Nick Antosca (2016)

Thank you for all the questions, and for watching the show. I'm going to wrap it up now. Hope you enjoy the season finale tonight!

On HANNIBAL, I once asked Steve Lightfoot (the other writing EP besides Bryan Fuller) why HANNIBAL looked so much better than anything else on TV, and he said "Good lighting doesn't cost any more than bad lighting."

I had to argue to make the Tooth Child a suit instead of a CGI effect. It wasn't a huge battle, but I definitely had to make the case.

Noah Greenberg, the DP, was Craig's cinematographer on THE BOY (2015). If you haven't seen it, see it. It's beautiful. It's why I pursued them to do CANDLE COVE.

1 - More like the deliberate pace of the show is deliberate… so the writing process causes the deliberate pace. I think about a scene in terms of “What is happening here psychologically? What does this moment feel like from Mike’s psychological/emotional POV?” We try to avoid obvious beats. The scripts for CC and NEH feel similar in terms of writing style. It’s just my style. When I write TV scripts, there is a ton of description and screen direction, including very specific camera angles and shots. I’ll even sometimes say “To get an idea of what this looks like, google [whatever it is]”. I don’t do that in feature scripts because it’s entirely up to the director. But for TV, I have much more of direct hand the visual language of the show.

2 - THAT SAID, this show was always intended to be a showcase for directors I love. Craig’s film THE BOY is so fucking intense and good and he’s the kind of director you would never expect Syfy to hire to do an entire season. And when I give him a script, it’s not like “DO THIS.” It’s like, “You can tell from my detailed screen direction etc what the intention of the scene is… so please preserve that intention but don’t feel like you have to do the exact shots.” I trust that a director like Craig and a DP like Noah Greenberg can come up with cooler shots and improvise and adapt to whatever conditions we encounter on the location, or stuff we discover with the actors. Same deal with Steven Piet on season two. These guys are great talents with distinct voices and you can see it in their respective seasons. This is a really unique show in terms of the showrunner/director collaboration.

3 - No idea. Ask Syfy!

Fucking Horrifying is relative!

Physically, I was most scared when I was a young teenager and we had a mentally ill/ dangerous man move into the little house behind ours. He had strange people over and buried little bags of bird bones in our back yard, and he would stand at his windows or just inside his door and watch our house for long periods of time. After six or eight months he left and we never saw him again.

Emotionally/psychologically, probably most scared at age 30 when my best friend died.

Yes, there are many. I loved doing No-End House (yes, we put a hyphen in the title). If we get more seasons, I have a short list of creepypastas that I think would be great for us to adapt. Don't want to name them now because we'd still have to get the rights.

Thank you.

1. The mythology of having a real child in the show would need a lot of unpacking. Who is Janice? I did like the imagery and the idea though. So we did have a real child appear (briefly) in the puppet show as a nod to Kris’s story — we just made it Mike’s daughter Lily, after she is taken.

2. No, definitely not canon. Don’t want to get too meta, but in a sense, our adaptation is fanfiction. Imho if there such a thing as “Candle Cove canon” it consists entirely of Kris’s story. (Or if there’s more to it, then that’s up to Kris to define!)

3. Don’t rely on easy scares. Make it psychological and personal. If writing for the screen, think in terms of images and cinematic storytelling. If writing fiction, think in terms of suggestion.

> How'd you guys get Olivier De Sagazan?

We wanted the puppets to be the “friendly” faces/masks for something sinister. In the writers room when I described what the “real” malevolence behind the show would look like, I would show Olivier’s videos. I wanted it to feel tactile and grotesque and organic in contrast to the puppets.

Once Craig Macneill came on board to direct we talked about how to achieve that. And it was like, “Wish we could just get de Sagazan to do it.” Then we found his email address online somehow, maybe just on his website. Asked him to do it, convinced the studio to hire him, and he flew out for a week.

One thing this show has let me do is meet and work with people I’ve admired for a long time, and Olivier is at the top of that list.

He is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. He set himself on fire for us — his idea.

He’s featured more substantially in the season finale tonight.

First, I have been very lucky. I never expected to make a living as a writer.

I was always writing fiction as a kid and planned to be a novelist. But even when I was young I had no illusions about making money doing it. So I had a day job (as an assistant, then an “associate”) in HR at a financial company while I was writing novels. Then I got laid off after the 2008 crash. I could see that great TV was being made. I had no idea how to get into the industry.

I teamed up with my best friend Ned Vizzini, who was an incredibly talented and very successful YA novelist and also wanted to get into TV, and we studied TV pilots for shows we liked (Twin Peaks, Lost, The Shield) and diagrammed their structure to teach ourselves TV writing. Then we wrote a pilot and a feature screenplay together. We came out to LA together in February 2010, searched for jobs for a while and tried to make connections until we got hired on TEEN WOLF in August 2011. Then we learned from our showrunners on that and other subsequent jobs.

