Geekscape Interviews: ‘Fear The Walking Dead’s Frank Dillane and Creator Dave Erickson Talk Audience Reaction And More!

It’s been a few weeks now since the always-incredible (and always exhausting), events of San Diego Comic-Con, and I’m beyond excited that I’m just now able to talk about one of the highlights of this year’s week in San Diego.

If you’re a long-time reader of Geekscape, you’ll know how huge of a fan of The Walking Dead I am. I’ve been keeping up with the comic book since I was in high school, passionately wrote Geekscape’s Walking Dead Weekly column before life got in the way, and of course, ate up every single second of Telltale’s incredible The Walking Dead video game.

So of course, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with the cast and producers of the new, mysterious companion series, Fear the Walking Dead.

Now, that being said, I’d felt a little iffy about Fear The Walking Dead since the companion series was first revealed. Sure, the world wants as much The Walking Dead as it can get (again, you do know that there’s both a comic book and incredible video game too, right?), but would this series simply be the same show in a different location, and without the survivors we already know and love? How could it differentiate itself from what’s essentially the most popular television series on the planet?

After having an opportunity to speak with the cast and producers of the series last month, any concerns that I had about Fear the Walking Dead disappeared, and I’m now simply excited to see where East Los Angeles, and the beginnings of the infection, take this dysfunctional blended family.

And that was all before that awesome trailer was released.

The interviews were run in a round-table format, and had journalists speaking to a few of the actors (or producers) at the same time. As it was a round-table, not all questions were mine, but all of them are definitely worth reading. It wasn’t the fantastic trailer or meeting these actors that made me really excited for Fear The Walking Dead, but the passion, excitement, and chemistry that all of its talent have with the project and each other.

My favourite interview of the entire convention is transcribed in full below. Sons of Anarchy producer Dave Erickson acts as executive producer, writer, and showrunner of the upcoming series, and he had some incredible insights on what we’re set to see later this month. I really, really with that Frank Dillane was able to answer more questions, but Erickson’s enthusiastic, intricate answers took most of our allowed time.

Question: So guys, how do you feel that the audience and the fans of “The Walking Dead” will respond here?

Dave Erickson: I think they’ll love it. No. [laughs] I think the show’s – there is enough connective tissue – there is enough, we’re living in the same world that Robert [Kirkman] created and the same mythology, the same rules apply to the walkers are infected, and so I think there’s definitely – there’s enough. It’s in the heart and soul of the original and the comic is present. I’d like to think that, maybe, there will be some folks who come to the show who don’t – I know there’s maybe one person left in the world who hasn’t seen “The Walking Dead.”

Question: Yeah.

Dave Erickson: But there may be some who would – we’ll see. A lot of people have asked me that just because the show does 17 million viewers just in the States and I actually think there is – I feel like Robert [Kirkman] and now, Scott [Gimple] and that group, and [Greg] Nicotero and Gale [Anne Hurd], David [Alpert] – they’ve helped us, because I feel like they’ve created this world in which, I think, we will open strong. I think people will come out of curiosity, and then, I think, we’ve produced a good show and people respond to it whether – I’m not worried about the numbers. I’m not worried about getting near that particular mark because I think it’s a little bit unrealistic for any show to expect to do that, but I think people will like it.

I think there’s – you get to see, especially, the fans of the show because we’re living in this pocket for Season 1 that they didn’t explore in the comic and they didn’t explore in the original, which is we get to see what Rick missed. We get to actually see the fall of the society. You see the fall of the major metropolis, but do so through the prism and filter of this highly dysfunctional blended family, which I promise, there is no resemblance to my own – just watch everything kind of crumble. I think what people will enjoy is the steps and the first time people became aware that these – because one of the things Robert was interested in when we first sat down was you don’t assume just because somebody is turned, they’re coming after you.

You don’t assume that they’re dead. You think that they’re sick or you think that they’re on something. For our characters, it’s – when they actually get to a place where they’re forced to, and Frank’s character has to deal with this pretty early, when they’re forced to deal with somebody who was a friend a day ago, who now is acting this way and I have to do violence to protect myself, Robert and I really wanted to explore what does that mean emotionally and psychologically if you have to do violence, too?  Because our walkers still look for the most part – they look human. They have not been degraded and atrophied in a way the wonderful work that Greg and his team have done in the original show. They do wonderful work on our work as well, but it’s a very specific look.

