Alan Ball

I, I was like, "I'm going with nothing.

I'm going with nothing." And the feedback was like, "She's an amazing, amazing actress, but we need, um, Alan Ball loves hot people." And I was like, "Hold my beer."

Oh.

Yeah.

This one's written by Scott Frank.

This one's written by Allan Ball.

This one's written by Steve Zaillian and Frank Pierson, and that's when I started to go back and then try to find any script that they had written and break down how they worked, how they got that magic captured on the page.

So I spent that next nine years, um, not only being a party to these films being made and h- and learning that way, but I was learning privately on how to tell them better and just the, the DNA of drama.

If you haven't seen it and you like that kind of stuff, well acted.

And, you know, the executive producer, one of them at least, on that is Alan Ball, who went on from there to make True Blood.

Of course, with some of the same casts and equally violent and bloody and spectacular.

But Banshee, really great.

It is.

And we're looking at that alongside some remarkably candid Entertainment Weekly interviews with the show's creators, Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec.

Our mission today is to explore the razor-thin, almost invisible line between the show that millions of you watched obsessively and the wildly different, almost unrecognizable versions that came dangerously close to happening.

It really is wild to think about.

It sounds like a bad fan fiction.

It really does.

But the network's initial instincts, the mandates they were handing down to the creators, were aggressively opposed to the grounded gothic tone the show eventually adopted.

Let's start right at the gravitational center of the show, Elena Gilbert.

I was working there in my, I think it started in my early 30s, and, and it was going.

And we were having a ball, and we were producing people like, uh, you know, um, Aaron Sorkin, Allan Ball.

Wow.

Some really, uh, there are others.

[clapping]

Hey, guys, how you doing? [laughs]

What are you teabagging over there?

Uh, I, I got some green tea this morning.

He's the one who executes it.

Yeah.

Basically, the idea is that you schedule an interview with someone, and I always had good drops pulled from questions that you guys have asked or [laughs] just things like that, or generic sports questions in some, some instances.

Yeah.

To be clear.

This is the part that Alan Ball, you know, added into True Blood.

But yeah, no, that was such a great world to be a part of.

And I've always loved vampires.

Um, But maybe something like that will happen.

Or the writer of the movie, Alan Ball.

Or something to do with the movie.

Something like that in the next three weeks.