Transcript
Intro: Hello. You’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America, East. In each episode you’ll hear from the writers of your favorite films and television series. They’ll take you behind the scenes, go deep into the writing and production process, and explain how they got their project from the page to the screen.
Today, our guest is Danny McBride, the creator, writer, and executive producer of The Righteous Gemstones, whose second season is now on HBO and HBO Max. The Righteous Gemstones tells the story of a world-famous televangelist family with a long tradition of deviance, greed, and charitable work. The interview is conducted by Derek Lawrence, writer for Entertainment Weekly and host of SiriusXM’s The Filmography. Here is the interview.
Derek Lawrence: Hey, how’s everyone doing out there? Me and Danny are going to talk and then we’ll answer some of your questions, [inaudible 00:01:03] some As for those Qs. Feel free to add the hashtag #EliGemsHome, right Danny? We could…
Danny McBride: Yes!
Derek Lawrence: Let’s go viral with that, you know?
Danny McBride: That would be appropriate.
Derek Lawrence: Well, yeah, thanks so much, Danny, for chatting. Always excited to talk Gemstones with you. I assume… Are you deep in construction right now on McBride’s Landing? Is that where we’re talking to you from?
Danny McBride: Yes, exactly. We’ve created a wonderful resort here. Yes. Exactly.
Derek Lawrence: So yeah, excited. I know you’re in a bit of pre-production on season three, getting ready to start shooting that, but we’re going to get kind of deep into talking about season two and just the unique, I guess, creative process that went into this one.
I guess, starting from the top, we’ll get into all the delays and maybe the changes you had to make, but when you set out on moving into season two with the Gemstones, what was the initial idea and thought process for this season?
Danny McBride: Well, one of the things that attracted me to doing Gemstones was just the idea that, from Eastbound & Down it was such a one-man show, and then adding Walton in Vice Principals and Edi Patterson and sort of expanding that and creating these other characters, and creating a story that centered around more than just one crazy individual, it just felt appealing. So with Gemstones I really wanted to just tackle an ensemble. I wanted to tell the story of a family and have a lot of different personalities in there and a lot of… you know, just a lot of different material to be mined in the seasons to come.
And so, it was always the thought process that in the second season we would start to make good on that and start exploring and pulling back some of the layers on these other characters. So Eli felt like an appropriate place to start. We always sort of had the idea that, yeah, that we would start to learn a little bit more about who this guy was and how he got here.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah, how much of that with the Eli backstory were you sitting on, even coming into the show, and then how much of it was just stuff you guys came up with as you were building season two?
Danny McBride: You know, it was a combo of it. As we… You know, like… For some reason, I always imagined that Eli’s story was that he was an old wrestler. I’ve always been fascinated with Memphis wrestling. I just think it’s a very… That late ’60s/’70s Memphis wrestling, there’s just a lot of cool stories out of there of what was happening. I don’t know how familiar you are with that, but… I don’t know. I grew up as a kid watching wrestling in that particular time period. It always just felt a little fascinating to me.
And in my head always was bouncing around some concept about enforcers who were wrestlers in Memphis and that they were wrapped up with the Dixie mafia and, I don’t know, it was just a story that was always bouncing around in my head and as we started opening up Eli and trying to figure out where he came from, suddenly that concept started to feel like it made sense here, you know? Like it would be a fun layer, a fun world to sort of connect to Eli.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, I will say I wasn’t very familiar with the Memphis wrestling scene, but now I feel like I’m more fascinated but also scared at the same time after seeing-
Danny McBride: Well, what always got me into it is because there’s this very specific moment in Memphis wrestling where basically whatever league you had, you owned all, you had all the big venues to go to and so that was your territory. And there was a war for territory in Memphis around this time period, and basically it was storytellers that had to go head-to-head. It was like which league could create the best villains and characters and whoever got the most seats got to keep Memphis as their territory. I’ve always been fascinated by that part of Memphis, that you have this, these fake fights that are kind of being orchestrated by a writer at the end of the day. It felt-
Speaker 4: You want to try to do it, Bill?
Danny McBride: … there was something about that that I just always loved.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. Obviously, as a professional TV watcher, I guess I’ve noticed over the years it feels like to me season two is a lot of times when a good series goes to great. There always seems like a big jump going into season two. I mean, like I said, you’ve made now three season twos of television over the last decade-plus. What is it, you think, about going into a second season that kind of allows people… I’m sure it’s, you know, now that the world’s built, you can kind of run with it from there, but what does a season two allow with opening up your, kind of, the world?
