TheDarceKnight
Veteran
NOT SAFE FOR WORK if I need to remove it or move to JBO I will.
True Detective Season 1 (NO SPOILERS)
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TheDarceKnight
Veteran
Good Interview with writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto - http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/true-detective-exclusive/
HBO’s True Detective is a study in contradictions: It’s a procedural written by a man who abhors procedurals; a television series which is shot, cast and produced as a film; the future of the medium whose main characters are throw backs to old school masculinity; a series with a plot and marquee star – this time around, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson – reboot after every season. However, as creator Nic Pizzolatto admits to Canada.com, that last assertion may not be as set in stone as the media thinks. The novelist-turned-showrunner recently spoke to Jonathan Dekel about convincing McConaughey and Harrelson to do television and why the anthology series may not be an anthology after all.
True Detective is a series which draws the viewer in with big names but the story and format are ultimately the star. How did you convince HBO to let you produce the eight-part series as essentially a single movie: One director, one plot per season?
It began around 2004 – when the Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood were all on HBO. I was working on my graduate degree in writing prose and I began to feel that those shows were answering my need for fiction much better and with more vitality, then the contemporary novels I was reading. So, that kind of started this desire to do it but I didn’t understand how to break into movies and TV, so when my novel got optioned I asked my agents how to go about doing that and they said I needed to write scripts. In July of 2010 I wrote six scripts and one of them was the pilot for True Detective. I held onto it for about a year and a half and didn’t sell it until I knew we could make it the way I wanted and be able to attain the proper amount of creative control to make sure it turned out well.
How much of the series was completed before you sold it to HBO?
I wrote two episodes and started trying to put together a package. We looked at a lot of directors before we ended up going with Cary Fukunaga. The next step was casting Matthew [as the stoic loner detective Rust Cohle]. And immediately after we were able to cast Woody [as loose family man Detective Martin Hart] and then we took it out and pitched it. At that point we had a pretty complete package so that made sure we would be able to maintain a certain amount of control.
Was it hard to get McConaughey and Harrelson to sign on to the project, especially before HBO was on board?
It wasn’t a hard sell at all. Matthew got the script and he responded hugely to the material and was really excited to play Cohle. We already had Woody on a very short list of men we wanted to approach – that was the year Woody had both Rampart and Game Change, two incredible performances back-to-back. And Matthew, as soon as he expressed his interest he suggested Woody for the other part and we were immediately on board. Actually, we were hoping he could help us get to him.
Had you considered making True Detective a film?
No, I wouldn’t want to do it as a film unless I was directing. In television, the writer/creator maintains ultimate control, so that’s why I wanted to do television …
I’m just not very interested in movies, to tell you the truth. I think American television has been mopping the floor with American movies for at least ten years. Movies to me, they’ve just gotten worse. Now they make three serious adult movies a year and everyone is touted as a masterpiece, whereas if this had been the mid-’90s they wouldn’t have gotten noticed.
Was it always pitched as an anthology?
Yes, for a few reasons. Part of it is my novelistic sensibility, in the sense that I like endings and most television series don’t have a third act; they hustle to invent a third act when their show gets cancelled.
I was interested in telling a story with a beginning, middle and an end and I was really, really wanting to work with serious cinematic talent and it seemed like the time was right for that because if an actor doesn’t want to play a super hero there are just not that many options in terms of films getting made. My thought was, if they only do one season we might be able to attract real cinematic talent, because the reason most movie stars don’t do television, even if it was extremely lucrative or high quality, is because most shows require you to sign on for four to six years. This would only be a five month commitment so we could approach serious, great actors and say to them, ‘Don’t do five months of Broadway, come do True Detective.’
The series’ universe comes fully formed in a way I haven’t seen since The Wire. How conceptual did you get before filming?
After writing the initial pilot, I wrote all eight scripts in about two or three months. I guess you can already see, even from the first episode, that the landscape is the third lead in this show and these are all the places I grew up around. When you’re a child you’re very porous and the demarcation between your ego and the outside world is much thinner so it tends to get inside and stay with you for the rest of your life. These landscapes had always haunted me – both as a child and as an adult living far away from them. I wanted to capture that in a realistic mode, with none of the cheap stylistic flourishes you tend to see in network procedurals.
