What does Alan Ball say about Sookie?
She’s fearless…she’s been through a lot. She lost both her parents at a very young age. She’s dealt with this–as likes to refer to it–her disability of hearing people’s thoughts. She’s generally a good person with a good energy. She’s very open minded.
And about Anna Paquin?
“She’s good casting,” he said. In the beginning I thought “Well why would Anna want to do TV? She’s got a movie career.” I’m used to American actors who have a movie career thinking television acting is beneath them.
“Thank god she wanted to do TV! When the casting director said ‘Are you interested in Anna Paquin?’ I shot back ‘Well, yeah, but is she interested in this?’ She says ‘Yeah, she is’.
I thought about it and I thought of course she’d like to do this, it’s a fantastic role, a great role. Nobody is going to cast her like this in a movie yet. I was a little worried that she wouldn’t want to dye her hair blond, but actually she was very willing. I felt a responsibility to be as true as I could to the book. You have to be close enough so they don’t think, “Whoa it doesn’t make any sense.” But ultimately physical resemblance isn’t as important as whether this person can bring this character to life in a way that’s compelling and makes me care about what happens to them.
Anna pursued this role, and thank god she did because… she really gives the show heart… soul. It’s a great cast, lets not discount anyone else in the cast, but playing someone whose been hearing someone else’s thoughts their entire life isn’t easy – and she makes it look easy.”
Did you watch other vampire movies to prep?
I did. But watching all those movies, I learned a lot of things I didn’t want to do. I wanted to stay away from opera music. I wanted to stay away from crazy contact lenses when the fangs come out, because it’s like, “Why? Why is that necessary?” And I wanted to stay away from that sort of industrial, hyperblue light that pretty much every horror movie made since the late seventies has. Blade, Underworld, all those movies. I just wanted to let them be. I didn’t want them to necessarily look like bikers or leather people or goths. I just wanted them to look like people. Because in the world of Charlaine’s books, vampires are like humans. There’s a lot of diversity.
I think we have to be very careful about special effects. We’re a TV show. We don’t have the time or the budget. I feel it’s very important to just suggest something or see the very beginning or end of something. I go back to those vampire movies when their fangs come out and they’ve got those weird contact lenses and their foreheads bulge out. Do you know how long that takes to apply to an actor? And do you know how many pages you have to shoot a day when you’re shooting television? Just give them fangs and let them act. With special effects, less is more.
What is so appealing about vampires as characters?
People are also drawn to the idea of immortality. The idea of only being out at night so you can give rein to your darker, primal, carnal impulses. And I suppose we all know people who suck the life out of us. I don’t really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people’s consciousness. But I do know they’re tremendously powerful. I mean, there’s a vampire on Sesame Street. And Count Chocula. I don’t know why it’s so powerful. As a culture we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don’t want to die. It’s like, well, too bad, we do.
When I was 13, my sister died in front of me, and it was very much … suddenly the presence of death was in my face, and, you know, that very much transformed me. In that one moment, life was separated into life before and life after.
It was a car accident, and I was in the car. So I think I probably have a closer relationship to death than I would have had had that not happened. And it certainly informed my consciousness, my life, and therefore my work.
What are you trying to say by having vampires in your story?
If it’s just a story device with fangs then I’m just not that interested. I’m not interested in special effects. We’re really trying to focus on who Bill is, what’s his history. What’s the curse of being immortal, how is that a bad thing? What’s it like to be immortal and still appear to be human? Those are the things that are important to me.
It’s always interesting to read the vampires as a metaphor for this or that — that adds texture but it’s not what this is about. When someone at HBO first asked me what this was about I said it’s about the terrors of intimacy, and at the time I thought, “Who knows what that means but it sounds good.” But over time I’ve really started to believe that this is the deeper meaning of the show. Six Feet Under had always been about subduing one’s emotions and being afraid of primal feelings we all have — they’re the byproduct of being creatures with souls — and dealing with knowing we’re going to die. It felt sort of liberating just to go a little crazy. And I wanted to do something different obviously.
And the physicality of the vampires?
We went to great pains to sort of depict a certain kind of physiology for the fangs in which they actually are retracted like rattlesnake fangs and then they click forward. I wanted to approach the supernatural not as being something that exists outside of nature, but something that is more deeply rooted in nature.
More than our physiological perception apparatus is equipped to perceive. I wanted to avoid the instantaneous incineration, and the strange contact lenses when their fangs came out or any head prosthetic for that matter, its a TV show. We don’t have the time or the money to do that. Give them fangs, that’s all they need.”