Ned was bipolar and took his own life in 2013. After that I was on my own, had only ever done screenwriting with a partner. That was a very painful time. Basically everything I knew I had learned from or with him. I didn’t realize it at first but almost everything I’ve worked on after he died deals explicitly with death or loss. Particularly HANNIBAL, but also THE FOREST (an assignment rewrite), and now especially CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE and NO-END HOUSE (which is VERY different from CC but has thematic parallels). Now that I think about it, for better or worse that was my version of therapy.

In terms of advice, I would say study great shows. Study the scripts and study the shows themselves, and reverse-engineer, write outlines for them to see how the structure works. Learn the cliches and tropes so you can subvert or avoid them (or use them to your advantage as the case may be). Try to think cinematically.

In terms of relationships, to write TV you really need to move to LA, and then just meet and talk to as many people as you can. Be around TV writers and showrunners as much as possible. Read interviews. Read scripts. Nothing beats in-the-room experience (I have learned so much from showrunners like Bryan Fuller, Shawn Ryan, and Jeff Davis) but you can be ahead of the game by internalizing an understanding of structure.

Don't write lots of scenes with kids and animals. Tough to shoot, logistically. But ESPECIALLY scenes with blood gags. Plan to spend more time than you think shooting them.

Season 3.

I'm not the guy to ask about Friday the 13th unfortunately! I was hired by a previous Paramount regime, wrote a script that I loved for David Bruckner, handed it in to the new regime, and never heard anything else about it. They got a new writer and director and are taking it in a totally different direction. It was a bummer because I had a great time and wanted to work with David.

My advice would be to get a day job and write (if indeed you are a writer) as much as possible.

I come up with new material by immersing myself in the source material, trying to come to a deep understanding of what makes it work and what is most interesting about it, and then letting myself be inspired and bring something personal of my own to it.

Extremely intentional.

Our kid actors were a dream to work with. Abigail Pniowsky (who also has a cameo in season 2, and can currently be seen in ARRIVAL) and Luca Villacis were incredible finds for us. Both local Winnipeg actors, and so essential to the show. And super down-to-earth and cool.

Not consciously. I read it when I was a teenager and only realized once we were in the writers room how similar the structure was to IT. But Stephen King has definitely been an influence. My friend used to say, "If you have a great idea, write it now. Otherwise, Stephen King will do it eventually."

The town of Iron Hill is loosely inspired by the small town in Maryland where I grew up after my family left New Orleans.

It came to me, actually. I was already a fan of the story and of creepypasta in general, but Max Landis had optioned Kris's story on his own and was looking for a way to adapt it. A movie had been discussed and decided against, and my manager (also Max's manager) approached me about doing it for TV. My first reaction was, why not do it as an anthology series since there are a ton of great creepypastas? So I pitched my take on Candle Cove (the Mike/Eddie story, etc) and then wrote a treatment and we took the pitch out to networks. Fortunately, Candle Cove is THE perfect story to begin a creepypasta anthology series with.

I consider the NoSleep stories fair game :)

Thanks. I don't know that one, but I will read it. For a potential third season, I have two in mind, but we would still need to get the rights.

Great writing anywhere I can find it. Thomas Ligotti, Peter Straub, James Salter, Nabokov, and Shirley Jackson are some writers who have directly influenced me. In film, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Andrew Dominik are directors I love (among many others).

Thank you! Candle Cove had already been optioned and was always going to be the first one. The idea to do more stories came later.

Yes. Because we don't have much of a budget, and because Craig and I strongly believe suggestion and atmosphere are crucial parts of horror, we did put a lot of care into the sound design, more than I have seen on any other show except HANNIBAL.

Yes. Sarah Sitkin. She is an amazing sculptor and artist who helped design some of the things you'll see inside the No-End House.

http://www.sarahsitkin.com

Also, the great Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin did some video art that will appear in No-End House.

In both cases it was kind of a Sagazan situation... "Huh, I wonder if this awesome kinda-outsider artist will come and help us out on our weird low-budget Syfy show... let's call them up and see."

They have a sense. Luca, who is 12, definitely does. The bullying scene was probably the most intense to film. Craig is wonderful with kids -- another reason he was perfect for this season.

I doubt it, each season will be closed-ended.

If we got more seasons, sure, we might do a character-based creepypasta.

It won't be Jeff the Killer.

I actually went to high school in Maryland! We left New Orleans when I was young. We lived in a terrible neighborhood, and our neighbors were threatening to kill us because of a dispute with my parents. They stole our car and one of my earliest memories is the car being dragged out of the Bayou St. John covered in mud. This was in the late 80s.

Bad taste in books and movies.

Mulholland Drive closely followed by Lost Highway tied with Blue Velvet.

I love Winnipeg and hope to go back. It's entirely up to the studio/network.

Hey Nora, I can’t tell you how often I asked myself what Ned would think of a particular scene or story idea, or heard his voice in my head while writing. I’ll email you!

We auditioned tons of kids in Winnipeg and Toronto, including twins, and Luca was simply the best actor.

Not on CZ -- I think he'll be busy running Dirk Gently full-time and directing American Werewolf!