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Tim Minear - Interviewed at the Angel soundstage August 23rd 2001

Coming to Angel
  Tell us about your writing background.

My first network job was on a show called Lois and Clark when it was in its last season.

The thing I did to get on that show was write a spec script. You write a sample episode of a show that you like, and try to write it well, so that you show that you can write episodic television.

I wrote a spec episode of The X Files and that got me onto Lois and Clark. Sometime during that year Chris Carter actually contacted me and said "Come and work on The X Files." So after Lois and Clark went off the air I went and worked at The X Files for a year, then after that I worked with a guy named Howard Gordon, who was also on The X Files, but not during the time that I was there.

He started up a show called Strange World which broadcast, I think, three episodes. We made thirteen of them, so if anyone wants to see them you can come to my house, I’ll screen them.

After that there were some offers. Angel was just getting started and David Greenwalt contacted me. We had met before, as I’d worked with John McNamara who had been one of David’s writing partners. They had created a show called Profit together, so David knew me through him and also through Howard Gordon.

When the opportunity came up to work with Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt I leapt at that, in a Crouching Tiger kind of way so it was kind of slow motion. I've been here since the first year and now we’re going into the third season of Angel. It’s the best place ever to work.

Bound to the studio
  I believe you've just been promoted. What will that mean to your work?

It’s probably less a promotion and more a deal with the studio.

20th Century Fox produces Angel, and the way shows work is, they’ll hire you onto a series and they’ll have an option on you for a certain amount of years. I think this season coming up would have been the end of their option on me, they had a two-year option on me from when they originally hired me.

So what they do with writers that they’ll sign them to an overall deal which pretty much sews them up for whatever show they’re on, to make sure that the studio has them after their initial options have expired. And it also allows the writer to work with the studio in developing new things.

That’s pretty much what’s happened with me and Fox. So if something were to happen to Angel, which it won’t, they would still own me and they could put me on, you know, Judging Amy [a mainstream family drama] or something.

Writers' Sanctuary (Spoilers)
  What was it like writing for an established character like Faith?

Oh god. Faith is a force of nature as is Eliza who plays Faith and so I was very excited about doing a Faith episode.

The problem I found when it came time to approach writing that script, Of course, we break all the stories together, and we broke this story with Joss. [It's the second half of] a two parter, which was Five by Five and Sanctuary, and in Five by Five you get Faith with the crossbow, hired by Wolfram and Hart to kill Angel.

So in the first part of the Faith two-parter, Faith was as she’d been established, kind of this bad ass, but she has a breakdown at the end of Five by Five. So the thing that I had to come into was a Faith who was trying to find her way back to some kind of redemption, who’d had a breakdown and was in a vegetative state for the first part of the episode.

So that was very difficult. [Previously] Faith had been written so specifically that you could really capture that voice, but this was a new voice for her.

Also, Buffy was going to appear in this episode, and I found myself feeling very intimidated because I knew that half way through the story Buffy would appear. I would have to write this iconic important character that I’d never written before and I was already writing one iconic important character, Faith. So when I got to the Buffy/Angel scenes I approached Joss and said "Maybe you could take a crack a these scenes because I’m feeling a little overwhelmed here" and he graciously did.

After that, I asked him if he would share a screen credit with me on the episode, which he did, and it was almost more exciting to see my name with Joss’s on an episode even then writing the episode itself. I liked that episode a lot.

Back to the fifties (Spoilers)
  How was the experience of writing Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?

Are You Now is my favourite episode in some ways, it’s got everything I love thrown into it. Although I think it’s its own thing, I don’t think it’s a complete pastiche of other things.

It has its own mood, and David Simmel, who directed that episode, really made the movie of my script. Oftentimes, you’ll see something shot and it’s not exactly the way you thought it should be, but in this instance it was almost as if Simmel was in my head, because it looked exactly like what I was seeing when I was writing it.

I was very happy with that episode, with the way it looked, the production values, the performances - David is amazing in the episode, and very subtle. Rob Krols' score was incredibly evocative of the nuance of the 50s, specifically Bernard Herman.

We were about nine minutes over on that episode so we had to find nine minutes to pull out of it which was a little difficult because everything actually was really good. But once we pulled out that stuff it just got tighter and I thought better.

