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Milo Ventimiglia and Zachary Quinto in HEROES - SEASON 1 - "How To Stop an Eploding Man"
Television
Exclusive Interview: JEPH LOEB AND THE WRITING SECRETS OF 'HEROES' - PART 1
The TV writer, producer and comic book scribe reveals how HEROES comes into being
Published 6/7/2007
They saved the cheerleader and the world, and now where do they go from here? The characters on NBC’s hit series HEROES may not know what is in store for them, but men like writer Jeph Loeb do. Loeb who was a writer and producer on both SMALLVILLE and LOST came on board with HEROES before the pilot was filmed, and is an integral part of the producing and writing staff (thanks in part to his years worth of writing in the world of comic books). iF Magazine caught up with Loeb for this exclusive interview in between his meetings for the second season of HEROES to find out the insider’s scoop behind season one, and some of the differences writing for genre television.
iF MAGAZINE: [Creator] Tim Kring has said what an integral part of the creation HEROES you played, what amount of time did you have to take from your other endeavors to work on HEROES?
JEPH LOEB: Well, let’s put everything in perspective. First of all, Tim is incredibly generous, which is one of the reasons I wanted to come work here, and he would say something like that. My involvement in the development of the characters was that basically in the highway of creativity, I was the guardrail. It was seven lanes and he was driving a hundred miles all by himself. So, when he came to me he had pretty much everybody all worked out. There were a couple of characters that we talked about; they bumped into pre-existing things and wasn’t there a way that we could try and do it another way.
The story that I’ve told too many times is that we had gone for the “powers” walk as opposed to a power walk and he told me the story of the pilot. It took an unbelievable amount of time and it was so detailed; it was as if he had seen the pilot already and was telling me about it and he hadn’t even written the script yet.
At one point he said one of the characters should be able to control metal objects and use his abilities to lift up a car and I said, “umm that’s Magneto.” He said, “Is that a person or a power?” [Laughs] Then I thought it would be kind of cool if someone were able to say that they had heat vision and someone else would say they had magneto power. When I explained to him what that was, I realized that Tim had not only never read comics, but he had never seen the X-MEN movies or SPIDER-MAN movies or any of those.
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What he knew instinctively, because that’s the kind of writer he is, what we all know when we write comics is that Peter Parker is infinitely more interesting than Spider-man is and Batman is simply a guy running around in his pajamas until you figure out that he’s a ten-year old boy who saw his parents murdered in front of him. Developing the characters came from not on the powers side of things, but in terms of who they were and what their background was. Whenever we do anything on the show with new characters, we start by talking about who they are and then add on all of the other layers. One of things that we don’t exactly think like this, but their powers are not abilities but rather disabilities. What we often do is say "what would this character be like if they were blind because that is very often how they react to the fact that they can fly or read minds." These are not gifts; these are burdens. In terms of the timeline, I talked to Tim before he wrote anything, and then I read a couple of drafts, and then the next time I saw it, it was shot. What I saw was what we screened in San Diego, the seventy-two minute version, that both introduced Matt [Parkman] and had a different story for the nuclear man the character that eventually became Ted in the first season. This one is very similar, but Matt’s story and the story of Ahmad, one became very different and one got erased completely.
iF: How does the writing process on a show like HEROES with so many different characters work?
LOEB: The way our show is run is very different than any show I’ve ever been on. It came out of necessity; we were picked up a year ago around this time and we had to start shooting in the middle of July. In order to do a show that is this complicated we needed to have three or four scripts in the can. When you gang write a script on a show, you do it generally because you are in trouble. So, you doll out who does act one, and act two, and three and hopefully when you get it all back together again it will all match. The gift of this show was that the character’s stories particularly in the beginning were very modular; so that you could write all of Claire’s story for the entire first three episodes and never bump into anybody else. That’s a tremendous gift to sit down and realize that your responsibility for this episode is six to eight pages. When you multiply that by six or eight people, you can turn a script around within a week. It was a grand experiment and it should’ve blown up in our faces and instead it turned out to be damn good! I think that speaks volumes about the process we go through in terms of breaking the story and following an outline that we were all involved in.
Secondly, we were al involved in every step of the writing process up until the point where the person who is credited is given all of the elements and then has to make it work. Sometimes that means literally, like the meeting I just walked out of, where one of the characters’ story elements wasn’t working so well for that episode and we pulled it out and re-jiggered it as something completely different. Again, the gift of that is that it is only six to eight pages; it’s not like you are restructuring the entire story.
Certainly, when I was on SMALLVILLE you could never do that because the main story was the story. On LOST, all the stories were pretty much geared around the person in the flashback. Often on LOST we broke stories around the person in the past and then broke the island story; in order to make those two things match up with one another. This is much more of a group concept and absolutely we found there were characters that people liked writing and gravitated to and once the script is finished nothing really goes to production without Tim going through and putting in his own particular style on top of it. But, it really enabled the writers to take up an authorship in every episode and what you didn’t have was a sense of preciousness about whatever you were working on. You simply did the best you could, and I think it’s paid off enormously. I don’t know if it would work on any other show, but it happens to work on our show because we have such an ensemble cast and that our casts don’t often meet each other.
STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 OF iF'S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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