David Fury "24" writer/producer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(RETURN TO PART 1)

ANDELMAN: How does a creative person’s career change after one Emmy, let alone two Emmys?

FURY: Creatively, there’s no change whatsoever. You are exactly… and that’s the funny thing, particularly with “24.” Right after we won the Emmy, it was right back to work the next day, and you’d never know we just came off a great banner year. We were in the middle of trying to write the next season, and it doesn’t do anything but decorate your family room or living room, wherever you put your statue. Creatively, you’re still the same person, you’re still the same writer trying to do the same things you did before. Frankly, I was never more creatively satisfied than when I was writing for “Buffy” and for “Angel” and working for Joss Whedon -- and there’s somebody who has long deserved an Emmy for what he brought to television. But it doesn’t really change you.

ANDELMAN: Are the creative processes that you experienced at “Lost” that first season and then at “24” the last two, are there similarities, are there differences?

FURY: There’s huge differences, at least as far as I’m concerned. What I tried to do when I was in “Lost” was, again, many of the things I learned doing “Buffy” and “Angel,” which is try to encapsulate a single story within a serialized show to try to really have a beginning, middle, and end and really say something and let there be a little poetry to the story. That’s something on “24” you can’t really do. “24” is, as I have described it many times before, it’s a run-away train. It is just this almost stream of consciousness writing, where there’s nothing really to arc out, there’s no beginning, middle, and end to an episode. There are events that happen, there are some emotional things that happen, but it doesn’t feel like a whole. There’s no episode that I can really take pride in saying, “That was my episode, that was my story that I wanted to tell.” As proud as I am of what’s episode 17 of year six, the episode you referenced, it’s not quite the same as being able to look at my John Locke episode from “Lost,” “Walkabout,” and feel great pride in that episode. It’s really much more of a factory here. We’re producing a product, and I’m just part of the machinery that produces the product. On “Lost,” there was pride of ownership as there was on “Buffy” and “Angel.” There was, I owned this episode, I feel like this is mine, this is my sensibility, this is my voice. “24” really can’t put across my voice. It has its own voice, and you have to kind of fold into it.

ANDELMAN: You sound a little like someone who might be a little aching to do something else.

FURY: I’m always aching. I am really proud of “24,” and when I took the job, I knew it would be a challenge for me. It would be something where I’d have to adjust my way of thinking, particularly as you pointed out, I came from comedy, and there is no graver, more dire drama on network television, in my estimation, than “24.” Everybody is at a heightened state of emergency, and there is no room for any kind of banter, let’s say, or any kind of real, just slow, quirky kind of things that I enjoy doing. So consequently, yeah, it’s been a frustration on the show that I can’t use my voice, I can’t use the things that I think I have honed over the years and I think that I’ve become good at. But everyone here is great, they treat me great, I have no reason to want to move on except I do miss writing the comedy. I miss writing the quieter scenes, the more fun scenes, and I miss writing the episodes that stand alone, that work on their own merits and are not just part of a larger picture.

ANDELMAN: I guess I have to ask, for a guy who has a very strong voice in his writing as has been proven in the past, how long do you see yourself writing for “24”?

FURY: Well, I signed on for a three-year contract. We are just starting to work on season seven now. We are starting to talk about season seven as we are finishing up season six. I know that they have talked to me about coming on for two more years, but at this point, I have said, “I will fulfill my contract, I will do my third year.” If I decide at that point that there’s nothing else to pull me away, that I don’t have anything that’s pressing, I might continue, but I have a feeling season seven will be my last season with “24.”

ANDELMAN: I want to go back, because you mentioned the “Walkabout” episode of “Lost,” which, of course, established that Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane crash, and I was kind of curious about other key moments that you have been responsible for on other shows. You have mentioned “Buffy” and “Angel” a few times. I wanted to give you a chance on that. Can you point to something on “Buffy” and something on “Angel” where there was definitely a David Fury touch?

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FURY: Ha. The David Fury touch.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

FURY: I wish I could pinpoint the David Fury touch. There are things where I got to affect the mythology of the show. My first solo script for “Buffy,” was an episode called “Helpless,” in which Giles loses his job as watcher to Buffy. In my original story, he regained the job via the episode, but Joss loved the idea so much, as did David Greenwalt, his co-executive producer at the time, that Giles has lost the job permanently. That was kind of mind-blowing for me at the time. I was freelancing for “Buffy,” and I kind of went wow, I just lost Giles’ job for him. That’s pretty amazing. I think with the first script that I wrote with my wife, who was my writing partner at the time, Elin Hampton, we wrote an episode for “Buffy” was called “Go Fish.” I think that certainly was a nice introduction to one-hours for me, because it played on a lot of the things that I love, which is old universal horror movies, like Creature from the Black Lagoon, and being able to incorporate a lot of humor into that and writing a funny horror show, which also had a point of view, which at that point had to do with jock politics, it played off, again, the sketches that I wrote, the sketches I used to write doing comedy were all very pointed allegories for something. I had Frosty the Snowman meeting with his agent who was going to drop him because he’s melting, and Frosty refuses to admit he’s melting, the perfect allegory for someone’s career who is not what he used to be and refuses to admit that. And it’s very much what “Buffy” was. I don’t know how much of my influence was that or how much I just clicked in with Joss’ sensibility, but certainly “Buffy” and “Angel” allowed me to play a lot on metaphors and allegory, and hopefully, my voice came through on those episodes.

