Re: The Walking Dead - TV Series on AMC ( Spoilers!!)
The Walking Dead: Gale Anne Hurd and Greg Nicotero on Season 3
The Walking Dead producers on new characters, winter zombies and more.
November 4, 2012
by Eric Goldman
With The Walking Dead: Season 3 underway, I recently sat down with executive producer Gale Anne Hurd and co-executive producer, director and special effects make-up designer Greg Nicotero about the changes this year, introducing new characters and more – including whether we might ever see zombies in the snow!
IGN TV: Your show is in its third year. What is it like to see the pop culture impact its had, from all the merchandising, to being part of something like Halloween Horror Nights at Universal?
Gale Anne Hurd: I think it’s as it should be. [Laughs] Honestly, there is something about the show, a dialogue that people have -- not only in the United States, but throughout the world, because it airs in 133 countries. For some reason, it seems to have resonated just about everywhere. Part of it, I think, is timing, but I think the other part of it is that the show takes itself seriously, it takes the characters seriously, it takes the world seriously, and is inspired by some of the best underlying material in the genre universe, Robert Kirkman’s comic book.
IGN: Bringing in Michonne and The Governor this season, did you give a lot of thought to how you were going to interpret them?
Hurd: Well, Danai actually has a shaved head. [Laughs]
Greg Nicotero: Yeah, that poor child has to wear a wig in the Atlanta heat. But one of the things we talked about earlier is the difference between a character in a graphic novel and a character in a show like this, where they’re so layered. You know, the Governor in the graphic novel’s got long and black, stringy hair. Woodbury’s sort of like Thunderdome, if you really think about it. It’s one thing to look at that in a comic book versus meeting that character for real and finding those characters grounded and layered. The beautiful thing about Danai and Michonne’s character is, in the comic book, it’s this: [Various sword noises]! But there’s so much more to it than that. And watching her character grow over the episodes we’ve shot already -- those characters have to be believable, as believable as Rick and Lori.
Hurd: And we have to hire the best actors to bring them to life -- whether they look exactly like the character or not -- that’s the most important thing. The Governor has to have charisma, and he does. He sees himself as this messiah who’s going to recreate this community, and it will be the new beginnings for humanity. You have to have subtleties. If you know from the very beginning that he’s a villain, then he’s really no fun.
Nicotero: And imagine a guy who, in his own mind, thinks that his own name will be in future history books. If you really think about a guy like that, who genuinely believes “I’m the guy who’s saving the world. This moment will define future generations” -- if you have a guy like that, how can it not go wrong? Usually people define themselves as it happens, not looking forward and going, “I’m going to be that guy.” It’s pretty fascinating what the writers have been able to do and what the actors bring to it.
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IGN: An interesting ongoing theme in this show has been this idea of the different approaches to leadership in the face of this situation. Considering Rick is taking a more hardline position as we open things, how different or not different are he and the Governor? Does it seem like they may have some similarities?
Hurd: The truth is, with Rick, what you see is what you get. He doesn’t have some other agenda. He doesn’t want the mantle of leadership, but he realizes that if he doesn’t take it, other people will die. It’s not a choice in the way that the sense -- whether they’re delusions are not -- of grandeur that the Governor has. He’s the anointed one. Rick would rather have it be someone else, but there is no one else who can fill in. He’s much more reluctant about it, but the Governor embraces it for all he’s worth. He has things to hide, and Rick has nothing to hide.
IGN: Greg, I loved the zombies in the riot gear in the premiere.
Nicotero: In our world, hand-to-hand combat is what our group is about. They’re hardened veterans, and they’ve been on the road for several months. They have to be proficient in hand-to-hand killing. Then you walk up and you’re like, “Oh, you can’t. We have to figure out a new way to kill it because it’s got a riot shield on.” It’s a great gag.
IGN: Season 3 opened with a time jump. Was it fun for you to pick up a few months later and say, “All right, things have been altered this time out”?
Nicotero: It’s a hard jump when you initially think about it, because Season 2 ended with the prison. Then you show up and it’s seven months later, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, how did they not find that?” Well, we don’t know. You’d have to ask the writers. But you really think about it, and you go, “Okay, well, they’re here. The prison is there.” But it makes complete sense that they could have just gone in the other direction. They don’t see the prison at the end of Season 2.
IGN: They didn’t have a cameraman telling them.
Nicotero: Yeah, there wasn’t a crane operator. But I think that allows for a lot of really unique storytelling. Lori’s at full term. I remember when Scott Wilson showed up on set for the first day, and he had his hair long with his beard. Everyone went, “Dude, you look cool!” He looks grizzled, like the sheriff of an Old West town. He just looks so cool. And I do think that it’s a unique opportunity to see our group after they’ve survived on the road for seven months and who they’ve become and the fact that -- to pick it up right where it left off, with the rawness of Shane’s death, it just would have felt like we’d tread that water already.
Hurd: Also, I love how the season opens, with this wordless communication between them. Clearly, this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. This is what their survival is like every day. They’re scrounging for an owl, a can of dog food. It gives you an idea of their desperate straights, so that when they do encounter the prison, it’s at the point of, “Oh my God, this is our salvation.”
Nicotero: Yeah, their Four Seasons is a prison.
Hurd: You wouldn’t have that immediately the next day after leaving the farm.
IGN: I know it’s easy for someone to say, but a lot harder as far as production and the difficulties of it, but do you think at some point we may get to see a zombie winter? This time, we skipped over it.
Hurd: It’s very hard when you’re shooting over the summer in Georgia. Although, it gets very cold in November.
Nicotero: Yeah, we’ve had those conversations. To me, the stuff in the graphic novel where they don’t have body heat, so they would freeze easier… I love that idea, I think it’s great. Just seeing frozen walkers -- even if you think about World War Z, in the book, they talked about the fact that, you know, in December, January, February, everything was great because all the zombies would freeze. Then in February and March, they start to thaw out, so everybody would head north because it was safer. I know there were discussions last year about some winter stuff.
Hurd: But when would we write the episodes? It would take a lot of re-planning.
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IGN: Can you talk about bringing Merle back in? I was mentioning to Norman [Reedus], it’s kind of funny that, aside from the one episode where he had the hallucinations, we’ve actually never seen these two characters really interact. So was that dynamic interesting this year?
Hurd: Merle’s almost like a presence; he’s so informed about who Daryl is that you almost feel like he’s always with him. but the difference is, Daryl’s changed quite a bit from the young brother that Merle didn’t think was up to snuff.
IGN: So I’d imagine there might be some friction there?
Hurd: There might be some interesting times ahead.
Nicotero: Good times for the Dixon brothers.
Hurd: Good Time for the Dixon Brothers -- that’s a show on its own, isn’t it?
Nicotero: Yeah, it’s a sitcom.
IGN: And the Dixon brothers are getting their own video game! That has to feel good because those characters were created for the TV show, and going in some fans were asking, “Why are there new characters at all?”
Hurd: And now they’re fan favorites. Now it becomes this whole campaign of “Where’s Merle?” It’s from the same people who said, “How could you do this? How could you invent these characters?” That’s pretty fun.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN and IGN at ericgoldman-ign.
Never trust those off screen "deaths". <cough> right Andrew? <cough>
