Before I write anything, before I create any assumption in my mind about what it's like to be in that world, I go out there first. I'm very drawn to darkness and light, very drawn to cop drama, because there are very few places besides war and murder and a homicide investigation where you see the extremes of human nature - the darkest crevices and cracks in what people do to one another.
I am endlessly fascinated by this notion that everyone has a secret. Some of our secrets are tiny, small things, and some of them are huge. Given that reality of the human condition, that's what our characters will go through. There will be some things where you'll just be like, "What the hell! How the hell did that happen?"
I heard John Wells say something really smart, many years ago. He said, "Assume your audience is really intelligent. Assume that they are really smart, and tell your story that way." So, for me, it's about never assuming that they will go away because they're not entertained.
We read novels. We read hundreds of pages of words, when the story is good because we're willing to stay there. I hope the story is good. I'm going into this venture thinking that the audience is really smart and really wants to hear all the nuances of what we're saying.
By not foretelling the ending to yourself, as a writer, you're able to open up the canvas and say, "I'm going to go here. I'm going to go there." It's just a little bit more freeing than a stand-alone procedural, where you work backwards from the end.
I've always been kind of drawn to the extremities of human nature. I wrote my first screenplay when I was 16. The initial idea was a friendship between two prostitutes, and I spent time with a vice squad guy in Cincinnati who brought me to a brothel and gave me the rundown on how street prostitution works.
Creating a world that reflects the inner voyage of our characters was really important. Also, because this isn't a black and white show, and this isn't about bad guys and good guys, but it's about good men being capable of bad things and vice versa, I wanted to be in a city that had contradiction.
I used to live in New York and now I live in L.A., and somehow I've become a different person because of the air and what I see every day, and I think we all do.
Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light.
I'm really trying to just keep this internal, and be faithful to the story and the characters, and keep 99.9% of my brain there, serving the story. It's a great network. It's the golden network of cable, so it's totally an honor to be there and tell this story, but I try not to think about anything beyond that.
It's a challenge, for sure. My family is not seeing me at all, for probably the next six months, and they haven't seen me for the last year. I'm really blessed with a lot of great partners, including my writing staff. Being able to rely on the people around me has really helped out.
But, for the role of Sarah Linden, we saw everybody. Everybody wanted this role. Every female actor in town really wanted to play a real woman and be in this drama. It was incredible that all these women were coming in. And then, Mireille [Enos] walked in the door and she was reading the lines that I had written, and I saw her in that field. I was like, "Wow, she's the one."
It was a very, very intense and long casting process [for The Killing] because we really had to find the right people who could carry the weight of this story, who had the chops and who had the spirit, where they could bring in so much of their own selves to these characters. So, the casting process took many months.
I think it is the hardest thing in the world. I'm endlessly intrigued by what human nature is capable of, both the horrible things we are capable of and also the heroic things. I'm really interested in exploring that side of human nature.
It's the open ocean right now because it's so unique. It's a really unique way of doing American television. There are a million possibilities. We can stay with the cops. We can introduce new worlds. And, who knows where it will end.
Because we spent so much time in the writer's room, not even talking about where it goes, but just who the people are in our world, we could find all those unexpected moments and twists and turns that we didn't even see ourselves.
The thing I love about this story [The Killing] and this type of storytelling is that I don't have to know the end before I know the beginning.
If I had multiple lives, I'd like to do many things, including being a homicide investigator. I'm not brave enough to chase people and draw down on them. Having spent time with that, it can be an incredibly terrifying job.
And as cynical and jaded as many have become, you see the heroic nature of cops, who put aside a lot of their own personal concerns and their families to speak for the dead, which is a sacred thing. Over time there is this thing in them that is very powerful and interesting and provocative to me.
The most surprising thing to me is what an incredibly intense effort it's been to create a world from the ground up. I had run a show that had already existed and had been created by the show-runner, Meredith [Stiehm]. It's a very different experience to come in at ground zero and meet people and assemble the cast and crew. As a group and as a family, we're creating this world.
