CS Weekly Kripke Interview
I don't know if this has been posted, but I thought I'd stick it up in case it hadn't been. I get a weekly e-mail "magazine" from Creative Screenwriting called CS Weekly. This week, they featured an interview with our very own evil mastermind. It talks more about the process of writing the show and gives background on the series and its creation, along with some specific plotlines from the past. However, this is Kripke, and I haven't read the whole thing yet, so though I don't think there are any major spoilers, one should always tread carefully where he is concerned.
Finding Your Inner Demons: Supernatural's Eric Kripke
By Jason Davis
Eric Kripke takes CS Weekly behind the scenes of his CW series Supernatural and explains how an affinity for urban legends and some sound advice during development led to a show closing out its third successful season on the air.
Supernatural chronicles the exploits of brothers Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki) as they follow in the demon-hunting footsteps of their father John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who declared war on everything from ghosts to vampires when his wife was killed by an evil entity years before. While finishing up the show's strike-shortened third season, creator Eric Kripke took time away from the forces of darkness to tell CS Weekly how the series came to be.
How did you end up creating Supernatural for the WB?
I had adapted another show for the WB, a piece of crap called Tarzan. Here're my feelings on Tarzan: I'll stand behind the pilot. It has a beginning, middle, and -- the problem -- it ends. I was hungry to have anything in production, so I wrote a 50-page story that ended. Then it got made and I had something in production and it was all my dreams come true. They said to me, "Let's do 12 more." I said, "Uh, wait! What's the story?" So, Tarzan was a hell ride in every way, and we only did eight before they wisely put us out of our misery. But I think Warner Bros. appreciated that I stood proudly on the deck of the Titanic with my violin and just played away. I never tried to dress as a woman and get off the boat… I just went right down with that ship. So they came to me the next year and said, "Thank you for developing Tarzan for us, but what idea do you want to do?"
I had in my back pocket an idea that was basically an exploration of American urban legends, an obsession of mine since back in elementary school. The pitch I took to them was a reporter who would go out and investigate these urban legends. They were all true, but no one ever believed them -- basically a sub-par rip-off of Night Stalker. Warner Bros., to their credit, said, "We don't want to do the reporter idea. What else you got?" The reporter idea was all I had. I'd been working on it for weeks and it was very fleshed out and had its own mythology. I immediately started lying through my teeth and saying, "I do have another version of this idea where it's Route 66… and it's these two guys on a road trip… and they're brothers! They investigate these urban legends as they drive from town to town in a muscle car." Warner Bros. sparked to that immediately. We took it to the WB and they bought it.
You mentioned on one of the DVD commentaries that your original pilot was substantially different from what got produced. What changed?
The single biggest change, although it ends up being the core of the show, was that in my original version, Sam and Dean were not raised with their father. Their father disappeared when they were kids and they were raised by this aunt and uncle. Dean went out to find his father and then came back to collect Sam two years later, saying, "I found out what Dad's really been up to." The idea was to bring Sam in as a civilian from the outside world who didn't believe in the supernatural. Then suddenly he was exposed to this insane world… and dad also died in the teaser.
I was too precious with [the script]. I cared so much about every little detail and filling every hole that it ended up being way too much exposition. It didn't have the same kind of loose freewheeling sense of humor the series ended up having. It was very, very serious. I must have spent three months writing it, turned it in, and the studio threw it out. They said, "We're not crazy about it." I heard, "We're wiping our butt with it." I said, "Let me find a way to simplify the back story." So, [producer Peter Johnson and I] said, "What if the boys grew up with Dad so they don't need any of this stuff explained to them?" All of a sudden, a two-page exposition scene just becomes a couplet of dialogue. They have this funhouse mirror of an American childhood where they're trying to balance their schoolwork with slaughtering creatures. It brought everything to life. The other thing about it that we didn't count on is they basically grew up as exterminators -- so they had this really humorous, blue-collar, unimpressed view of the supernatural. That's something you never or rarely see, even in shows I adore like X-Files. You know there are aliens and you have to take time for that appropriate sense of awe and wonder. But on Supernatural, if they see a ghost, they shoot it with a gun. I love that dead-pan reaction to these unbelievable and extraordinary events.
I guess in retooling the pilot you also created the ongoing storyline...
