Lizzie Bennet Diaries showrunner Bernie Su speaks to Hypable in the second half of our exclusive interview.

In part two of our interview, Bernie Su discusses (and teases) Lizzie Bennet Diaries spinoff series Welcome to Sanditon and the next major book adaptation. Plus, what special features can fans expect on the Lizzie Bennet Diaries DVD (can you say, deleted scenes?) and more.

Be sure to read part one of the interview, take a look Su’s new web series Lookbook (and spot a familiar face), and read Hypable’s top 10 Lizzie Bennet Diaries epsiodes.

Hypable’s interview with Bernie Su:

Hypable: How and why was Sanditon chosen as the next series?

Bernie Su: We knew Lizzie Bennet was going to end, and we realised it was going to take time to adapt the new full novel – it was going to take months, at the minimum. For YouTube, you’re not supposed to not have content for months, you’re supposed to have content constantly, so the idea was the find this balance of taking a little bit of a breather, to let people mourn the loss of Lizzie Bennet.

We wanted to give people some bridge content – that’s what we are calling it internally, the “bridge series” – to bridge us between book 1 and book 2. So it became, “Alright guys” to the writing team, “What are we going to do? Can we send someone on an adventure?” I was pretty fixated on using Gigi, because Gigi is just so beloved in our universe that we built, and also she made the most sense because not only is she such a charismatic character in our world, she’s also furthest away from the Bennets as possible.

Even though Lydia could be more beloved in many ways, you can’t send Lydia off and not connect it to Lizzie directly. You could send Charlotte off, but just based on the Maria spinoffs I don’t know if Charlotte the character can headline, can drive a narrative. I don’t know, I’m not saying she can’t, it just didn’t seem like it was quite there in that spinoff. So then it was like, “What’s the adventure? What does she do? Is she going to solve a crime?”

I think that would be great.

Going back to my fanfiction imagination for the great Gigi Darcy. So then Jay [Bushman] came up to me a few days later, and was like, “I have an idea.” And I said, “Yeah, tell me,” and he goes, “Well Jane Austen, before she died, she was working on a manuscript called Sanditon. It’s about a young girl who goes to this town called Sanditon and deals with all the crazy personalities there.” I believe Jay used the word “plucky” to describe Charlotte Heywood, the main character, and I was like, “Well we could make that work.”

So then it became, “Everybody read Sanditon now!” to make sure that it was possible. It just made sense, there’s the idea of it and there’s the execution of it, and they’re two different things. The idea comes first of course, and there’s the business side and the creative side. The business side is talking to Hank, and Deca – our partners who help give us resources to do what we want to do. It becomes “Alright, this is what we’re going to do for bridge content,” and it became a very easy sell. They were like, “Totally, awesome idea, amazing, go do it!”

The tricky thing about Sanditon is because it’s unfinished, and I almost feel bad for the people who are reading it, there’s not really a story there, it’s just a bunch of setup.

“We’re not going to try to finish the book for Jane Austen, we’re going to construct the world.”

We’re going to tell a story, we have stories, but we’re not saying that the story we’re going to be telling is what Jane Austen intended, because no one knows.

So we’re just going to try and construct the world that Jane Austen constructed, in a modern version, which I think is brilliant. I say that because Jay is a transmedia guy, he’s a prolific transmedia person, and so I’m really curious to see what he and Alex [Edwards] and Margaret [Dunlap] and the team come up with. I can put in my ideas, but I’m trying to stay very hands off on it, because I want to be the observer, even though I’m directing.

We were doing location scouting yesterday, going around to places like, “Okay, is this a character’s office that we need? Is this someone’s store front that we need?” So it’s not just ‘girl in room,’ like we did with Lizzie Bennet. We have that as a base, but this is more like the Gigi spinoff than it is Lizzie Bennet. It’s Gigi in one spot, and stuff happening on screens. We’re planning on being not so tight and close-framed like we were with Darcy and Fitz and Wickham in the Gigi spinoff, we’re going to open it up a bit so you can see more of the spaces.

