‘Walking Dead’ creator Frank Darabont discusses making ‘Mob City’
Director Frank Darabont has gone from launching AMC’s The Walking Dead to now creating an exciting new series on the mafia: TNT’s Mob City.
Darabont spoke with The Guardian about the key guidelines to bring the show to life.
“You should always be on the hunt for a good story. John Buntin’s book (LA Noir, on which Mob City is based) is non-fiction but that has lent a huge amount of creative freedom to blue-sky the story. I never wanted to be straitjacketed by actual facts; I wanted to tell the most entertaining story I possibly could. We decided we wanted to cast off the shackles of adaptation and come up with the coolest story we could: a tense, noir potboiler. The book then becomes a wonderful touchstone historically, and the fiction we invent weaves into the non-fiction. We are taking tremendous liberties!”
He discusses get the mood and music just right, noting the success of The Sopranos and how the show is made up as you go along.
“Here’s the secret that no one wants to tell you: they’re always making it up desperately as they go along! Even the great stuff. If you ask Vince Gilligan, he’d probably tell you the same thing. When you’re in the middle of the second season you don’t necessarily know where things are going in the fifth. There’s quite a lot of discovery to be had, and that’s where the fun is. I laughed when everyone asked where Lost was going; I was pretty sure they had no idea either. When planning a series, my thoughts don’t penetrate past what might be the possibilities of the second season. One has one’s hands full containing all the ideas in the current season. But once you start asking yourself where you want to see these characters in the second season, that’s when the stew in the pot really begins to bubble.”
Darabont wasn’t done praising Gilligan.
“It’s been a role for quite a long time but the media has seized on it quite recently; certainly now you have showrunners as the creative visionaries, like Vince Gilligan, without whom there would be no Breaking Bad. And what a high bar he and his writers set. It’s simply not the same as some hired gun brought in to run a show.”
Mob City debuts in the UK on January 17, 2014.