...of finding Dad. I have to give [Warner Bros. President] Peter Roth credit for that, too. I spent three months on the first version. I spent probably three weeks on the second version. And the second version's better 'cause I had more fun with it. The way this version ended is Sam went back to his apartment to find his dead father. It was Peter Roth who said, "Please keep the father alive. It provides a place for them to go and a certain amount of hope for the boys. It's not so nihilistic." That was the right decision, because it ended up providing us a really strong season one mythology. Still, of the three years of Supernatural, my favorite season is season one, because it's so simple and so emotional. You can tell the whole season-wide story in two words: find Dad. We've never come up with a mythology as pure and elegant and emotional as that one.
But someone had to die. The studio and network were giving me all these notes about Sam's girlfriend, [Jessica, played by Adrianne Palicki], who survived originally. Can she make phone calls with the boys? How's their relationship going to develop? Are they meant for each other? I was horrified by the idea of telling a relationship b-story while you're trying to avert Armageddon in the A-story, so I went back to them and said, "Good news! I've figured out exactly how we're going to develop the girlfriend's story." They said, "How?" I said, "I'm going to burst her into flames on the ceiling." The reality is, Luke Skywalker ain't going off to save the universe until his aunt and uncle are crispy. So if we couldn't kill Dad -- which would have certainly motivated Sam in terms of revenge -- we had to shut off the possibility of a normal life, which the death of Jessica did. There was no choice but to go off with Dean to find this demon and try to get some revenge.
How do you break a Supernatural story?
In season one, we had a greatest hits of urban legends -- Hook Man and Bloody Mary -- so the first thing we decided was the monster. Then, the story developed around it. Because of that, the structures of the season one episodes were actually quite similar, to the point of becoming boring and repetitive. The guys rolled into town, they met the girl, they went to the library, they fought the monster, they kissed the girl, and off they went. Just plug in different monsters each time.
Once we got into season two, [executive producer] Bob Singer and I realized if we continued down that path, we'd be dead. We stumbled onto a more effective way of breaking these stories. The first thing we determine is, what structure haven't we seen before? Is it Dog Day Afternoon? Is it Groundhog Day? Is it Memento? What's a way to keep our structure changed up so we rarely repeat ourselves? Two, what storyline will put the boys under the most emotional duress? Putting the boys in mortal danger doesn't really seem to be all that effective. You know they're going to survive. But putting them in emotional danger really works because you can just torture the hell out of them and the question becomes can they be saved before they're emotionally screwed to hell? That actually has some stakes to it. Once we figure out what their internal demons are we say, "What creature is the perfect metaphor for that?" The episodes have improved as a result.
How does an episode like "Hell House," with such a unique monster, come into being?
That was a writer who wrote a freelance for us, Trey Callaway. He told an anecdote that we thought would be a great episode for Supernatural. He and his buddies found an abandoned barn and they painted the inside of it with red paint and chains. Then, they went home and told everybody how they stumbled onto this barn and that the ghost of a serial killer resided there. So, kids would start going and checking this place out… and then the rumor just spread until it became a town legend. People started reporting seeing the spirit, and then some girl saw the spirit and ran so fast and scared that she fell and broke her leg. And this whole time, this group of boys made it up and it's taking on a life of its own. The idea that we sparked to is a story of urban legends themselves and how they spread. So it's about how these things take on a life of their own and they become these self-fulfilling prophecies. [The story] became about these people who invented this urban legend and then [it] literally came to life from the fact that people believed in it. The last step was, what piece of real-life legend out there would support this idea? Trey researched and said "Tulpas -- things that come to life when people think about them." Plug that in and that's a good example of how something develops, usually monster last, these days.
And you don't seem to be afraid of a little of philosophizing here and there -- the religious-themed episodes "Faith" and "Houses of the Holy" spring to mind…
You're playing in the realm of life, death, fate, destiny, good, evil, and so it seems inevitable to tell those kinds of stories and do a bit of philosophizing. I'm actually more comfortable hiding those things in a bit of metaphor. One of my favorite philosophical episodes is "Bloodlust." They meet this hunter, Gordon (Sterling K. Brown), who's this vampire killer. If you substitute any minority of your choice for the word "vampire" in the episode, it actually becomes a fairly subversive investigation of racism. Gordon is a human supremacist and feels the only good member of this particular minority, vampire, is a dead one. Why I love this genre is 'cause you can say subversive things and just hide it in metaphor. Dean gives a speech at the end of this episode saying to Sam, "Dad raised us to be racists. I didn't want to be, but I can't help it because I hate them so much." To have your main character basically cop to racism is something you just don't see much on the CW. You just bury it in genre and the people who get the message are really paying attention.
