How did you choreograph the snake dance that some poor actress has to do in the shadow of Salma Hayek?
Haven’t done that yet.
You’ve cast that character though.
Yeah, it’s Eiza Gonzalez.
Are we going to see her more than we saw Salma Hayek? She didn’t last long after that dance.
Yes.
But that’s a scene everyone still talks about so how do you want to approach it?
It’s the same thing I said before in the sense that it’s about honoring it but also tapping into the richness of it. She’s a super rich character that we know nothing about, starting with the fact that Santanico Pandemonium is not her real name. It’s a stage name, obviously, right? So there’s layers there. That’s all I’ll say about that because I don’t want to give anything away. The big layer is the temple at the end of the movie, that shot. He jokes about it, “It’s like this offhand thing I did. I wanted to explore but I couldn’t really dig in, so I threw it in there just so at least I could touch it.” But that is a massive vein, man. When you tap that vein, there’s just so much great Mesoamerican mythology that we can use.
Is that the end of the first season?
Not quite. We’ll get to that part a little earlier actually, and we’re going to go a little further.
As far as the nuts and bolts of the dance itself, are there any ratings issues on El Rey? How far can you go? Are there aspects you want to go further than Salma Hayek?
You mean in terms of how much blood can we show?
How explicit can it be?
It’s tricky, I can’t really speak with authority to that because here’s the thing. There’s different versions. We’re doing what we call cable/network version for airing, but selling internationally we can show more. Miramax International Sales is selling the show all over the world, so we can show more in Europe. We’re shooting two versions of stuff when the time arises. Then we can dial back. You know, Nicotero can do some crazy sh*t. We can go to a certain point. Even if you look at “Walking Dead,” they’re usually TV-14 but sometimes they get labeled M. Those are all things we’re thinking.
I’m thinking “Spartacus” and “Game of Thrones” with the nudity and sex.
Well, we’re not pay cable so we can’t go full on.
Is continuity a nightmare because some episodes are all day, eventually they’ll be all nights and there’s a section that would have to be dusk?
No, that hasn’t been too hard. We’ve been tracking it and, look, I did “24” which was real time. “Nikita” had a lot of those elements too where you would do episodes, or a series of episodes in a short timeframe. So that hasn’t been too hard to manage. Look, if we get it on the page and we track it and we manage it and we communicate with the set and all those lines of communication are open, then it’s not too hard.
I know you don’t want to spoil, but if there are fans who were sad Richie became a vampire in the movie, is there reason to hope his fate might be different on the show?
Sure. I think the show will go in surprising, exciting places for all the characters. Like I said, they are rich characters and they were richly drawn by Robert and Quentin from the jump. Again, it’s sort of our privilege to be able to expand them over five seasons, if not more.
Could that mean that some characters who lived in the movie aren’t as safe as we thought?
Sure and I can tell you that the other interesting thing about the show, in addition to what I was saying about it being a story about brothers and family, a story about revenge and Freddie chasing them, it’s really what the movie is, in the sense that we’re trying to make a crime saga with supernatural elements. So there’s a big tableau here of crime organizations. There’s crime organizations that the Gecko brothers worked for that they robbed for in the past who will come to bear in future seasons. There’s crime organizations involved in The Titty Twister that we don’t know about. So there’s a big crime saga in the backdrop that gets fed by the supernatural elements, the vampires and all that stuff. So it’s a big tableau.
The great thing about the movie is if people didn’t know going in, they were surprised it became a vampire movie. Now that that secret is out, do you introduce the vampires earlier?
Yes, but the series is a mashup like the movie. However, like the movie, it doesn’t get crazy ‘til midway through the season. We’re aware, because television allows you different points of view in different parts of the universe. So we are seeing some of that and we’re teasing it, but it still has the characters. Put it this way, the characters on the show experience the same surprise that the characters in the movie experienced and that the audience experienced as well.
The Geckos are trying to get to El Rey. Is that a destination you’re saving for the second season of “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series?”
Even further than that.
Oh, so it’ll take them a while to get there.
At least in my mind. I have it all kind of mapped out.
As in how many seasons?
I don’t want to say, but I have it kind of all mapped out. I also have done this long enough to know that, and this is why I’m not being specific, you keep yourself open to a new road. Sometimes you set the map and all of a sudden you’re traveling down a road and that road might be an actor who surprises you or a storyline that the audience responds to that you didn’t even expect. So you’ll take that road and it’ll change your map.
Did that happen on “24” a lot?
It happened on “Nikita.” “Nikita” we had a lot of characters we introduced, the secondary characters who surprised us and we brought them into the fold so it really grew from a single lead show into a team show in the best possible way. Some of those characters were one offs that became big characters for us. You’ve just got to be open to it.