Danny McBride: You know, the thing that’s kind of fun about a season two is that everyone knows what it is now. You know what I mean? When you’re making the first season, the showrunner might have the concept of what it is, and then as you make it everyone else starts to kind of figure it out. But having that full season for everyone to see how it all came together, what the vision was between the different directors, between how it’s scored, between what performances we used or didn’t use, it feels like there’s just a level of understanding that comes when you start making that second season, and we’re just really lucky that our actors are all just game. And they’re so much fun, from Goodman to DeVine, to Edi, everybody is just having fun. So I think that getting into that second season, that just sort of became the mission, it was just, give these people more fun. Let these actors get a little wilder. Let’s tap into what they’re good at and expand it.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Eastbound was kind of… obviously you had a great supporting cast, but a lot of the times that was changing year to year. Obviously, Steve was a regular, but then other than that, people were coming and going. Vice Principals, you and Walton but then also bringing other people too, Edi included. And then this one, this is probably the biggest ensemble you’ve had on any of your shows. What’s it like making sure in 10 episodes you’re satisfying each character and giving each actor their own couple moments?
Danny McBride: You know, that’s been the most difficult thing about writing the show, is that HBO still is concerned about running times and stuff. These things still air at programmed times, where on some of the other streamers maybe things just… the running times don’t matter as much. But it still does matter there. And we appreciate being able to air that way. We like being able to premiere at 10:00 and people have to wait for it.
But I think with that you have to kind of play the rules a little bit; and so this show’s tricky in that regard because there’s so many characters to service and you really do have to plan the season out almost like a mix tape or something. You have to figure out, all right, we could hit Baby Billy hard here, and then we’ll have real estate to go to someone else here, and then we can come back to Baby Billy here or Judy here. And so, you do try to figure out how to track everyone and how to keep everybody alive so you don’t just sort of end up in these scenes where it’s just… you’re just checking off; like, all right, there’s one scene with every character and all your favorite characters are just nodding and standing around while one person talks. Trying to make it feel like their stories are still alive.
And that’s the trickiest part about writing the show. The way we write the show is we write it all together at once. We keep open everything. I mean, I’m on the last two episodes right now of the third season, and of course the first draft of those come in, and now we’re going back and rewriting all this shit in the first half. And so, I’m sure it’s not uncommon, but that’s just sort of how we operate, is you’re just constantly trying to figure out how you keep these characters alive. Sometimes it’s taking an episode heavy with one character and then figuring out how to spread those beats out over a few episodes. You know, it’s almost like playing Jenga or some shit. It’s like we’re always just trying to get the tower stacked just precisely.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. You mentioned, I feel like, the scripts are never locked for you. But you probably went to maybe the extreme with season two, just… I know you guys were, what, three days into filming on season two when all the COVID shutdowns hit? And then you were… Everyone’s just at home and you, you probably went… Take me back to the moment where you decide, “Okay, I’ve played enough board games with the family. I need some me time. I’m going to go crack open these Gemstones scripts.” What made you decide that you were kind of going to… Because it feels like you rewrote, you and the team, rewrote a lot of that season. So just take me through that decision and then that process of rewriting.
Danny McBride: Well, I’ll take as much time as I have to write. To me, it would never be finished. And so, when I realized that we were going to be sitting on our ass for most of 2020, I really wanted to make sure that I didn’t spiral and go into the mouth of madness and just move commas and periods around for fucking six months on the scripts. So I forced myself just to push the scripts away and not to look at them. And as we sort of were waiting to see if we were going to be able to shoot that year, or what we were going to be able to do, it became apparent as the year went on that COVID was a much bigger deal and that we wouldn’t be shooting that year.
So we talked about, well, maybe we shoot something smaller that just keeps the audience connected to these characters. And so I actually went and wrote an hour-and-a-half Christmas special that sort of followed Jesse and Gideon in Haiti. And we were going to shoot it in July of 2020, but as soon as we were getting ready to, the numbers in South Carolina started blossoming and it just didn’t seem like it was appropriate or safe for anybody, so we put it to bed.
And then after that, it became apparent we weren’t going to be shooting again until 2021. So in that fall, I finally, after not looking at the scripts, I just said, “I’m going to open them back up now that I’ve had some time, and just sort of see how they sit with me.” And it was kind of incredible because I felt like the scripts were good to go when we shot, and then after taking those few months and not looking at any of them and then coming back and reading them again, it became very apparent of what was working and what wasn’t working, and what I wanted to try to challenge or not. I don’t know, it was cool because you don’t really usually get that when you’re writing for television. You’re writing to production. Everyone’s asking for pages now, now, now. So, we’re lucky to just get the scripts finished. It was kind of awesome to have them finished and then to have that extra time to really kind of sit with them and to really make sure that everything was working as efficiently as it could.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah, what was that process like? I know you have… You said you kind of have a small team that you’ve been working with for a long time. I know Edi’s in the mix too. So I know you guys were on Zoom, probably, for a couple months just… What was that like, cracking those open and then rewriting and doing what you wanted to do with them now?
