Exclusive Interview: The Strain’s Carlton Cuse

PREMIUM: Carlton Cuse, showrunner of the FX series The Strain who was also co-showrunner of Lost, talks to World Screen about the various projects he has in the works.

WS: How did you become involved in The Strain?
CUSE: I read the book, I liked it and then a couple of years later I was approached by my agent at William Morris Endeavor, who was also Guillermo’s agent, and he said, “Would you be interested in adapting The Strain for television?” I was. There was this cool idea embedded in these books, which was, you could upend the current notion of the vampire genre. We had all these vampire stories that were based on romantic, brooding, glittery dudes with love-life problems! It would be much more interesting to go back to the roots of vampires as scary, dangerous, parasitic creatures. I thought that there was a way to take that idea and carve out a spot in the genre that was not occupied.

So I sat down with Guillermo and we connected. We shared a lot of aesthetic sensibilities and I felt we also had really complementary skill sets. The other thing that attracted me to the project was I felt like Guillermo was one of the best visualists working in film and entertainment. I was confident that he would be able to create these creatures in a way that was interesting and compelling. I’ve had a lot of experience as a storyteller in television and I felt I had a good take on how to take the spine of this narrative and really flesh it out and turn it into a full-fledged 13-hour first season of television. My focus was primarily on the storytelling, the scripts and the editing. We shared casting. Guillermo, meanwhile, was very focused on the monsters and the visual look of the show. It was a wonderful collaboration where we each brought the best of ourselves to the table. I very much believe that success in television is a collaborative artistic medium. There is this erroneous assumption that creativity is in its best form a singular pursuit, but there are many cases of that not being the case. Even people you think of as being solitary creative artists were not solitary creative artists. There is so much work involved in creating the world of a TV show and making a story that plays believably over 13 episodes, our collaboration really made this story special.

WS: Was there a desire to reach beyond the genre fans and appeal to fans of mysteries?
CUSE: Absolutely, while the show was initially marketed on the horror axis, I view the story that we’re telling as an adventure thriller with horror elements. What I do as a writer is cross-genre storytelling. The very first show I created was The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. It was a Western with science-fiction elements. Lost was an adventure story with science-fiction elements. I see The Strain as an adventure thriller with horror elements. I wasn’t interested in just hardcore horror; it just interests me as a component in a more complex drama.

Apart from that and really significantly, there is something that differentiates Guillermo’s work from other works that are labeled horror. A movie like Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautiful lyrical story. It may carry the horror label but there’s so much more to it than that. Even his straighter genre pieces like Blade or Hellboy are filled with humor and heart. There was a common thread in our discussions about how to make the show. We were not going to make it like a horror show, where it would have a singular tonal quality, it was going to be a story that mixed and combined elements of different genres. 

WS: Lost was one of the first shows to have flashbacks and fast-forwards. How were you able to create a show like that?
CUSE: My goal was to make a show that I wanted to see. Damon Lindelof and I would sit in my office every morning over takeout breakfast from the Disney commissary and we would talk a lot about what is the show that we want to see. If we both thought something was cool it would go in the show. There is a real danger in overthinking things. We also weren’t afraid to fail. If you do anything great artistically you have to not be afraid to fail. We would have been very happy if Lost had been a 12-episode cult classic on DVD that people passed around like The Prisoner that was 17 episodes or Twin Peaks, which was 30 episodes. We would have been happy with that result.

We ended up violating a lot of rules of television that we were told were inviolable: we had a complicated mythology, we didn’t make a lowest-common-denominator show, it required that you sit forward and pay attention, it wasn’t spoon fed to you. There was intentional ambiguity, which was something that really intrigued me as a storyteller because I was enchanted by it in shows like The Prisoner or Twin Peaks or in movies made by Michelangelo Antonioni or Fellini. There were characters who had done really bad things like murder people, and on network television you weren’t supposed to have guys that did stuff like that. But all those things that broke the rules of television were the very things that people found interesting and made them want to watch the show.

WS: What was Lost’s legacy?
CUSE: The lesson that came out of Lost was that you could subvert expectations and that in subverting those expectations you give an energy to your show that would really engage an audience. And the legacy of that can be seen on a show like Game of Thrones. The surprising and unexpected death of major characters is something that we did on Lost and they have taken the mantle of that and run with it very successfully. In television the idea of complicated characters that are neither good nor bad is something we were on the forefront of in network television. We could take risks and be commensurately rewarded by an audience embracing our show for all the things that were ultimately novel about it.

