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THR wrote:'The Walking Dead': Glen Mazzara on Frank Darabont and His Fears as the Drama's New Showrunner (Q&A)
"I have to find my own voice on the show. This is important to me and I don’t want the show to feel like 'Frank light'; that’s not fair," he tells

When The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont was suddenly dismissed from AMC’s zombie drama, executive producer Glen Mazzara was rattled. The writer, who penned an Season 1 episode as a freelancer and was brought in during the zombie drama’s off-season as Darabont’s No. 2, says he panicked after first being upped to showrunner.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mazzara discusses flying to Atlanta to meet the cast the wake of Darabont’s dismissal from the series and his philosophy for taking over the critical and commercial hit series, and dismisses rumors that the second half of the series’ split season would be “his episodes.”

THR: What was your first reaction to news of Frank’s dismissal?
Mazzara: When I was first told, I felt horrible for Frank. I’ve been through it to some extent and I know that it’s painful. Immediately you ask, ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ Frank was very much in control of the show. I felt bad for my friend. I did not accept the showrunner position until things were reconciled with Frank. Things that were in the press were not exactly accurate. I wanted Frank to be safe, to be settled out, what ever it is. Then my reps spoke with AMC and then I was made showrunner. I panicked. This is a beloved show with a strong fan base. I’ve run some very tricky shows in the past with big personalities and what if it turns out that I’m the guy who f---s up The Walking Dead? I’m dead in Hollywood. I was really fearful of that.

I took my time and realized that we have great producers on the show, great writers and great material. The dumbest thing I could do would be to deviate from that roadmap. I met with everyone and I said that was my plan: to just execute to the best of my ability what’s already in play. Therefore, I wasn’t threatening to anyone; I wasn’t the new sheriff in town. I was really a guy who was going to step up in a crisis.

THR: You mentioned the inaccuracies that were reported immediately after Frank’s dismissal. Can you touch on what those were and what had to happen before ultimately accepting the showrunner position?
Mazzara: What ever went down between Frank and AMC, I wanted that to be settled before I accepted the position. I did not want to be disloyal in any way to Frank; I didn’t want to be seen as being disloyal. I realized that there was some chatter that this was somehow my coup. I turned down a number of showrunning gigs to be Frank’s No. 2, and I was very happy with that. I was writing for an Academy Award-nominated director and screenwriter and we were having fun. I owed it to Frank to be respectful that I was not going to pull and Al Haig and run on stage and say, ‘I’m in charge.’ I tried to be very respectful of that.

THR: You’re put in place and fly to Atlanta to meet with the cast. What were those conversations like?
Mazzara: It was a very emotional day. I had not been to Atlanta; this was the first time that I stepped foot on set, as the new showrunner. The cast was so angry and so hurt. They were terrified: ‘Who’s this guy? This guy is going to kill my career.’ That’s what they were worried about. ‘He’s going to kill the show when we finally have The One, the great show we’ve all been looking for after our careers have been going from audition to audition.’ There was a lot of pressure. And when the cast said that they’d support me, it was incredibly meaningful.

I was very candid that I was not making any changes; I was not deviating from the roadmap; I was not firing any producers; there was no agenda. I was just there to steady the course, to provide some stability at a moment of crisis. I reassured people that I was not letting anyone go. The show was going to stay the course. That’s what I felt was going to be a lifeline not only for me and for the show but for everyone involved in the show: ‘We know what to do, daddy’s not here, but he’s been very clear as to what to do. Let’s continue to do that.’

THR: You, Robert and Frank had all previously mapped out Season 2 before Frank’s dismissal. Did you deviate from that?
Mazzara: Yes. There was a scene in an episode that was coming up to prep about a week or two after everything went down. I had always wanted to push the emotional scene further. I wrestled with, ‘Do I push the scene further or do I not? I felt comfortable enough with myself as a writer that I was going to push the scene in a way that Frank didn’t want to do.

