Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis and David Alpert on Fear The Walking Dead
With a month left before The Walking Dead returns to the airwaves, tonight marks the third [...]
With a month left before The Walking Dead returns to the airwaves, tonight marks the third episode of Fear the Walking Dead, a new series set in the same universe, but across the country and in the early days of the outbreak that has reshaped the world in the massively-popular zombie drama.
Over the summer, ComicBook.com joined series leads Cliff Curtis and Kim Dickens as well as executive producer David Alpert to discuss the first season of the newly-launched spinoff, a new episode from which airs tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.
You guys are walking into something that has massive expectations. Is that a little bit daunting?
Dickens: My experience going into it was, I didn't think about that so much. We just get really caught up in the moment-to-moment execution of it and the work, and you kind of are deep in that bubble of the experience. As it gets closer to that moment where you give it to the world, and everybody says, "Do you feel pressure?" Well, now I feel pressure. [Laughs] I want the audience to be able to embrace it, for being distinct and for being still a part of that universe. I hope we make them happy. But at the same time, I know that we did a great job and that we put our heart into it. I'm really proud of it.
Alpert: You know, coming here six years ago with The Walking Dead, there was such an expectation because people knew so much about the source material. So people were questioning, "Is Andrew Lincoln Rick Grimes?" It was part of the pressure that we had, was that we thought yes and now it seems like the answer's yes. But in a weird way, people know so much about the world of Fear the Walking Dead, but they know absolutely nothing about these characters. So what's great was, I think it really freed up Kim and Cliff and our great cast to find their own way and sort of make the characters their own in a way that you can't really do on The Walking Dead.
Did you reference any of the comic book material at all, even though this takes place before the story, to familiarize yourselves with the canon?
Dickens: I didn't have time.
Curtis: No, we were told that wasn't necessary and actually it was quite favorable that the less we know, the better. We don't really know anything about zombies in this universe. We don't know about walkers, we don't know about anything that's happening in Atlanta.
We're just a family in LA going about our lives. We're more concerned about our jobs...and our teenagers, trying to wrangle our teenagers and have a relationship. That's where the show starts.
Dickens: And then there's like a chaotic, kind of supernatural epidemic that starts to happen and our characters would never know what an apocalypse looks like, so it was sort of beneficial to us as actors to not have that in our head.
Because this is the origin, there's no information out there. How is that going to build?
Curtis: One of the most successful elements of the show so far as I can see is that we're treating it as real. As you know, we're a time of media, social media and information. There's so much information that nobody can really agree on anything anymore. So whatever the outbreak is, it's really just a lot of dialogue about people not agreeing what it is, and that feels very authentic. It's quite confusion; we almost have too much information and so we have to discern for ourselves what's real and what isn't real...and that feels very real and very relevant.
Everything's filtered through a familial situation. We're not concerned with the apocalypse! I'm more concerned with whether she loves me and what I can do to love her. That's what my focus is; it's really not about who's infected over there...until it gets here.
Alpert: In our world, there are things that are scientific facts beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there's still raging debate that goes on with no time pressure. Whatever your position is on climate change, there's people who say it's real, there's people who say it's not real, and you're like, "How are we having this discussion?"
So in that environment, if somebody came out from the government and said, "There's an outbreak of zombies," half the people would think it's a marketing stunt. They wouldn't believe it or they'd say "I saw it happen, but it's not true, it's something else." Playing up all those different strains as to how people receive their information, I think that's a really interesting way to see, as society starts breaking down.
The other thing is, most people don't pay attention. They're busy living their lives.
Curtis: And so that helps authenticate the experience of the show for me. We're not treating it like a genre piece, we're not treating it like the apocalypse, we're not treating it like a monster show. We're talking about real relationships, real people, and I feel like the first few episodes especially is a little bit of a slow burn, and it's establishing who we are and what's important to us so that we can see the evolution fo these characters. A lot of that is really setting up expectations and very cleverly and effectively pulling the rug on our characters and our audience as an experience.
Andrew Lincoln in the first season had said that "This show is all about me getting back to my family." Is there something that is the mission statement for your first season?
Dickens: I feel like for my character, my whole super-objective is to protect my family.
Curtis: And my character's super-objective is to hold my family together, because I've got an ex-wife and a teenage son estranged and I've got this new love and her son, and so I'm trying to build a new family in a collapsing society.
This show happens in Los Angeles, so you're dealing a lot with the urban landscape. How does LA add urgency to you as characters, or what's the challenge of writing stories in that environment?
Curtis: The first thing it means to me is a blended family and diversity, you know? The little neighborhood where we're set up is called El Sereno, which means "Serene," is the oldest neighborhood in LA and the neighbors are so diverse. There's no one demographic or ethnic background in the neighborhood. I think our show is a reflection of that.
Dickens: We've been in all kinds of areas in Los Angeles. It's a very urban feel -- not your typical kind of glitzy side to Hollywood. It's urban, it's diverse, it's very grounded, it's very sun-bleached and worn and graffitied and it's a very interesting character.
Alpert: Los Angeles is such a unique city in the sense that it's a bunch of tightly-packed suburbs who had a car accident and sort of got stitched up together, so you have these different pockets where you drive a mile in one direction and you're in an entirely different neighborhood with a different ethnic makeup and different socioeconomic background. In a way, that's exciting but when things start breaking down, in a way it adds to the sense of isolation in the sense that, how well do you really know your neighbors? What's your sense of community as society starts to break down around you? Whereas when you go into the suburbs and the rural areas of Georgia, you imagine that those communities are much more closely knit, that there's a stronger social contract between them. Here, you're going to people and saying, "Look, we need to ride this out," and there's not a long history between them. They don't even know each other. It's like, would you take that person in? That's really the question of the social contract that we'd like to explore as the city starts unraveling.
Curtis: Yeah, and our dependency and addiction on infrastructure, as well. One of the great things for me on the show is around the collapse of how human ego and investment in our superstructure, when it falls, it falls hard and fast.