Danny McBride: Well, I didn’t tell all them that I was planning on rewriting them all. I had just kind of opened them up and one day I sat down and read through everything we had and then just sort of made notes. And then I kind of sat on that for a few days and then I kind of just drafted up a document of what I would do in season two redux and just laid out all the points, and called up the writers like, “Listen, I’m thinking about diving back into these scripts again. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing.” And everyone was game. They all kind of read it like, “Yeah, this doesn’t sound like we’re being crazy. It does sound like it’s fixes for things that weren’t working great.”
Yeah, and everyone just dived back in and we did it completely on Zoom. That was the first time we had done that because the previous season we were in a room and, I don’t know, I kind of liked the writers’ room on the Zoom. I thought it was kind of, I don’t know, efficient. You miss out on some of that banter that you have in the room, but you can spit out a few ideas and then boom, you’re instantly writing them and you’re off to the races.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah, it feels like you probably save a lot of time too. You’re like, “All right, we don’t got to force it. We could all just log off and log back on later if we want to.”
Danny McBride: Yeah.
Derek Lawrence: You mentioned the Christmas special. So are we just… Is that still somehow maybe possible or have we just like… Is that just the untold Gemstones Christmas Special that only you and a select few will ever know what happened?
Danny McBride: I think that’s it. It’s just the untold. I feel like the story has moved past there. It was going to be sort of a bridge between season one and two, but I feel like now that story is not needed.
Derek Lawrence: So obviously, to go backwards with Eli in season two, and you have… In the first season, you had the interlude episode. You have another interlude episode in season two mixed in with other flashbacks throughout the season. What do you love about writing those interlude episodes, and how is that… how do you guys approach that differently, if you do, than the regular episodes?
Danny McBride: You know, with the interlude in the first season, we weren’t sure if we were going to ever do that. We had gotten to episode four in the first season and we were ahead of schedule. It was the only time that we’ve ever been ahead of schedule. We actually had like… I was a week ahead of where I wanted to be. So John Carcieri and Jeff Fradley, the other EPs who I write the show with, we were sort of just joking around about how it would be fun to see what this used to be like. What was it like with Aimee-Leigh and Eli? What was it like with Baby Billy? We’re just writing all this stuff in the present, but what’s it all based in? So we kind of were like, “Let’s just write an episode just so that we know what that is, and it doesn’t have to be in the show or anything. It just can be us understanding what this is.”
And it was funny, we came up with that idea at like 10:00 in the morning. We outlined that episode and were done by 11:00 in the morning, and we broke up the scenes between us three and then we wrote them all independently and then we just sort of combined them together just to get a rough draft to read it; and we did that in four hours, and then what we combined was what we shot. We never went back and rewrote it or anything. It just… the story literally just came out from us and it made sense to us and it made the show make sense to us. It was kind of cool. It helped us, and it was a fun way to crack it.
And so, we’ve kept that. And kind of our only rule with it is that we don’t want to ever outline what that interlude is. We want to write the show, and then sort of when you get to the middle, then let yourself think about what happened before. So you’re not trying to be too clever by connecting too much stuff; that things maybe tangentially sort of connect thematically and in subtler ways, I guess. But it’s been kind of fun because you’ll start writing the season, you’ll kind of get to that point in the middle of the season where you’re trying to figure out what the hell it’s all adding up to, and it’s kind of nice at that point to press pause and go back somewhere deeper and fill in the blanks.
For us, those interludes are… I mean, this is just kind of in our heads, but it is a generational story and a lot of religion we look at as a way of… it’s just one generation telling the next generation what the rules are, what you’re supposed to do. You know? So for us, being able to tell this story where you’re seeing how different generations handled this sort of profession, it just, I don’t know, it felt like it made sense and it felt like it was what it’s about. It’s about passing things down to your kids, good and bad. And so it felt appropriate to sort of get into that.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. I rewatched the season two interlude episode ahead of talking to you, and I will say, I think maybe the hardest I’ve laughed in a while was Baby Billy telling young Kelvin that Baby Billy’s wife hated Kelvin’s haircut. Just that… That was a thing that maybe I missed the first time around, but I just… It kind of killed me. It’s those little things that you guys keep in. Is some of that stuff just things that make you guys laugh and you’re like, “We’ve just got to sneak these little things in even if we’re the only ones getting anything out of it”?
Danny McBride: A hundred percent. I mean, I feel like when you’re watching the stuff that Jody, David, and I do together, everything is constantly us hitting a spitball against the back of each other’s heads; just throwing something in there just to make our buddies laugh or this sense… I don’t know. Just pushing each other’s buttons creatively, I guess.
Derek Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, as someone who has watched the Ashley Schaeffer outtakes from Eastbound season one 50 times, twice in the last year, I’d be curious how much improv is done on Gemstones. What’s your philosophy when it comes to that? Is it like, “All right, we’ll do this how it’s scripted and then everyone will get a chance to kind of add something if they want to”? How do you approach that on this show?
