AMC is starting the fall television season tonight with the premiere of their new series “Fear The Walking Dead”, a spin-off of their hit show “The Walking Dead”, which has taken the zombie apocalypse genre to new heights. Executive Producers Greg Nicotero and Dave Erickson sat down with us to discuss the intricacies of telling a new story set in the same universe of such a wildly popular show while maintaining it’s own identity.
Fear The Walking Dead premieres tonight 9/8c on AMC.
Interview after the jump!
There were a million different ways you could do another Walking Dead series. How did you decide on this take?
Greg Nicotero: Well you know, we didn’t want to do CSI. We didn’t want to do a cookie cutter show as the exact same thing. Daryl, Michonne…they’re larger than life characters. We took a slice of that universe and wanted them to be real characters that were grounded, they’re your neighbors.
We had explored after the first couple seasons of The Walking Dead, I had wrote and directed a couple webisodes and they were little snapshots of what life would be around the rest of the world. That was kind of like wow there’s an entire world of stories of how people survived. The one common thread is what happens to people as society changes as society unravels, who do you become. In The Walking Dead we explore that quite a bit and in our show that’s really important.
What were some of the biggest challenges in creating a standalone show that’s borrowed from the other universe but still its own entity?
Greg Nicotero: I know Dave and Robert one of the things that we talked about even designing the zombies because The Walking Dead is genre show I was always, sort of like I do on The Walking Dead, pushing to make things bigger let’s do more elaborate zombie make-up and Robert and Dave we had a conversation one day and they were like no this is a different feel.
You have to be in a room and see twelve people and one of them could be infected and you wouldn’t notice it. We actually pulled back on the make-ups in the first episode because you wouldn’t want to draw to much attention to it. In the trailer you see Franks character seeing the woman zombie with a knife stabbed in her chest and blood coming out and you’re like ok. He doesn’t know how to process that. When he starts talking about it he’s like these people were all dead and they were up moving around and everyone was like you were hallucinating. That’s how people would deal with it. So that was very important was to distinguish our show in that world.
I’ll tell you what’s crazy too, I live in LA and I lived there during the North Ridge earthquake and 4:30 in the morning BOOM I was thrown out of my bed and the weirdest thing is they say is never turn the gas on never do all these things and you just did it. You ran downstairs, you tried to flip lights on, you instantly did exactly what they tell you not to because you’re sort of shaken into this uneasy situation and I remember pulling my car into the front door of my house and turning the headlights on because all of the lights in the whole neighborhood there was no reflection of light in the sky because it was 4:30 in the morning and we went and sat in my car and turned the radio on just to see what happened.
So all of those kinds of things when I read the first couple drafts of the script I started thinking about that stuff, put myself in that situation.
Is there a difference in tone of the production between the two shows?
Greg Nicotero: Well they’re different shows you know. It’s very different and its got Scott and Dave are different guys so they both run their ships differently. I’m sort of interwoven into The Walking Dead so much so that I never made it up to Vancouver during the shoot (for FTWD).
The plan now is that when The Walking Dead goes on hiatus we start shooting Fear The Walking Dead so I can be I don’t have to do double duty. But they’re just different shows in terms of how they’re managed. The zombies are different. We zombie school but in shooting in Vancouver we ended up using a lot more stunt people than we do in Georgia.
In Georgia we use a lot of extras but I think the rules are a little different in Canada so we ended up using more stunt people. I’ve shot other movies in Canada that were like zombie movies like Land of the Dead I shot with George Romero and all the zombies were Canadian actors, extras so the rules are a little different.
Can you talk about family dynamics in the pilot and throughout the first season?
Dave Erickson: Hopefully the good thing about the show is that every element of the pilot all the conflicts that are specific to the family drama six, seven seasons from now if you look back you can track the churns and the finality of whatever those arcs might be you can trace them to the pilot.
One of the things I hope will continue to distinguish the show which is this roundedness of the family conflicts with dysfunctional blended family what that means and how do we let the apocalypse impact that and exasperate that story as opposed to ultimately succumbing to strictly survival, strictly zombies being there and I think the comic has done that quite well and the original show has done that very well in a very specific way and the hope is that because we allowed ourselves a little bit more time over the course of Season 1 to really invest in these families before we go to full-on apocalypse it really gives us that much more in terms of character development a richness that we can stretch as long as they let us keep going.
Can you talk about the pressure, the responsibility taking this established creation that’s so beloved and try to create something that’s different.
Dave Erickson: I think we owe something to the fans and the enormity of that fan base. I think we owe something to the comic and that’s one think about the original show, it’s really difficult to adapt to continue to make those little subtle adjustments in a compelling way that doesn’t put off the audience do it in a way that feels rich and new and different of the world and I think they’ve succeeded beautifully. We have a lot more license and a lot more flexibility which I think makes our side of things a little bit easier but if you watch the trailer it does speak to the apocalyptic scope of the show.
It is a show that’s going to be exciting it is going to have the elements of The Walking Dead that people know and love will be part of the show. I think we have an opportunity to front load it with an intimacy that in all honesty just based on the way the comic was structured they didn’t have time to do that.
I think that’s actually something when I first talked to Robert it was really important to him…there’s a lot of things you write something whether it’s the comic or script and then a year from now, five years down the road I wish I had done that or I could have gone down this road. I think, I can’t speak for him, but I think that’s part of why he wanted to do this I think there were elements of the show of the comic that he hadn’t had a chance to really explore.
For more information about Fear The Walking Dead visit:
Website: http://www.amc.com/shows/fear-the-walking-dead
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FearTWD