Do you have a sense of hesitation with a TV spin-off from a movie?
Brian Grazer: “I produced the movie and worked on the movie for about 13 years and struggled through five different directors until I got together with Pete Berg who I felt would, in order of priority, understood the movie, understood the culture of Texas, understood that it was about boys and girls’ identity in that period and thirdly was about football. He really got the culture so well, and I have some anxiety as a movie producer about having a movie then become a TV series. I’m very happy with the shows and I thought Pete did the most outstanding job with the pilot, but there’s some tension on that.”
Peter Berg: “I think Brian, if there is tension or anxiety about it, it’s recognizing that we really were very happy with the film and happy with the pilot, and we’ve been very happy with the way the show started to unfold but we recognize the inherent limitations of television production. We’re working really hard to try and maintain a certain level of quality. I think as long as we can continue to do that, we’re very comfortable with the transition from film to television.”
Kyle Chandler: “With both of what Brian and Peter said from our side, trying to reach that quality of the optimum job that we’re looking to do as well though we’ve got a certain process that’s allowing us to try to capture that which is giving us as the actors an immense amount of joy and challenges and responsibilities, but it’s a process of all coming together and figuring out from our side that quality is reachable. That’s our goal so we’ve got this tremendous challenge, but it’s there. We see the light so for our side, it’s just amazing. It’s an amazing challenge.”
Connie Britton: “And having worked in a lot of television for me in the past, and now working on this show, the process is so substantially different. And also having worked on the movie Friday Night Lights and having seen how great the pilot came out in comparison to the movie, which was also amazing, it’s very clear that this is a different TV experience.”
The movie was set in Texas as is the show, however the name of the town’s been changed. Why?
Peter Berg: “I think even though we did change the setting from Odessa to a fictitious town, and we did update the show so it’s not set in 1988, at its core, it is a show that certainly has high school football as a big component and Texas as a big component. We thought that to shoot that somewhere else, say Vancouver where maybe it’s a little bit cheaper, even Los Angeles, would hurt our ability to maintain authenticity.”
Did the state make it more attractive to film there?
Peter Berg: “The city of Austin has been very cooperative. One doesn’t get the feeling that they need [TV] production but they certainly welcome it. They don’t have the tax breaks that other states like Louisiana and Arizona have now but in terms of cooperating, the city has been very cooperative and the high school football program has been very cooperative also. And I think that that’s as much a reflection of their love of the book and the film as it is their need to have a film crew clogging up traffic five days a week in their town.”
How big is the fictional town?
Peter Berg: “It’s probably similar to Odessa. It’s probably a town of, I don't know what the population of Odessa is. It’s somewhere around 100,000, maybe more. It’s a good medium-sized Texas city. It’s very important to not present this in any kind of - this is not a small dusty, rural, Texas town that’s so far off the track that no one knows where it is. This is a contemporary city that gets into issues that certainly are not unique to Texas. This is a modern city. Maybe not an upper-class city but certainly a modern, functioning American city.”