Well, we’re going to try. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but we’re going to try. So that’s what we just did, and now scripts are coming in and we’re doing auditions of course, because we have to shoot this thing soon if we want to have it come out in May like we promised. All these things are coming together very quickly, and it’s very exciting.

How many episodes are you anticipating Sanditon will be?

I’m not guaranteeing. I can say at least 12, but I would be surprised if it’s just 12. I would be genuinely surprised, for many reasons. And also, although that may seem like a small number considering how much time is between the first and second book, we do have a lot more interactive content designed this time.

“It’s designed to be different but similar than ‘Lizzie Bennet.'”

100% of the viewers watch Lizzie Bennet, but only say 50% or so dive into the interactive stuff. We’re experimenting with the interactive stuff. We don’t want to lose the super-fans, and I feel the super-fans do all the interactive stuff anyway, so that’s the kind of thing we’re going to play with. And then the new show launches in the later summer, we hopefully should be fine.

And it will be on the Pemberley Digital YouTube channel?

Sanditon will be on the Pemberley Digital YouTube channel, yes. I will also say that it may not be the only place where there’s video content.

You have said before that the interactive and transmedia elements are meant to be supplementary to the main story, but you don’t need them. Given that Sanditon is more immersive – will it become more critical that fans become involved with these elements, or will there just be more options if you choose to be?

I think it’s a little bit of both. Again, it’s not required. Let’s say, there’s one video and then there’s a bunch of transmedia content for days, hypothetically, and then there’s another video. Being required means that if you don’t watch any of the transmedia content, you’re completely lost in that second video. So that is definitely not what we are trying to do, because that’s just the way I want to world to be, and I’m pretty sure my teams agrees with me here.

But I do know that we want to try different things. There were a lot of things in Lizzie Bennet that we wanted to try but we just didn’t have the resources to do, or the time to do, and I’m really excited to see what they do this time as far as just enriching the world. I think that’s what the transmedia stuff did. The one great example in Lizzie Bennet, a recent one, was the San Francisco trip.

That was one we teased in multiple videos, and it was like, “We’re teasing, we’re teasing, we’re teasing and it doesn’t happen,” and you don’t see it on video but the event actually happens. So if you’re following on transmedia you get to see all of it, but you don’t necessarily need it. It was one of the coolest things I think we have done, and something I was really excited about.

So I’m guessing there’s stuff like that, but again I have not seen specific things, I just hear, “Oh we’re going to do this,” and I think “Oh wow.” And of course we now have two people who are part of the story, per the Kickstarter, and we have not contacted them yet. We are just waiting for the Kickstarter to end because they can always pull their pledges, but we’re really excited about that. When I asked and was like, “So the first one sold. Do we want to offer another one, will that make it harder for us?”

Because there’s a point where it’s diminishing, if we had five people we had to integrate – or five may not have been too much but ten definitely would be. One seemed pretty simple, and I thought two would be doable as well, and we were discussing it in the story meetings and they said “We could actually use another character” and I was like, “Oh okay great. Add one.” And sure enough the thing sells.

Do you have a set release date for Welcome to Sanditon yet?

No. We have an approximate but I don’t want to lock us into something, and then run into a problem and be delayed. It’s going to be either the first week of May or the second week of May. We are aiming for the first week of May. We have not decided actually what day of the week we are releasing. My feeling is it’s Monday, but it could change. Everything tells me Monday, but if transmedia is the crux of it all and there’s a lot of it, maybe you put it in the middle of the week. So that’s the only other version, but right now if I were to say what it was it would be Monday, but we have not locked that in.

Are you looking at only one episode a week then, or will you still be doing two?

We are exploring different accommodations.

Given there’s still a connection to Lizzie Bennet, is there a chance other characters will show up in it?

Yes, it’s not ruled out, it’s not guaranteed. I think you talked to Daniel a couple weeks ago?

Yeah, he said he would do it if he was asked.