At first blush, True Detective is a thriller procedural about two detectives trying to catch a serial killer but it goes out of its way to transcend the tropes of the genre.
The aspects of a police procedural don’t interest me at all and I’m certainly not interested in serial killers or serial killer stories. I’m interested in the humanity of characters and the way circumstances force them to grow or not grow and reveal themselves and their contradictions. My fundamental concern is the dilemma of human consciousness and memory and death and love. So when looking for a familiar structure that could be populistly accepted, a genre which in itself is an investigation can naturally lend itself to that. So even though it makes use of certain tropes which have been well worn with audiences, when he hit them I think our show pretty swiftly subverts them through an organic character engagement. What begins to happen is, as we go along, we begin to peel back these characters until they stand fully revealed before us, even as their modern day versions are still struggling to explain their lives.
This strategy relies heavily on McConaughey and Harrelson’s performances.
One of the great things about Matt and Woody’s existing friendship is that they’re comfortable pushing one another. As I cut the show I’m continually amazed about the way Matthew captures every nuance of Cohle. It’s stunning. The best compliment I could give these guys is that, as I watch the show I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing these parts. And believe me when I say you have no idea what’s coming. They’re like my muses now.
I get the sense Cohle had been ruminating in your mind well before True Detective became a reality
Both Cohle and Hart were birthed out of my individual obsessions and searching for a voice for those obsessions. I remember True Detective really starting in 2010 when I was writing longhand in a mole skin and I was just writing in Cole’s voice and Cole started telling this story. I recently found those notes and a lot of those notes are said verbatim from Matthew’s mouth.
It appears he may have a mild case of Aspergers.
No, he doesn’t have Asperger’s. He’s just a man who doesn’t give a shyt about most of the social niceties of our society. I think he considers a lot of social niceties as untruthful. He’s a man who has own code of honour and he doesn’t give a sh-t about anybody else’s code, so if you cross the line he’s going to slap you in the face. He’s unique and paradoxical because, as an isolate — he doesn’t have elements in his life creating the sense of responsibility. It’s something he carved out of himself. Whereas the other men he works with, who have more governing influences – family and stuff like that – they tend to display a much grayer sense of right and wrong than Cohle.
Where do you think Cohle and Hart fit within the world of HBO’s antiheroes?
I don’t think either of these guys are antiheroes. I see that term used a lot in the media but I don’t think they know what they means. Tony Soprano wasn’t an antihero, he was just a very bad man. He’s just somebody you’re fascinated with watching. I think both of these men are straight up heroes — they’re flawed men but they’re not corrupt. They’re kind of throwbacks, for better or worse, to a different kind of masculinity. They’re real men.
When we were looking at various actors I kept turning down a lot of prospects because they didn’t seem like believable men who had been through ups and downs. For me [Cohle and Hart] represent a throwback to a certain type of male archetype and a certain type of rogue.
Sounds like you really fell in love with both the characters and the men who play them. Is there a chance that you would break from the anthology concept, if given the option?
I miss them as men and I miss them as characters. Honestly, that would be up to Woody and Matthew. If those guys wanted to do anything I’d probably jump on it.
So if they said they wanted to come back for a second season, you’d do it?
Oh yeah. I could write Cohle forever.
HBO’s True Detective is a study in contradictions: It’s a procedural written by a man who abhors procedurals; a television series which is shot, cast and produced as a film; the future of the medium whose main characters are throw backs to old school masculinity; a series with a plot and marquee star – this time around, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson – reboot after every season. However, as creator Nic Pizzolatto admits to Canada.com, that last assertion may not be as set in stone as the media thinks. The novelist-turned-showrunner recently spoke to Jonathan Dekel about convincing McConaughey and Harrelson to do television and why the anthology series may not be an anthology after all.
True Detective is a series which draws the viewer in with big names but the story and format are ultimately the star. How did you convince HBO to let you produce the eight-part series as essentially a single movie: One director, one plot per season?
