Tuesday, June 28, 2011

‘True Blood’s’ Alan Ball Answers the Season Four Premiere’s Burning Questions

Excellent interview !

Fairies lobbing bombs. Dead parrots coming back to life. A doll-decapitating baby. Judging by all the strange things happening in the Season Four premiere of HBO’s “True Blood,” life is back to perfectly (ab)normal in Bon Temps, Louisiana. Where it appears there really is no such thing as a good day for anyone. “Everyone gets an episode to be happy,” jokes executive producer Alan Ball, “but then you have to mess it up because otherwise, it gets boring.”

That’s one word that can’t be used to describe the premiere episode, which brought up plenty of burning questions for fans of the series. XfinityTV asked Ball to deal with some of the more perplexing queries based on what we’ve seen of Season Four so far. Here’s what he had to say.

The first six minutes of the Season Four premiere felt like some summer action blockbuster. Why did you come up with something that big?
It was huge. We did a lot of research about all different kinds of fairies, alien abductions, relativity…..From the time we started writing to the time that episode was locked, it was about four months. What we wanted to do was just jump ahead in time, shake things up and start fresh. The second and third seasons started directly after the season prior. So we wanted to get people to a different place.

And that place is a year later….why leap to that spot in time?
We could pick up this world and shake it like a snow globe. We could make everything different and there’s no real downside. You can make Jason a cop. Andy can be full-out addicted to V. Tara is fully ensconced in her new life. Terry and Arlene are married and the baby is born.

Your fairies seemed more like guerilla fighters. Will they be back?
That’s not the last we’ve seen of them. Time for fairies is different so it takes them a while to react. Our show has 12 episodes, and for them that’s like a minute. They will react (to Sookie’s escape) eventually.

Is there any significance to the watch that Sookie passed along to Jason from their grandfather?
The watch is basically to prove to Jason that she was there with her grandfather in the land of the fairies. The watch has no powers although maybe…now that I’ve got that thought in my head….

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