Finding Your Inner Demons: Supernatural's Eric Kripke
By Jason Davis
Eric Kripke takes CS Weekly behind the scenes of his CW series Supernatural and explains how an affinity for urban legends and some sound advice during development led to a show closing out its third successful season on the air.
Supernatural chronicles the exploits of brothers Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki) as they follow in the demon-hunting footsteps of their father John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who declared war on everything from ghosts to vampires when his wife was killed by an evil entity years before. While finishing up the show's strike-shortened third season, creator Eric Kripke took time away from the forces of darkness to tell CS Weekly how the series came to be.
How did you end up creating Supernatural for the WB?
I had adapted another show for the WB, a piece of crap called Tarzan. Here're my feelings on Tarzan: I'll stand behind the pilot. It has a beginning, middle, and -- the problem -- it ends. I was hungry to have anything in production, so I wrote a 50-page story that ended. Then it got made and I had something in production and it was all my dreams come true. They said to me, "Let's do 12 more." I said, "Uh, wait! What's the story?" So, Tarzan was a hell ride in every way, and we only did eight before they wisely put us out of our misery. But I think Warner Bros. appreciated that I stood proudly on the deck of the Titanic with my violin and just played away. I never tried to dress as a woman and get off the boat… I just went right down with that ship. So they came to me the next year and said, "Thank you for developing Tarzan for us, but what idea do you want to do?"
I had in my back pocket an idea that was basically an exploration of American urban legends, an obsession of mine since back in elementary school. The pitch I took to them was a reporter who would go out and investigate these urban legends. They were all true, but no one ever believed them -- basically a sub-par rip-off of Night Stalker. Warner Bros., to their credit, said, "We don't want to do the reporter idea. What else you got?" The reporter idea was all I had. I'd been working on it for weeks and it was very fleshed out and had its own mythology. I immediately started lying through my teeth and saying, "I do have another version of this idea where it's Route 66… and it's these two guys on a road trip… and they're brothers! They investigate these urban legends as they drive from town to town in a muscle car." Warner Bros. sparked to that immediately. We took it to the WB and they bought it.
You mentioned on one of the DVD commentaries that your original pilot was substantially different from what got produced. What changed?
The single biggest change, although it ends up being the core of the show, was that in my original version, Sam and Dean were not raised with their father. Their father disappeared when they were kids and they were raised by this aunt and uncle. Dean went out to find his father and then came back to collect Sam two years later, saying, "I found out what Dad's really been up to." The idea was to bring Sam in as a civilian from the outside world who didn't believe in the supernatural. Then suddenly he was exposed to this insane world… and dad also died in the teaser.
I was too precious with [the script]. I cared so much about every little detail and filling every hole that it ended up being way too much exposition. It didn't have the same kind of loose freewheeling sense of humor the series ended up having. It was very, very serious. I must have spent three months writing it, turned it in, and the studio threw it out. They said, "We're not crazy about it." I heard, "We're wiping our butt with it." I said, "Let me find a way to simplify the back story." So, [producer Peter Johnson and I] said, "What if the boys grew up with Dad so they don't need any of this stuff explained to them?" All of a sudden, a two-page exposition scene just becomes a couplet of dialogue. They have this funhouse mirror of an American childhood where they're trying to balance their schoolwork with slaughtering creatures. It brought everything to life. The other thing about it that we didn't count on is they basically grew up as exterminators -- so they had this really humorous, blue-collar, unimpressed view of the supernatural. That's something you never or rarely see, even in shows I adore like X-Files. You know there are aliens and you have to take time for that appropriate sense of awe and wonder. But on Supernatural, if they see a ghost, they shoot it with a gun. I love that dead-pan reaction to these unbelievable and extraordinary events.
I guess in retooling the pilot you also created the ongoing storyline...
...of finding Dad. I have to give [Warner Bros. President] Peter Roth credit for that, too. I spent three months on the first version. I spent probably three weeks on the second version. And the second version's better 'cause I had more fun with it. The way this version ended is Sam went back to his apartment to find his dead father. It was Peter Roth who said, "Please keep the father alive. It provides a place for them to go and a certain amount of hope for the boys. It's not so nihilistic." That was the right decision, because it ended up providing us a really strong season one mythology. Still, of the three years of Supernatural, my favorite season is season one, because it's so simple and so emotional. You can tell the whole season-wide story in two words: find Dad. We've never come up with a mythology as pure and elegant and emotional as that one.
