It’s a Pope of television, the creator of one of the series, perhaps THE series – which marked the first golden age of cathode as far as the author’s concept is concerned. Alan Ball (Atlanta, 68 years old) arrived at the beginning of this century in the offices of HBO, at that time not yet a platform with global reach but the first cable television channel. prize American, with an Oscar under his arm. He was the hip screenwriter. He had signed the unexpected gem independent who had best captured the anguish United States: American beauty. And Hollywood had proudly given him a well-deserved statuette. “Carolyn Strauss (still the platform’s executive today) offered me the chance to write something about a family who ran a funeral home, and I was immediately struck by countless ideas. I had spent my childhood in those kinds of places. I knew the atmosphere, the people,” he recalls. Yes, he was born that way Two meters underground.
It’s a gray day in November. It is raining. Ball is sitting in a seemingly uncomfortable leather chair. The place is Casa Seat, home of the Festival Serializedwhich is taking place these days in Barcelona and to which Ball, like a legend, intervened to give an opinion masterclasses. It’s curious that someone like him, for whom the world of auteur television should be fighting – creative blank checks – has been trying to place a project somewhere for five years. “It’s depressing. The only thing they want now is something that looks like something that’s been successful. The competition is fierce. Everything is tremendously oppressive. It seems like the fear that inundates everything is even in the writers’ rooms and especially in the directors’ rooms. Creativity is dead,” he says. That the concept of an auteur series still exists, that Vince Gilligan (creator of breaking Bad), or Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls), or Noah Hawley (fargo)—to continue to sign his own work is, he says, “a miracle.”
But he sees nothing casual in this EtoileSherman-Palladino’s last work, it was canceled after the first season. The same thing happened to him with his latest series, the very juicy one Here and nowwhich he didn’t like. Or he didn’t have time to do it. “There was a lot to explore and it was a shame. It really depressed me.” In Here and now It just so happened that a wealthy interracial family, composed of a couple of white intellectuals pretending to be something they were not, and their four children, three of them adopted and from antithetical parts of the world, lived together in a world where any kind of diverse harmony is still a utopia. “That’s why I stopped. I’m writing a novel. And I’m having a lot of fun. You know why? I have no one to give me an opinion on what I do. No one intervenes in my creative process. For once, I’m alone. For once, no one will control me. Anything is possible. And it’s perfect,” he says.
He doesn’t talk about the plot, he just says that “it’s part of one of the series I’ve been thinking about writing.” He liked the characters and didn’t want them to be lost. “It’s interesting what happens to the characters. They’re pieces of you,” he says. ”Nate, for example, here begins to list his relationship with the protagonists of Two meters underground—, it was the part of me that didn’t want to grow up; David was the gay in me and I didn’t know how to deal with his embarrassment; Claire was the artist that I was, trying to find her way, and Ruth contained all my loneliness,” he says. And what about death? All that time spent in homes that were family funeral homes as a child? “Well, death will always be there for me because when I was 13 I was in a car accident. My sister was driving. He died in front of me, instantly, in the crash. Then for me the world split in two. Since that day I have existed in two realities,” he confesses.
real bloodhis later and majestic work, the series about vampires with political parties and apparent normality, the series in which the United States tolerated fanged beings – the question of fangs It was never casual, there was a direct attack on deep America and its aversion to homosexuality, or simply to what is different – but he feared them, he also spoke about death, even if he did it “in a much more playful way”, he says. “I think so Two meters underground It helped me and helped many other people accept death, but real blood He talked more about the divided America that has always existed, but which is more evident today than ever. The one of those who don’t want anything to change, and the one of those who would like everything to change”, he says. “Who are we trying to fool? America is not virtuous at all. It comes from genocide and slavery,” he adds. And today fear exploits. “Donald Trump is a psychopath and he is destroying the country by exploiting people’s fears,” he says.
“American beauty It was about the schizophrenia of dissatisfaction. Capitalism will always tell you that you can have a better car, a better house, even a better face, and will make you feel unhappy and guilty for not having it,” he says.
Would you say your work is ultimately about understanding what it means to be human? “I would say it’s about living authentically in a world that’s determined to keep you from doing that, which ultimately has to do with being yourself and being comfortable with who you are, ignoring invasive advertising messages of all kinds that insist that you should be who they want you to be at all times,” he replies. And, at the end of Two meters undergroundfirst final round of an arthouse series, says it “started as a joke.” “Someone on the team said, ‘Why don’t we kill them all?’ We laughed and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why not? Why not accompany them all to the end?'”
