Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2009-06-26

Interview:
We had the pleasure of speaking with Alan Ball, the creator and writer for HBO's True Blood. He spoke about the second season, Anna and Stephen's real-life relationship, and the future direction of the series. Here's part two of our two part interview (Part One):

With Sookie and Bill's relationship being the core of the show, how do you keep the complications seem natural and not just contrived? How do you do that as a writer?

Alan Ball: Given the source material, there's a lot going on. This year Sookie goes to Dallas to help Eric find this missing vampire, and ultimately we actually broke down the timeline of the entire season. And season 2 takes place in 12 days, and when a lot of that time is spent running for your lives or trying not to get killed or trying to get past this or that obstacle that keeps you from each other, it's not really hard. They don't really have time to run into the same kind of relationship things that us mere mortals do. Like "You know, I really hate it when you do that," and "I wish you would-". You know, that kind of thing. They're basically trying to just get through the day without getting killed.

Now that the show's a bona fide hit, are you feeling more pressure or less pressure?

Alan Ball:I don't really think about those things. I feel like that is a real trap, because I just really try to do the best work that I can do and stay out of the results. I'm glad people are watching the show; I always thought that it was a show that a lot of people would have fun with. But, I don't feel more pressure, and I really work very hard to stay in a little bubble, in that regard. Because otherwise, you'd just go crazy. It doesn't help.

I want to talk about the characters like Tara and Jessica that really weren't a part of the book, per se. You've done such a wonderful job weaving in all of these different stories with this ensemble. What are some of the things you're trying to explore with the characters that you're straying from what the book did? What do you want to explore with those kinds of characters?

Alan Ball: The process that we work with in the room, is very organic, so we never set out and say, like, "Ok, we want to explore this," or "Let's create a character in which we can explore that." Certainly Tara does exist in the books, but she's not African American and she doesn't show up until season 2. Thinking about Tara, I did think, "Well, we need another strong woman who is one of our core group of characters." And I think it's Louisiana, let's explore this sort of racial make up of that region, and also this is a small town in Louisiana where they still do things like hang nooses from trees at high schools and that's based on racial tension. I think it would be silly to do a show set in a small town in Louisiana and just have Caucasian characters. I wanted Tara to be-Tara, definitely, in the books, she does have an alcoholic mother. She was Sookie's friend, but I wanted to really explore a really strong friendship of two kind of outcasts.

Then Jessica- once we decided to make Bill the guy who stakes Longshadow instead of Eric, which is the way it is in the book, it just felt like it would be really interesting for him to have to do something that he'd never, ever wanted to do; the worst punishment for him would have to be to have turn someone else into a vampire. For him, that was the biggest tragedy of his life. And then once we had a girl who came from a very sheltered home-schooled background and plucked her out of that and put her in this entirely new environment, with entirely new powers, that just opened itself up to all kinds of interesting situations.