You don’t know in the early days of this if you have to lash out in that way, you don’t know if two days later, the cops will come into your door and say, you know the guy you knocked up the other day, well, yeah. He was sick. So it’s an interesting exploration and it’s all elements of that. The nature of, I think, the brilliant narrative stroke in the comics and coma, it was wonderful and it came before Danny Boyle, I know, but it was a lovely way to dive into the apocalypse, but they really went from zero to apocalypse in a heartbeat and we get the opportunity to extend the season. So that really explains it, so it’s a long waited answer. But yes, that’s the idea.

Question: Setting it in LA, like, what was the reasoning behind that? Do you allow you to…

Dave Erickson: Well, both Robert [Kirkman] and I live there, which was appealing. [laughs] No. I think he very much wanted it. Robert’s from Kentucky, he’s from the South, rural Georgia, it’s been explored on the show for the past several seasons, so to do something that was distinctly urban, to do something that had a very different look, that was the, I think, the first impulse. Second is we definitely wanted to see a major city and try to depict the fall of a major city. What happens – we arrived in Atlanta at the end of the pilot of the original show and the city blocks the dead to try to dramatize what that process would have been like was, I think, was appealing.

For me, dramatically, the show is really about reinvention and it’s about identity and California, the West Coast, LA, specifically. It’s a place where people go to disappear and to reinvent themselves, to change, to become something else. Most of our characters, I won’t say which ones, they’ve had experiences in their past that have scarred them. Things that happened whether crimes done to them, things that they have done and they’ve moved here, they’ve arrived to distance themselves from that. With the onset of the apocalypse, some of these things – the secret that they’ve hid, the things that they have done, their personality traits are, actually, will better suit them for survival.

So it’s about how to become something completely different or dig back into what you were before and find ways to survive. But it just felt like it was a really interesting confluence of, I think, a thematic that works with the city we chose, but also works with our characters, which I think will come across, but that was the reason for LA, as opposed to – and then, also, I live there.  And then we went and shot in Vancouver, so it makes absolutely no sense.

[Laughing]

Question: Yeah.

Question: There is no character that’s coming from the entertainment industry. Is it because none of those would survive after that time?

Dave Erickson: No. It’s funny because – no. We went through – Robert [Kirkman] and I went through the process where I would [laugh] I would write a lot of shit and I send it to him, he would go [laughing]. No. There was. There was actually, there was a couple of characters in the first, in the early incarnations, that were – and I think the feeling was and I ultimately agreed that it was an easy place to go. A little bit too expected and it begged for parity. It was the right move not to go in that direction. It’s not to say that that doesn’t happen in the future, but as it is right now.

So the thing about the Los Angeles that we’re representing on the show, it’s East LA. There’s a specific neighborhood, which is very close to the school we shot at in the pilot. The hospital – there’s a hospital, so I mean it all has a very un-Hollywood look to it and that was what was important to us as well. So you don’t see – you’re not going to see Hollywood Boulevard. You’re not going to see the Hills. You’re not going to see the West Side. It’s primarily East Side. The thing about, one of the great things, our director, Adam Davidson captured, he’s from Los Angeles, born and raised. He has a beautiful gift for really getting a sense of place and because our show, we’re catching up, the audience is well ahead of all of our characters, which is a big part of attention for this season is waiting for them to get it and to walk in that fine line where the audience never wants to just slap them and say, wake up, which I think we’ve done.

But it’s like every time you cut your wide shot, you’re looking at these stacks, hill sites, all of these homes, like, one on top another, you’re looking at these packed freeways. You’re looking at – and the audience is going to watch those. They’re great because they bring in the city and they keep the show cinematic and open, but from a story telling perspective, it’s like every person that’s watching the show is thinking they are all going to die, [laugh] and that dude doesn’t know yet. It’s working for us on a number of levels.

Question: I have to ask about casting. Plus, Frank, probably, well, is he kind of new to this role?

Dave Erickson: Any casting process, except for Frank because Frank came in pretty easily. It takes – I was just looking for actors that I hadn’t seen. Cliff [Curtis] has done television, but he hasn’t done a ton of television and I got very lucky because I was just going through, just trying to think of people that I admired and the people whose work I’d seen and I’ve seen Cliff in “Three Kings” and I’ve seen Cliff in “Training Day.” And then I got to watch “The Dark Horse.”

Question: That is new.

Dave Erickson: Yeah.

Question: Yes.

Dave Erickson: And it’s like, he’s a chameleon. He can do anything.

Question: Yeah.

Dave Erickson: And he has this deeply, empathetic quality and for this character because this is like he’s really the moral compass of the show and he’s just so grounded and so rooted and so honest in his performances, so we just got lucky. We Skyped and he was, I think, he was shooting and he was actually playing Christ.

Question: Yeah.

