INTERVIEW: Steven S. DeKnight

Steven S. DeKnight Credits

Best known for:

Spartacus: Vengeance (Executive Producer/Writer) 2010–2012

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (Executive Producer/Writer) 2011

Dollhouse (Consulting Producer/Director/Writer) 2009

Smallville (Co-Executive Producer/Supervising Producer/Director/Writer) 2004–2007

Angel (Supervising Producer/Co-Producer/Director/Writer) 2002–2004

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Writer) 2001–2002

NL: Spartacus has become quite a phenomenon. It’s addictive and fun to watch. You’ve found a way to make a historical television series accessible to fanboys who tend to be flocking away from television and into gaming. I know you’re following the arc of history, but how much dramatic license are you able to take with actual events?

SD: When I first started working on Spartacus, the concept of doing it in the style of Zack

Snyder’s 300 – all on green screen and with a very graphic novel feel to it – was sold by Rob

Tapert [Executive Producer], Josh Donen [Executive Producer], and Sam Raimi [Executive

Producer] to STARZ. I was actually working on [Joss Whedon’s] Dollhouse at the time. They sold it as, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did Spartacus and shot it like 300?” Everybody thought, “Yeah, there’s not that kind of R-rated action show on television at the moment.” This was when

STARZ had Crash [the series based on the movie] on their network, but that was produced by

Lionsgate. This was the first show that STARZ wanted to produce themselves, and they really wanted something that was unlike anything else on the landscape at the time. So that’s how I fell into it. They hired me to develop the story and run the show with Rob Tapert.

When I first approached it, I approached it as being very true to history. I wanted it to be as true as possible, but I quickly found out that that was nearly impossible when you’re trying to tell a story for either features or television. You have to dramatize it – you have to take liberties to make it accessible to the audience – to make it exciting and emotional.

I like to say that we’re “historically adjacent.” We’re in the neighborhood. I think it is very important for every writer who’s approaching a historical work to remember that you’re not shooting a documentary. Your job first and foremost is to entertain the audience

And by entertaining, I don’t mean to make them laugh or just have a jolly good time.

Entertaining also means to make them excited or afraid – to genuinely get an emotional response from them and make them want to continue watching. That’s something we latched on to with

Spartacus. We wanted to take everything that was known about him, but put it through a filter that a modern audience would find exciting and engaging. The show was originally conceived as an action show. When I came on, I wanted to give it that deeper emotional core and a lot of political intrigue. It’s interesting to watch the first couple of episodes. It takes usually two to three episodes for a show to come together. I’ve gone on record before as saying that I think our first episode is our weakest one of the series. It just didn’t come together for many reasons. I remember when the show first aired; we just got murdered in the reviews. Murdered. NL: A couple of them were positive.

SK: About two out of every hundred were positive. It wasn’t until mid-season that I started to see

on the internet that the people who had kept watching were saying, “Hey, this show is actually

good and getting better and better.” By the time we finished the season with our finale, it was

180 degrees opposite from what the reaction was when we first started. That’s one of the joys of

premium cable in that you shoot all your episodes first and then air them. So they are never

going to pull a show before they air all the episodes.

NL: Did you write 13 the first season?

SD: Yes.

NL: Did you write most of the scripts or all of them before you started production?

SD: We were under the gun. STARZ was doing something different. They weren’t shooting

pilots. They still don’t shoot pilots. They green light straight to series. Normally on network

television, you write a pilot, you shoot the pilot, you kick the tires, you re-shoot parts of the pilot,

or you shoot all of the pilot and you re-cast. You have time to fine tune. When you go straight to series, we shot episode one and immediately had to shoot episode two. So we didn’t have the luxury of fixing the problems that we knew were there. Once we finished shooting, we managed to grab a couple of days of re-shoots and new scenes were added, but it really needed a little more love and attention.