It began around 2004 – when the Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood were all on HBO. I was working on my graduate degree in writing prose and I began to feel that those shows were answering my need for fiction much better and with more vitality, then the contemporary novels I was reading. So, that kind of started this desire to do it but I didn’t understand how to break into movies and TV, so when my novel got optioned I asked my agents how to go about doing that and they said I needed to write scripts. In July of 2010 I wrote six scripts and one of them was the pilot for True Detective. I held onto it for about a year and a half and didn’t sell it until I knew we could make it the way I wanted and be able to attain the proper amount of creative control to make sure it turned out well.
How much of the series was completed before you sold it to HBO?
I wrote two episodes and started trying to put together a package. We looked at a lot of directors before we ended up going with Cary Fukunaga. The next step was casting Matthew [as the stoic loner detective Rust Cohle]. And immediately after we were able to cast Woody [as loose family man Detective Martin Hart] and then we took it out and pitched it. At that point we had a pretty complete package so that made sure we would be able to maintain a certain amount of control.
Was it hard to get McConaughey and Harrelson to sign on to the project, especially before HBO was on board?
It wasn’t a hard sell at all. Matthew got the script and he responded hugely to the material and was really excited to play Cohle. We already had Woody on a very short list of men we wanted to approach – that was the year Woody had both Rampart and Game Change, two incredible performances back-to-back. And Matthew, as soon as he expressed his interest he suggested Woody for the other part and we were immediately on board. Actually, we were hoping he could help us get to him.
Had you considered making True Detective a film?
No, I wouldn’t want to do it as a film unless I was directing. In television, the writer/creator maintains ultimate control, so that’s why I wanted to do television …
I’m just not very interested in movies, to tell you the truth. I think American television has been mopping the floor with American movies for at least ten years. Movies to me, they’ve just gotten worse. Now they make three serious adult movies a year and everyone is touted as a masterpiece, whereas if this had been the mid-’90s they wouldn’t have gotten noticed.
Was it always pitched as an anthology?
Yes, for a few reasons. Part of it is my novelistic sensibility, in the sense that I like endings and most television series don’t have a third act; they hustle to invent a third act when their show gets cancelled.
I was interested in telling a story with a beginning, middle and an end and I was really, really wanting to work with serious cinematic talent and it seemed like the time was right for that because if an actor doesn’t want to play a super hero there are just not that many options in terms of films getting made. My thought was, if they only do one season we might be able to attract real cinematic talent, because the reason most movie stars don’t do television, even if it was extremely lucrative or high quality, is because most shows require you to sign on for four to six years. This would only be a five month commitment so we could approach serious, great actors and say to them, ‘Don’t do five months of Broadway, come do True Detective.’
The series’ universe comes fully formed in a way I haven’t seen since The Wire. How conceptual did you get before filming?
After writing the initial pilot, I wrote all eight scripts in about two or three months. I guess you can already see, even from the first episode, that the landscape is the third lead in this show and these are all the places I grew up around. When you’re a child you’re very porous and the demarcation between your ego and the outside world is much thinner so it tends to get inside and stay with you for the rest of your life. These landscapes had always haunted me – both as a child and as an adult living far away from them. I wanted to capture that in a realistic mode, with none of the cheap stylistic flourishes you tend to see in network procedurals.
At first blush, True Detective is a thriller procedural about two detectives trying to catch a serial killer but it goes out of its way to transcend the tropes of the genre.
The aspects of a police procedural don’t interest me at all and I’m certainly not interested in serial killers or serial killer stories. I’m interested in the humanity of characters and the way circumstances force them to grow or not grow and reveal themselves and their contradictions. My fundamental concern is the dilemma of human consciousness and memory and death and love. So when looking for a familiar structure that could be populistly accepted, a genre which in itself is an investigation can naturally lend itself to that. So even though it makes use of certain tropes which have been well worn with audiences, when he hit them I think our show pretty swiftly subverts them through an organic character engagement. What begins to happen is, as we go along, we begin to peel back these characters until they stand fully revealed before us, even as their modern day versions are still struggling to explain their lives.