Dave Erickson: I think he [Cliff Curtis] was finishing that film. He was just incredibly gracious because we put him through – he had to fly out on a day’s notice and come to read and he had fly out again on another day’s notice to sit down and do a read with Kim [Dickens] and he was just lovely. And the second, we were talking about it before, the second we saw Kim and Cliff read opposite each other it just – it felt right, in the same way, when we had Frank [Dillane] read with Alycia [Debnam-Carey], it just felt like we had a family and there was, like, the chemistry which is really, really tricky. You hear about that, so many shows they shoot the pilot and then it’s just not working and they start re-casting and that was never ever a question or issue for us at all. Everybody just kind of clicked. And so he’s playing – we’ve also wanted to make sure we were just letting him bring some more of his own identity to the show, so he is of Maori descent. That’s the character. He’s been at America for – he was born and raised in States. I think it’s the first time he’s actually, aside from shooting in New Zealand, where he’s not – there is a quality to him, which is something I actually want to be talked a lot about, just his tats and his experience in his life and my hope is that it will continue to inform the show and inform the character over the next few seasons. No. They had a short answer. He’s awesome, so that was it.

[laughing]

Question: I think it is.

Dave Erickson: Yeah.

Question: If I got it right, there was long running in the alley in one of the teasers. Are you? What are you running from?

Frank Dillane: Ahh.

Dave Erickson: What do you think he’s running from?

[laughing]

Frank Dillane: My girlfriend.

[laughs]

Question: The husband of your girlfriend.

Frank Dillane: Yeah.

[laughs]

Dave Erickson: Yeah. Why do you think I’m running?

[laughs]

Question: How do you do a show that’s part of this huge world that it is “The Walking Dead” and future exist, and the people love it – how do you take this world and turn into something new because it is completely different from what we’ve been hearing and reading and all the things that you’ve been saying about this particular show? It’s going to feel like more like a drama. We’re going to get to know the characters and I’m assuming you’re going to make us fall in love with them and knowing that they’re going to die.

[laughs]

Question: So how do you do that? How do you take these challenges especially because there’s a big fan base?

Dan Erickson: It’s starting with, fundamentally, it’s starting with a family drama and the problems that the family has. Robert [Kirkman], at some point, said we’re just talking about “The Walking Dead” and talking about the quality of the comic and just the show at large. It’s your parents just got divorced, oh, there are zombies. He didn’t get out to the prom, oh, there are zombies. I think that’s, in principle, I think, there are elements of that in the comic and in the original show, but we’re able to, because we stepped back a little bit from it, we’re actually able to establish those dynamics, and really, cement them early on.

So it is about Frank’s [Dillane] character has a very specific problem and something he’s been dealing with for a long time. He will continue to deal with it throughout the season and throughout the show. It’s about Cliff’s [Curtis] character who’s divorced from Liza, played by Elizabeth Rodriguez, and he’s trying to bring his son into Madison’s family with Frank’s character and Alycia [Debnam-Carey] and just the everyday we’re dealing with, the difficulty of that. What does that mean? And what’s great is all of those problems, which I’ve dealt with in my own blended family are actually, they actually work in the world strangely.

It’s in the simple things. It’s like, okay, Dad, I know you want to go back and get your girlfriend. But why can’t we just go? Why can’t we be our own family? Why do we have to go on and blend and be with that family? And it’s putting those characters in this position where who do I save? Who do I love? Is it my biological son? Or do I owe it to – I have fallen in love with this woman. One of the wonderful things I think about the show is that between Cliff and Kim [Dickens], Madison and Travis, there is true love there.

They really do care about each other. You see them together and you want them to stay together and it’s the pressure of the apocalypse as they come that will create fractures of issues and that’s – but there is a love story, fundamentally, it’s a love story there. It’s a love story. It’s really pointing the story between Frank’s character and Madison, his mother as well.

So that, to me, is sort of the heart and soul of it. As long as we can hold true to the problems, those conflicts that we’ve established early on and continue to build on top of those rather than start with the supply run episode, which we will have to do because we have to get supplied. As long as we do that first, I think we’ll be okay. I think it will really be these characters, and yes, and the danger that they made. We will love them and they may die. That’ll help too.

[laughs]

Question: Thank you so much.

Dave Erickson: Thanks guys. I appreciate it.

Question: Thanks.

Fear The Walking Dead premieres on August 23rd! Looking for more conversations with the talent? Here you go:

-Rubén Blades and Mercedes Mason
-Kim Dickens and Alycia Debnam-Carey
-Cliff Curtis and Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd
-Elizabeth Rodriguez and Lorenzo James Henrie