Tom Fontana

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2013 issue of World Screen.

 

Since the 1980s, Tom Fontana has been changing television. The medical drama St. Elsewhere, one of the first ensemble series, destroyed the concept that doctors are infallible. Oz, with its gritty depiction of prison life and its flawed characters, was HBO’s first original series. Borgia and Copper, Fontana’s current shows, represent new models of international co-production.

 

WS: When you created Oz for HBO, you met Chris Albrecht. He was an executive of a different type, wasn’t he?

FONTANA: Very, very different. It was a network that had no rules and didn’t really have any clear sense of how they would define themselves. They were doing some things very successfully: documentaries, sports—and comedy, because Chris’s background was running an improv club where comedians got their start. And when HBO was casting about for an hour-long drama, they wanted to go as far away from anything you could watch on network television as possible. Now that seems so simple, but at the time, it was just so revolutionary. So what could be further away from Touched by an Angel than Oz? And that’s not taking anything away from Touched by an Angel, but Touched by an Angel was on CBS, we were on HBO. So it was a little like being a crack addict and being told you can do as much crack as you want and nothing will happen! You can’t get arrested and you can’t hurt your health. You just are going to feel good! It was just a tremendous experience for me.

 

WS: You changed your storytelling methods with Oz, right?

FONTANA: I did. First of all, there were no commercials, and [as a weekly series] what I thought would be interesting would be a series of short stories about individual prisoners. Some weeks the stories would last 20 minutes, and some weeks that character’s story would last two minutes. And things didn’t necessarily have to follow; you didn’t have to find a story that was going to bring you through the whole hour. One of the most difficult things about writing an hour drama on a week-to-week basis is every week you have to have a central story that drives the action, so that whatever else is happening, it’s pushing you through and you go back to it constantly. So to be free of that was an extraordinary gift, and a lot of fun to write it and for the actors to play it, because [each] character’s story was all together, it wasn’t spread out over the whole hour.

 

WS: Did you feel a certain responsibility that if you messed up HBO’s first original series, they wouldn’t do any more?

FONTANA: That’s absolutely true. Being given the extraordinary freedom that I had been given, I felt enormously responsible to whoever—and at that point there was nobody on the playing field but me—was going to come next. I thought to myself, if I screw this up, the next guy who comes in here is going to say, give me the creative freedom, and Chris is going to say, “I gave it to Fontana and he fucked me! [Laughs] So I’m not giving you the creative freedom.” I did seriously worry about that, because you don’t want to be the guy who created the problem. In this business, we all spend our time paying for the sins of someone else. For example, a studio has gone into production on a series where the showrunner went way over budget. You’re the next showrunner the studio works with and they say, “Look, this is the way it is, you’re not spending a dime over that.” Or the network gets in trouble because some public-interest group starts a letter campaign about somebody else’s show and suddenly, “Look, we tried to do that, we tried to do abortion on such and such, and we don’t want to [now].” You end up paying for the other people’s sins. So I didn’t want anyone to pay for my sins. I feel very proud of the fact that HBO has had such a great run of hour-long dramas. None of them were like Oz, so it wasn’t like David Chase came and said, I’m going to do another one of what Tom did. He had his own vision in the way that I had my own vision, as did Alan Ball and David Simon and David Milch. All that happened with Oz was that it made HBO be OK to take huge risks, to trust the talent. Trust the writer and something good will come.

 

WS: And what’s been your experience with Borgia?

FONTANA: I was thinking about what I wanted to do next when Chris Albrecht, who was now gone from HBO, and Anne Thomopoulos, who I had worked with at HBO, called me and said, “Canal+ in France wants to do a TV series about the Borgia family, and they want an American showrunner, they want to do the American model.” They knew that I loved the popes, that I think it’s such rich storytelling, and that I’m a big history freak anyway, and so they asked if I was interested. I said, “I’m definitely interested.” I met with the studio and the network, and I said, “Don’t just say you want the American model and then try to turn it into the European model. You either have to say, yes, Tom is the guy, or I don’t want to do this.” And to their credit, they were like HBO, they said, “OK, we will trust you.” What we’ve been trying to do is create a model for European writers to become showrunners. So now I was potentially going to screw an entire generation of European writers on top of American showrunners! [Laughs] It didn’t make me do anything differently than I would have done, but I did have this thing in the back of my head going [I’d better not mess this up].

 

WS: Given the success of Borgia, is this a model that will be repeated?

FONTANA: I think it’s another possibility in the same way that Netflix is now another possibility. I don’t think there has to be one model over the other. I will say the upside of it is that we did not have to deal with an American entity, and so Borgia never had to carry the weight of any of the American preconceived notions of what the show would be. That being said, the downside of it is that when you have this patchwork quilt of a German studio, a German network, a French studio, a French network, an Italian network, a Spanish network, and then 55 other people, you do start to feel like you’re trying to get something past the United States Congress! I’m not talking creatively, because creatively they handled it really well. They gave very few notes and they gave them very respectfully. And nine times out of ten they were terrific notes. What I’m talking about is the financial aspect, getting the show picked up. It was such a hit after the first season and it took so long to get the pickup for the second season. In America the show would have been picked up two episodes in, if not after the first episode. So I don’t think they’re quite as comfortable with this co-production. I jokingly say, now having spent two years with the French and the Germans, I know why there were two world wars! Not that they are enemies, but there’s a lot of positioning going on. I so respect all the players, and the truth of it is that they all are coming from the right place. It’s not like they’re behaving badly. They’re just behaving the way that they behave, because they’re all used to being the boss and now they have to share.

 

WS: They have the baggage of the “Euro-pudding,” the co-production formula used in the ’90s: we need a French director, a German actor, a British writer, and the creative was the last consideration.

FONTANA: Yes, which is interesting because there was none of that in Borgia. I would potentially have used more American directors, and the only reason that I wanted to use some American actors is there are a lot of actors that I love that I would just have loved to put in the show. But the counterpoint to that, and I’m going to get myself in a huge amount of trouble right now, is the Canadian model, which is the opposite of that: 92.7 percent has to be Canadian. I find that the rules for Canadian content were totally justified because Canadians have been taken advantage of by American companies time and time again. But it’s restrictive creatively. There are so many talented people in Canada, but [one should not] be forced to use somebody as opposed to being able to say, I want the best person. Sometimes the best person is Canadian, sometimes the second-best person is Canadian. That’s when you start to think, “Oh, Jesus, this is not the best that we could do.” And that’s been very frustrating for me. I’m very proud of Copper, but I think that we have had to cut corners some places to fit this Canadian content model that I feel like was not set up by people who actually work in the industry.