(soft music)
- I want to talk for a minute
about the depiction of cops on television.
David's obviously telling a story
about white supremacy lurking within a police force.
But there are many, many shows where that is not the case.
How much responsibility moving forward
do you feel is on the TV writer
to stop pushing this sort of hero cop narrative?
- This idea of basically saying good cops, bad cops.
That's not the conversation that I wanted to have.
The conversation that I want to have is,
the system of policing is infected by white supremacy.
It's an infection.
And now where everything is moving so fast,
we're having this conversation
at the beginning of the summer,
early in June,
but who knows where we'll be in September or October.
A week ago, I had not heard the phrase, defund the police.
Now, I'm pushing out that phrase.
I understand what it means.
It's not as frightening to me as at first was.
But I think that this idea of...
The first thing that we have to do is educate ourselves.
The moral of the story of Watchman was
I had not heard of Tulsa 21, the massacre.
It was mentioned, I went back, I educated myself
as opposed to asking people what I should read.
And now basically it's all of our collective jobs
to understand the history of policing in this country.
Watchman went back to the late 19th century,
post civil war reconstructionism
but only scratching the surface
of what the history is.
We kinda need to understand it.
We need to do our homework.
And then hopefully that will inform our storytelling.
- Yahya has talked about
how he thought he was signing on to a show
where he was the husband of Regina King.
Why did you wait as long as you did to tell him
he was Dr. Manhattan?
- From an acting point of view,
if the character doesn't know who he really is,
perhaps you're over-complicating it
with the actor by saying,
I want you to play all these things,
but also you're in an omnipotent,
you know, a hundred year old white man.
Then there was an accident.
He became blue and all powerful.
He left the planet.
Just what would the look on Yahya face be
as I was explaining all these things to him?
- In your case when Kerry and and Reese
brought this book to you.
You had, I think something crazy like 24 hours to read it.
What did you see in the book that you felt like,
there's a bigger story to tell,
and this is a story that I feel an attachment to?
- I think when I read Little Fires,
it just, so viscerally felt like
a story that I felt so connected to.
Even though it being a story
about kind of the mothers you're born to
and the mothers you're longing for
and the ones that you find maybe in unexpected places.
Like it just, it just, it was kind of a,
it spoke to me in my heart.
And I was so excited to bring it forward.
And then it was really about finding the team
who I was going to tell the story with.
Because certainly there were
a lot of connectivity points for me,
but there were a lot of places
where I couldn't connect to the material in the same way.
The main characters are white, black, Chinese.
It meant having white, black, Asian writers
all represented in the room.
And not just represented in the room,
but represented at the top levels in the room.
That's what made the show to me,
able to be so much more nuanced and thoughtful.
- Alex, you've also sort of acknowledged
that you were initially hesitant to sign on to The Terror
because you aren't Japanese Americans.
What was that process for you?
- Well, in fact, I'm Chinese American.
So my experience is not literally
that of what the Japanese Americans went through
during World War II.
What I discovered and I needed to find a way
to connect into the material
if I was gonna run this thing.
But the feeling of coming to this country
with hopes and dreams and embracing a country
that doesn't always embrace you back,
is something that I could tap into.
And that I was very familiar with.
And that's how I approached it.
I approached it as an immigrant story.
But I knew I needed people.
I needed writers who could tap into it
from a specifically Japanese American perspective,
which is what we did.
And obviously our cast and our crew as well.
- What are the sort of uncomfortable
or the conversations for which you had to get comfortable
having with talent?
- There was a real sense of everyone coming together
and telling the story
that is such a part of who each of those people are
and our crew as well.
This will probably never happen again in my career.
But with people dropping everything
to come work on our show
because this was their family stories,
their parents' story, their grandparents' story.
So, in a way, we got very, very lucky.
Everyone sort of understood
what the story we were telling was
and why we're telling it the way we were.
And that kind of saved us
from some more difficult conversations.
- How do you create a room that is sort of curated
so that you can have real conversations
and ultimately provide something to the viewer
that feels like it speaks to the moment?
- For my own part
I'm not learning something new
about curating a room that's diverse.
I just want to point that out,
that's not news for me-- - I think that's fair.
- I don't need a primmer on like, Ooh,
how do I learn to accept a voice
that's different from mine?
Since I grew up in a time in this business
where I was too far.
A lot of procedural TV was hire a black person or a woman.
And then if they got to hire me, they got both.
And they didn't have to hire to hire anyone else.
So it's a little bit to me,
even the question of like,
how do you curate a room?
Do better, is the answer.
And I've said this before we started,
I wouldn't be here in my career
if Robert and Michelle, if Greg Berlanti,
if people who didn't look like me had hired me,
I had already been comfortable
with having someone who is different from them
before it was trendy.
I mean, I hire people who are different from me
specifically because they have a different perspective.
They don't have to be racially different from me
to be different perspective,
but I haven't hired a North Eastern double Ivy,
African American woman,
cause I don't need that perspective.
She's here already.
