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

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