy who writes Claire's voice really well might not be possible at the time so we have a lot of utility players.
We have to ask about the writers' strike, obviously. When you went into doing the second season, we imagine that as the weeks progressed, your head must have been filled with thoughts that you might have had to cut the season in half?
I have to admit the threat of the writers' strike didn't really take shape until fairly late: it was pretty sudden actually. People wondered when it was actually going to be called for and most people's guess was that it was going to be June of this year and it wasn't until a few weeks before that everybody started to think that November was perhaps going to be a more powerful time to start. So it wasn't really until those last few weeks and then literally the last seven or eight days it became very serious and we started masterminding this strategy where we ended up tossing out some story and wrapping up Volume Two. The idea of volumes rather than seasons really turned out to be extremely beneficial for us because we had always intended that Volume Two would end at episode eleven of season two, and so we were able to take that Volume ending and turn it into a season ender with a little bit of rejigging that we did literally at the last minute. We tossed out the last five minutes of the show that had already been shot and we wrote and rewrote an ending that would give us a cliffhanger that could sustain a longer break than what we were expecting.
At the beginning of the second season, the show was criticised for its structure and pacing and you came out and said at the time you weren't 100 per cent happy with the way that the show was progressing. Do you think with the second half of Volume Two that you were able to pull out all the stops?
For us, there's a certain frustration level in how the audience has to watch the show compared with how we're making it because we're often months ahead of where the audience is. We had realised that we should have started the story a little sooner and we started making those adjustments internally literally before the show aired and so when those criticisms came, we had already made these adjustments so it looked to people that we suddenly reacted to their reactions whereas in fact we were months ahead of them. I wish I could say that this is a precise science making a show like this but the truth is the show has been so ground-breaking in so many ways that it really is only from a distance sometimes that you can see some of the mistakes. One of the problems with a show like this is that you get the audience addicted to a certain kind of pace and that expectation becomes harder and harder to live up to.
So what is the thing you're most proud of with the second volume in terms of what you introduced structurally or in terms of character development?
In so many ways, when you really assess season two, there were lots of similarities to the first one. With season one, there were the same frustrations and criticisms early on, it's just that nobody knew that it was going to reach the heights it did later on in the season and so they weren't as condemning of it. I think we learned some lessons about needing to tell the audience where we were going earlier on in the season. I think we were a little clever by half with starting the season four months later and letting you catch up with things. One of the problems with a show like Heroes is that there's a zeitgeist quality to the freshness of the show and it's a show that asked very big, archetypal questions and its mysteries were big and archetypal. “What's happening to me? What are these powers? How are we all connected?” Those were these big archetypal questions and it becomes very hard to ask those same questions over and over and over again. Once you've answered those questions, you've got to come up with a new set of questions and those new questions are oftentimes not as primal and as pristine as the original questions and so the quest constantly becomes: “How do you reframe those original questions so that they constantly change” and what we're going to do in season three is literally reframe all those original questions. But like anything else in life you can only do it once and it's only fresh the once.
But the character of Hiro has changed quite dramatically. He started off like a comic relief figure and he's become a lot more sophisticated as a character. I presume that was your intention from the very start?
Absolutely and one of the problems that you have with serialised storytelling is that the characters have to progress, they have to move forward and they have to learn and as they learn, then they're no longer as innocent and when they're no longer as innocent, maybe they're not as fun or as charming and so the quest then becomes to figure out ways to have characters unlearn things that they learned, so that the character no longer knows the answer. If you don't move forward with the character, the audience senses you are treading water and if you do move forward too much, the audience wants the character to be what they originally fell in love with.
Before the strike, did you have a little bit of an extra adrenalin buzz? Where you on tenterhooks the whole time, thinking, “Bloody hell, is the strike going to happen?”
Volume Two was always going to be 11 episodes but we thought we were going to have a full season of 24 episodes. Looking back, the last week before the strike was a very exciting week, when we were suddenly forced to rejigger, it was an adrenalin rush. We asked ourselves, and the studio and network to be honest asked us, if episode 11 were to be the last episode of this season, could episode 12 be the season opener. And as prepared and as written, the episode 12 that we had was unequivocally not. We did not want that to represent our season premiere: it would have felt flat and lacking in big enough new directions to warrant it being a season premiere.
Can you say anything about Volume Three?
One of the things we were talking about was lessons learned along the way and after making 34 episodes, you look back and you see things that worked and things that didn't and one of the things that we really want to stress in Volume Three is the thrill ride quality of the second half of season two, the high points along the way. We really have looked at assessing those qualities and tried to design a volume that's going to be a bit more of a high-octane version of the show.
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