At the
Showtime part of the TCA Press Tour, Alex Gansa, the executive producer and
writer of Homeland, spoke about the themes of the new season, locations, deaths
and the repercussions that season 2 will have on the new season.
Question: Since he’s not in the first two episodes,
what went into your decision to hold back the appearance of Brody in Season
3? Do you think there might be a
backlash from fans who want to see where Brody is sooner?
GANSA: The decision to not have Brody in
the first two episodes was strictly a function of the story and where the story
was taking us. So much was transpiring
on the ground in Washington that Brody’s flight from America just made it
impossible to include that storyline in the first couple of episodes. And whether there’s a backlash or not is
completely out of our control.
Sometimes
it’s really hard to know what is considered a spoiler. Do you consider it a betrayal if we write
about Brody not appearing in the first two episodes? And since he’s obviously still in the show, can
you say when he will show up?
GANSA: I don’t think it’s a betrayal to say that
he’s not in the first two episodes, but it would be a betrayal for me to tell
you when he is in the show.
GANSA: Certainly, one of the themes of Season 3 is
the cost being an intelligence officer exacts on the people who are in that
career. I think Saul and Carrie are
obviously the prime examples of that, this season. As a result of the attack last year, the CIA
itself is on trial. That is an agency
that couldn’t even protect itself. How
should it be expected to protect the country?
And Saul is confronted with that very question, in the first
episode. Saul finds himself in a very
unique and different position than he’s ever been in before, now that he is
sitting in the director’s chair. He’s
been quite comfortable on the sidelines, for the last 20 years, criticizing and
making suggestions. All of a sudden, he
finds himself now having to make the decisions.
And with the actual existence of the CIA in question, he has to make
some very uncharacteristic choices that he’s not comfortable making, and one of
them obviously has direct bearing on his protégé, Carrie Mathison. So, we find Saul in a very difficult spot, as
a man who is loath to make decisions, now forced to make the most important
ones of his life, and not only have direct consequences for a woman who is his
protégé and who he loves as a daughter, but also in terms of the CIA
itself. I think he’s actually fearful
that he might be the last director of the CIA, so where it might seem his
actions are out of character, I think he finds himself in a position that his
character is not used to being in.
That’s what generates these different responses.
While
this is obviously a Carrie Mathison/Brody story, Dana Brody is potentially
becoming one of the pivotal characters.
What led you to that decision, and what originally made you decide to
cast Morgan Saylor in that role?
GANSA:
Almost all of the writers on the staff have kids who are exactly that age, so
we bring that into the room, all the time.
And I think the reason why we cast Morgan is because she clearly
represented that in her audition, in a way that was so much more credible than
your usual teenage, eye-rolling character.
She just felt real to us.
For
all of the critical love that there is for this show, in Season 2, there was
also a bit of a backlash about credibility issues. Do you have any response to that, and did you
keep that in mind when you were putting together Season 3?
GANSA: I don’t think we were responding to it in
Season 3. Our job is to put the shows
out, in the best way we think possible, and it’s your job to like it or not
like it. I obviously wish the backlash
had never happened, but it didn’t really influence either the way we rolled out
Season 2, or Season 3. The show built an
audience, all through Season 2, and our 11 Emmy nominations are a nice comeback.
You
filmed parts of Seasons 1 and 2 in Israel.
Are there any international locations, this time around?
GANSA: Yes.
We shot some scenes from a number of episodes down in Puerto Rico this
year, and we will probably be going back to Israel to shoot the last couple of
episodes of the season.
Given
the way that Season 2 ended, you could have done a number of things with both
Brody and the Brody family. How did you
come to the decision you did for where you wanted to go with Season 3?
GANSA: A lot of different scenarios were
considered. We lost a couple of writers
from Season 2. Henry Bromell tragically
died, Meredith Stiehm went on to create The Bridge, which is a fabulous show on
FX, and Alex Cary was off doing a pilot that Howard [Gordon] and I were supervising. So, we brought in a couple of writers, and
the writers were fans of the show, so we were able to ask them some very
pertinent questions, like “Are we interested in watching the Brody family, if
Nick Brody isn’t part of the mix, since he’s on the lam?” And it was interesting because it was a
unanimous consensus that there was interest in those people. There was interest in Jessica and Dana and
Chris, and we took comfort in that. We
felt we had to honor those people that we created and see what their lives
would their lives be like, after this devastating attack, and after their
father and husband was accused of being the guy who did it. And also, all these other things were
happening. There was the Sandy Hook
shooting and there was the Boston Marathon bombing, and all these family
members are always paraded in front of the cameras. It felt like a very good avenue to explore
how this would reverberate down onto those people, so we made that choice to
dramatize their story.
Could
there be some deaths this season, from the main cast?
GANSA: Sure.
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