Exclusive Interview: Homeland’s Alex Gansa

PREMIUM: Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa takes us behind the scenes for a look at the inside workings of the series’ writers’ room.

WS: Would you give us an example of how your writers’ room works and how you break stories?
GANSA: At the beginning of every season we all take a field trip to Washington, D.C. All the writers and sometimes Claire Danes or Mandy Patinkin or both will join us, and we sit down with all our consultants, that is active intelligence officers, retired intelligence officers, current State Department people, former and current ambassadors, NSA people, occasionally some people from the White House, and we just take the temperature of the town. We get a sense of what is being debated in the halls of power. What are the preeminent issues in terms of keeping America safe, in terms of protecting American power overseas. What are the hot spots? What is being discussed? All in an effort to find out what are the issues we should be talking about in Homeland this season. What are the real conversations that are happening? One of the wonderful things about doing this show is that we get the comment on current events.

When we did this last year for season three, what was front and center on everybody’s mind was the relationship between Iran and the United States. Iran had arguably been the major beneficiary of our adventure in Iraq, and the question was, here are two countries that had never had any kind of formal or informal relations for a couple of decades at least, and were now sniffing around each other. Now there was the possibility of some sort of a dialogue around this issue of nuclear weapons. So we came away from that week in Washington thinking that is an interesting story to tell and how do we fit our characters—Carrie and Brody and Saul—into that equation. Of course, it bled over from season two; we ended season two with the big attack on the CIA and it is revealed in season three that actually Iran was behind that attack. Carrie and Saul, in an attempt to deal with their own culpability on that attack, manufacture a plan to engage Iran in a dialogue and that is done through the character of Javadi. So that is a window into how season three came to be and how we settled on the arena in which to put all our characters.

WS: Once you decide on the story arcs, how do you then divide up the writing among the writers?
GANSA: What first happens is a couple of months of concerted discussion among all the writing staff. We sit together every day for between six and eight hours or however long we can tolerate looking at each other! And we start to figure out how our characters fit into this scenario and look at where they begin the season and where they end the season and whether that is a story worth telling. We go through all the characters. Last season we went through Carrie and Brody and Saul and Quinn and tried to figure out where they began the season, where they ended the season so that we could plot their character progression along that continuum. It takes a long time to get the general feeling of what the season is about and where it’s going. Then it becomes of matter of sitting down and saying, OK, here’s the first episode and everybody is sitting in the room together and we talk about what the first episode is, what it looks like, where we are trying to set the stage for the season and where, most importantly, we find last season’s most important characters, which were at the time Carrie and Saul because Brody was out of the picture and on the run. We knew Brody was going to have a limited run on the season by virtue of what he was being accused of having done.

It’s a good month-long process to break that first story and that is done with everyone. I get to write the first and last episode of each season. Then we move forward and start breaking the second and third and fourth episode. Usually when the first four are broken, you get a sense of a writer’s strengths or which writers are attracted to a particular story and then a writer gets assigned to a story that has been broken by the entire team. Broken means we know what all the scenes are: here’s scene one, here’s scene two, scene three. Usually there are between 25 and 35 scenes in an episode, and those scenes have been broken by the entire group together, and that writer is tasked with going off and writing an outline based on all those scenes that we have all decided on. Once that outline is written, it is vetted, and once it is vetted, the writer will write the script. Then it will be vetted by everyone and it will be worked on and refined and ultimately put in front of the cameras.

WS: I’ve heard that all the writers have previously been showrunners.
GANSA: Every writer on this show has run a television show. And by virtue of the fact that they have, they’re very glad that I am running the show and they are not! Because it is undoubtedly the worst job on the show! I always say that the best job I ever had was on 24 when I was working with Howard [Gordon] and he was running the show and I got to be a writer, which was so liberating, just to write the scripts! Just to sit in the story room and talk stories is a blast—to come up with the characters and figure out what the story is and the jigsaw puzzle of it is a lot of fun.

WS: Homeland airs on Showtime and because it is a premium service you have a lot more freedom to say and show things than you would on a broadcast network. But what kind of notes do you get, if any, and how is that relationship?
GANSA: The relationship with Showtime is superb. It is a relationship that we value and we view the executives there, namely David Nevins, Gary Levine and Randy Runkle, as real partners. They read these outlines and scripts extremely carefully and we really use them as a service. They are incredibly bright. They are amazingly passionate about the show and they have very strong opinions and sometimes just outrageously good ideas!

Homeland is unlike a lot of shows. We have a very open-door policy. We will take good ideas and encourage good ideas to come from anywhere. I always tell the story about Patti Podesta who was the production designer on the pilot. We were scouting locations. There is one scene in the pilot in which Carrie is in a bar and she is picking up some guy and she is listening to a jazz band and watches the fret work of a bass player and realizes, Oh my gosh, Brody was communicating with someone when he was on television by using a tapping code [with his fingers]. The version of that scene when we were scouting the location of that bar was that Carrie was on her way out of the bar and passed a booth where a bunch of deaf college students were signing at each other. There is a very famous university for the deaf in D.C. called Gallaudet and these students were signing at each other and when she saw them using sign language, that’s what gave her the idea that Brody was using a tapping code to communicate in front of the cameras. So we were all at this bar, scouting this location and there happened to be a jazz band playing and Patti Podesta looks at me and says, “Alex, look at the bass player.” And I look at the bass player and she says, “Wouldn’t that be better than the deaf kids?” And from that conversation, obviously the scene changed. But not only that; Carrie’s love of jazz came out of that location scout. And the production designer, whose last job it is to talk about stories, came up with this idea and we said, That is so much better.

There’s an example of the production designer, but believe me, Showtime has had a number of fantastic ideas and the first and foremost one of them is they pushed us to make Carrie more of an extreme character than she was when we first wrote the script. Although they didn’t suggest specifically the idea that Carrie was bipolar, they said, “Look, we need something more, what else can you add to that character? She’s not just a maverick; she’s not just a pariah in the CIA. Is there something else we can add to that character that makes her more alive and more interesting?” So Howard and I went away and thought about it for a while and we came back with this idea that she had this bipolar illness, which, again, informed the series on such a deep level and it was a direct result of Showtime pushing us to be something more.

WS: Carrie is brilliant but bipolar, Brody was a hero and also a terrorist. How has the evolution of flawed characters freed you as a writer to explore territories that you hadn’t been able to before?
GANSA: When you talk about the Golden Age of television, if you look at a lot of the protagonists in these shows, these are deeply flawed, complicated antiheroes. And that character became possible on cable television. You weren’t confined by the strictures of what a hero is or should be—up to that point on television there was a tried-and-true formula for that. Cable allowed people to explore what the other side of a hero could be. We certainly did that. You are absolutely right, there is a liberation to that idea. And up to that point, and I don’t know when that could be but you could probably point to The Sopranos, a protagonist or lead character had to be likeable. Cable made it possible for a character not to be likeable, as long as that character was compelling. I don’t think it should be understated. It’s a different paradigm and it allows for more interesting characters.