CraveOnline: Can you share those notes, or would they be spoilers?
John Ridley: No [spoilers]. In the pilot episode there was at the very head of the show, two really, really short scenes of Russ – played by Tim Hutton – at work, where he used to work in Arizona. He was in California, he moved to Arizona, now he’s come back to California. So it was a really short scene of him at work, and a really short scene with him at night, out with his friends just at an Appleby’s talking about sports. I mean, they were like seconds long. But just giving a little perspective of him as a person.
I imagine that helped the phone call about his son come out of nowhere, so you can appreciate how he had a life.
Yes. It wasn’t some completely anonymous individual. You get a sense that he’s a regular guy. And Paul Lee, the head of the network, he saw the pilot after we cut it. He loved it. He had no notes. He literally had, “If this is the pilot you want to put up, put it up.” He said, “The only thing I would put out to you, you have those two shots of Russ, I don’t think you need them. I think it’s very interesting with you coming in, just naked, off this guy.”
And we were long, the pilot was really, really long. And I mean, we’re talking a couple of seconds here, but it was sort of like, “Okay…” I felt like, honestly, it was sort of my nod to traditional, that he’s not a completely anonymous guy, that he’s got some kind of a life. And I thought it was very interesting that the head of the network was saying, start with that phone call. Just go with that. And that has been the one thing that people have always commented on about the show, that it starts with the start. There’s no nothing. You don’t know anything about this guy, you don’t know anything about his circumstances. So I give it up to the network for saying, if you want to be bold, be even bolder. Take it a little bit further.
You said there were three notes. Do you remember the other ones?
Yeah, there was another that was… we had shot, I think it was in episode number three, so by the time [you publish this] people have already seen it, Alonzo and his brother-in-law are talking and they’re having this very intense conversation about his brother-in-law thinks Alonzo made a big mistake in how he dealt with the police in regards to his son, Tony. We tend to shoot everything kind of wide or tight, and we shot this one a little wide. Just these two guys on the stoop interacting, and it was very much about their body language.
The network, it was the one place where they said, “Would you mind going back and getting close-ups? It’s a very intense conversation and we’d rather play it tight.” And it wasn’t a big deal to go shoot it, so we went back, we shot it and it plays very strongly that tight. It’s one of those things where it wasn’t where, “Oh God, why do we gotta do that?” We did it and it played very, very well.
I don’t know the third one. I know there was a third one… [Thinks.] But those were the kinds of things were they were like, “We’d really appreciate it if you would consider this,” and that was the way they’d always put it. “We’d really appreciate if you would consider.”
I’m just fascinated that you’re doing this entire, lengthy story with all these different moving parts, and it sounds like the only notes they had were just about moments they think could be sold better, as opposed to the nuts and bolts of the story: who really did it, whether audiences would find that satisfying, something really dramatic.
I think a relationship developed over time where there was always a lot of conversation. We got our scripts done early, we got our scripts in, so it wasn’t this space where we’re kind of behind, and we’re rushing up on episode three, and they’re just getting the script going, “Oh, wait, why didn’t you have resolution on the thing? Or can’t you have somebody get arrested?”
There was always that feeling of, let’s be really good partners. I know it’s your money and your network so I’m going to be really respectful of that, but you asked me to do this show so there are going to be things where I try to push. And we’re not going to have a police officer show up with some DNA evidence at the 45-minute mark, or whatever. We’re going to end on Russ, I think it’s in the third episode so I can talk about it, he gets a new job and it’s selling flowers.
Look, as long as there’s communication everything changes, whether it’s a job selling insurance or you’re working on a TV show, people always work better when there’s a line of communication. ABC went out of their way to be communicative, and I hope, I hope I went out of my way to be a good partner in that regard.