She showed up to work every single day.
And as a show runner,
I'm the last computer that episode goes through.
So I don't need that.
I need everybody to be different from me.
And what I think is so frankly
silly about our business is that,
it has supported the idea of hiring people
like you for years.
The fact that people are right now going, Oh my God,
I should hire different people.
Well, that's just to me,
it's like, that's tired, that's sad.
That's like saying I should pay
women the same amount as men. Oh, really?
Like, come on, man.
We're beyond this.
We're beyond, we're beyond it.
- One of the things I've heard you say to exactly that point
is don't question sort of how you got in the door.
- Yeah. I just mean that once you're in the room,
don't ask why you got there.
Like use the opportunity and the moment
to say what you need to say
and be who you need to be.
The why of why they hired you can be tokenism
and that still doesn't quiet your voice.
Like in other words you can be a token
and still make yourself heard.
You can't always criticize and say,
well, they're only hiring me because of this.
Do you know how many times
I've only been hired because of X?
I mean, that doesn't really matter.
- Well, how many panels one has been on,
because one is female.
I mean, this is an atypical panel.
I don't know where (mumbles) lives.
I don't know about your worlds.
But it is very common for me to be the only woman.
And kind of obvious because I'm half a team.
And then it will be, well,
you know, this time we,
we think we just need one of you
and it probably should be you Michelle, you know?
And you kindaay, okay, yeah, I can, I can do that.
- Courtney, you've said that in creating Power,
you wanted to ask the question of
what it mean to be a black man in America,
after Obama was elected?
Curious how that changed world to weighed on you
over the course of the series Run.
And how it would have changed how you approached the story
if you were doing so now?
- The world is not different.
Racism to this extreme was always here.
It didn't go anywhere.
It's not news.
I believe racism in America is as old as a America.
What the issue was with Power is that
the eyes through which this show was kind of told
we're black eyes.
Our African American lead was really...
He was in the central position in the show.
And so he was anticipating racism.
He wasn't surprised by it.
It wasn't a shock.
It wasn't the story because for many of us
who are black in this country,
it is the companion piece to everything that we do.
It is with you day in and day out.
It is walking next to you every day of your life.
I don't know that the show is,
would be so different given these times,
given how the show was written.
I chose to make the show a little apolitical
in its inception.
In other words, the hero cop situation
that we have on television is directly related
to the lack of voices of color in the rooms.
I have never written a hero cop.
And that's because my perspective is different.
- I'm gonna take it one step further which is,
even if you have an inclusive writer's room,
you get executives saying to you,
but I don't think the cops would do that. You know--
- Presumably these are white executives?
- That would be correct.
- Do you ever get nervous in telling the stories you do?
And if the answer is no, why not?
- I mean, I cannot begin to imagine
having a show and not addressing
what's going on politically.
I mean, especially with the characters we had.
Because we knew we had a bunch of liberal characters
walking into this series.
So, if you're going to be honest about it,
they're going to have a point of view
and they're going to be talking about it.
So, it would have not even been possible
and not to tell the story without addressing it that way.
- As a storyteller in the year 2020,
what do you see as your biggest challenge?
- Filming these shows and not getting their crew killed.
- That's real. - Yeah.
- There's been so much talk about
how do we make these shows?
What are the areas to avoid being indoors,
being in large groups,
being together for long periods of time.
Welcome to my set.
- Does it change how you tell stories?
- Of course, you know, you look at crowd scenes,
you look at what you can shoot smaller,
you look at not having as much recurring cast,
which will have to travel from place to place,
but going okay, who are my series regulars?
Can I tell a story like that.
It's about having the conversations with the studio
about you guys are gonna have to spend more money
to get the same thing.
And I know that's terrible,
and I know that's your worst nightmare,
but the truth is if I can only have my lighters light
and I can't have the cameraman on the set,
working on the cameras while these people are lighting.
And because everyone is in their departments
has to work in shifts,
That's gonna take a lot of my day.
And the whole point of production,
as everyone here can tell you is hustle.
Everyone hustling.
And if you can't have, if you building in not hustle,
you will get, not film.
And you will get, not scenes
and you will get not episodes,
in that same period of time.
And yet I feel very strongly that I need to protect my crew.
- I think that there's guidelines
for how to have a safe set,
but what I'm not seeing is
what happens when you hear about the first infection?
We can't all go to Orlando and test every day and close down
basically like having NBA
that is completely and totally contained.
I think all of us...
back to what Michelle said is like,
what we're solving for is safety.
Like, how many deaths is acceptable
for you to get your new season of X show?
The answer is zero, zero deaths.
- First of all, I have read the white paper.
And just in case y'all aren't aware
Writers Guild, AKA,
the folks that are supposed to be representing show runners,
not part of the conversation,
did not contribute.
There's much discussion
about how we can deal with craft service.
Cause everyone's really happy to talk about
the things that aren't gonna cost any money.
- I could have come up with
let's buy Lunchables for everybody.
That's not really the issue.
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