Exclusive Interview: Person of Interest’s Jonathan Nolan & Greg Plageman

PREMIUM: Person of Interest showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman discuss the series' timely topics of surveillance, protecting the public and the right to privacy.

WS: Where did the idea for the series come from?
NOLAN: I grew up in the U.K. in the 1970s where, because of troubles with the IRA [bombings by the Irish Republican Army], Scotland Yard and MI5 were backing the installation of the security cameras everywhere. This was [an extension] of Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century panopticon and the way the English built prisons so that inmates could be spied on at any time of the day. When I moved to the United States in the late ’80s there weren't security cameras everywhere. It was like moving back in time to a more innocent age when everyone was not spying all the time. Then, for good reasons and not so good reasons, that panoptic state followed me across the Atlantic and set up shop here in the United States. Now between state-sponsored CCTV and private surveillance [there are cameras in major cities like New York].

As a little kid I understood intuitively that there were more cameras than there were people to watch them. I was always fascinated by all the stories that might unfold and be caught on camera but no one was watching. The CCTV cameras that are all throughout London and now throughout Manhattan are witness to acts of violence and even banal things that play out over the course of one day. All that human drama playing out and no one is watching, or if people are watching, it's not what they are looking for. They are not looking for kidnappings or gang warfare; they are looking for acts of terrorism.

I went to a meeting with JJ Abrams. We really hit it off and several hours into the meeting—we had been talking about a lot of different film projects—I finally told him about my idea. Four years later I find myself with Greg running a massive TV show. It's been very cool!

WS: How similar is the machine in the show compared to the one the U.S. government had at one point?
PLAGEMAN: Shane Harris, the author of the book The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, is a friend of ours and we brought him to the show a couple of times to talk about the state of surveillance. He is way ahead of the curve, a journalist who is tied into the beltway and understood everything that was happening with Admiral John Poindexter before almost anyone else. You might recall, Poindexter had this idea going back to 1983 when there had been an attack in Lebanon [on the U.S. Marines barracks]. He thought we could have done a better job in predicting these types of attacks if there had been surveillance. In this case, the prototype was Total Information Awareness. There were a number of these projects that were being funded. The long and the short of it is when we finally got a version of it up and running after 9/11, Congress heard about it and shuttered it in 2005. [All the surveillance projects then] went into something called the Black Budget. We essentially funded surveillance only nobody heard about it. The technology was out there and the necessity for it still existed, and they were going to build it. The revelations from Edward Snowden about what the NSA is doing worldwide have brought that to bear.

WS: What is your process for breaking stories? Do you work together on all the story arcs?
NOLAN: We sure do. Greg and I started working together very early. I had written a script and Greg came in and we started figuring out how we could shoot the pilot and build it into a series. We went to New York together with a director and an incredible team to shoot the pilot. It was a dream for me to shoot in New York. We then pulled together a team of incredible writers. Some of them Greg had worked with before. I had never worked in television before. I had never really collaborated with other writers before. That was part of the reason I wanted to do TV in the first place, to be part of that writers’ room. I spent over a decade working on features. [With] my brother [Chris Nolan] that's more of a serial collaboration than a parallel collaboration. He'll go off and shoot the last movie we worked on and I'll start writing the next one. It's a very isolating experience. I'd been on the Warner Bros. lot writing for years and years by myself and I wanted that collaboration.

WS: Person of Interest has updated the traditional procedural.
NOLAN: What makes the show unique is that it's building very much on this tried-and-true format of television where you have a story of the week. Cable shows are all novelized. But a huge of amount of the audience doesn't have time to watch every week, and the idea that you can turn on the television and find a compelling story that has a beginning and an end within one episode, that's the most endurable model of storytelling on television. I look at The X-Files as a benchmark for how you can have your cake and eat it too—how you can have a story of the week but also have a really big, really compelling genre story that is moving forward every week, getting the audience that is watching every week more and more engaged. I really think that doing that model is harder [than serialized drama]. You need writers who can come in and tell one compelling story, wrap it all up in one episode, but also move the ball forward with this huge arc that we are spreading out over 23 episodes. Our writing staff has to do all of that every episode; it's pretty extraordinary what they do.