There was another instance in the episode that was prepping when everything went down – the fifth episode – in which there was something in the script that I never really liked. I now had the opportunity to cut it and I really relied on the writers and producers. Everyone was split right down the middle. I made the decision that I respect Frank enough that I’m going to go with Frank’s decision here. I take these moments of deviation very seriously and I’m only deviating where I really feel that I’m then in my wheelhouse. If it’s a tie, I’ve been giving the tie to Frank.

Maybe I’m torturing myself over this but it’s important to me because when you first take over a show, especially a hit show that’s on a very public stage, those first few weeks were tough and I didn’t have my sea legs yet, so I was deferring to people around me and really getting input.

THR: Did you feel a need to put your imprint on the show and change something right away?
Mazzara: No, I didn’t. I felt that what we had was working and that it was about providing stability. Where I had felt differently and/or felt that I could add something that didn’t really come up for a few episodes down the road.

THR: Was splitting the season in two parts something that you were aware of?
Mazzara: The season was always designed as two halves before a single word was written. I’ve read stuff on the Internet where people are saying, ‘The first half of the season is going to be Frank and the second half is going to be Glen. This doesn’t bode well.’ That’s all horseshit. I’ve been involved in every single episode; Frank has been involved in every episode to some degree creatively. [The split season theory] is not accurate. It’s always been designed as two halves for programming purposes because football is a monster and nobody wants to go up against my Giants. [Laughs.]

THR: Will Frank remain an executive producer on every episode?
Mazzara: Yes.

THR: In terms of the budget, did you feel any constraints this season?
Mazzara: Having run a few shows before, I do find the budget that we’re working with to be consistent with cable budgets. The truth is, it’s a hit show and if we get into a jam and we need something, AMC will pony up. They’re not going to kill the baby.

THR: Are you still in contact with Frank and do you feel any pressure to deliver for him?
Mazzara: Yes. Frank and I have traded emails and he’s wished me luck. We have a producer on the show who still works closely with Frank. There’s a number of people who are very tight with Frank, so there’s a lot of communication going back and forth.

I don’t want to say that I want to win one for the Gipper because I think that’s a goofy statement, but I do feel honored that someone of Frank’s talent picked me to be his No. 2. Now, yes, I’m at personal risk if the show doesn’t do well but I also feel like I still believe in his vision of the show. I will not just try to do what I believe is my version of Frank’s show; I have to find my own voice on the show. This is important to me and I don’t want the show to feel like ‘Frank light’; that’s not fair. I’m confident that I can deliver scripts that will work for the show. I need to embrace it, take direction and find myself on the show. People have been very generous about allowing me to do that.

THR: As showrunner, you mentioned that you’ve now read the comics.
Mazzara: I didn’t want to read the comics. We had issues early on with some of the material being stronger than others – during Season 2. The way I focused this episode [the premiere] was it’s a story about Rick. And Rick is on a rooftop. He’s a guy who lives in this zombie world and he is facing issues of leadership. It’s a question and I believe the entire season will be a question of, ‘Is Rick a good leader? Is Rick a worthy leader? Is Rick the right guy to lead this band to safety?’ As an artist, those are the questions I now face. In a way, I believe – because I’m a narcissist and have to make everything about me – that the show, since it’s dealing with leadership issues, is a metaphor for my own artistic journey this year.

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Well that's fairly reassuring. I figured at the point at which they fired Darbont it's not like they had time to make any massive changes to anything anyway. Assuming he's still around, this guy's touch will probably be a lot more pronounced in Season 3. And I don't hold the failed "Crash" t.v. series against him, that was a bad idea from the get-go and I'm sure nobody in his shoes would have turned the job down.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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we have this today, courtesy of io9:
Comics creator Robert Kirkman says the show will reveal this season what Jenner whispered in Rick's ear in last year's finale:

"I wouldn't want to give away exactly when we reveal it, but I will say that it's something we don't carry in into the next season - assuming there is a Season 3. We understand that there are different [questions] that TV shows will tease out for a very long time [and] how that sometimes becomes a little boring and wears out its welcome. We're definitely not going to do that. That's all I'll say."

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i'm all caught up and loved the ending of the most recent. great stuff!

love that crazy-eyed guy from identity and deadwood
but he never lives through anything! (unless i guess you count identity's ending... he needs to do more stuff.

