Comic-Con Roundtable with Burn Notice star, Bruce Campbell, show creator Matt Nix and writer Alfredo Barrios, Jr.
Bruce Campbell - at the Con 2009 © Albert L. Ortega / PR Photos
Bruce Campbell, the co-star of USA Network's popular action drama series, Burn Notice, spoke with reporters at Comic-Con to chat about their show and to answer fans questions. Campbell proved to be just as entertaining as Sam Axe, the character he plays on Burn Notice.
You actually look like you walked straight out of Miami with the white outfit.
Photo by Tracey Brown ©M&C
Campbell: I did!! I’ll be back on the set tomorrow. I have to take a red eye tonight. This is from the wardrobe department. I said, “I’m going to Comic-Con, hook me up with the Miami whites!!”
What is the most exciting thing you’ve enjoyed this past season?
What about the interrogation scenes?
Campbell: Tormenting people is becoming Sam’s specialty … which is fun too. Because then you get to figure out how to crack that person. My brother was actually at Guantanamo, as a military police guard, so I pick his brain, but he really doesn’t tell me anything. He’s like, “I can’t tell ya, or I’d have to kill ya.” So, those (type of scenes) are fun too because you get to see a whole new side (of the character). Where you can either be really serious or mean or crazy.
How about the relationship between Sam and Madeline?
Campbell: It’s good … its increasing. She considers herself Sam’s friend now. Sam goes over there to hang out and protects her all the time and lies to her a lot. He’s moving out of Madeline’s house to his new girlfriend’s who is living behind Madeline’s house.
What about the tone of the show and maintaining that balance between the serious and humorous?
Do you enjoy the snipping between Sam and Fiona?
Campbell: That’s what we do, because I think she’s crazy and she thinks I’m a loser. (Gabrielle) is so not Fiona. She’s this dignified English woman who is very classy and cool and she plays this psycho bitch. (laughs) Which is good … it’s good to have that.
What about Sam’s love life?
Campbell: He gets around. You never see much of the ladies though. He just talks about them. Maybe it’s all talk and he’s full of crap.
Would you like to see that explored?
Matt Nix, the creator, director and executive producer of Burn Notice and Alfredo Barrios, Jr., writer and co-executive producer, also fielded a few questions on how they go about making Burn Notice the unique show that it is.
Where do the ideas for all of the various gadgets come from? Who do you go to for the new ideas?
Barrios: We have a number of different sources. We have a consultant on the show named Michael Wilson, who is a former intelligence operative who has been instrumental in helping us figure out a lot of the technical side of things, the gadgetry and coming up with ideas. Often times we will come up with a goal that needs to be solved or this is the general principle that needs to be employed but how do we make it work and how specifically what will we build, where will we get it. Often times I joke we’ll find a lot of stuff on the internet and ultimately will have to verify it. (But) we take great, great pride in really being accurate with the science, (while) not giving everything away because we build some pretty dangerous devices along the way. But we really do our research. We are both kind of geeks and take great pride in being right about stuff.
Nix: Growing up I thought I was going to be a scientist and have always been interested in that stuff. So if I go to a party I want to talk to the engineer. I want to talk to the Scientist. It’s been good thing for the show that I live near JPL and my kids go to school with a lot of kids whose parents work as rocket scientists. So literally, I will go to parties and be like, “Let’s have a beer. Tell me how drones work.” We also bring in people who work in various technical fields and we’ll just sit them down and buy them lunch and say,”Tell me everything there is to know about optics.” Or that kind of thing.
Barrios: I think naturally the whole writing staff, Matt is very much this way and I am this way, we like to read about all sorts of things and often times ideas come from places where you wouldn’t expect it. You read a story that has some science in it and you’ll derive some interesting fact which might spark an idea for building a gadget device and we’ll get excited about it and bring it to the room and have fun with it.
Talk about the story development and the rich characters
Barrios: The funny thing is that a lot of people when talking about writing in Hollywood will talk about character and plot as if they are tow different things. Character is this really good thing over here, and that’s what makes show good, like it is some ingredient you put into shows. Plot is just this after thought and mechanism. We are a very “ploty” show. We do a lot of stuff in 42 minutes. But I think that one of the things that make the characters rich is they have to do a lot of stuff and creating a bad guy who is a worth adversary to Michael, who can have the plan that Michael has to go to the ends of the earth to unravel, well that bad guy is just going to get more and more interesting as you go through the script. Because how would he know how to do that? Well, maybe he was a doctor. If we need to get from here to there, that’s going to demand a really dynamic scene between these two characters because this character has to get so mad he’s willing to blow up that hotel (for example), so what’s that scene look like so that you are willing to blow up a hotel and we’ve got to stop you.
Nix: Often times trying to come up with Michael combating these villains, he ultimately exploits a character flaw, something that is born of character and seizes on it and then exploits it and turns it on them. It is the source of their power and their demise, which is always fun for writers to figure out what is that trait that is unique to each villain that Michael can seize on and is a problem, but is ultimately something he can use to undue them …. and that’s character.
Was the use of voiceover as commentary and almost a counterpoint to the action onscreen there in the show from the beginning?
Nix: It was there in the very beginning, in the first outline that I ever wrote, and you normally don’t write dialogue in an outline. Not even the first outline (it was in) the first pitch. I went in and I actually did the voiceovers in the pitch. Because part of what is interesting to me on the show is that they are voiceovers about technique and putting you in Michael’s head and helping you see the world the way he sees the world. We never get to use voiceover to say, “This happened and then this happened.” It means that it allows us to showcase a lot of what is really interesting to me which is the fact is that a lot of what spies do is counter intuitive.
(For example) you want to fight a guy, go become his friend. It helps to have voiceover to explain to the audience to explain this is why we are doing something that seems exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. When you think about it, there are a lot of things we do we could never do on a show without voiceover, because they would be completely confusing to the audience. (The audience might say) I’ve seen other shows where you are supposed to cut the blue wire. We’re saying you don’t cut either wire; the best thing to do is submerge it in ice or something like that. Without the voiceover you’d need another character there for him to say it to. We really wanted to get you in the head and let you know what it feels like to be “that guy”.
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