American Gods’ Bryan Fuller & Michael Green

Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, co-creators of American Gods, tell TV Drama about their approach to bringing Neil Gaiman’s book to life and share how its core themes are more relevant today than ever.

In 2001, British author Neil Gaiman’s American Gods hit the bookshelves. The sprawling tale of a conflict between the “old gods” of all faiths, brought to the U.S. by immigrants, and the “new gods” of media, technology and other obsessions, won a slew of accolades and millions of fans. Among them were Bryan Fuller—known for his work on the visually striking Hannibal and Pushing Daisies—and writer and producer Michael Green. Together they have crafted an adaptation of American Gods with FremantleMedia North America for Starz in the U.S. Snapped up by Amazon for the first window globally, American Gods debuts April 30, unspooling the story of ex-con Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) and his journey across America with Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane)—Norse mythology’s Odin—corralling the old gods for a faceoff against the likes of Media (Gillian Anderson) and Technical Boy (Bruce Langley).

TV DRAMA: How did you approach writing the script and devising a look for the series?
FULLER: It’s very loyal to the novel. We began with page one of the book and started going from there. As we progressed further and further into the story, there were characters that had relatively minor roles in the novel and we started asking ourselves, Wouldn’t it be cool to see what they were doing when they weren’t being covered in the pages? And that got us very excited.
GREEN: And then we just sat and asked each other, What are your favorite things in the novel? We earmarked a few things that we wanted to put into the first season, just to make sure we could see them on screen no matter what happened.
FULLER: We came into this imagining how to tell the story and how many seasons it would take and how to divvy up the story to spread it out over those seasons. We were not necessarily just thinking about season one, but about the approach to covering this book and where we deviate. Where do we remain absolutely loyal to the word on the page? How do we expand story lines to fill up a television season and make it about a lot of characters, not just Wednesday and Shadow?

TV DRAMA: Fans of the book all have their own ideas of what Wednesday, Shadow and the other characters look like. What was your casting process like?
GREEN: It was long! It was fun because the characters crystallized when we found the right people, and in television that’s always one of the most rewarding parts of the process. When you read a book, you hear a certain voice in your head and you enjoy it and then you start writing it and it changes slightly and then you hear it performed by the person who is going to inhabit the role and then they bring it to life in a whole new way. They add depth and precision to the words that inspire you to take the character in different directions as the episodes go on.

TV DRAMA: Tell us about your partnership. I understand you first worked together on Heroes?
FULLER: It was a very quick, collaborative bonding of like minds on how to approach genre stories with enough emotional authenticity to make them relatable. We had been talking about how to work together again for a while and then American Gods sprung up and seemed like the ideal situation. And it’s just a matter of splitting things up and sharing each other’s work and then shipping it off to the network and the studio for feedback.

TV DRAMA: And what kind of creative environment have you found at FremantleMedia North America and Starz?
GREEN: Both those entities are taking an enormous chance with this show. It’s because they came at it as fans—they all love the book, they all love the potential they saw in the book, they have tremendous faith in Bryan and me to adapt it, and they are very excited to have Neil [Gaiman] there to be a barometer of things being right. You can’t mount a show this ambitious without all your planets aligned and gravity pulling in the right direction.
FULLER: It’s a challenging, sprawling story that doesn’t have a tremendous amount of standing sets to rely on. A traditional staple of how to pull off a television schedule is you have standing sets. And you’re able to depend on them. But we’re doing a roadshow. What’s fascinating for Michael and me as we’re in the post process every day approving visual effects shots and crafting the final aesthetic of the show is that everybody has gotten on board to do something that doesn’t exist on any platform right now. That has us very excited, but also we don’t know what to expect.

TV DRAMA: Media and technology have changed so much since the book was published. Did you have to update the traits of any of your new gods to fit with the times we live in today?
GREEN: We were fortunate in that Neil’s take on media and technology in the book was predictive. He had his finger on the right pulse. It has all gotten richer and more pervasive. The largest change we’ve made is that the literal face of technology in Technical Boy has gone from someone marginalized and made fun of and often called “the fat kid” in the book—who was very much inspired by the turn-of-the-century The Matrix and the kid-living-in-his-grandmother’s-basement aesthetic—to a much hipper form. Those on the cutting edge of technology now are industry titans, are the admired people, are the dating catches, and that brings a certain amount of swagger. In our take on it, there’s also the desire to constantly reinvent oneself. The instant evolution of media and technology is something we brought into the literal faces of [those characters], so every time you see them they are new shades of themselves and constantly striving to be something fresh and unique and new.

TV DRAMA: What themes from the book do you think are most applicable to this very strange and disturbing political time we’re living in?
FULLER: The book is based on the notion of thoughtform: that if you believe in something enough you can manifest it into reality. There’s something about that idea that feels very fair and honest with regard to the equality of faiths. It’s exciting for us to be able to tell stories about faith that are mythological and magical and yet somehow very human. That feels like a rich place to explore, not only for themes of immigration and religion and race and homophobia and just the general fear of the other, but it’s also something that is uniquely celebratory of America’s reputation as a melting pot, where people can come and celebrate their differences as opposed to walls being built between them.
GREEN: Two years ago when we started working on this, I don’t think either of us would have ever imagined that the idea of immigration would be as divisive as it is now. The idea of America as a melting pot, as an international country, as a place built by immigrants, was always heartwarming and something to be proud of. No one could have predicted that it would be such an anathema right now.
FULLER: So many themes sprout beneath the umbrella of that immigration headline. It feels like they all boil down to people trying to find their way in a place that is not their home and that they are trying to make their home. Who can’t relate to that?
GREEN: It makes us especially glad that we worked as hard as we did to produce the coming to America sequences that are in the novel. On a production level they were very, very challenging and expensive, but we felt they were important to the show and they’re important to us.

TV DRAMA: And now you have Amazon taking it to some 200 countries all at once.
FULLER: It is exciting to not only have this seen in America but all over the world. The world’s eyes are on America right now for all the wrong reasons and I think [the show is] sort of a message from the inside.
GREEN: We are blinking to the policeman at the door! [Laughs]

TV DRAMA: What’s the collaboration with Neil Gaiman been like?
GREEN: I remember on our third day of production, Ian McShane’s first day, Neil had come to watch. Mousa [Kraish, who plays The Jinn] brought his well-thumbed copy of American Gods and asked Bryan and me if it would be OK to ask Neil to sign it. Neil overheard that and said, “Give me the book!” and wrote him a very nice note. So many people came to this project as fans and there are some people who became fans of the book due to their relationship with the project. It shows how enduring the novel is.