Exclusive Interview: The Blacklist’s Jon Bokenkamp

PREMIUM: The Blacklist showrunner Jon Bokenkamp talks to World Screen about the series, which is a hybrid between a serialized cable show and a broadcast procedural.

WS: You worked in feature films for so long, what attracted you to television and how did The Blacklist come about?
BOKENKAMP: I just was fascinated by TV and started watching a lot of it. After we had kids, my wife and I started nesting and watching TV rather than go to the movies. I love shows like Breaking Bad and Shameless, a lot of great character television. Over the past 10 years movies have become very corporate. They have to be based on a video game or a spin-off or a franchise and have to check off all the boxes of a four-quadrant movie. It feels like television is where independent film was in the ’90s and it seemed very exciting to me. It was something different to explore.

The Blacklist came out of an idea between John Fox, one of our producers, and myself. He was also a feature guy; he had no experience in television. I had written one TV script before and nothing happened with it. Off of that John and I were talking and talking about ideas that would be fun and interesting. He wanted to do some kind of show about a mythic crime figure. This was right after [organized crime figure] Whitey Bulger was found in Santa Monica. John’s idea was, What if an 80-year-old man was captured and started to talk? What kind of stories could he tell? We could go back and find out who shot JFK and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried and all of that. That was the kernel of the idea that eventually became the show.

WS: Bob Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment, has said that The Blacklist is the perfect hybrid between a serialized cable show and a traditional broadcast procedural. Was that done intentionally or did it happen by chance?
BOKENKAMP: It was very intentional. Quite honestly I don’t watch a lot of network television. A lot of what I have watched most recently have been hyper-serialized cable shows. I am a huge fan of those characters and of the way those stories can feel very cinematic. Yet at the same time I wanted to try to do something that would fit the network model of a new case each week. That is a constant balancing act that we are still exploring and trying to discover the right balance. At times last season I wondered if we got too serialized, but we don’t want to be too stand-alone either because one of the things that is fun about the show is the interplay between the characters and those stories. So it is an interesting tightrope to walk, but it was very intentional from the beginning.

WS: What are some of the differences between writing a movie and writing a TV series?
BOKENKAMP: It’s a very different process. In any of the features that I have written, I think of them like a math problem. I love a good twist at the end of a thriller and so I always work from that twist backwards. You feel like there are certain beats that you need to hit at certain moments in a feature. There is very limited real estate in terms of time to tell the story. With a television show to tell a story like this, there are those places where we know we are going. But we are trying to embrace the idea that we can take time to get there and take little side routes into characters and stories that don’t necessarily push the story forward in a brace-neck pace but deepen the characters. I liken it to if you are traveling from Los Angeles to New York in a car, there is a very direct way to get there, but if you know you are going to stop in Salt Lake City and Tucson and Cincinnati, it can be a very winding road. There are a million different ways to get there. The other thing that is very different about writing for television is that my partner, John Eisendrath, started out as a reporter and he is very good at keeping flexible. If a story idea is thrown out or isn’t working, he is very good at saying, well let’s just find something else; let’s try another. One of the things that has really been a learning curve for me, but has been very exciting to do, is to work very quickly and be open to change and re-writes—being open to different ways to hit those different signposts that you are trying to arrive at.

WS: Do you have to write much more quickly for a TV series?
BOKENKAMP: Any of the movies that I’ve had made, it was a minimum of six years from writing the scripts to when the movies got made. I was either fired off jobs, or fired and re-hired, and any number of writers would come in, but it was a really long development process. With this, I can’t tell you how many times we would write something on Thursday, it would be shot of Friday, it would be cut in on Saturday, we would mix on Sunday and it would air on Monday. That wasn’t the story itself, but sometimes we would do a re-shoot, or the network would have an idea that would improve the story, all at the last minute. It feels [like] it’s not done till the moment it airs.

WS: Raymond “Red” Reddington is a bad guy, and yet he is a likeable guy. How do you achieve that?
BOKENKAMP: Red he is a guy who loves being Raymond Reddington. He relishes life. He is fascinated and interested and open, so for me there is a big element of wish fulfillment with that character. He says and does things that we may want to do or may think about but he just does them! He isn’t one to sit around and worry about the repercussions. There is a big part of that. Obviously [James] Spader plays a big part in bringing the character to life. It’s a show that could easily be dark without much sense of humor and we try to recognize when stuff is bit of a reach or a bit preposterous—Red acknowledges that. I think there is a bit of self-awareness to who he is. The biggest thing is the enjoyment that Red and Spader have in living that life.