WS: Do the issues we see in the show regarding the right to privacy versus protecting the public reflect the debate that takes place in your writers’ room?
PLAGEMAN: Definitely. This is an age-old trade off: privacy versus liberty. Post 9/11, the Patriot Act and all the things that have transpired since then, have laid the groundwork for the situation we are in now. For Jonah and me, the challenge is not to be preachy about the situation because that would be too easy. It's too easy to say, Look at what your government is doing, isn't this outlandish, isn't this outrageous? Yes, to a certain degree it is, but what did you expect them to do? The interesting aspect for our show is to say, Let's just say this exists. Let's just say [survelliance] transpired out of a need for people to feel protected by the government, but also out of convenience. All of us click on end-user license agreements to get Facebook or Twitter or Gmail or whatever; we all agree to it [and relinquish tons of personal data in the process]. So to sit there and act like hypocrites, saying that we didn't know [corporations and the government have all this information about us] is a little silly. So Jonah and I said, Let's just use it as a backdrop. The information is out there, it's available and there are parties that are using that information. We find ourselves in a really interesting place in history right now in terms of privacy and technology and it's only going to get trickier. The ability of an algorithm to basically predict your taste in what you are going to do next is only getting stronger and stronger. If we take that as a given for the show, it becomes a really fertile ground for some really interesting stories about larger questions—questions about privacy and anonymity and even free will.

WS: Do you think that the majority of Americans are not concerned about being under surveillance because they think they are being protected from terrorism?
PLAGEMAN: Absolutely, people think of their own necks first. It's amazing the level of blood lust after 9/11, but also the level of fear. There is a culture of fear that exists after every terrorist attack. What's happened in Israel and [in Ukraine] has a lot of people on edge. And whenever that happens the first thing you see is the privacy grab by governments. When you look back and you wonder how that happened you say, well that's because the public wanted it. The political will was there to respond to what the people's fear indicated. That's happened throughout history. In addition, any time you go on Amazon and it tells you “others who bought this item, also bought these items,” it gets a little creepier and creepier, so there is a convenience aspect to it that all of us begin to enjoy. People start saying, well I don’t mind so much that Amazon knows everything about what I want to buy.

WS: Is it true that from the beginning of the series you have known how you want it to end? Is that part of your creative process or is also done in the event that if CBS decides it won’t renew another season, you can tie up all the loose ends?
NOLAN: I've been primarily a film writer and a huge part of figuring out how to write a film script is to start at the end. On The Dark Knight we knew exactly what the end was and it was relatively easy when you know where it's going how to build toward it, especially if it's a strong ending. Doing television, even though the number [of episodes can be] mind-boggling, the variability is huge, too. We've had friends who had shows that never make it past the pilot. That's the thing about the television business; it’s very, very, difficult. You have a pitch, they like it, and [the project] goes forward. You write a script, they like it, it goes forward. You shoot a pilot, they like it, you go forward. You shoot 12 more episodes, they like them, you go forward. You shoot nine more episodes, a full season, they are doing well and you go forward. [It’s a] year-to-year crazy treadmill where you are trying to roll these things out and make sure they are great. We’re in the old-school model. We are making 23 of these babies a year and we are trying to make all of them fantastic, but we are shooting them in a very new-school way. We’re shooting guerilla style out in New York. That's an awful lot of stories to cover. Greg and I decided very early on that we needed to know where the story was going every season. And it's exactly your point, if we got through the first season and it wasn't going well, we would want to wrap it up and tell a clean story. That model is becoming increasingly important to both the networks—who are realizing that they are punishing the audience by just yanking a show before they can even finish the story—and to the studio for the long-term catalogue value of these shows. You'd like to think that the business is headed a little more in this direction now. You did the first six, it's not working out, let's get through 12, wrap it up, have your DVD set, make it more of a miniseries. There is a little more grace to that. That's the long picture.

As for each season, we've always known at the beginning of every season where it would end. The writers all sit down together and just talk about where we want the story to go. With some provisos in mind, we know how to get to that point, and the funny thing is, even with 23 episodes, at the end of every season, we're still breathless, there is still so much to tell. Every season we have a finale that packs two or three episodes’ worth of content into one episode because we always have more story we want to get to.