{"id":13214,"date":"2020-05-26T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2020-05-27T09:29:44","modified_gmt":"2020-05-27T13:29:44","slug":"elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/","title":{"rendered":"Elwood Reid Talks Adapting Barkskins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elwood Reid tells <\/em>TV Drama about his approach to bringing Annie Proulx\u2019s <\/em>Barkskins to Nat Geo.<\/em><\/p>\n

At a sprawling 736 pages and spanning 300 years, Annie Proulx\u2019s acclaimed 2016 novel Barkskins<\/em> could have been deemed unadaptable. But National Geographic and Scott Rudin Productions saw potential in Proulx\u2019s epic tale of two immigrants to New France in the 1690s, optioning the rights before the novel had even hit shelves. Seeking out a writer for the adaptation, Carolyn Bernstein, executive VP of global scripted content and documentary films at National Geographic, reached out to novelist and scriptwriter Elwood Reid, whom she had worked with on The Bridge<\/em> during her time at Endemol Shine Group.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> How did the Barkskins<\/em> adaptation for National Geographic come about?
\nREID:<\/strong> I\u2019m on a deal at Fox [21 Television Studios]. Carolyn Bernstein and I worked on The Bridge<\/em> together. She called me and said, Scott Rudin just sold us this really cool book by an author I\u2019m sure you know. Of course I knew who Annie Proulx is. She said it\u2019s a monster book, and I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s adaptable, take a look. Scott Rudin stood out to me, Annie Proulx is an idol of mine. And then quite frankly the chance to work with Carolyn Bernstein again and do the first fictional show for Nat Geo. Everything was right. And then I read the book and knew there\u2019s not a TV show like this on right now: a costume drama with murder and guys with axes in the wood. It had a lot of interesting angles I could explore. It was a no-brainer to say yes.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> What was the approach to crafting the arc of season one, and are you envisioning more episodes?
\nREID:<\/strong> It\u2019s always been planned to be multiple seasons. I really only adapted the first 100 pages of the book. When you leave 600 pages of a book on the table, there’s a lot of room for a lot more stories. I designed it to ramp up to a high point and then just drop you off a cliff. You want to leave the audience wanting more and not feel like they ate the whole meal. That was a very conscious decision on my part to do that. These characters need actors, and I had so much fun with these actors in this world that I would love to do another season.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> The cast is fantastic.
\nREID:<\/strong> They made me seem like a f**king genius! You see David Thewlis and Marcia Gay Harden and Christian [Cooke] and Thomas [M. Wright] saying your words, you look really smart.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> It has a lot of characters. How did you work on giving each of them fleshed out plotlines while also keeping the storyline moving?
\nREID:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know if this is something I\u2019m good at or just something I seem to do a lot. I\u2019m a novelist and also a short- story writer, and I\u2019ve written a lot of TV shows. I like to juggle a lot of characters. One of the things as a writer when you have lots of storylines, and you\u2019re going to be moving from one storyline to the next, is you make those scenes count. So you\u2019re dipping into let\u2019s say Trepagny\u2019s [played by David Thewlis] storyline, I\u2019m going to give you all the good stuff. I\u2019m giving you the main course. And then we go to the next pot of characters. Everything moves. It\u2019s not five scenes where I can see Trepagny walking through the woods and talking. You leave the scene at a high point and go to the next storyline. For this show in particular, I was trying to tell a really big story, and I knew I\u2019d have a lot of characters, so I laid down tracks as fast as I could. If you watch the first episode, a lot of shit goes down. Every episode is like that. I like shows that have a lot of nooks and crannies.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> What were the challenges of re-creating this time in history\u2014one that most of us know nothing about?
\nREID:<\/strong> I don\u2019t mean to speak broadly about a whole genre of TV shows\u2014I do watch period shows. I do find the trap that period shows run into is they tend to be all about the costumes and the setting and the look, and a lot of the drama is very interpersonal. When people talk about period, it\u2019s, Oh, everyone walked around in beautiful dresses and they went to balls and rode in carriages and they were going to figure out who they were going to marry! History is incredibly bloody, in particular, this period of time. That seems to get left out. And that seems to go into genre. Anything you read about this era, there were wars and battles and people are screwing each other over land. It was full of plot. So I said, we\u2019re going to have people in beautiful costumes and there\u2019s going to be some dances and there\u2019s going to be some relationships and there\u2019s going to be people sticking axes into other characters.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Tell us about how you brought your background in writing crime procedurals to the show.
