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Showrunner Scott Gimple talks about taking on the role, balancing feeling and gore, and his goals for the series.
The Walking Dead Season 4 premieres this Sunday, October 13 on AMC and in anticipation of the upcoming season we were able to sit down with new showrunner Scott Gimple to talk about his approach this season, and what he hopes to achieve.
IGN: First of all, when the season begins, time has passed, but everybody’s still in the same location, which is different from previous years. Seasons have kind of been identified by their locations.
Scott Gimple: Yeah, and we’re going to keep mixing it up. We’re definitely not going to stick with any hard and fast rule of like, “Prison season!”
IGN: It seems, though, instead of changing location, what’s changed are the people. Internally, they’ve gone through a lot and come out the other side.
Gimple: Well, the theme of the season is -- I almost gave away the theme of the next season. Now I’m checking myself.
IGN: Go ahead! Yeah, do it.
Gimple: Are we too far gone? It is the title of one of the collections, but are we too far gone? Have we endured too much? Have we changed too much to be human beings, to feel, to have normal lives, to even picture ourselves having normal lives? Are we too far gone? But we do start in a relatively idyllic situation.
IGN: The show has taken humanity to the point of breaking and beyond. Now, people are still trying to do the humanity thing, but I think it’s really, really difficult for them. What’s really interesting is, Rick not only has to come to terms with that, but also with that happening to Carl.
Gimple: Absolutely, that’s driving him. I mean, he’s not wearing his gun, he’s farming, he is no longer the leader. That isn’t for himself. That’s all for his son, because of what he saw his son do at the finale last year. That was his wakeup call. Rick had gone through so much here. The pressures of leadership, the pressures of the horror that he endured, losing his wife, then topping it off with his son. Really doing something and owning it. “I did what I had to do.” That was a wakeup call for Rick. He started letting people in, and now he’s started living a very different life and making his son live a very different life. It’d still be an incredible contributor to their society, but just in a different way.
The Walking Dead Showrunner Scott Gimple | Photo by: Cherie Roberts
IGN: I feel like it’s always been about human relationships, and that’s the core of the show. It’s not really about zombies, although it is an interesting thing of balancing action and human elements. Do you consciously think, “Hey, we’ve gotta dial up the zombie action here,” or is it more of a “This situation warrants this thing”?
Gimple: Oh yeah. The action is all there to facilitate, comment upon, enhance the human story going on, sometimes even sort of metaphorically, underneath the surface in some ways. But a lot of times that thing is either commenting upon an emotional story or generating an emotional story, or it’s creating a different dynamic between two characters. There is no doubt on this show a quotient of hopeful awesomeness. We do want to see cool things. We do want to have straight-up cool moments, but hopefully that is done in the service of something emotional, something substantive. I think some of our best moments have been that.
I’m real proud that a huge zombie slaughter with a little girl, who is a zombie, stumbling out of a barn can elicit an incredible gut-punch moment. But before that it was zombies coming out of a barn being blown away, and even that was an act of pragmatism and intensity via a character trying to win an argument, for all intents and purposes. If you can combine all that at once, that’s the dream, where you might be going, “Oh, that is so awesome,” but then also, “Oh my God, that is so heartbreaking,” or “Oh My God, I can’t believe they did that. That says so many things about the relationship between X and Y.” Then you go back to it like, “Wow, that’s just awesome.”
IGN: I think that’s actually why the show is as successful as it is, because if it were just straight-up action where there’s no emotional involvement, it would be cool to look at for awhile, but you know...
Gimple: For that action to work, you have to care about that character. I care that that character is winning, I care that that character is losing, I care that that character is going to die, I care that that character is going to live. “Oh my God, if this thing happens, that means that thing that they’ve always wanted will never happen.” It’s Joseph Campbell and obstacles... It’s just making those moments of the Hero’s Journey awesome -- scopey, spectacle, scary.
IGN: Let’s talk a bit about your personally and coming into this role, how it’s been for you. What’s the feeling of it? It’s such a highly publicized thing, and obviously there are folks like us who are just hanging on every word about the series.
Gimple: I gotta say, this is my third year, so for me to step into this role, I love this show. I love working with these people. I know this is super boring, but I love working with these people. It’s comfortable. A lot of people have been like, “Is it scary?” It’s like, “It would be scary if there was a lot of unknown stuff.” But I know who I’d talking with every day and who I’d be working with, who I needed to ask the question to get the answer I needed, who I can lean on for this and who I can lean on for that. If you ask about the news stories and stuff like that, that’s kind of surreal and weird, but it feels kind of like watching TV, because there’s a lot of people getting stuff wrong, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s an interesting story. Wow, that’s a picture of me! Okay, all right, cool.”
But I guess the only drag being in this role this year is I’m in charge a little bit less. I love being down there and producing an episode end to end, but I have a lot more responsibilities, so yes, that’s been a little bit of a drag. I do get down there a lot, but in a different role where I’m looking at every single episode and not those single episodes. I have a lot of great writers and producers that do that, as well as a lot of great producers on set. It’s not like I have to be there, it’s more like I would really love to be there. There’s nothing else like it, to have been creating something in a room and writing something and standing on set with 60 zombies and these actors who have just learned what they have to do to achieve, the director, the DP, this massive army of a cast -- there’s nothing like that, and I do miss that. I was able to do that first episode. The first episode, I’m going to try to keep doing those, because I can go down to Georgia end to end for those. So that’s been the only drag of it. But as far as the noise and articles and stuff like that, it’s all good. I understand. People are interested. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be interested. It’s cool.
IGN: Obviously going into something like this, you’re comfortable, but you had to have some sort of vision for yourself and the thing you were personally trying to achieve. What was the thing that you were personally trying to achieve with this season and the project in general?
Gimple: I’ve loved working on the show. I feel that I’ve been a big part of the show since I started. You know, it’s not a huge staff, and I was really lucky to be able to do episodes I’m really proud of. My big goal is that at the end of the season we have this box of DVDs and I can say, “These are 16 episodes that I can be proud of for the rest of my life,” that made people feel that every potential of the show had been fulfilled. And when I say I’m proud of working on it, not just the episodes I wrote, but we work on this together, so I’m proud of all the episodes down the line. I’m proud of looking at writers who have been on the show and writers on the show now and the stuff they’ve done. Having been a part of that, it was really just taking my favorite stuff on the show and doing more of it.
I love when we’ve been able to just have a cumulative story that builds and builds and builds and pay it off in the end. This is something that I’m absolutely responsible for in the other seasons as well: we weren’t able to hit every character with stories every season. I wanted to hit it, that every character gets a story this season. I wanted that. I wanted to put all the actors through their paces. They’re unbelievably talented, they’re sitting there -- let’s do it, and have all of those emotional journeys crash together in certain ways and connect. We’ve done that on the show -- I’m proud of it -- I just want to do more of it.
The Walking Dead Season 4 premieres tonight.
