Shakespeare Unlimited: How King Lear Inspired Empire Ilene Chaiken, Executive Producer Interviewed by Barbara Bogaev A Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast March 22, 2017 ---------------------------- MICHAEL WITMORE: Shakespeare can turn up almost anywhere. [A series of clips from Empire.] —How long you been plannin’ to kick my dad off the phone? —Since the day he banished me. I could die a thousand times… just please… From here on out, this is about to be the biggest, baddest company in hip-hop culture. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the new era of Hakeem Lyon, y’all… MICHAEL: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I‟m Michael Witmore, the Folger‟s director. This podcast is called “The World in Empire.” That clip you heard a second ago was from the Fox TV series Empire. The story of an aging ruler— in this case, the head of a hip-hop music dynasty—who sets his three children against each other. Sound familiar? As you will hear, from its very beginning, Empire has fashioned itself on the plot of King Lear. And that‟s not the only Shakespeare connection to the program. To explain all this, we brought in Empire’s showrunner, the woman who makes everything happen on time and on budget, Ilene Chaiken. She was interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. ---------------------------- BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, Empire seems as if its elevator pitch was a hip-hop King Lear. Was that the idea from the start? ILENE CHAIKEN: Yes, as I understand it, now I didn‟t create Empire— BOGAEV: Right, because you‟re the showrunner, and first there‟s a pilot, and then the series gets picked up, and then they pick the showrunner. CHAIKEN: Yes. It was created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong. And as I understand it, that was the idea. Danny Strong wanted to write about hip-hop. He went to Lee and his idea was, let‟s do King Lear in hip-hop. BOGAEV: And it seems pretty literal in that it‟s explicit in the pilot, there‟s a reference to King Lear. CHAIKEN: Exactly. Exactly, it‟s literal in the conception and in the modeling of the show, and it‟s actually put on text. BOGAEV: Yeah, remind— for people who didn‟t hear the pilot, and also the premise, which is, it‟s three sons, not three daughters. CHAIKEN: Right. So it‟s a father who charges his three sons each with earning the right and privilege of inheriting his company, his kingdom—it‟s called Empire. It‟s all very literal. BOGAEV: Yeah, his name is Lucious. I mean the patriarch. CHAIKEN: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And in the premise-establishing scene, which is a scene probably five minutes into the pilot, when Lucious sits his three sons down at his dining room table and says, “One of you three is going to have to take over this company.” [CLIP from Empire.] LUCIOUS LYON: Your brother and I been working hard to turn Empire into a publicly traded company. Now, part of us going public is ensuring a legacy for this company, and right now, it appears none of you are prepared to take over when I’m gone. CHAIKEN: Lucious already knows or believes that he has a fatal illness, and he puts it to them: “One of you is going to have to prove himself. You‟re competing against one another to take over this great billion-dollar company that I‟ve created.” [CLIP continues.] LUCIOUS: Now it won’t happen today, nor tomorrow, but I will start grooming someone soon… CHAIKEN: And one of the three sons, Jamal, the most sensitive, the most artistic, the most honest, and pure, and the one his father is least likely to favor says, “What are we, King Lear or something?” [CLIP continues.] JAMAL: What is this? We King Lear now? LUCIOUS: Call it what you want, smartass, but over the next several months— ANDRE: Wait, wait, what are you saying? We’re all in competition to be the future head of the company? CHAIKEN: And I think that you know, probably we should believe that Jamal is the only one that would go there, Jamal is the one who has the literary framework to even understand that reference. BOGAEV: And there are a lot of reverberations and foreshadowing and in some ways it‟s closer to The Lion In Winter, right, because in that you have a husband and a wife using the children in all these ways, and as pawns and there‟re three sons rather than three daughters. CHAIKEN: Yes, and Danny also was explicit about The Lion in Winter. He said, “This is The Lion in Winter, that‟s what I‟m doing, it‟s King Lear.” I‟m not sure that this is correct, but wasn‟t King Lear the underpinning for The Lion in Winter? I mean, isn‟t it, you know, a reference and an inspiration that now goes through several layers of interpretation? BOGAEV: Now as we said, you‟re the show runner, so you came on after the series got picked up, and it already has this Shakespeare-flooded intention. Was it clear to you how you were going to practically follow through on that though? CHAIKEN: No, not initially, my job in coming on as the show runner, to carry out somebody else‟s vision, Lee and Danny‟s vision— BOGAEV: Right, to make it work. CHAIKEN: —Is, it‟s to make it work, but it‟s also to really explore it with them. They‟re very involved in the show and especially in the beginning, the first thing I did was sit down with them, and talk to them at length—it‟s a very kind of psychological interview, a mind-meld. BOGAEV: It‟s a mind-meld. Right. CHAIKEN: It‟s all of those things, you know, what are your wishes, intentions, and so on? And neither of them has ever done a television series, has—I mean Lee is a filmmaker, a director. Danny is a screenwriter and an actor. He‟s acted in television shows before, but he‟s never created one that‟s been on the air and had to tell stories week after week. So, I talked to them about all of the things that are important to them, and one of the things that comes through is… these Shakespearean themes are core to our concept of the show, and we want to really stay true to them and it‟s not that we‟re literally doing Lear, that‟s going to have to— BOGAEV: Fade away. CHAIKEN: Yes. It‟ll have to fade away, or at least take on a life of its own. But the themes of the show should always feel Shakespearean. And so we talked about all the different ways in which that can happen, and one of the things that I‟ve done in my own shows, has been to find something that doesn‟t expressly wind up on the screen, but that informs the thinking behind a show. It‟s, you know, how do you name your episodes? How do you contemplate your themes? And I suggested that maybe every episode we should find a quote from Shakespeare—and it can be anything, I mean, I think we‟ve stayed with the plays, we‟re not going to sonnets—but every single episode, we find our themes, and we always define a Shakespearean theme or story in the episode, as we‟re breaking a story. And the scripts, you know the audience never sees this, but every single script has on the title page, a quote from one of Shakespeare‟s plays, comedy or tragedy. BOGAEV: Right and you have “Out, damned spot” and “Et tu, Brute” and “Poor Yorick”. CHAIKEN: Exactly. And further to that, every episode, with the exception of three that were written by Danny, because he likes to choose his own titles, but every episode is titled with some portion of a quote. And we try to be—not random about it—but we find sometimes something that‟s not all that familiar. That says it in a way that isn‟t clichéd. BOGAEV: But I find that really fascinating. And as a show runner, you think about… it‟s very much about construction and form, right? You… that‟s what you, among other things, bring to this, bring to a script, especially a television script. So what do these quotes do for you all there in the writer‟s room? CHAIKEN: They do a number of things. They help to pull us back to our themes, because breaking an episode of television, especially when you‟re doing serialized drama, is hugely challenging. And you always wind up going off in a million different directions, and you need something to pull you back to the show. Now, it‟s the characters, primarily, and the stories you‟re telling, but we always find several moments during a story-break, where we go back to that quote. When we say, either, “Are we being true to these themes?” or if we‟re lost, “How can these themes help us to find our way?” So— BOGAEV: So, it‟s like the guiding light. CHAIKEN: Yeah. BOGAEV: That‟s so interesting. Now, and going back to what you said before, that Lee Daniels and Danny Strong and you were very adamant about this series reflecting Shakespearean themes, and style, and honing to that--what did that mean? CHAIKEN: I‟m not sure that it meant the same thing to the three of us.