ANDELMAN: Do you have a good Joss Whedon story that has not been told?

FURY: Good Joss Whedon story. That has not been told? That’s the other question. Gosh, I don’t know. No, no, I don’t think so. I wish I did. Joss has just an extraordinary love of what he does, extraordinary love of writing and such affection for his characters. Most shows, this show, certainly, and I found it in “Lost,” and I’ve talked to other people on other shows, everyone’s sort of doing their job, and they are putting out their product, but the affection for their characters wanes at some point, and they just feel they are doing the job, they don’t really care. Joss never lost the love of any of his characters, and it was remarkable, because seven years into “Buffy” or five years into “Angel,” he loved those characters. He couldn’t bear to let them go, and so he’s continuing Buffy on in comic book form right now. It’s not much of a story, I know, it’s not really a Joss story, but it’s just something, again, I really admired. It does sort of inspire me to want to find those projects where I can continue to love these characters, not become tired of them after a few years, and still think there are stories to tell about them.

ANDELMAN: As a writer, now, what do you like to read? What’s made an impact on you over the years or recently as a reader?

FURY: You mean reading anything? Novels….

ANDELMAN: Anything at all.

FURY: Well, you know, I find myself reading, I do have kids, and I find myself reading to them a lot, so I end up finding a lot of books that they can appreciate, as well. I mean, the Harry Potter books are very big in my household. For my personal enjoyment, I read things like World War Z, which is a zombie book, a book about zombies. I guess I’m reading a lot of genre things right now, which I didn’t used to do. I used to be a lot more varied. I was always a fan of genre, but I guess now that I’m not really writing a genre show, I miss it, so I wind up reading a lot of that.

ANDELMAN: Let me come back to genre a little bit. “Lost” is apparently pushing toward a conclusion at some point in the next two years.

FURY: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: There has been a lot of talk about that lately. Where does “24” go from here? You’re going to be with it for another year. We know it’s signed on through a ninth season, I think. Can it, should it break in some ways with what’s become a rather rigid format?

FURY: Well, they’ve certainly talked about it over the years. They keep threatening to break the mold on the show, and it’s been difficult for them. When I say them, I say the people who have been here from the beginning. There’s always a lot of talk about really shaking things up, and ultimately it winds up back to be the same thing. Next year, I’m an executive producer on the show, so I’ll have more of a voice, as will Manny Coto. We’ve talked quite a bit about it, that our involvement is going to be more substantial next year in terms of helping to make the show different, not to retool it but to kind of make a concerted effort not to be rehashing some of the old tropes of ‘24.” It’s gotten no official pick-up through year nine. As far as I know, it’s got no official pick-up for next year, either, although I imagine that will come, and I am thinking it is going to be for two years.

You ask where it’s going to go. Well, there’s a difference between, a big difference between this show and “Lost” in that every season has a finale, has an end point, and the next season picks up off of anywhere from one to two years later. And I think what works about that is you can completely reinvent the show every year. There’s no reason you can’t and have a whole group of new characters, a whole new situation. “Lost” is a show that is playing almost real time itself. Every season, I think, takes place over roughly a 40-day period. I think the big difference with this show is that we can do anything we want to next year, whether Jack is going to be back in the same capacity, whether he’s going to be doing the same thing, I will certainly be very vocal about trying to find new avenues and new stories to tell with Jack Bauer that we haven’t told. It’s been tricky. We have put him through the wringer. We’ve cost him his family. His wife, his daughter is estranged from him. There are just so many things you can do with somebody like that. We’ve given him a love of his life, Audrey, who’s now, you know, about whether or not he’s going to lose her, these are all these…

There are just so many stories that we don’t want to keep repeating, and I can’t really tell you that we have it licked yet, but again, we are just starting to talk about it now. I think “24” can really go on. Its premise and its concept, can, just for the sake of argument can go on without Jack Bauer. It’s its own animal. It might be something else. I’m not saying we’re going to do it without Jack Bauer. I’d hate to do it without Jack Bauer, but as long as we retain the 24-hour concept, there’s not very much we can’t do.

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the show started with that twenty-four-hour clock, and it was quite stunning and revolutionary at the time, but then it wound up almost painting you guys into a corner.

FURY: Well, it’s definitely very challenging. It’s extremely difficult not to have time lapses, it’s very hard to get Jack from point A to point B. There are some people who thought this season, season six, was going to take place in China, have Jack start out in a Chinese prison. But people don’t realize, well, he’ll never get back to the States because it will take 12 hours to fly back to the United States! Are we going to do twelve episodes on a plane? People don’t realize that, they don’t really see the concept. It’s definitely frustrating. We’ve tried to do ideas where the show doesn’t take place in Los Angeles, but again, it’s tricky. CTU is in Los Angeles, you want to keep Jack in close proximity to CTU.

These are the kinds of decisions we are going to have to make to try and break the mold and find new ways to tell a story. But certainly, yeah, the concept for all it’s conceit -- which I still think is brilliant -- and I started watching the show in the first season and said, “How are they going to do this? And how will they keep this going?” And it’s sort of an exercise to watch it and then to be caught up in it, going, this is working. Oh my God, this is actually working. A lot of people have passed on this show, who said, you can’t do a show that takes place over a 24-hour period. It’s crazy. You know, people are going to be going to the bathroom, people need to eat, people need to sleep, who’s staying up? But it works. I mean, it works, and it’s heightened reality that we are presenting, and it sort of makes sense.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.