WS: You didn’t have Spader in mind when you created the character.
BOKENKAMP: No, I did not. We almost didn’t shoot the pilot because we couldn’t find a lead, which sounds preposterous to me now! I remember speaking to James for the first time and he was very articulate and intense and specific about the character and I thought, Wow, this guy is going to be great! But he wasn’t who I was thinking about when I was writing the pilot. But in terms of what James brings to the role, one of the biggest things is just a wonderfully strange sense of humor. We talk daily during production; it can be a lot of fun. When you get him on a roll with something that is just preposterous or something gets us laughing and discovering who the character is, it’s a real joy. We had a bit with this character Borakove, he’s sort of a Julian Assange character who had been in house arrest. We thought Red should bring him a gift when he visits. So he brings him a fruit basket with some vitamins and some Richard Pryor albums. Who would bring Richard Pryor albums, actual vinyl records? Red would! It’s those sort of things, when James and I and John get to giggling about it, there is nothing better than that! So one of the things James brings is a wonderful sense of humor and he is adamant that once we think we know that character, we know nothing about him. We are constantly trying to deepen that character in unexpected ways.

WS: Red does have vulnerability and there is an underlying humanity to him, but how can he do such horrific things?
BOKENKAMP: It is a strange pendulum isn’t it? In episode 12 when he shoots Diane Fowler, he murders a 70-something-year-old woman sitting in a chair, and yet when he has a wishful memory of his family we go there with it. Very odd.

WS: Exactly, when she says, “I know what happened to your family,” in that fraction of a second, you see his expression change and you know that meant something to him and then he bounced right back and says, “Well if you know about it, other people know about it too, I’m going to find them.”
BOKENKAMP: Yeah, we talked about that a lot, there were a lot of incarnations of that scene. James is able to play those nuances and subtleties without saying a word, he is very warm and engaging, I’m fascinated by that and it’s one of the things we try to do in the show. I credit Joe Carnahan, who directed the pilot, with a look that was very big and cinematic and muscular and then we would go in super close for these über-close-ups that were really intimate and warm. We try to do that with the writing and the pacing of the show, we’ll have something that is a big set piece with lots of blood and things exploding and then all of a sudden we will slow down and take time to let a very specific moment or scene breathe and let the audience just sit with that. That juxtaposition to me is really interesting.

WS: Do you have FBI agents consulting on the show? And are some of the criminals who appear in the show composites of people who actually existed?
BOKENKAMP: Yeah, we find stuff in articles all the time that make for the beginnings of great criminals. The Stewmaker is somebody who actually worked in a Mexican drug cartel. The Alchemist is somebody who we found from great articles about DNA tampering and how it’s possible to alter one’s DNA. Stuff that feels like it’s on the fringe of science but is grounded is really interesting. So yes, we do graft elements of true crimes into the show because we want it to be as grounded and also unusual as possible. And yes, we do have an FBI technical adviser who works with us, Brad Garrett, who was with the bureau for years. We show him every script and he comes back to us with, The bureau would do this, The bureau wouldn’t do that. There is a certain creative license that is taken, but he tries to keep us as grounded as possible.

WS: There is a lot of violence for a broadcast show. How free are you to pursue your vision for the series?
BOKENKAMP: The network and the studio have been incredibly supportive. Again, I have never done this before so I don’t have a tremendous amount of context, but in talking with my fellow producers and with James and with other people who have done television, we have been incredibly well supported by the network. In terms of the violence, it’s funny that stuff often reads absurd or silly or uncomfortable, and then when I see it I go, Oh my God, it’s a little more bloody than I had thought, or it played a little more real or graphic than I intended. But I am always surprised how that seems to be okay with audiences whereas sexuality is not. We had a shot of the Stewmaker, who was walking around naked in the woods and I think they saw the top inch of his backend and we had to digitally remove it!

The butt crack of a naked 70-year-old man somehow doesn’t pass muster whereas lots of blood does. That fascinates me! We are certainly not trying to be a bloody show, but just by nature of what the character is, we’re constantly asking ourselves, If you were in this situation with Red what would really go down here? And that oftentimes is a very dark answer that we’re always struggling with.

WS: Is it possible that Red is agent Elizabeth Keen’s father?
BOKENKAMP: Oh absolutely, I think that’s one of the central questions of the show—What is this relationship? Whether he is her father or not, why does he care so deeply for this woman? To me there is clearly a core relationship there that is always in question and is always shifting. One of the really fun things about the second season will be seeing where these two people go; seeing how Liz recovers from Tom and the betrayal and how Red perhaps helps her grapple with that. Yes, those two are inextricably connected. We will continue to tease that.

WS: Is there also reason to believe that Tom might not be dead, because his body was missing when the agents went back into the room where both he and Berlin were shot?
BOKENKAMP: Well, I say it’s odd that his body is not there but Berlin’s body was. Something smells suspicious about that to me

WS: Something’s amiss, right?
BOKENKAMP: Something is amiss, yes!