Shonda Rhimes

Shonda-Rhimes-NATPEShonda Rhimes has been creating characters and making up stories since before she could write. She used to play in the kitchen pantry, pretending cans were people, and then dictate the stories to her mother, who would write them down. An avid reader as a student, she dreamed of becoming a novelist but ended up being a screenwriter instead. One of her first projects was Introducing Dorothy Dandridge for HBO. Rhimes was then attracted to TV series because of the character development they offered. The first show she created was Grey’s Anatomy, which premiered in 2005 and instantly connected with a loyal audience. The rest, as they say, is history. Rhimes set up her production company, Shondaland, home to several hit shows, including Scandal. For her many accomplishments, Rhimes was named Personality of the Year at MIPCOM this past October. On the stage of the Grand Auditorium she sat down with World Screen’s Anna Carugati to discuss her career so far and the tools of her trade.

WS: How did Grey’s Anatomy come about?
RHIMES: I [was] writing what I like to call “teen girl movies.” I wrote Crossroads and The Princess Diaries 2. I enjoyed it, but there wasn’t a lot of character development going on in those movies, these were more blockbuster kind of films. But then I adopted a baby, and I was at home a lot. What you realize when you’re home that much is there’s a lot of television to be watched, and I started watching television. I watched an entire season of 24 in 24 hours, and I loved it. I thought, Wow! This is where all the character development is happening. This is really interesting. I watched three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in like four days. Babies never sleep, so you’re always awake and you’re watching TV, and it was genius to me because that’s where you could really develop characters. I remember calling my agent and saying, I want to do TV. He sent me over to ABC Studios, which then was called Touchstone. I had a meeting, and they said, You want to write TV? That sounds great, let’s try it out. And we tried it out.

WS: And Grey’s Anatomy was the result?
RHIMES: Yes. The first year I wrote a script about war correspondents. I was really proud of it, and it was a really great experience, but it didn’t get made because it was about war correspondents who were having a lot of fun drinking and being very competitive and having a lot of sex while covering the war—and [the country was] at war, so that did not feel very appropriate. And the next year, I remember asking very clearly, What does Bob Iger [the chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC] want to see? They said, Bob Iger wants a medical show. I used to love to watch surgeries on [TV]. I’d been a candy striper. So I wrote a medical show about people who were very competitive and had a lot of sex and really enjoyed doing these things while doing surgery, and that was Grey’s Anatomy.

WS: What did you learn from the first season of the show?
RHIMES: It’s a really interesting job because you go from being a movie writer, where you’re at home in your pajamas by yourself, and you type one script a year—literally I would spend 300 days doing nothing, 40 days thinking, 15 days writing and one day celebrating the fact that I had written something—to suddenly having to churn out a script every eight or nine days. You have 300 people working for you, and you have to run a writers’ room and know what you’re doing. So it was zero to three thousand in an instant, and if you’re a very introverted person, if you’ve never held any other job before besides possibly being an assistant, it is pretty intense—so I learned a lot. I learned pretty much everything you could learn, as fast as possible.

WS: Grey’s, in its 13th season, remains one of the highest-rated dramas on ABC. How do you approach the show each season to keep it fresh and exciting for viewers?
RHIMES: I always try to think of the fact that Meredith Grey has been on a journey now for 13 seasons. It’s not the same show every year, even though there is a procedural element every week—there are medical cases every week and you’re watching her solve them and you’re watching our doctors do things—it is a character journey. I feel like I’ve been writing a novel for 13 years. Ellen Pompeo, who plays Meredith, and I have been locked together in this very interesting journey for a very long time. And because Ellen is fearless—as in, show me without my makeup, go ahead and cut back to me 12 years ago, watch me age on screen, all of these wonderful things—we get to watch somebody evolve on camera. What I try to do is look at each season as if it’s a completely different show, not as if we’re going to tell the same story we told last season or are going to try to repeat the feeling we got last season. Where is Meredith now? And how do we make that story feel interesting and how are we going to tell it?

