What has been unique about the process of making this show that allows it to be so fucking weird compared to the rest of TV right now? First is that you get to write language. Whether you grew up with Shakespeare, or Deadwood was your favorite show ever, the idea that you can finally have this freedom to write language is very exciting.
Another aspect is that we don’t necessarily have the money that everybody else has, but we do have a lot of money. So we problem-solve — like, “How do you do a giant fight when you don’t have enough time? Oh, let’s do it from Claudia’s point of view!” And we always try to keep the stakes a little bit more grounded. It’s TV, and it’s dramatic storytelling, so it always comes back to casting and to actors. No one’s watching it to hear our writing or to see our little special effects. It’s about characters, and it’s about actors. The basic building blocks of this show are great scenes for great actors. You’re always looking for the unique backdoor to the story.
It really shouldn’t work. It was not supposed to. It was rigged to fail. Let me praise the people who are line-producing on this show. We are writing 17- and 18-day scripts, and we’re shooting these in 12 to 14 days, very creatively. Sometimes we probably don’t have enough time to pull it off, but everybody’s really, really creative about how to jam in these very ambitious scenes. They’re vampires. They kill somebody every day. They’re just not going to have normal conversations or do normal things. You start there as a dramatist, and you just go forward. It’s always some weird-ass thing. I have no idea how we do it.