This strategy relies heavily on McConaughey and Harrelson’s performances.
One of the great things about Matt and Woody’s existing friendship is that they’re comfortable pushing one another. As I cut the show I’m continually amazed about the way Matthew captures every nuance of Cohle. It’s stunning. The best compliment I could give these guys is that, as I watch the show I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing these parts. And believe me when I say you have no idea what’s coming. They’re like my muses now.
I get the sense Cohle had been ruminating in your mind well before True Detective became a reality
Both Cohle and Hart were birthed out of my individual obsessions and searching for a voice for those obsessions. I remember True Detective really starting in 2010 when I was writing longhand in a mole skin and I was just writing in Cole’s voice and Cole started telling this story. I recently found those notes and a lot of those notes are said verbatim from Matthew’s mouth.
It appears he may have a mild case of Aspergers.
No, he doesn’t have Asperger’s. He’s just a man who doesn’t give a shyt about most of the social niceties of our society. I think he considers a lot of social niceties as untruthful. He’s a man who has own code of honour and he doesn’t give a sh-t about anybody else’s code, so if you cross the line he’s going to slap you in the face. He’s unique and paradoxical because, as an isolate — he doesn’t have elements in his life creating the sense of responsibility. It’s something he carved out of himself. Whereas the other men he works with, who have more governing influences – family and stuff like that – they tend to display a much grayer sense of right and wrong than Cohle.
Where do you think Cohle and Hart fit within the world of HBO’s antiheroes?
I don’t think either of these guys are antiheroes. I see that term used a lot in the media but I don’t think they know what they means. Tony Soprano wasn’t an antihero, he was just a very bad man. He’s just somebody you’re fascinated with watching. I think both of these men are straight up heroes — they’re flawed men but they’re not corrupt. They’re kind of throwbacks, for better or worse, to a different kind of masculinity. They’re real men.
When we were looking at various actors I kept turning down a lot of prospects because they didn’t seem like believable men who had been through ups and downs. For me [Cohle and Hart] represent a throwback to a certain type of male archetype and a certain type of rogue.
Sounds like you really fell in love with both the characters and the men who play them. Is there a chance that you would break from the anthology concept, if given the option?
I miss them as men and I miss them as characters. Honestly, that would be up to Woody and Matthew. If those guys wanted to do anything I’d probably jump on it.
So if they said they wanted to come back for a second season, you’d do it?
Oh yeah. I could write Cohle forever.
god=nature=we'reFUCKED
Organize the non obvious
That song in the intro is going to haunt/hype us each sunday!!
so after 2 episodes you know what's gonna be the "twist"
he ain't "woody" for nada
sofia, salma.....
please
Both pics have a blonde girl surrounded by 5 men.
great observation
And did ya'll see the owl?
i knew i saw something up there but couldn't get a close up or pause it
i was expecting another one of them stick things...
The Devil's Advocate
Call me Dad
I can truly say, IF they weren't fake. Those might be the most perfect set of titties I have ever seen in my life!! Not a flaw on them thingsThose pups were A1, heavenly, top notch, legendary, etc etc etc
I love her
If they was fake. They were the most natural looking fake titties ever. And she had a little booty back there too.
We definitely need more of her this season
Kinda fukked up they will change each time. This will either be epic with who they choose. Or they will shoot their load with the great casting this season and it'll all go down from here
dude those t*ts were not fake at all. thats what that natural thang looks like. they were just incredibly phenomenal.
Don't disrespect the gawdthis man is a national treasure
vince who?
MightyHealthy
said what he said
I worried that they would outshine the show, which is phenomenal so far...@ half this thread is just dudes talking about those titties.
...but damn, have you seen those titties?
I worried that they would outshine the show, which is phenomenal so far...
...but damn, have you seen those titties?
I can not lie those are some damn nice titties.
Dirty Mcdrawz
Your girl loves em....
:gotawoody:them titties are works of art breh. i envy the man who gets to gaze upon them in the flesh
licktheballs
Wu-Tang Stan
goddamn those titties 