\nREID:<\/strong> I came up as a novelist, and I read a lot of crime fiction. When I first came out to Hollywood, I loved procedurals. I loved NYPD Blue<\/em>, that world that David Milch created. One thing I noticed about those shows is, the minute there\u2019s a body, when something really bad happens, people by and large, no matter how bad what follows is, are going to stick around to find out what happened and why did they do it. So it\u2019s a very effective motor, and I think we tend to only apply it to cops in Armani suits walking around cities. Why not transplant some of that motor into what you call period drama? I think it really works. It felt good to be able to drive the story around a central mystery. One thing you always have in a procedural is this train track. You can diverge off that train track, but the minute you get back on that story track, the pace picks up. It’s very comforting to have that as a writer.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> There are elements of genre in it too, in terms of the mystery of what\u2019s out there.
\nREID:<\/strong> There was an element of the show I had to lose in the editing room; there was a supernatural, superstitious element. It\u2019s there when the characters talk about it, but I had some scenes that had some of that in there. When you read anything about the time, the Catholic Church, for example, thought that the New World was inhabited by new demons and devils that didn\u2019t exist in their world because the church had \u201cconquered\u201d them and civilized the people and their beliefs. Then you have all the First Nations people who believed in the spirit world. Then you just had people being afraid of the woods, of the unknown. In these towns, when the sun went down, it was pitch black; there was nothing but candles, there were animals out there, there were people out there trying to murder you for your land or your furs. They did believe that the spirit world was right there, that there were evil creatures out there. There\u2019s a ton of First Nations mythology around this stuff. I just felt the air would have been filled with it at night, it would have been palpable, so I tried to put that into the show.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> I\u2019m always struck by writers who can work in so many different mediums. How do you juggle your TV writing and your novel writing?
\nREID:<\/strong> I\u2019m about ten years late on my new novel\u2014I\u2019m almost done with it! It\u2019s a complicated question. The rap that used to be on novelists and story writers was that they couldn’t write television or movies because they didn’t understand the structure. Starting with David Milch, David Chase\u2014NYPD Blue<\/em>, The Sopranos<\/em>, \u2014the pacing and the structure of a great novel is very akin to serialized cable drama. Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations<\/em> serialized in a magazine. As the medium has evolved, it\u2019s made my skills much more in common, as a novelist, with screenplays. I love both. I\u2019m not going to say it\u2019s easy. I hire a lot of novelists for my rooms; sometimes they can make that transition, sometimes they can\u2019t. One thing you have to learn in a TV show is you can\u2019t be precious; you\u2019re always going to get rewritten, or you\u2019ll get a note that you may disagree with. A novelist will say, I can put whatever I want in there. You can’t do that in television. If you enter [into TV writing thinking] I\u2019m going to be an artist and no one can touch my precious words, you\u2019re never going to win. There are days I work on my novel in the morning and I work on screenplays at night, but it is a little bit of a different muscle to flex. As I\u2019ve gotten older and craftier, I\u2019ve learned how to switch between those two. Back in the day, once I wrote screenplays, I put down novel writing for a while; I was trying to learn a new craft. It\u2019s trial and error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elwood Reid on his approach to bringing Annie Proulx\u2019s Barkskins to Nat Geo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":13215,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,70],"tags":[3877,3878,1940],"class_list":["post-13214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","category-top-stories","tag-barkskins","tag-elwood-reid","tag-national-geographic","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nElwood Reid Talks Adapting Barkskins - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Elwood Reid Talks Adapting Barkskins - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Elwood Reid on his approach to bringing Annie Proulx\u2019s Barkskins to Nat Geo.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-05-26T12:00:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-05-27T13:29:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/07\/Elwood_Reid-520.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"319\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/\",\"name\":\"Elwood Reid Talks Adapting Barkskins - TVDRAMA\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-05-26T12:00:34+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-05-27T13:29:44+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/elwood-reid-talks-adapting-barkskins\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Elwood Reid Talks Adapting Barkskins\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\",\"name\":\"TVDRAMA\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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