Mutant X Interviews: Jonathan Hackett (5/04 S2 DVD)
S2 DVD Extras Producer: Jonathan Hackett
Jonathan Hackett: I was approached about doing season two to bring some excitement and fun to the show, to bring elements into it that made it more accessible to many kids. To give our audience something to really bite into. To give some fun to our actors, so that they really could interact with the world and we could see their powers in a real world. But at the same time, keeping it a secret, keeping what they did a secret from the world. That they weren’t just gonna go off willy-nilly and go down the street and start blasting things, but they could go after mutants and they could do what they had to do in secret. And the other idea was that we were gonna make it much more of a Mission Impossible adventure type show. And that it wasn’t going to be a dark and serious piece, but much more of our guys going out to fix wrongs in the world, to take on the bad guys. And you know, you need to get them out in the world. You need to, if you’re going to go on missions, if you’re gonna go on adventures, then they’ve got to get out of here. And this is a home base, their command control center, if you will. And they need to get out into the real world to confront their enemies or their friends, or the world that they’re gonna be interacting with. It’s kind of logical.
We really wanted to get to know our characters because we felt that we’re not really going to embrace their adventures and their stories unless we get to know who they are. Because I think there’s something really exciting about somebody who’s partly feral, for example. That if they can embrace that animal side, if they can take on this animal side of the world, break through the human barrier and make them into a different person, then we need to know and get a sense of who that is. If you could shoot electricity out of your hands, then it’s gonna have some pretty exciting ramifications. Not only for the people around him, but also for that person. So we’re trying to get inside their heads a lot more and learn how that affects them. Because it can be a power, but it can also be a tremendous liability. And, in the case of Brennan, if you’re electrified and you come in contact with a puddle or rain or something like that, then it can be very dangerous. Equally, if you’re feral and you lose control and that animal comes through, then that also becomes very dangerous. You don’t have any real control over the situation. So we wanna be able to play the liabilities, we want to be able to play all of those things to get our stories to work.
I think the thing that I really wanted to change was I wanted to make the stories and the world that they were in accessible. That I wanted to see people that...I wanted to understand the people and their powers so I could understand how that worked. And then I wanted to see how that worked in the world and make it as dramatic and exciting as possible. There were a lot of challenges ahead of us. It’s been a very bumpy ride, but it’s certainly been dramatic ‘cause we really had to ramp up and work this out very quickly. And when you’re dealing...you want the mythology to work. You want this world to work logically. You want to be respectful of the audience. And we don’t want to be making arbitrary decisions and next week we discover, oh well we’d like it to be different, and then just making it different. Each step we take is a stepping stone for the future and we have to be conscious of the ramifications of that. And we need to be constant to the world we’re creating and we have to be careful about it. So I don’t really know where we’re going to get to them, it’s impossible to say. Because I think it’s going to, if we’re smart and if we let this take on a life of its own, then we don’t really know. I mean, each character’s gonna evolve. We’re gonna blow them all up at some point, and then rescue them. And I don’t know where it’s all gonna go. It could be fantastic.
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