Superherohype just published an exclusive interview with NBC Heroes creator Tim Kring.
Here follows a short excerpt, the full interview is available at Superherohype
SHH!: Most of them have been lucky in that they haven’t been seen in public using their powers, so will we be seeing anything like the “secret identity” stuff that’s so common in comic book superheroes?
Kring: Well, yeah, for the most part, most of them have remained fairly anonymous, allowing them to live anonymous lives, which I think is really important for the show, so we don’t get into a situation where we’re looking at Superman and Batman being public figures, although a little bit of that is going to creep in.SHH!: After asking about the flashbacks, I realized that you have this character who can travel through time to different periods making them unnecessary. I was curious what sort of problems that’s posed. I’m sure Jeph (Loeb, the show’s co-executive producer) has mentioned all the problems that time travel has caused within the different comic book universes.
Kring: Oh, yeah. It’s a very, very sticky world when you start to do the time travel, so we’re using it extremely judicially. Obviously, it’s no secret that Hiro has landed in feudal Japan, so he has adventures to fulfill there, but we are definitely going to use it a few other times at least. It’s a lot of fun.
SHH!: I’m looking forward to that since I’m a huge Kurosawa fan. Is he going to spend a lot of time in Japan or is that just a temporary stopover?
Kring: I’ll go as much as to say that it’s a handful of episodes.SHH!: Besides Hayden and Ali, a lot of the people you’ve cast were new faces who’ve come to prominence from the show. Have you had any problems with some of them wanting to take other offers that come there way like movies, etc and have you had to rewrite things to accommodate that?
Kring: Well, listen, all of them are very committed to the show and get the idea that this was a huge thing for them, so that hasn’t really begun yet, but with the size of the cast and the logistics of our shooting, it does actually afford people the ability to go off and do little projects along the way. Those are always challenging, but it’s also good for the show sometimes.SHH!: You obviously have a gameplan worked out for the second season, so I wondered if you still have that flexibility if something comes up.
Kring: Yeah, there’s always flexibility, and we have to do it constantly on a daily basis. Things come up and we’re retooling all of the time. Literally, just yesterday we learned that our first pod of episodes is going to be eleven in a row, instead of ten in a row, so that threw a giant monkey wrench in our plans, because we had ended Volume II at Episode 10 and now we had to end it at Episode 11. Sometimes, stretching is very hard to do. When you can name that tune in 4 beats, it’s hard to name it in 6.SHH!: What about bringing on new and known directors? Shows like “Lost” and even “Oz” as they went along got interest from better-known directors who wanted to direct episodes.
Kring: Oh, yeah. There are sort of two competing goals in terms of directors. You want to have as small a stable as you can, because you don’t want to have to keep teaching old tricks to new directors. But the flip side of that is that a show like this that gains a certain amount of popularity also starts to attract very interesting directors who wouldn’t normally do a first year show and may not even do television. Sometimes you want to be able to breathe some new life into the directing of the show by bringing in people with fresh ideas, so you keep enough slots open every year out of the 24 to kind of audition new people. But the goal again, like I said, from a production sensibility is to try and have as small a stable as you can of directors so the actors are used to certain people. It’s always dicey when you bring in a brand-new face because they may or may not be able to get the vibe of a place or they may not connect with the actors the way that you want them to, so when you get somebody who does, that works, you try and lock ‘em up.
SHH!: Will this new mini-series give you an opportunity to bring in new directors or ones that we might know from other shows/mediums?
Kring: That’s the whole idea. The whole idea is that it will not tax the production of “Heroes” at all. We’re going to have separate production, separate writers, separate directors, separate stage space. Everything will be separate except for a couple of us at the top who are going to sort of supervise things. The wonderful thing about it is the ability to attract some interesting writers and directors who are not normally interested in doing series television, but would come in and do one episode of a kind of Rod Serlingesque television show that has the stamp of a fairly big show like “Heroes.” We’re currently in negotiations on a couple of names that I’m going to announce in the next couple weeks that I think are going to be really exciting.SHH!: Maybe there’ll be an announcement at San Diego Comic-Con?
Kring: That’s the idea we’re going to try right now.
Click to read the full interview at Superherohype
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