WS: Speaking of complicated characters, are the vampires in The Strain all bad or is there something good about them?
CUSE: I wouldn’t say you should be looking for good in the vampires. That’s the thing that differentiates The Strain from other movies and shows in the vampire genre, where vampires aren’t bad as much as they are misunderstood. In our world, vampires are bad. Another thing that differentiates our show is that here is also a very complicated layered mythology for the vampires. In a show like The Walking Dead you have one force of zombie antagonism—the zombies are all homogenous. In our story they are more like bees, there are worker bees and then Queen bees. We have elevated vampires and what’s interesting is the complex mythology about the vampires that unfolds across the course of the first season and even beyond, where we as an audience are really learning the whole story of the mythology of the Master and the other vampires, how they came to be and why they are here and what their origins are and what their goals are. That unfolds across the series and it’s interesting to see they have both empirical and spiritual roots.

WS: At the time of Lost, blogs and online commentary were just starting, but there was so much talk about the show. If we fast-forward to today, are you using social media to connect with fans of The Strain?
CUSE: Yes, really engaging the fans is an important and critical part of making television nowadays, but that is also with the understanding that by the time the fans see something, we are well down the road. So for instance, if the fans are watching the first season of The Strain, the first season is written, shot and we’re just putting the final post-production work on the final episode. So there is no changing the narrative of the first season of the show. However, I am paying attention to what people like and don’t like and what people respond to in the show, and the detailed reactions that are available through social media are definitely going to impact the second season.

WS: How do you break stories for Bates Motel and how is the writing process different than it is for The Strain, which is based on books?
CUSE: The books provide a guideline that is wonderful but there is a lot of invention and creation involved in making The Strain episodes. In Bates Motel the idea was to take two wonderful characters from the iconic movie Psycho. The thing that really intrigued me was that Norma Bates is this famous character in cinema but we don’t actually see her alive, we just see her dead corpse and hear a projection of her voice. So I thought, what would it be like to bring her to life? I sold the idea of doing this as a contemporary prequel to A&E. I had come up with some other inventions, including the idea that there was a brother and very quickly presented a version of the show that was untethered from the movie. I wanted to work on it with someone because I really do like the collaborative process of television. I was introduced to Kerry Ehrin through Universal Television. We teamed up and she had a bunch of wonderful ideas and we jointly developed the concept for what the show would be. The idea fundamentally became that it wasn’t interesting to just have this shrewish character. You imagined that Norma Bates was this shrewish character that berated her son into becoming crazy. But it seemed far more interesting to us if Norma Bates and her son had this complicated, crazy, dysfunctional, but intensely loving relationship and that Norman had a flaw in his DNA and maybe her behavior ultimately catalyzed his demise. These characters loved each other more than anybody in the world and yet we know ultimately that they befall tragic fates. Tragedy is a wonderful storytelling form, it’s worked for a long time, it worked pretty well for Shakespeare! It worked for the Ancient Greeks. It worked well for Jim Cameron in Titanic! But it’s not an easy storytelling form to go out and sell. It’s hard to go to a cable network and say, Hey I’ve got a great tragedy for you! So we Trojan-horsed an original tragedy within the framework of Psycho and we were blessed to get the two most wonderful actors we could have possibly have gotten: Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore. If you told me you were giving me $100 million to make the movie, I would not cast anyone over Vera or Freddie, they are as good as it gets. They can do anything that we give them and make it better. It’s wonderful. The idea for that show became this notion of doing pulpy, exaggerated storytelling that was almost noir-ish, but had super-nuanced characters. It’s taken the audience a little bit of time to understand what we are doing, everyone had preconceptions from the movie. But the great thing was by the end of the second season people were saying, Oh, I get what you guys are doing, I’m into your show!

WS: What other projects do you have in the works?
CUSE: I have three other projects that I am working on. One is The Returned, which is filming 10 episodes in Canada. It is a remake of the French show Les Revenants, which won the International Emmy for the best drama series produced outside the U.S. last year. It’s a wonderful story about people who mysteriously come back from the dead and there is no real understanding as to why this happened. They are not here to eat people or take over the world; they are here to reunite with their loved ones. It’s this very nuanced character story about moving on and about love and death and the ways in which we connect to one another in the world. It’s really wonderful and it’s been a lot of fun to do.

I’m about to shoot an original science-fiction series, Colony, about Los Angeles under a futuristic colonization. It’s a very humanistic story, it’s not an us-versus-aliens battle. It’s more of a rumination on the nature of colonialism against a science-fiction backdrop. I co-wrote Colony with a wonderful writer called Ryan Condal who authored the recent Hercules movie starring Dwayne Johnson.

And the final thing I’m doing is called Point of Honor for Amazon, which I co-wrote with Randall Wallace, who wrote the feature film Braveheart. It’s a family saga set against the American Civil War about a family in Lynchburg, Virginia, and what happens to them once the war breaks out in 1861.