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| Interview conducted by Lauren Berkley |
The season finale of BBC America's Orphan Black airs this Saturday, June 1, and it has already been renewed for a second season.
I spoke to executive producers Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier about the challenges of a serialized show, how all the clone scenes are shot, and taking their love of coffee to the extreme.
FOG!: How did you come up with the idea for Orphan Black?
David Fortier: Well, it was John Fawcett and Graeme Manson who came up with the idea. We optioned the script that Graham wrote 4 years ago. I guess they had been working on the script for quite a long time-- it was originally a feature idea and then it got workshopped at the Canadian Film Center when Graham was a showrunner-in-residence and they read a bunch of scripts. When they both had a little bit of time in between gigs, they decided that they would try and get it up off the ground and they started going to different production companies. We had been trying to work with these guys for a number of years, we were friends, and we worked with them as writer and director respectively, but not as showrunners.
So they asked Ivan and I to read it and we read it on a plane to London about 4 years ago and loved it, and as soon as we got off the plane in the cab, we phoned home and said, “Do you whatever you have to do to option this, because we need this script.” That was in 2009 and then from that period on, we began the development process with the two guys and there you have it.
FOG!: Let's backtrack for a second: A lot of people may not understand how the TV industry works, especially from a development, start-to-finish standpoint. Can you briefly tell us what it is you both do?
Ivan Schneeberg: Briefly? [laughs] Well, Dave and I are professional. We started as Executive Producers – we're Creative Producers – of TV shows. We started as showrunners ourselves and then started building a company around ourselves, so that we could make more shows that we were interested in and we effectively built out Temple Street Productions, which is our production company, and it would be like a mini-studio, the equivalent of an American studio, except we don't deficit finance; we have to raise the funding for our shows, so more like an American independent [studio].
We've got about 30 staff now here at Temple Street, many of whom work with us creatively developing different TV shows or for different genres; different things that we're interested in.
Dave and I continue to be the Creative Executive Producers of all of our shows, so any television shows that we make, Dave and I usually make the decision that we want to option them or commission them or work on them. We give notes, creatively, and we approve all the casting. We have in the past done all of the editing in a lot of our shows, as well.
We didn't do that in this case in Orphan Black, we had an editor who did most of the editing with the creative team, but we are creatively accountable for Orphan Black within Temple Street and also to our two broadcasters and our distributor, our worldwide distributor.
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| Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier |