Hypable participated in a conference call today with Bruno Heller, the executive producer and writer for Fox’s highly anticipated show, Gotham.
Gotham is a brand new drama from Fox that goes somewhere no other TV show has gone before: The city of Gotham before the arrival of Batman, and welcomes classic villains like the Riddler and Poison Ivy. All the villains (and heroes) we know so well had to come from somewhere, and Gotham will explore those origins and more.
What was your thought process on including so many characters in the pilot? And is this going to be a villain of the week type show?
Obviously the demands of opening big mean that we will front load it with lots of characters for fun to indicate where we’re going, but it won’t be villain of the week simply because these are such great villains and their story lines are so big and so epic that it would be short changing them if we did it that way. There are a lot of big characters in that first episode as it rolls on, and other iconic characters will be introduced in a much more measured way.
As a prequel series, what did you look at to draw inspiration from for the series?
For me the immediate attraction of this story is the chance to tell origin stories. Those are always the aspects of superhero legends I enjoy the most and it ties into [certain questions]: How did things get the way they are? This is a world everyone knows, everyone knows who Batman and the Riddler is, etc., so telling their fully fledged adult stories – it’s tough to find a fresh way in. This way you get to learn how things got to be the way they are. And that to me is one of the gifts of good narrative.
Its like seeing pictures of parents before you were born, there’s something fascinating about that period [that you don’t know] and that’s the feeling we were going for.
Shows like Arrow and Smallville have proven that mainstream superhero shows could be successful ventures. How much of an impact did those shows play on the development of Gotham, and would this have been possible 10 years ago?
That’s a good deep question. Both of those shows are WB shows and DC universe is very much a part in WB culture. I’ve been talking with DC for many years before we got to this point and landed on Gotham. You’re probably right, 10 years ago it wouldn’t be possible and I think that’s a combination of the brilliance of what the Nolans did to revitalize the Batman franchise and also the shows you mention. People could see that there’s both an audience and a way of doing that larger than life world on the small screen.
I would say the difference between those shows and this show, is that those are cable shows and this is network and there are slightly different demands there. The analogy would be: those are arena shows and this has to be a stadium show and has to appeal to an even larger audience. It has to appeal to both people who love Batman and love Gotham and also people who have no particular love for the world; you just have to grab onto the strength of the stories and characters.
One of the things about working for an old school studio like WB is there’s an institutional culture and memory, both in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing. Just like in the 50s we were in a western cycle, we’re in a superhero cycle here.
On page 2 Heller talks about the Penguin, and characters likely to not be ‘Gotham’.
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.