Oh, Darla-ing
  You've written some Darla episodes - how has the character developed.

Well, we shot flashback episodes in the first year and when it came time to end the season we knew we wanted to bring back somebody from Angel’s past. We weren’t really planning on it being Darla, earlier in the season.

But when we looked back at what we had done we realised, "Look we’ve actually introduced this character through flashbacks, with her importance in Angel’s development, so wouldn’t this be the perfect character to bring back." We’d actually laid the groundwork without realising we’ve been doing that. So we brought her back at the end of season one.

As far as the episode Darla goes, I felt like it was time to do a Darla story. We’d seen her in a few scenes in the first couple of [season two] episodes, and then in episode five "Dear Boy", she made herself known to Angel. And we learned a huge piece of information which was that she’s not a vampire any more, she’s human.

By the time we got to episode seven I felt like it was time to really explore what that meant. Joss had invited me down to the Buffy set so we could discuss Angel, and I suggested that we do a Darla flashback, an origins piece in essence, [where we'd be] seeing her before she was turned into a vampire. [It would look at] who was she before as a human, since the story would deal in what it was like for her to be a human now, post-vampire.

So I felt like a big flashback episode was in order, and I remember him saying to me "That’s all very well and good, however on that very night on Buffy we’re doing an episode about Spike's origins, of his flashbacks." At the same time it occurred to us – actually, that makes perfect sense because their stories would intersect in certain ways. Also, this was a way for us to do a crossover without actually doing a crossover, with two completely stand-alone episodes.

When you view them together you get more pieces of information that maybe you would seeing them separately. So that was very exciting for me, and it was also the first episode I got to direct which was enormously fun.

In the Director's chair
  Can you tell us about your directing experiences?

It’s heaven.

I grew up making films and always thought that’s what I wanted to do. I fell into writing, and have been a writer for a long time, and now I’m at a place where I look forward to the opportunity to get behind the camera and direct some of the things that I write.

I find it unbelievably easier than writing. For no other reason than you have a hundred people helping you, and every time you move there’s a chair under your butt, so that’s certainly a good thing. So you have all these incredibly talented people to work with, it’s not the isolated kind of trauma that writing is.

You’re out there collaborating with other people and it’s a lot of fun. For me, anyway, it’s no big mystery on how to direct because I have a rapport with the actors. They’re all very talented, and if I see something in my head a certain way it’s very easy for me to communicate to them how I would like to see it. They’ll have ideas how to make it better, and I’m seeing the movie in my head as I’m writing it, so I’m not really walking onto the set, wondering "How do I accomplish this?"

150 Chinese peasants vs five talking heads
  If you know you'll be directing them, do you write scripts that are less complex to make things easier for yourself?

That’s interesting. I don’t ever really approach it on that level, I’m always just trying to make a story work.

It’s hard enough just to make it track, and make sense, and be compelling. Kelly Manners, who is a producer on our show, will probably tell you that I don’t think about how hard it is to do things. I’m always getting notes saying "This is too much, we have to tone this down."

The first episode I directed, [which had] a hundred rioting Chinese peasants at the turn-of-the-century, couldn’t have been a bigger show. But in a way it really wasn’t that big, because the scenes were generally between one or two characters with all this stuff going on in the background. It’s not like I have to direct the extras, there’s someone there doing that with me.

So actually the hardest scene I had to direct was the beginning of the second episode that I did, which was Through the Looking Glass. It was simply all five of the principals in one room standing in different places and moving around the room. Having to cover that, and making sure I had all the lookbacks meant covering four pages of dialogue was harder than a hundred Chinese peasants rioting.

I did say that day when I was shooting that scene that I will never write a scene where all the characters appear together that I have to direct. But that’s probably not true.

Does the man never sleep?
  Would you like to follow Joss in writing for other Buffy or Angel outlets?

I believe Joss is about to reinvent the wheel, and possibly fire as well.

Would you like to get involved in comic writing?

Not really. I have enough trouble just keeping up with the show.

It’s amazing to me what the Buffy writers do, they write episodes of Buffy, and then of course Joss goes "I’ll write a musical, I’ll create a couple of shows, I’ll write some movies, I’ll do a thing..." It’s all Whedon.