Alan Ball in Melbourne
I saw Alan Ball interviewed last night here in good old (freezingfrickingdoesn'tknowit'sspringnow) Melbourne. The crowd consisted mostly of True Blood fans and screenwriting students, which made for a less wanky/pretentious Q&A session (unlike at Jonathan Franzen's the other week. OH MY GOD). Though there was the opportunity to line up and have something signed by him after it was over, perpetually awkward me decided she did not want to giggle in his face and ruin her memory of the night, so she passed.
Anyway, I took notes for the few of you who might be interested. He spoke a lot about Six Feet Under, American Beauty, and True Blood.
He was quite critical of broadcast television and said he had to rethink his approach to writing when he started working for HBO (he used to work on sitcoms on ABC and said they basically killed his soul). They actually told him to make the pilot of Six Feet Under "more fucked up" when they read his first script, and he took that as a license to go to town. He has never really had to deal with any censorship concerns from them since.
In his opinion HBO cares about the product while the broadcast networks ultimately only care about the advertisers, so he feels like he can make actual art on HBO. As a result he writes what he himself would like to watch, not what he thinks would be popular or mainstream. He has no real interest in heroes and villains or well adjusted people - he likes morally grey, complex, fucked up characters.
He talked a bit about winning the Oscar, and how it made people think he knew what he was talking about all of a sudden, when he didn't see himself as particularly changed. He expected American Beauty to be a small indie picture only a few arthousey people would see, not the critically successfully cash cow it became.
When asked who his favourite person has been to work with over the course of his career, he said Francis Conroy on Six Feet Under.
He doesn't read internet opinions on True Blood, and tends to view them as destructive, because they are either one extreme (love) or the other (hate). I thought that was a slightly simplistic way to look at it, but it does seem to be the status quo with screenwriters and there is a lot of embarassing crap out there, so.
Interestingly, he doesn't believe he is depicting the gay and lesbian community in a particularly positive light - as monsters 'n all - despite awards he has won for doing so. To him, characters are characters, and he's not trying to make a particular political statement with his vampires - they represent a broad range of disenfranchised people, and their bloodthirst and depravity is not to be taken literally - but people read into things what they will.
He said the 'man candy' -ness of True Blood isn't an intentional thing to objectify men over women - it just happens that his male actors are more comfortable doing nudity. For example he wrote Alcide wearing boxers when he gets into bed with Debbie in season 3, but Joe Manganiello flat-out said, "No, Alcide sleeps naked" so Alan just went with it like, 'okay, you want to show off your naked body, I'm not gonna stop you." Lol.
He doesn't like his characters to be victims. He doesn't like them holding onto being a victim. Which considering Tara, I thought was kind of amusing.
There were some wanky writer craft questions thrown his way - like 'what time of day do you write?' (kill me) - but he did offer up some interesting specifics regarding the writing of True Blood.
It doesn't sound like he has much influence over what individual writers do with their episodes - he gives them a general outline but doesn't see the result until dailies are released.
He also said he is heavily influenced by box sets in the way he set out a season - he wants each episode to come across like an installment or chapter, and he prefers the show to be viewed in full rather than week by week.
He said they plan a whole arc for a season before they get started on it, and they work out the mechanics of the storylines for each character, but they tend to rewrite the back end of the season after episode 6 or 7 because the storyline organically evolves at that point. Which to me explains why episodes 6-7 and the last few usually tend to be better.
He didn't give much on spoilers, but he did say:
-In the process of researching maenads for season two they stumbled on some lesser known supernatural creatures, and they will be introducing these in season 5.
-Season 5 will be the first season to combine books. Which I think we had all guessed, but it was cool to hear.
I think I've probably forgotten a lot, but it did convince me he is in no way influenced by the fans or his actors when he writes, which was nice.