Alex Gansa walks us through Homeland’s first season (Part 4 of 4)
Homeland co-creator Alex Gansa recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the show’s first season, episode by episode. This section of the interview covers episodes 10 through 12, beginning with “Representative Brody” and concluding with “Marine One.” Don’t miss part one, part two, and part three.
“Representative Brody” (Dec. 4, 2011)
Brody decides to run for the House of Representatives. Carrie and Saul attempt to flip the Saudi diplomat to provide intelligence on Abu Nazir’s plot.
The A.V. Club: How did you build the story of them trying to turn the diplomat?
Alex Gansa: Here’s another example of a scene that everybody’s seen a thousand times, and the question was, “What spin do you put on it? How do you make it different? How do you make it interesting?” The way we chose to make this interesting was, the very thing Saul and Carrie think that they have over this guy, and that’s going to be the trump card, doesn’t work. That’s what turned the scene on its head all of a sudden. To me, that’s the best moment in the scene, is when the diplomat says that great Henry Bromell line [“Yes, I like sucking cock… Yummy, yummy, yummy.”], which I’ll never forget, and gets up and walks out of the room. And Saul, who has been completely quiet at that point, worries that Carrie has failed and starts to talk to the diplomat himself, and Carrie shuts him down and calls the diplomat out and turns the tables on the diplomat.
If you have more than one thing going on, a scene is always better, so what’s going on in this scene is that Saul has turned over the interrogation to Carrie and trusted her to do it. Carrie fails. Saul tries to now be the big guy, to step in and take charge of the situation, but Carrie’s not done yet. So the dynamics between Carrie and Saul are just as important as the dynamics between Carrie and the diplomat, and that’s what adds the richness and the complexity to the scene, and makes it feel different and unexpected. And always, whenever you’re writing a scene, whenever you can do something that comes purely from character but that is unexpected, that’s the gold. That’s when you’ve mined something that’s really worthwhile. We set it up, of course, with Carrie and Virgil earlier in that whole scene in which they’re prepping for the interrogation, in which Carrie learns everything she can about the diplomat, so she has something up her sleeve here to pull out and to save the day at the end.
AVC: Carrie pretty openly threatens the diplomat’s daughter here. How much did you want to play around with the idea that she is willing to push some slightly unethical buttons to get what she wants?
AG: Again, to me, speaking from just my own political perspective, there’s nothing unethical about what she does in this scene. And her putting the screws down on this guy, first of all, calling him on the carpet for his homosexuality, it’s gonna exert pressure on him, in terms of his culture, and that’s legitimate. In fact, that’s what these intelligence officers are trained to do: What is a human being’s weakness, and how can we prey on that to get what we want? So that’s where she first applies the pressure. That doesn’t work. Now, she’s got to go to something closer to home, and that’s the relationship this man has with his daughter.
She’s going to use everything she can short of putting the guy on the rack, or attaching electric currents to his testicles, or whatever we did in the past. She’s going to exert whatever pressure she can on this guy, and that’s what she chooses. Whether they would actually go through with it… I imagine they would. I imagine they would have the power to deport this guy. She’s gonna bring whatever advantage she has over this guy to bear in this scene, and that’s what she chooses to do to get what she wants.
AVC: You don’t use torture at all on the show, but it was used often on 24. What do you lose not having that as a storytelling go-to, and what do you gain?
AG: First of all, there was a little bit of coercion that went on in the Hamid thing, with the heavy metal and the changes in temperature, which, I understand they’re not doing that anymore. And the sleep deprivation, they’re not doing that anymore, either. So we may have crossed a line there on some level.
But I think ultimately, what you lose is—look, those torture scenes are the equivalent of pornography. They were on 24, anyway, these scenes where [Jack] Bauer cuts off somebody’s head or finger or whatever. They were the violent pornography of that show, and we were really trying not to be exploitative in that way on this series. And so we had to do things like figure out a more clever way for Carrie to break the diplomat than strapping him to a chair. And I think you lose the immediate visual horror of what torture means, but you gain something a lot more interesting, which is you see how very smart people are able to manipulate others.
AVC: This episode ends with the bomb going off at the fountain. This show takes place in a world where the general public has just learned that one Marine has been turned, and a bomb has gone off in downtown Washington D.C. How do you play what the people of this world who aren’t in the show are feeling in terms of paranoia, without spending too much time on it?
AG: It’s kind of interesting, because in action-thrillers, it’s all about the explosion itself. And in psychological thrillers, like Homeland hopefully was, it’s all about the anticipation and the tension and the anxiety of what happens before the bomb goes off. So truthfully, we weren’t thinking too much about how the event or the bomb going off would impact the community of Washington D.C. And maybe that was a flaw on our parts, because we kind of glossed over it afterward. It’s just Jessica watching a newscast after it. And I imagine that if a bomb did go off in Farragut Square in Washington D.C., it would be a much bigger deal than we made it out to be in our portrayal of it. But we as storytellers were much more concerned about building the anxiety and tension of the moment rather than what happened in the aftermath. Look what happened to Washington D.C., when the sniper was out there killing people. The whole community just caved in on itself.
AVC: As the title reflects, this is an episode that hinges a lot on Brody’s run for Congress. With Manchurian Candidate, that’s something people are aware of. How do you play in that arena without inviting direct comparison?