NL: I thought the season finale was so strong. Everything came together for me. The revolt is not just an action sequence; it’s incredibly emotional. Was your original intention for the season one arc always going to be: from capture to slavery to gladiator training to leader of the revolt? SD: Yes, that was always the intent. That brings up an interesting bit of history. There’s so little

known about Spartacus. Bits and scraps. Mostly by Plutarch and Appian. Literally, you can read

in a couple of hours what’s actually written about him. Everything else – all of the larger books –

they’re all guesswork. Since there is no real written history from inside of Spartacus’s camp, it’s

all from the Roman side, talking about what happened. So this gave us a lot of leeway for

invention. One of the largest inventions in season one is that it’s historically known that

Spartacus was a slave in a place where they trained gladiators, but there is no mention that he

ever fought as a gladiator. This is one of the reasons that I say we are historically adjacent

because we took the fact that he was fighting as a gladiator and decided that first season to see his rise as a rock star in the arena. What would be unexpected is that he buys into it at one point.

That he almost starts to enjoy it. Then, there’s the turn where he brings the whole system down.

Another invention that I felt strongly about is that I didn’t want Spartacus and all of the other gladiators to be Robin Hood and his Merry Men. I didn’t want the heroes getting along. I wanted tension there and that’s why I built season-long tension between Spartacus [Andy Whitfield] and

Crixus [Manu Bennett], culminating in that moment in the finale where Crixus helps Spartacus revolt. It’s very important in any of these historical dramas, especially in TV, that you mix actual characters with characters who are fictional. Spartacus is a perfect example. There are many characters from history: Spartacus, Crixus, Batiatus [John Hannah], Glaber [Craig Parker] – and then we throw in fictional characters like Batiatus’s wife, Lucretia [Lucy Lawless] and Ilythia

[Viva Bianca].

NL: The power struggle between these two fiery women is one of my favorite aspects of the first season. And then episode one of Vengeance in which Ilythia sees that Lucretia is still alive is an awesome moment. It gave you so many great things to play with when Spartacus shows up in that other camp where they’re plotting to fight back and bring down the revolt, and Lucretia sees

him and tries to warn everyone – but now she’s turned into this crazed Ophelia character and no

one believes her. It just gives you “story tentacles” – in that it opens you up where you can see a

whole slew of episodes emerging from that one story choice.

SD: Exactly. And that’s why mixing in fictional characters with historical characters seriously

helps you. Especially in a TV series where you need those tentacles of storytelling and you need

some freedom in storytelling.

NL: And you get a chance also to build in some humor there because I love when Lucretia says

to Ilythia, “You know, we’re best friends.” And she’s like, “Yes, yes.” Because she doesn’t

remember, she can tell her anything she wants. There’s a lot of great humor throughout. Lucy

Lawless does such a great job – all the cast does. I wanted to talk about some of the

anachronisms with language and dialogue. Because obviously if you were being completely

historically accurate, they wouldn’t be speaking in English at all. I could see some of the

influences of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – which I personally love about your show. Like where

one of the guys in Vengeance says, “You had me at whore,” which was a reference to the Jerry

Maguire line.

SD: It’s very funny about that line. I think oftentimes, as most writers do, you’ll write a line and you’ll think, “My god, that’s brilliant,” and you don’t realize you’ve heard it somewhere else.

This was one of those cases where we were in such a crunch that I threw that line out, and it wasn’t until after it was shot that I realized, “Wait a minute, that’s from Jerry Maguire.” And I wanted to take it out because I didn’t feel like it was of our world, but everybody loved it. I remember seeing it when we premiered in a theatre, and everyone went nuts when he said that. NL: Yeah, I loved that, and there’s also when Ilythia tells a slave that Lucretia “is a fucking bitch.” For me, those touches of modern jargon add to the fun of your show. But it sounds like for you, a little bit of that goes a long way.

SD: It does, it does. It’s interesting with the language. I remembered when we premiered the first season, and even to this day, I get people complaining about the anachronistic cursing on the show. And they always bring up the word, “fuck,” that fuck wasn’t invented until the middle ages – which is correct and incorrect. All of the curse words we use on Spartacus do actually exist in Latin and were found on graffiti during the time. People get confused because there’s a

Latin word that means the same thing as fuck, but the actual English version of the word fuck didn’t come into existence until the Middle Ages. So that’s why people think they never said fuck back in ancient times, but yeah, they did. And personally, I think the caveman had a grunt that meant the same thing. I’m always curious to see what people latch onto as being anachronistic. And as you read comments, you start to realize that a lot of people only know about that time period based on other movies and TV shows they’ve seen, which also influences it.