Exactly. We have not had the discussions yet. Basically we are focused on world building right now, and story building, and making it about Sanditon and not about “Oh, here’s Darcy.” First thing’s first, we’ll get to the cameros later. But it does make a lot of sense that Darcy would call his sister, or Gigi would call her brother at some point, or her partner in crime Fitz.

And the second major series will take part in the same universe as well?

Yes, that is planned. The only way at the point that the second series is not in the same universe is if one of the actors plays a vital role in the second series as a different character, but I don’t see that happening.

Do you think you would recast them as someone else?

Not really, not at this point. Here’s an example, you know that Lookbook just came out, you wrote about it. I’ll give you a story and this is exclusive to you.

“Originally, I was going to have Jane Bennet in ‘Lookbook’ as a character.”

Because it made sense, even though it’s a darker story, her character appearing in Lookbook would have made a lot of sense. It wouldn’t be like, “What the hell is she doing here?” She would be in that world. And I couldn’t use Jane, or Laura in this case, after Wes was cast. Because the most important thing was to find the right guy for that role, than to cameo Jane.

So she wouldn’t have been a main character?

She would have had a one-scene part. It was actually an important scene for the lead, because she actually interacts with the lead, and so it would have had a purpose, and if you didn’t watch Lizzie Bennet Diaries you would have been like, “Oh yeah, that’s just another character, another fashion blogger that just talks to her.” But the Lizzie Bennet fans would have loved it of course. I really wish it would have happened, but Wes is great in that part.

You’ll have to cast him as a nice guy in something else so he isn’t typecast.

“I was imagining a couple weeks ago about doing an action series with Christopher Sean and Wes Aderhold as partners, running through the streets and solving crimes and shooting guns.”

But if I work with Wes again on a different project, assuming that Lookbook doesn’t continue which I don’t know, it’s too early to tell, I would really really try to use him as a good character, a good guy. Mainly because I know how much of a nice guy he is. And the casting of that was amusing, in that we actually had trouble finding the right person for that role, so we actually did a second callback, or a second round of casting. And Wes got submitted.

Jenni Powell of course was casting Lookbook as well, and I was kind of like, “I see Wes here. We should totally call him in, he’s totally right for this role.” And Jenni was like, “Yeah, why not?” And I was like, “Well if I put him in the role, if he wins it I can’t use the Jane Bennet cameo that I wanted to do.” And then she’s like, “Well you gotta pick,” and I was like, “The role’s more important than the cameo, and Wes has to still win the role first, so let’s bring him in.”

And he and that girl Kimberley are so good together, you can kind of tell already. I love all their scenes together in the show and they interact several times, and it’s so evil and fun.

It’s a fun show. Do you think there will be a lot of crossover from the Lizzie Bennet fans, or is it just too different?

One of the things we don’t do for Lizzie Bennet is we don’t promote each other’s works, because that’s just a black hole of promotion. If you’re a fan of the person, then you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook and you can go that way. As far as Lizzie Bennet fans going over, I’m not going to force it down their throats.

It’s a very different show, even though it’s technically for “young women,” it’s for very different young women as you can tell. So I’m not going to push it down their throats at all. I’m just like, if you guys want to watch the show, watch the show. If you don’t want to watch the show that’s cool, wait for Sanditon and the next book; they are going to be more back in the tone of LBD while this one is going to be darker, and very CW, and all that.

Let’s talk about the second book. Can you explain how you chose it?

When we were doing a deal with Deca, they were like, “What’s the second book? Because the first book is the first book, but the second book is what really interests us.” And I went, “Well I think right now it’s going to be this.” We started working on it, although I couldn’t really work on it because obviously my energy was focused on Lizzie Bennet.

So we started developing it and also considered the format of “girl talking in room” as the base. Then I ran into a roadblock, and what happened was I went, “Alright, darn it, I have to switch books.” So in late November I went to them and said, “I’m switching books, I’m switching to this.” And they said, “Okay, you do whatever you want.” Then I realised when I was doing the second book that this one felt boring. It’s not a boring book, but it felt like the way we’re doing it was boring.

“It felt like ‘Lizzie Bennet’-lite.”