AG: First of all, I always thought this episode should be called, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” [Laughs.] And not “Representative Brody.” But it was ultimately called “Representative Brody.”
Look, that’s where the show is going next year. Brody pitched to Nazir this idea that he’s going to be able to influence policy in a much more profound way as a Congressman, as a candidate, and we’re just going to have to deal with the fact that that’s going to be more of Brody’s trajectory. We’re never going to be able to top Brody with a suicide vest in a bunker. And I think to go that route again, to have Brody plan another violent attack against America, is just going to feel repetitive. So we’ve got to give him a new mission, and this is his new mission.
AVC: Why would it only occur to Abu Nazir to try and do this after Brody pitches it to him in the finale? Why wouldn’t he already be moving Brody toward this in this episode?
AG: Again, I think it speaks to what Carrie tells Saul, which is, ultimately, that’s not Nazir’s M.O. Nazir’s about explosions and big publicity moves and explosions in markets and suicide bombers and taking out a lot of lives. That’s how he’s prosecuted his war against America, and probably in Iraq, and maybe Israel. So that’s how he’s learned to prosecute the war against his enemies, and not so much in this long game. Not so much the Manchurian Candidate model.
“The Vest” (Dec. 11, 2011)
Carrie suffers a breakdown in the wake of the Farragut Square explosion, and Brody takes his family on a trip to Gettysburg, a trip that results in him procuring a suicide bomb.
AG: We were looking for the most dramatic, the most personal, and the most effective way for Brody to carry out his mission. All the various possibilities: We talked about it being at one of these party conventions; we talked about some sort of Walker-Brody sniper team. Could they take out the vice president just by doing what they did in the field in Iraq? Ultimately, all those things felt kind of soulless, in a way. And the idea that Brody was so committed that he would actually kill himself in the process of this just became more and more compelling to us.
There was a movie called Paradise Now. It’s a really wonderful film about two Palestinians who are recruited to carry out a suicide attack against Israel. The whole movie is about the buildup to the event and the martyrs’ video that they make, and the actual physicality of the bomb, and the proximity of all these explosives against your bare skin, and just the terror of it all, and the brainwashing of it all. Even though it was extreme, and even though there were some big questions in the staff about whether a Marine would actually do this and employ this technique, there were just so many things that vouched in its favor. The most important one, of course, being that the thing could malfunction. So it just put it at such a personal level, and it meant that Brody was gonna have to say goodbye to his family, which was the entire impetus of this episode, that Brody was gonna take his family on this last trip together, and in a way, explain himself, and in a way, say goodbye to each member of his family.
AVC: Were there ever any concerns about how far you can humanize someone who is essentially an enemy of the United States?
AG: That was our goal from the very beginning. If we could make people understand why Brody was doing this, and if we could make people like him, in spite of it. It’s remarkable how many people voice their dismay that he actually didn’t go through with it. At some level, they must have felt he was justified. I don’t think anybody wanted to see Brody die for the sake of Brody dying, because they disliked him, or weren’t intrigued by him, or didn’t want to see what happened to him next. I think that they ultimately found themselves, in a crazy way, rooting for him. It was complicated, because you were also rooting for Carrie. But this episode, “The Vest,” really tried to seal the deal, really tried to show not only the growing certainty that he was actually going to go through with this, but also to really make sure, and to portray and dramatize, that Brody wanted to make sure that his family was going to be okay in the aftermath of it.
AVC: You mentioned that you kept pushing back Carrie’s mental breakdown. When did you finally decide, “We’re going to make it this episode, the next to last”?
AG: Well, it was the last one. We had no choice. [Laughs.] It was this one or nothing. The reason is that the closer to the end we could incapacitate Carrie, the better. Because the more we became certain that Brody was going to go through with what he had planned to do, the better it was to have Carrie sidelined. And what better way to sideline her than to have her have this manic breakdown, and then to have her excommunicated from the CIA, so she would be no longer be able to actually stop him? So that was the impetus for the two stories.
AVC: How much did you look into manic depression?
AG: Oh, we did lots of research. And Claire [Danes], as she did for Temple Grandin and explored [autism], she did the same thing for bipolar [disorder] on this. She really, really did her homework on what it’s like to have a manic episode. Meredith [Stiehm], who wrote most of her stuff in this episode, also has a sister who’s bipolar, and who has experienced these manic episodes. There was a lot of verisimilitude in this.
AVC: Especially in an episode like this, you’re really tossing a lot on the actor. How does it help to have actors who you know are going to be able to handle that sort of thing?
AG: It’s invaluable. In the hands of a lesser actor, the thing wouldn’t have worked.
I actually think all through the course of the season, on a number of fronts. Certainly, obviously with Damian [Lewis] and Claire, they had such tricky things to pull off, and they did with such virtuosity. It’s remarkable. Claire’s performance in this episode, from the minute she steps onscreen, is so nuanced and so heartbreaking and so real. I got a letter from somebody who said she’s bipolar herself, and she said Claire’s performance was so real to her that she worries for Claire’s sanity. Claire is just so in control of her instrument, as a performer and as an artist, and she just disappeared into the character in a way not a lot of people can do. We sit in the story room and we just feel we are writing dialogue for some of the best actors of our generation. Literally, we feel that way. Now, maybe we’re wrong. [Laughs.] But watching dailies, and watching these people bring to life what we put on the page, is incredible.