NL: I remembered [showrunner] David Milch got a lot of flack when Deadwood came on HBO because of all the “fucks” and “cunts” used in dialogue – and Milch was like, “No, that’s historically accurate. It’s the way people talked back then.”

SD: People also always tend to have a romantic view of the past – that everyone was prim and proper – which just isn’t true. NL: Because you don’t have commercials, are you still structuring with act breaks in terms of

creating story momentum? Do you create A, B, and C lines? What has been your method on this

show since it’s different than network?

SD: This is the first time that anyone has ever asked me this question – and I’m delighted. In

network television, you have an act structure which is a very artificial way to write. You have to

hit your act breaks with something that will pull the people back in after the commercials.

NL: Right, cliffhangers and all that.

SD: I remember when it used to be a teaser and four acts and then it became a teaser and five

acts, and I personally think it’s almost impossible to tell a story that way. You don’t have enough

time to get momentum during your act before you get a break. So for Spartacus, this was the first

time in my television career that we didn’t have to do act breaks. I’m at the point now where I

don’t know if I could go back to doing act breaks because it is so infinitely more difficult. It’s

hard enough to write a television script without the added burden of arbitrary commercial act

breaks. We take more of a feature film approach that we want an act one, an act two, and an act

three feel to it. We tend to start off with an action scene in the first act that sets up the problem.

In act two, there’s the complication to the problem, leading to: “How do we solve the problem?”

which is the big act three ending. And that’s how we approach it. Another thing that I wanted to

do with Spartacus is that I love premium cable and I love HBO. At the time that Spartacus aired, if I had one complaint toward HBO it was that their hour-long dramas stopped caring if they were entertaining or engaging – particularly with the ending. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be watching a show and the credits would start to roll and my reaction was not, “Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next week,” but: “What? Wait, it’s over? That’s it?” So one of the things we wanted to do on Spartacus was to end each episode with a definitive ending, but still have it propel us into the next episode. So for the entire run of Spartacus – and we’re working on the final season right now – I wanted there to be a strong resolution at the end of each episode. The only exception is a two-parter, in this upcoming season, where there was just one episode that was too gigantic to finish in one episode. I didn’t want to do that end in a middle of an action sequence to get the audience to come back. But as a general rule, at the end of each episode, I always present a new problem for the characters to face, so that the audience is left feeling, “Oh,

I’ve got to see the next episode.”

NL: I think you’ve succeeded at that. It’s almost impossible just to watch one. It’s actually one of the changes that’s happening with television – even network television, where a lot of people are now binge viewing via DVR on download, instead of the weekly viewing habit when we didn’t have a choice. There is a real momentum that you create where the viewer thinks, “Okay,

I’ll watch another one and another one.”

SD: I think that’s important in this day and age.

NL: I know you have historical consultants, and, of course, Howard Fast’s big novel and the original film as reference points, so I’m wondering if any of these historical touchstones have hemmed you in or inspired you as a creator?

SD: There are definitely plusses and minuses to these restrictions. Communication is a lot more difficult. Sometimes we had to fudge, “Oh, he’s getting a message from Rome in two days,” when it would actually take a week to reach him. There is this brotherhood among gladiators, and it was common for gladiators to have funerals and be honored. We wanted to hit that theme of brotherhood among these men who are forced to fight which I thought was very important, so that even people who didn’t like each other still had this bond of brotherhood. And literally, a bond because they were all branded with the symbol of Batiatus. There were many instances where we had to take liberties with history, and most people probably would never even notice.

For instance, in the gladiator games, gladiators were highly prized, expensive commodities, so the fights were rarely to the death. There was actually a referee during gladiator matches that would stop the fight if someone was injured and unable to continue. Because if every fight was to the death, you’d lose all of your investment very quickly. But of course, for dramatic reasons, you can’t have a fight to the wound because stakes become much lower. So we make pretty much every fight to the death. Of course, there’s the classic – we went round and round about the thumbs up/thumbs down because it’s actually that thumbs down means he lives and thumbs up means he dies. It’s a common Hollywood thing to do it the other way, and we decided that it would be too much explaining to do to get people out of that mindset. One of the big historical things was that women weren’t allowed to just wander around the city by themselves. They had to have a male escort and that didn’t work for storytelling reasons.

