Carlos Coto comes from a TV family. His brother Manny Coto worked on “24.” I’m sure you noticed his name in the credits. Carlos just wrapped “Nikita” and moved on to the El Rey Network where he is show running “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series.”
Based on the Robert Rodriguez movie, the series retells the story of the Gecko brothers’ ill fated border crossing and holing up in the vampire haven The Titty Twister. After El Rey’s very first presentation to the Television Critics Association, we sat down with Coto to discuss the evolution of the movie to a long-running television series. He was very happy to meet us too.
Spoilers for the movie From Dusk Till Dawn follow, but those are not spoilers for “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series.” The show promises to do things differently.
Carlos Coto: I love Crave.
CraveOnline: Really?
Absolutely. Good stuff.
Thank you. So the movie was written by Tarantino. He’s obviously not writing the scripts for the show. How did you find writers who could, is emulate the right word?, emulate that style?
Honor is the better word.
You’re right. How did you find writers who could honor Tarantino’s writing?
Look, it’s as much honoring the style as it is honoring the characters. To me, the moment in the movie that I’ve always loved and that drew me to the series is the moment in the motel room after Seth gets back and finds out what Richie’s done to the bank teller and says, “It’s going to be all right. We’re going to make it to El Rey.” To me, that basically begins the story of two brothers. The show, I’ve always said, is about one brother trying to save another brother. That’s really at the core, that’s one of the cores.
The other core is a man trying to save his family. The Harvey Keitel character, which is played by Robert Patrick [in the series], Jacob Fuller and his daughter Kate, there’s a family story there and it’s about a family kind of coming apart. Again, it’s told in the movie but it’s told partially. There’s all these great emotional nooks and crannies in the movie that you can explore and that give you all this richness. If you remember the diner scene with the family, they’re sitting around talking about mom died. Well, how did mom die? What happened with mom? What’s that story? Why are they going to Mexico? Why is he a preacher who has lost his faith? All that stuff is so rich, so what Tarantino gave us were characters and it’s our job to honor them and mine them respectfully.
Why is Jacob so obsessed with sleeping in a bed?
Exactly. Now, that’s a good example because actually in the series we slightly change the reason why he sleeps in a bed. So there are some moments in the movie that we play similar to what they are in the movie, but then there’s other moments where we find new context because what we’ve also done is added a whole new character, Freddie Gonzalez who’s a Texas Ranger who is Earl McGraw’s partner. He becomes sort of the Gerard character for lack of a better word, and he is chasing Seth and Richie the whole show. There’s a whole parallel story with him and his pursuit of the infamous Gecko brothers.
Freddie is actually the only one who is bold enough to cross the border and chase them down. So there’s a whole storyline there, that’s a new character in the mythology we can mine. There’s so much stuff.There’s a Kahuna Burger. That’s kind of an offhand thing. He goes out and he gets Kahuna Burgers. Well, you get to go to a [Big] Kahuna Burger. You get to spend some time there, some stuff happens with Seth. It’s not just the trip to the burger place.
In the movie that was continuity with Pulp Fiction.
Right, but there’s a whole universe there that Robert and Quentin created that is just super rich that we can mine.
We already saw that “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series” revisits the duct tape, the hole in the hand, the quickie mart hold up, the motel. Is everything from the movie in the series in some fashion?
Yes. Pretty sure. It’s a good question because nobody ever asked me that. Everybody’s always asked me the reverse, what’s not? I’m pretty sure. I guess actually the diner is not. We have a version of that scene, but they’re in the moving RV, but the diner doesn’t really play as a big thing in the movie. It’s just where you meet them, but I thought it was better to meet them in motion because it dramatizes better the trip that they’re on.
I’m thinking great little scenes like the border crossing.
That’s a whole episode. That’s a whole episode because there’s a lot more forces at play. It’s almost like a mini-thriller. We’re going to build a whole border station. We’ve got great budgets and we’ve gotten every dime on the screen. The most exciting thing is Robert’s got this orchestra. The production designer, the assistant directors, some of the casting people, the costume people all worked on the film 20 years ago. It’s all the same people.
So they realized that we’re honoring the original work but also expanding it. Robert’s got this orchestra there in Austin that he conducts and that’s just great. It’s a privilege for me to be there, join the trumpet section and start blowing. In that sense we really get a good looking show.
Robert hasn’t shot on sets for over a decade, except for Planet Terror.
[Laughs] That’s an interesting point.
Does that give “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series” a unique look within his current oeuvre?
One of the things that I said from the beginning was that tonally, the show needed to be grounded and raw the way the movie was, because you have to believe that this is happening. You’ve already got one supernatural element in the show. If you told the story in a very overly affected way, it kind of takes the audience out of it. For me, it had to be very real world so that’s why it’s very down and dirty, shoot on location. Robert is the king of efficient lean and mean directing. The way he directs is the same way he built the network. He brings everyone together and the music starts and he just films it. Good directors don’t over-manipulate.