Pride and Prejudice is the better story, most people would say that, and this doesn’t work as well and we’ve already done a lot of things. We can’t do things like costume theatre; I feel like no matter what we do that would feel very, very derivative. So we don’t have that element, so this book is going to feel very, very stale.

Was the second one an Austen book?

That’s unconfirmed. Then I switched back to the original book, not only because that one got me bored or it didn’t work, I actually figured out the hook in the other one. How to fix it, how to fix the thing that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. And so far, it’s the same. I think it would actually be very catastrophic if we switched books now. Not catasrophic, that’s a big word, but it would be difficult.

Problematic.

If we switched books now, in the time where people are discussing it and talking about how we are doing it. We had a budget meeting the other day, and all that, so it’s like, “Well, we’ll figure it out.”

You mentioned “girl talking in room” as the basis – would you consider adapting a book with a male protagonist?

Well, we have said that the next book is in the Austen, Bronte, those books, and all of those have female leads. So it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to be a girl as the main character.

But would you try a male protagonist in the future?

Oh absolutely. First person genre stories, if you think of any of the old monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein – told in a kind of diary form. There are ways to do it. They would require a lot more effects and production and stuff, but there are ways to do it. At some point, if the format grows again, then the team can grow and the business can grow, then we will start doing other novels. And there’s also the other option too of non-public domain books coming to us and saying, “We want you to do our book as this.” Especially since not every book can be a movie, but every book wants a movie deal.

Has anyone approached you?

Not yet, but I think it’s still early. I think if we pull it off again with the second book, they’ll come out of the woodwork. They’ll just be chomping at it. Basically every book that has a movie option that has expired, or a movie option that never got made, would try to see if “Hey, can you do it for us?”

The Kickstarter is now over $350,000, which is ridiculous and great. What extras can fans expect to see on the DVD, given how much it has raised over the target?

It’s great, it’s crazy but it’s great. We know there are captions. We’re pretty sure that we’ll have a couple captions in different languages. At this point, Portuguese is probably a likely one, we have a large fan base in Brazil. I’m guessing next would be Spanish, and my guess for the next country would be Germany. We’ll explore all those things, we have to budget it all out.

I have actually not seen the new DVD budget, based on wanting to do captions, and we have a little more resources to play with, but we’re not going to go crazy. We’re going to try to keep is relatively close to the original budget of DVD production, but at the same time we want to have a good DVD. Captions of course are important to us, so I’m really happy to see that. We’re going to just have more and more featurettes.

“There are some deleted exchanges, not deleted scenes, but deleted exchanges between characters, and we’re going to have those in.”

I’m willing to try and do as many behind-the-scenes things I can think of; for example, when I was flying the other night I was looking through one of my journals, and I noticed that I had written out by hand a couple episodes of Lizzie Bennet, in outlines and in script, and I think I’m going to put some of those in the DVD.

I don’t know what other things we have planned, I just need to talk to the actors and see if, “Hey, do you guys want to do something fun?” I don’t even know what that is. I’m sure the answer is, “Yeah, let’s do something fun!” but we don’t know what that is. We’ll have fun with it for sure.

Have there been any more developments about how the transmedia elements will be presented on the DVD?

It’s not just how do you show tweets on a screen, it’s how do you show tweets on a low resolution screen.

With terrible navigation.

With terrible navigation. The navigation is what absolutely kills me in this. A clunky navigation system, particularly with an old DVD player, that really worries me. I don’t want it to be a bad experience. Maybe it’s all there somewhere, somehow as a digital file, but to have a bad experience, that means people don’t watch, period. That’s the big hurdle. If someone sees a way to do this, show it to me, but it can’t just be do motion graphics and show tweets on screens, because that’s not what it is. It’s also the user experience.

As a last resort, would you consider printing an accompanying booklet that has all of the transmedia events in order, or if you couldn’t make it interactive would you just not do it?

The booklet thing I’m not opposed to. I, as a storyteller, want all the story to be on the DVD. I want to find a way to do it, I just don’t want it to be bad.

Images: Lizzie Bennet Diaries, lizziebennet.com