Exclusive Interview: Marc Cherry

August 28, 2012 World Screen Top Stories
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PREMIUM: Marc Cherry, the creator of Desperate Housewives, talks to World Screen about his upcoming show, Devious Maids, for Lifetime.

WS: Devious Maids is based on a Mexican telenovela. What appealed to you about the world it depicts?
CHERRY: Many years ago, before I became a professional writer, I was a personal assistant to Dixie Carter [the actress best known for her role in the series Designing Women]. I worked inside her home and helped run her house. I was reminded of what it’s like to work in a rich person’s house. You have your own dreams and you are busy helping them live their lives and you’re surrounded by their wealth. It brought up a lot of emotional issues for me about what it’s like to work for someone whose dreams have come true when you have so many of your own dreams that are still unrealized. Given the fact that I now have people living in my home working for me, I am seeing the issue from both sides and I thought it might be an interesting thing for me to explore.

WS: How much did you take from the original concept and how much are you creating yourself?
CHERRY: I would say it’s about 99.9 percent original. I liked the idea of it but I wanted to create my own thing.
 
WS: How different is the world on Devious Maids from the world on Desperate Housewives?
CHERRY: Desperate Housewives was a commentary on wives and mothers going insane in the suburbs. Devious Maids is very much about class differences in Beverly Hills, the world of privilege, the world of people struggling to achieve their own goals and desires. My dark comedy tone will be similar, but the issues and the stories are pretty different.
 
WS: Are the women in Devious Maids more aspirational in wanting to better their lives than the ladies on Wisteria Lane were?
CHERRY: The joke about Desperate Housewives is these were women who had ostensibly attained their dreams—they were married to the men they wanted to marry, they were in the suburbs, they had their kids—and yet something had gone wrong with the dreams. Yes, Devious Maids is far more aspirational. It shows a class of women that we don’t often see depicted on TV, working-class women. The irony of their lives is that they work for very rich people who sometimes aren’t all that happy. One of the themes of Devious Maids is happiness—what is true happiness and do we know it when we’ve gotten it. I look at them from all sorts of angles. Being close to Beverly Hills I’ve heard a lot of stories from both sides of the fence, as it were, and I have a lot of personal experience with what goes on in those households.
 
WS: Will there be your signature style of comedy in Devious Maids?
CHERRY: My dark comedic tone? Yes, I’m going to find a little comedy in a lot of dastardly doings!
 
WS: So many actors who have worked with you said that what you write is musical and is so easy deliver. When did you first discover you had that gift?
CHERRY: I spent years working on sitcoms where it was all about finding the music of the punch line. Then, when it came time to break out of the sitcom ghetto and I was striving to do more adult kind of writing, I really made sure I wasn’t telling any jokes, that my writing was just about the dark and horrible things people say to each other and the ways that they reveal themselves. I started to teach myself to write contextually so that what the characters are saying on the surface is seemingly pleasant or banal, but it’s really covering up a more insidious emotion inside. It’s something that I feel I have gotten better at but I still struggle with: how do people talk? One of the hardest things for all writers is to make sure that the characters don’t sound alike, that they sound different. So I am constantly listening in real life trying to hear how people of different socio-economic levels speak. I am fairly well educated white man from Orange Country, so I’m always trying to listen to other people and see if I can capture the music of their personal rhythms. I also love listening to other writers. I’ll admit, it, I’ll steal freely from other writers! You listen to the staccato of David Mamet’s dialogue. I read some of the poetic flourishes of Tennessee Williams. You hear that dense political dialogue that Aaron Sorkin does so well. There are many people who I am a fan of and I try to learn from them. You never feel you are done. There is always more to learn and there are always more people to steal from!