Alan Ball has had a good run already on HBO, with his critically acclaimed "Six Feet Under," an unlikely hit series with a morbid backdrop of a funeral home and the average American family who ran the business and lived their lives around the dead.
09/04/2008 - Alan Ball - HBO Series "True Blood" Los Angeles Premiere - Arrivals - Cinerama Dome - Hollywood, CA. USA © Albert L. Ortega / PR Photos
In "True Blood", Alan Ball's characters are no longer six feet under. They are out of their graves and coffins and out at local convenience stores buying synthetic blood.
Ball's latest erotic drama is set in the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, and is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.
The unusual 12-part series combines mystery, suspense, romance and humor for the vampiric genre, and centers on Sookie, an unusual waitress (played by Anna Paquin) with telepathic powers and a fierce attraction to a 173-year old vampire named Bill who walks into her life one night.
Stephen Moyer as Bill
Monsters and Critics spoke to Alan Ball at the summertime Television Critics Association about his new effort.
Regarding the graphic sex scene in the pilot, Ball noted it was integral to the theme from the books. Ball noted, "It was an instinctive choice, and and it felt part of their world. Having read all the books, it just felt like that was just a part of the whole world that the Sookie Stackhouse novels take place in. One of my main characters is also sexually compulsive, so you had to go there."
Ball shared how he came across the literary inspiration for the series.
"Totally by accident! I was early for a dentist appointment and was killing time at Barnes and Noble when I came across the book. It was the first book I came across, 'Dead Until Dark', and the tagline was 'maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend wasn't such a good idea' and I thought, that is funny. I bought the book and I could not put it down. Midway through the second book is when I thought, this will be a great television series, because it has this sort of, you just want more, of this world and the characters."
Anna Paquin as Sookie
Ball continued, "I got in touch with Charlaine (Harris) and I was told the books were optioned for a movie. When the option ran out, I talked to her again, and she opted to go this route. It was important to me to be true to the spirit of her work, and the books are basically Sookie's story. She narrates everything. All the other characters only exist when they are in the same room with her."
Ball touched on the "vampires as metaphors for gays" theme that many pointed out in the large panel that day.
"It's not that specific but yes, it works as a metaphor for gays or people of color, or anyone who is different. Because of the cultural climate we are in today, it seems like it is a metaphor because of gay marriage, and gay rights and all, but in the end it's also not a metaphor, it's vampires."
Ball shared he was keeping to the sequences of the books that Charlaine Harris had penned. "The first book really is the framework and primer for the season, we are adding a few events that are not reflected in the book, however."
The choice of Louisiana as a production hub for "True Blood" was explained. "It was all written before we went to Louisiana, and we shot most of the pilot there, we knew we couldn't find Jason and Bill's houses there. And the air, the light is so much different down there, because of the moisture content in the air, and the greens are very different. The first time I went down there I took my camera and took tons of pictures, and that made me think that was where we should be. Most of it was shot in Shreveport."
Vampire cliches were also addressed by Ball. "It's lame when you let your vampire go out in the day because you don't want to shoot at night. I'm not really a big vampire fanatic but I can tell you some of the ways the mythology differs. Vampires, in our world...lots of myths were created by vampires themselves over history so that they could pass because if you could convince everybody that you could not be seen in a mirror or that you would freak out if somebody shoved a crucifix in your face, then you could prove you weren't a vampire pretty easily."
Ball elaborated, "We went to great pains to depict a kind of physiology for the fangs where they actually are retracted like rattlesnake fangs. They click forward. I wanted to approach the supernatural not as something that exists outside of nature, but something more deeply rooted in nature. More than our physiological perception apparatus is equipped to perceive. I wanted to avoid the instantaneous incineration, and the strange contact lenses when their fangs came out or any head prosthetic for that matter, its a TV show. We don't have the time or the money to do that. Give them fangs, that's all they need."
"True Blood" premieres on HBO September 7 at 9 pm
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