NL: They always travel with their entourage of slave girls – they’re never alone.

SD: Exactly. So there are a lot of little things like that, but especially in Spartacus being set in

Ancient Rome amidst gladiators and the slave war. More than anything I’ve ever worked on, time period does influence the storytelling and the types of storytelling we do on the show.

NL: What is your approach to theme?

SD: The age-old question of: “What’s the theme?” I have veered off thinking in those terms for

Spartacus. It’s probably because all my time spent in network television has soured me to the question. Because so many times the network executives would read a script, be uncertain if they liked it, and ask, “What’s the theme?” And 99% of the time, when a writer responds to you what

the theme is, he’s making shit up on the spot. It’s the tail wagging the dog is what I always feel

when you pick the theme and then write the story; I think you’re going to be somewhat didactic

in your storytelling approach. What I do with Spartacus is while I’m working on a story as I’m

doing the production polishes, I’ll find a theme that perhaps I will echo throughout the episode.

But we never approach an episode with, “Okay, what’s the theme?” Same thing for the entire

season, we don’t approach the season with the idea of what’s the theme. With perhaps the exception being, the last season of Spartacus: Vengeance – well, there you go that’s the theme.

NL: It’s more event driven than theme driven. It’s building to these larger events that then turn you into the next season. I interviewed Chip Johannessen, who was running Dexter and now he’s on Homeland, and he said the same thing about theme. He took it even further – he was like,

“It’s just bullshit,” and yet other showrunners I’ve interviewed, especially from network shows, have said, “Yeah, every episode has a theme and every season has a theme.” Matthew Weiner always has a theme in his episodes on Mad Men. It goes to show you there are so many different ways to tell a story. And they’re all wrong and they’re all right – whatever works.

SD: I’m not for theme or against it. The real thing I’m against is slapping on a so-called theme

just to appease the network – it’s just false.

NL: Let’s talk about the conceit of “ticking clocks” in your storytelling.

SD: Not having clocks is perhaps one of the trickiest things in Spartacus. There are so many

times where you can’t say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in ten minutes.” Or, “I’ll meet you at 1:30 p.m.”

You’ve always got to be like, “When the sun is at its highest.” It gets a little tricky. At all costs if we can, we try to avoid any mention of actual time. Sometimes we have to and then it gets a wee

bit awkward.

NL: There’s just a sense, an undercurrent of tension that something ominous is coming. When you’re doing your script, are you very aware that this is day one or day two, or is it that they have this much time until the army comes in and tries to take them down? Do you have timelines or some kind of a bible that you’re working off of that ratchets up the stakes and urgency in each episode?

SD: I think that’s extremely important especially in a show like Spartacus – which is an action

show at its heart. You need to have that pressure that something is going to happen within this

period of time and often it will be: “We will be out of food in a week” or “We have to get from

Point A to Point B before this thing happens.” We actually never approach it in any kind of real

timeline or map it out. It’s usually just as we’re going through the episode that we’re very

cognizant that you want to get the feeling of mounting urgency in each scene which propels you

to a finale. Oftentimes, you’ll finish an episode, and there’s an awful lot of shit that takes place

in two days which is somewhat unrealistic, but that’s refrigerator logic. Has anybody mentioned

refrigerator logic?

NL: Yes, that’s when you’re coming home from the movie theatre and you’re making yourself a

sandwich, and you open the fridge and then it occurs to you.

SD: Right. It’s often a necessary evil with science fiction, and I’ve found it can sometimes also

apply to a historical series set in a dramatically heightened arena. But as long as people are

engrossed in the characters and action while they’re watching, then I think we’ve done our job

pretty well. NL: At the end of the classic film, Spartacus, he’s crucified.

SD: I don’t want to play spoiler, but that’s not actually historically accurate.

NL: So that was their mythology?

SD: Yes.

NL: And your series will offer an alternate conclusion?

SD: Stay tuned.