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Absolutely, they dragged that storyline out a bit too much. But I think they managed to buy themselves some time during to really set up some nice confrontations just waiting to happen. And the ending of the last episode just screams of carnage to come.

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I guess I am the only person on the planet who didn't like the "finale". An entire season of waiting for that ending as the last bang? Crap. I'll admit I'm probably just disappointed because I have read the comic. I was actually liking the season how it was going so far, the slowness wasn't really bothering me. the Shane/Otis trip episode was great. Then at the best part of the farm scenario in the comic, they pretty much ruin it.
There are no stupid questions. Just stupid people.

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Funny, I just finished Vol. 1 of the Comic last night immediately after watching the finale again, and I have to say I think the show does a much better job. For one thing, Kirkman's early characters are all either just grateful to be alive, or yelling FUCK at each other all the time, which doesn't work for the old doctor. In other words, I think they do a better job with the characters on the show. And the barn scene in the book is kind of a lame clusterfuck, whereas a lot of threads that built up throughout the 7 episodes this season boiled together, and over, nicely with the way they did it on AMC. The comic has nothing approaching the Sophia reveal either.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Will repost this here since I know TC likes to keep topics tidy--a recent email from Frank Darabont outlining a very cool sounding concept for the Season 2 premiere that of course he never got to execute. "Sam" is Sam Witwer, the actor from SyFy's Being Human and Darabont's The Mist.
Dear Eric,

Sure, I’ll confirm that storyline. Why not? Big caveat here though:

CraveOnline is much mistaken in saying this was for a “web series.” This was never meant as a web gimmick, this was intended for use in the actual TV series. I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls. 



The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort.)

Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this “brush with established characters” idea didn’t work in the script stage, I’d have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.) 



So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin...but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies. 



The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:



After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death...and after a quiet lapse of time...we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde...blows that zombie soldier’s brains out...now Rick’s trapped...fade out...the end.



The notion was to take the “throwaway” tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own...was, in a sense, the star of his own life’s movie. And we’ve followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That’s why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I’d need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.



And then starting with Episode 202, we’d be back with Rick’s group and back in step with the flow of the established story from last season.

I always had in mind to throw in a “wild-card” episode every season, maybe as a season opener or closer. Just a separate story more in the feel of an anthology series, one that appears completely off the track of the regular series but actually does wind up tying in somehow by the fade-out. They did that sort of thing on LOST on occasion, and I really respected it. It always seemed like a bold choice that trusted the audience and rewarded their loyalty with a totally unexpected surprise episode every so often.

That’s it from me. I hope things are well on your end.

Best,

Frank
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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That would have been a fantastic start to the second season, and I love the notion of every zombie/extra having a back-story. They were all humans too, once.

Looking back at the first part of the second season, I really hope they kick it up a notch and just leave that fucking farm already. Yes, you've had your tention-within-the-group moments now, for a bunch of episodes in fact. You don't need to keep doing that right now, just keep the story moving a bit. And have the balls to kill of a character or two (I'm looking at you, Dale and Rick).

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Based on the comics I suspect we'll see a major character death in the second half of the season. But they do need to ratchet things up a bit.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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note to marketing: SPOILER ALERT, JEEZ!!!
io9 wrote:As for someone whose long-term survival chances are not looking good, a description of the upcoming second season Blu-Ray features this description. The relevant part has been bolded:
"This special limited edition Blu-Ray includes all 13 episodes on 4 discs, including bonus features such as: the making of the barn, an extended zombie gut scene,
Shane's last episode
, full Comic Con coverage with panel, comic book vs episode comparison, and more!"
wow. total failure.

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HA! Worst kept secret already, but man, the AMC marketing folks really stuck the landing on the fail there.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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i love this show. last two episodes of the season were great. but seriously, the show has to get better to continue. the hint at the samurai chick coming at the end and the prison were both great palettes for season 3. hope it delivers.

also, wasn't scott ian supposed to be one of the walkers this season? i looked for him but never saw him.

also, this:
unlimitedammo.jpg
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