CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 1/15/10

Swords, Sandals, and Swearing:
Spartacus: Blood and Sand's
Steven S. DeKnight

BY DAVID WHARTON

Warning: During our discussion of foul-mouthed gladiators, the language does get a little salty.

With its series adaptation of 2004's award-winning Crash, Starz had clearly set its mind on following in the footsteps of HBO and Showtime and becoming a home for original scripted entertainment. Their latest offering premieres tonight, a bloody, 300-inspired take on the story of Spartacus. Heading up Spartacus: Blood and Sand as showrunner is television veteran Steven S. DeKnight, known for his work on Joss Whedon's series stretching from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dollhouse. While DeKnight is having a blast steering this graphic-novel-style take on ancient Roman gladiators, he almost didn't take the job. Executive producers Rob Tapert, Josh Donen, and Sam Raimi had already sold the concept to Starz when DeKnight's agent told him the network wanted to meet with him about a gladiator show they were developing—no more details than that. "My gut reaction was, 'Starz? I'm on network TV, why would I want to go to Starz?' Then I remembered I'd had the same reaction years ago, where I said, 'Why would I want to be on FX?' Then The Shield came out." DeKnight took the meeting and hit it off with the network and producers, but at the time he was prepping to direct an episode of Dollhouse and couldn't be available as soon as they wanted. They parted ways, but a few weeks later they approached DeKnight again and he took the job.
 
Anxious to explore the creative freedom of cable—and really, how often do you get the chance to work on a gladiator show?—DeKnight was eager but hesitant once he learned that the concept was a retelling of the Spartacus story. "My first reaction was I love the Kubrick film and I don't know how we could improve on that," says DeKnight. EP Rob Tapert soon explained that the idea was to back the story up a bit, because almost nothing is known about the historical Spartacus prior to his escape from Batiatus' gladiator school in Capua. This series would explore those origins of who the man was before his name entered history. "At least for the first season it's Spartacus Begins," jokes DeKnight. "We are telling the whole story, but we're telling it 13 hours in a chunk over five or six years. We need to back it up a bit and really explore the man."
 
With that concept decided, the question was just where to begin the story. "Do we start when he's already in the gladiator school? We all agreed we should do the first episode as sort of an origin story," recalls the writer. As he began researching the historical Spartacus, DeKnight was surprised at how little information there is about the man. "There's about 40 pages of scraps throughout history referencing Spartacus. You can read it in about an hour and a half." From these sparse kernels of information, DeKnight set out to add some meat to the skeleton of history.
 
Early on DeKnight and his writers decided to couch Spartacus' origin in a love story, which sees the Thracian warrior abandoning his duties in the Roman auxiliary after a general betrays him. Soon he and his wife are captured and sold into slavery. While DeKnight acknowledges he's heard some criticism of this element being too similar to Gladiator, he points out that Gladiator itself borrowed heavily from the true story of Spartacus. Moreover, Spartacus' wife serves as an emotional anchor and a driving force. "We went round and round about, 'What does Spartacus want to get back to?' There's nothing like the love story. There's someone you love, and you will do anything to get back to her. It's Last of the Mohicans. Despite all the violence and the sex, there are strong undertones of romance in this series."
 
When figuring out just who their protagonist was to be, DeKnight says they ran into something he calls the Superman/Clark Kent problem. "It gets very difficult to write for your hero if he's perfect. Kirk Douglas' portrayal in Kubrick's classic film is the most familiar version of the character, but as DeKnight points out, he is more or less an iconic hero from the very start. "Kirk Douglas was very much hero from the moment he bit that Roman guard's ankle." With (hopefully) five or six seasons of story to tell, DeKnight's Spartacus needed to begin in a less noble incarnation. "He doesn't always do the right thing, and often he'll do the wrong thing for the right reason," says DeKnight. "And there are consequences. He goes down a bad path."

One element already setting tongues a-wagging is the show's unabashed embrace of profanity, hyper-stylized violence, and nudity. DeKnight jokes that he may have had a bit too much fun in the first episode, playing with elements previously verboten during his years on network TV, but he adds that the profanity in particular is the result of a concerted effort to find a balance between stylized dialogue, clarity, and some semblance of historical accuracy. "We're trying to find the right balance between an antiquated way of speaking that also has modern undertones," he says. "It's not Shakespearean; it's not modern. I call if Deadwood-lite." DeKnight was trained as a playwright, and he says that in his first couple of drafts the dialogue erred too much in favor of the Shakespearean. "It was hysterical, because most of the notes on the pilot script were, 'I don't understand what they're saying!'" admits DeKnight with a chuckle.
 
Developing the show's dialogue style was a challenge rife with surrealistic moments. DeKnight recalls the show's historical consultants sending him a two-page document on which profanities would have been in use during the era, and he also ran up against a network wanting to be edgy...but not too edgy. "There are certain words they've given me a limit on," says DeKnight. "I've got a two-cunt limit, which is one of the funniest notes I've ever gotten." Despite a whole new toy box of vocabulary to play with inside the cable landscape, DeKnight is still very particular about how profanity is used on the show, and also who uses it. While many an f-bomb is dropped over the course of the season, he points out that Spartacus never once says it. Rather than just being scattershot, the harsh dialogue is used consistent with character. "I think the one that curses most is Batiatus, played by John Hannah," says the writer. "He's a Roman, but he's a guy in the middle. He's a businessman on hard times. He wants to be one of the elite, but he's not. He's a little more coarse."
 
Having come up working with and learning from Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse, DeKnight has nothing but praise for his mentor. "Joss has an incredible ability to develop characters that are phenomenal and engaging. He also has an incredible ability to slip in something extremely serious in the funniest of moments, or something extremely funny in the most serious of moments." He also cites one important Whedon truism he has applied to Spartacus: if anyone's ever happy, bad things are about to happen. With a show where dialogue is so important and given so much thought, DeKnight says he remembers one of the first things Whedon ever taught him on the subject. After handing in his very first script on Buffy, Whedon told him he was trying a little too hard on the dialogue. "He read it and said, 'Some of this dialogue is so fancy it speaks itself.' And he told me two words I'll never forget: clarity and emotion above all else. It's all about people's desires and fears and what they want. That's what drives the show."
 
Perhaps the most important lesson he took away from Whedon now that he's running his own show is to create a relaxed and fun environment inside the writers' room. "I've been in writers' rooms where it's like a death sentence. Nobody feels like they can relax and be themselves and express their ideas. I want people to feel like they can throw out the most ridiculous, horrible idea ever, and nobody's going to get upset. There may be some good-natured ribbing, but I make it clear to my writers, they're more than welcome to rib me as well. We're all equal in the room."
 
When asked what he looks for when hiring new writers, DeKnight repeats an old adage taken to heart by every writer worth their salt: you've got 10 pages to wow him. "What I look for is writing that excites me," he says. Staff writer Miranda Kwok was hired off a House spec script she wrote. "I don't care what genre it is," says DeKnight. "It can be a procedural, it can be a fantasy, it can be sci-fi, as long as it's well done and has engaging dialogue and characters."

David Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He would like any cross-wielding Romans to know that he is most definitely not Spartacus.



Spartacus: Blood and Sand courtesy Starz

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