You do some interesting spins on characters we know, especially the Penguin. When you were developing Gotham how much did you decide to stick with the comic vs go your own way?
It’s a tricky balance because obviously you don’t want to simply create a new character, you have to create the iconic character and you have to recognize who they are and they have to have those iconic characteristics. But on the other hand if you create a character that you’ve seen before then you’re failing the audience. The Batman world has such a great variation of these characters that you can’t simply take these elements and regurgitate them, you have to give them a new look.
For me with the Penguin we had to stay true to the psychology of the person; this is a sort of graphic novel version of the character versus the comic book version of the character. It’s hard to distill it down to an essence.
Also this is Penguin as a young man – striving and struggling and hungry – [so] that’s going to be a very different character than who he is on his own when he’s reached his goal in life. Right now he’s that hungry, violent, struggling character that he must be to get where he gets.
In general it’s important even if some of the audience go “thats not my idea of that character”; well you know a little friction and controversy in those terms is not a bad thing. All I can promise is that we work very closely with Geoff Jones at DC to make sure we’re not betraying the essence of who these people are because that would be pointless, we’re not changing these characters just to change them.
We know who almost all the characters are eventually going to become if you’re a fan of the mythology, so what has the process been like creating the path that leads the characters to their eventual destiny?
The main challenge there is reverse engineering enough that we have a journey to take without destroying all the iconic elements of these characters that people know and love. But at the same time we want the journey to be as interesting as possible so we can’t start with fully fledged characters even if we wanted to; there’s a whole bunch of history that has to happen before these characters emerge as their [final form].
For me that’s a big part of the fun of the show, both making it and watching it (I hope) – it’s seeing how they’re going to change over time and giving them space to grow. It’s hard to describe in simple terms, how that works.
A lot of the challenge with TV as opposed with movies is you have to leave room for the characters and the story to tell themselves and sometimes you don’t know where the character is going to go until the actor takes that part and makes it their own and then, as novelists say, the book starts to write itself. The characters start to tell their own stories and we know where it’s going as opposed to mapping it out step by step. We have a broad arc to follow but you have to leave space for these characters to live and breathe.
Is there a favorite scene of yours?
You know Danny [Cannon] did such a great job [directing] – I very rarely watch the first few episodes of a series with glee, but with this I thought it was all gripping. To a degree my favorite scene is the opening sequence [in the pilot] because it played out pretty much as much as I’d seen it in my imagination, so that was a thrill. I also think the scene in the pilot with Penguin and Gordon on the waterfront has such cinematic juice that you rarely achieve on TV, and if I had to point to one scene that would be it – two great actors bringing it and a directer getting it.
Are there any characters from the comic books that you knew from the beginning would absolutely NOT be on the show? If so, why?
There are certain characters that would be difficult to put on the screen. That Crocodile guy is a tough one, although we may go there. We haven’t excluded anyone from the mix potentially but generally what we’re looking at is characters with some drama or a story for how they got to be where they are, and we’re looking for characters who can live in the real world of Gotham as opposed to the even more super real world of Metropolis, if you like. It’s not about superpowers it’s about super will, and so we veer towards those characters who are interesting as people and rather not interesting for their power or their gimmick or their costume so that’s how I would divide that world. But the simple answer is: No, we’re ready to go with any of them.
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