WS: How did Scandal come about?
RHIMES: I had two shows going at the time, I was exhausted, and Betsy Beers, my producing partner, kept saying, There’s this woman I think you should meet named Judy Smith, and she is a Washington fixer. And I kept saying, That’s great, but I’m not writing any more shows, I don’t have time to meet anybody. She said, Well, we have to meet her because I set up a meeting. I said, OK, we’ll give her 15 minutes. So Judy Smith came in, and she had done everything from representing Monica Lewinsky to getting Clarence Thomas through his [Supreme Court confirmation] hearings—she’d done a ton of things. We started to talk, and I think it was like four hours later, I looked up and thought, I’m hungry, that’s the only reason why I looked up. I realized that there was a show in there. There were hundreds of episodes in what this woman did for a living—it was fascinating. And I was stuck; I was stuck because now there were all these stories in my head and that was a show. It took about a year for me to write that show; I kept thinking, I’ll put it over there. Then I went away for maybe four or five days, and I wrote the script and came back and turned it in and said, OK, this will be a show. It’s been a lot of fun.

WS: Tell us about the new show that is coming up midseason.
RHIMES: We have a new show, created by Heather Mitchell, who is another longtime Shondaland writer—she wrote on Grey’s Anatomy, she wrote on Scandal, and now she’s got this new show. It currently does not have a title; we’re calling it the Untitled Shondaland Project at the moment. All of our shows were called Untitled something at first. And it’s sort of a sequel to Romeo and Juliet. It’s what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. We jokingly call it Romeo and Juliet Are Dead right now. It’s the story of what happens to the families, the Montagues and the Capulets, who’ve been left behind—how they’re going to cope, what happens to the town of Verona, the struggles that go on about who’s going to take the throne and how it’s going to work and all of the politics that come with that.

WS: You mentioned that you had people who started for you as writers and who are now showrunners. Has that been important to you, allowing people in your company to grow?
RHIMES: It’s probably been the best and most exciting thing about having this company: to find talent and watch them grow and bring them up through the ranks. Stacy McKee, who was an assistant on the pilot of Grey’s Anatomy, is now the head writer on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s wonderful to have people that have been here and to give them these opportunities. But it’s also just how we work. The [way] Shondaland tells stories is really through character and about character. I always say a story is best told by saying, What’s the worst possible thing that could happen at this moment to the character? And then make that happen and then get them out of it. You learn that sort of story­telling really well while working in Shondaland. So we hire our assistants and know that they have the potential to be writers. And from there on up, that’s how we promote our writers; that’s how we train them. Then we find people who are interesting and great and have been working at our company in other capacities, and we think, Wow, we should give them more responsibility—if it’s post-production, if it’s production, if it’s anything, we really want to keep people. So we have people who’ve been with us for 13 years or more just because we like our people to stay.

WS: When you write, does your job require that you be able to write anywhere, or do you have favorite places?
RHIMES: I can write anywhere, and I’ve trained myself that way, simply because when you have small children and when you travel and when there are so many shows at so many different lots and locations, you have to figure out a way to write anywhere. So basically, my Pavlovian reflex is that as long as I have headphones on my head and music in my ears, I can write wherever I am, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be in a specific place; the headphones are sort of the thing that transports me.

WS: I’ve spoken to showrunners and writers who dread sitting down and writing, but they’re happy when they have the finished script. Do you enjoy writing?
RHIMES: I do enjoy writing. I think there was a time when I didn’t, when I dreaded the getting there, the forcing myself to access the place where the writing could happen. But I enjoy the writing process now. I think that because it’s been such a habit and because I have to do so much of it and because there’s not a lot of time to think about how much I don’t want to do it—there are too many scripts to be written. I enjoy getting to sit in the world of the hospital, I enjoy getting to be Meredith Grey for a while, I enjoy getting to be Fitz [president Fitzgerald Grant in Scandal] or getting to be Liv [Olivia Pope in Scandal] or getting to be any of those characters. It’s fun. My assistants will tell you—bless their hearts, I’m glad none of them have recorded this—I say all the dialogue aloud while I am writing, very passionately. I act it all out, and it’s embarrassing. I don’t hear it because I’m wearing headphones and there’s music playing, and Betsy Beers makes fun of me because she’s in the office across the way. But it’s important to me to make sure that it feels right and everything acts out well. I think that it’s a little bit of playacting, it’s a lot of fun for me. When I was a kid, I used to hang out in the pantry of my kitchen and play with the cans in there, and it’s still a little bit of hanging out in the pantry playing with cans and pretending that they’re doing things. I enjoy it a great deal.