Do you view the vampires as a metaphor for gay people in this country?
“It’s not that specific but yes, it works as a metaphor for gays or people of color, or anyone who is different. Because of the cultural climate we are in today, it seems like it is a metaphor because of gay marriage, and gay rights and all, but in the end it’s also not a metaphor, it’s vampires.” I really don’t look at the vampires as a metaphor for gays in a very specific way. Part of the joy of this whole series is that it’s about vampires, and so we don’t have to be that serious about it.
Given the show’s backwoods Louisiana setting, how does the broader concerns of the vampires—their official fight for equal rights, their integration into society—figure into a locale where few have ever met a vampire? How do those two things integrate?
I’m not sure they really do. It seems to integrate more in the marketing campaign than in the actual show. It integrates in the way that a presidential campaign is integrating in a small town, and it kind of filters down. But it does serve a purpose in the show as texture, as background. The story is not about how the vampires are going to get their rights. But those issues are coming back, and certainly as the season progresses, the anti-vampire church comes more into play, and you’ve got to keep the political dialogue going between the pro-vampire and anti-vampire forces. When that happens, it feels organic, so that it’s not like all of the sudden, we’re telling stories about the church. Because to me, that’s really clumsy storytelling.
So what are you looking to evoke about the South in this show? Do you see it as straight Southern Gothic?
I certainly don’t want to belittle the South and do the typical Hollywood “Look at those clowns and idiots,” or give the women silly hats and big flowery dresses. I’m from the South, so while I personally find it impossible to live there, I still have a fondness for it as a geographical region. I’m just trying to create a place that has a real taste of something non-generic. Certainly one of the aspects of setting the show in Louisiana that we love is the presence of nature, the humidity, the heat, the bugs, all of that stuff. And I try to keep that alive in every episode, because we decided to approach the supernatural as not something that occurs outside of nature, but something that’s a deeper manifestation of nature than we are equipped to perceive. One of the other things I responded to in the book was how much I love that Southern dialect, the way people express themselves. It’s like music, and so it’s nice to go there.
You’ve definitely picked up on the sensuality of the books. What made you decide to go in that direction?
That was an instinctive choice. It felt like it was a part of the world. Also, one of my main characters is totally sexually compulsive, so it sort of feels like you have to go there.
I don’t know if it’s because the fantastic nature of the premise allows me enough of a remove so that it’s not so upsetting. Because it’s like popcorn TV or an amusement park ride for me. Certainly sexuality is a real window into somebody’s psyche I’m not as freaked out by the characters. There’s a lot of sex and violence in Charlaine’s books, and I wanted to do something different. Six Feet Under was all about repression, and True Blood seems to be something about abandon. I find the show really entertaining to produce and to be a part of making because it’s escapist. It’s totally escapist.”
Obviously the act of feeding is a very blatant sexual metaphor,” said Ball. “There’s penetration. There are bodily fluids exchanged. There’s a cathartic, frenzied physical moment. You know how a lot of people are attracted to the bad boy or the femme fatale? The hot sexy, dangerous person you know is really not good for you? Your conscious mind is going, ‘Ok, move away, walk away from this.’…The one you should want and know you should want, they don’t turn you on as much.
Are vampires better lovers than humans in this story?
Yeah, they’ve had hundreds of years to like figure things out and to learn things.
Where you influenced by other vampire stories?
I have not read Twilight so I don’t know what those similarities are. I think vampires are a timeless powerful archetype that can tap into people’s psyches. They’ve been around forever, even before the reinvention of vampires in the 1990s with [Francis Ford Coppola's film] Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A lot of world mythology all over the globe has creatures like the succubus, the one that feeds on the essence of people. I don’t really know why this is all happening at this time. I’m just glad it’s happening.
When Dark Shadows came on I was in elementary school. My next door neighbor and I, it would come on right after we got home from school and we would rush into out houses. We would sit there when the theme music came on and we would hold our throats like we couldn’t breathe. I have no idea where this came from but we would pretend like we were choking until the title sequence. We didn’t really watch it. To an 8-year-old I think Dark Shadows was really slow. Certainly it was something about vampires — the excitement that made us do this weird little psychodrama, while that organ music played and those waves crashed against the rocks.
I personally have never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel. I’m not really a big vampire fanatic. I can tell you some specific ways the mythology differs. A lot of the myths about vampires were created by vampires themselves over history so that they could pass because, if you could convince everybody that, you know, you couldn’t be seen in a mirror or that you would freak out if somebody shoved a crucifix in your face, then you could prove you weren’t a vampire pretty easily. The vampires in our world know that.
source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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