But someone had to die. The studio and network were giving me all these notes about Sam's girlfriend, [Jessica, played by Adrianne Palicki], who survived originally. Can she make phone calls with the boys? How's their relationship going to develop? Are they meant for each other? I was horrified by the idea of telling a relationship b-story while you're trying to avert Armageddon in the A-story, so I went back to them and said, "Good news! I've figured out exactly how we're going to develop the girlfriend's story." They said, "How?" I said, "I'm going to burst her into flames on the ceiling." The reality is, Luke Skywalker ain't going off to save the universe until his aunt and uncle are crispy. So if we couldn't kill Dad -- which would have certainly motivated Sam in terms of revenge -- we had to shut off the possibility of a normal life, which the death of Jessica did. There was no choice but to go off with Dean to find this demon and try to get some revenge.
How do you break a Supernatural story?
In season one, we had a greatest hits of urban legends -- Hook Man and Bloody Mary -- so the first thing we decided was the monster. Then, the story developed around it. Because of that, the structures of the season one episodes were actually quite similar, to the point of becoming boring and repetitive. The guys rolled into town, they met the girl, they went to the library, they fought the monster, they kissed the girl, and off they went. Just plug in different monsters each time.
Once we got into season two, [executive producer] Bob Singer and I realized if we continued down that path, we'd be dead. We stumbled onto a more effective way of breaking these stories. The first thing we determine is, what structure haven't we seen before? Is it Dog Day Afternoon? Is it Groundhog Day? Is it Memento? What's a way to keep our structure changed up so we rarely repeat ourselves? Two, what storyline will put the boys under the most emotional duress? Putting the boys in mortal danger doesn't really seem to be all that effective. You know they're going to survive. But putting them in emotional danger really works because you can just torture the hell out of them and the question becomes can they be saved before they're emotionally screwed to hell? That actually has some stakes to it. Once we figure out what their internal demons are we say, "What creature is the perfect metaphor for that?" The episodes have improved as a result.
How does an episode like "Hell House," with such a unique monster, come into being?
That was a writer who wrote a freelance for us, Trey Callaway. He told an anecdote that we thought would be a great episode for Supernatural. He and his buddies found an abandoned barn and they painted the inside of it with red paint and chains. Then, they went home and told everybody how they stumbled onto this barn and that the ghost of a serial killer resided there. So, kids would start going and checking this place out… and then the rumor just spread until it became a town legend. People started reporting seeing the spirit, and then some girl saw the spirit and ran so fast and scared that she fell and broke her leg. And this whole time, this group of boys made it up and it's taking on a life of its own. The idea that we sparked to is a story of urban legends themselves and how they spread. So it's about how these things take on a life of their own and they become these self-fulfilling prophecies. [The story] became about these people who invented this urban legend and then [it] literally came to life from the fact that people believed in it. The last step was, what piece of real-life legend out there would support this idea? Trey researched and said "Tulpas -- things that come to life when people think about them." Plug that in and that's a good example of how something develops, usually monster last, these days.
And you don't seem to be afraid of a little of philosophizing here and there -- the religious-themed episodes "Faith" and "Houses of the Holy" spring to mind…
You're playing in the realm of life, death, fate, destiny, good, evil, and so it seems inevitable to tell those kinds of stories and do a bit of philosophizing. I'm actually more comfortable hiding those things in a bit of metaphor. One of my favorite philosophical episodes is "Bloodlust." They meet this hunter, Gordon (Sterling K. Brown), who's this vampire killer. If you substitute any minority of your choice for the word "vampire" in the episode, it actually becomes a fairly subversive investigation of racism. Gordon is a human supremacist and feels the only good member of this particular minority, vampire, is a dead one. Why I love this genre is 'cause you can say subversive things and just hide it in metaphor. Dean gives a speech at the end of this episode saying to Sam, "Dad raised us to be racists. I didn't want to be, but I can't help it because I hate them so much." To have your main character basically cop to racism is something you just don't see much on the CW. You just bury it in genre and the people who get the message are really paying attention.