Email
PrintDavid Milch
Live From Hollywood
EnlargeCowboys & Indians: As creator and producer of Deadwood, you must be very happy that the entire series is now available on Blu-ray. Do you think sales of the box set might encourage HBO to finally produce one or two TV-movies to wrap up the story line?
David Milch: I wish I could say that I was optimistic. I would very much like to do it. But I think it might still be a year or two away. There are a lot of variables at play, so I couldn’t guarantee one way or the other. But I’m very, very glad that it’s out on Blu-ray.
C&I: When you first proposed Deadwood as a series, did you encounter any resistance from bean counters or decision makers who felt westerns weren’t popular anymore?
David: Absolutely. And an equal amount of resistance once it came out, because it wasn’t the sort of western that people remembered from when they were growing up. My feeling about both of those issues is, the materials have to make their own claim on a viewer’s imagination. It’s not because a genre is popular, it’s not because a genre has fallen into disfavor. So I was grateful for the opportunity to investigate these characters at that moment in time without thinking, Well, what is the public going to say? If you start to think that way, you’re in trouble. Your first loyalty is to the imaginative integrity of the world you’re trying to portray.
C&I: Of course, a lot of traditionalists complained about the vulgar language of your characters.
David: That’s true. But if you look back to westerns in the ’30s and ’40s, the language and the conventions had more to do with — well, you know what the Hays Code was, right?
C&I: That was the Motion Picture Production Code, the set of industry censorship guidelines that was in effect from the 1930s until 1968.
David: Correct. Well, because of that, the language and the conventions of westerns had more to do with the Hays Code than with the way people really spoke at that time in the West. One of the chief stipulations of the Hays Code was that any obscenity in word, thought, or deed was an offense against the laws of God and man, and would not be tolerated in our films. And my research into the West — rather than into the conventions of old movies — suggested to me that given the absence of statutory law, before turning to outright physical violence, people resorted to violence in language, which included profanity.
C&I: Still, a lot of people who grew up watching, say, the westerns of John Ford had a tough time dealing with the gritty realism of Deadwood.
David: I think we all develop an affection and loyalty to the first group of conventions to which we give allegiance. People who grew up in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and so forth, they experienced the works of John Ford and other great westerns as a reality. Those stories were experienced as a reality. But that does not mean that they correspond to the way that life was lived 150 years ago. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for their allegiance to those conventions. And I’d be grateful if they didn’t begrudge what I feel are deserved allegiances to other storytelling conventions.
C&I: When you were first casting Deadwood, you must have figured it would rise or fall depending on who played Al Swearengen, right?
David: There’s no question, and it’s no secret — it’s actually a testimony to how wrong I can be sometimes — that I very much resisted the idea of casting Ian McShane when it was first presented. I had originally written the role with Ed O’Neill in mind. Ed and I had worked on a cop show called Big Apple. So when HBO was resistant to that idea, feeling that Ed had appeared on too many network television shows, and proposed Ian, my knee-jerk reaction was not friendly to the idea. And, of course, the minute he walked in, he just sort of took ownership of the role and my imagination. I wish I could be as happy about every other mistake I’ve made in my life as I am about that one.
THE TAB
OFF TO THE RACES: David, who owns several thoroughbred racehorses, has teamed with producer-director Michael Mann for his next HBO project, Luck, a contemporary drama set in the world of horse racing. The series, which began production in fall 2010, features an all-star cast led by Dustin Hoffman.
TOUGH TALK: Long before Deadwood, David shocked TV viewers with NYPD Blue, which he cocreated with Steven Bochco. “Again,” he says, “I think I was true to my experience, in terms of the way the cops that I met spoke.”
