SXSW 2016 Interview: Robert Kirkman, Patrick Fugit, Adam Wingard and Chris Black Talk OUTCAST

Ahead of the world premiere screening of Outcast’s first episode, Daily Dead had the chance to catch up with creator Robert Kirkman, executive producer Chris Black, pilot episode director Adam Wingard, and series star Patrick Fugit to discuss what fans can expect from the new show that is based on Kirkman’s popular comic and debuts on Cinemax this June.

Here are the highlights from our roundtable interview during the 2016 SXSW Film Festival, and look for more on Outcast—including our impressions from the first episode—closer to the show’s debut this summer.

When Outcast was being created as a comic book series, how did you make the leap from working on it as a comic to deciding you wanted to adapt it into a show?

Robert Kirkman: It was a fairly unique situation. Sharon Tal Yguado, who runs Fox International and heads up the international side of The Walking Dead, approached me. Outside of the US, The Walking Dead is a Fox International show and we were at some kind of Walking Dead event in-between seasons one and two. She just casually was like, "Hey, what are you working on now? You have any new things that you're cooking up?" I was like, "Oh, you know, I got this thing I'm doing. It's about this guy, Kyle Barnes. It's an exorcism thing that has some cool elements to it." She interrupted me and went, "Well, I'll buy that." I was like, "Well, that's—wait, what? I don't know what that's all about, but sure."

Then the next day my people, as they say, called me up. They were like, "We got this call from Fox International. They want to do this deal for Outcast. What's going on? What is this thing?" Even before I had really developed it much as a comic, I had just casually sold it, which was very strange.

How did that inform writing the comic knowing that it was already sold as a show?

Robert Kirkman: Well, from then I was just left to my own devices to do what I normally do. I started developing it as a comic cook while starting to write it as a pilot. It was weird because I was writing them both concurrently. There would be times where I would be writing the comic, and I would say, "Okay, well, I want to do this scene, but I only have four pages to do this scene. I'm going to have to take this element out and this other element out." Then on the pilot script side, I could go ahead and put that stuff in.

There were scenes that ended up being very different just because there are things that work really well in comics and things that work really well in TV. Those are not the same things. It was a pretty cool process.

It took me a long time on The Walking Dead to get used to the fact that television characters don't have to always say things. In comics, people have to say, "I feel this way", or "I want to do this." You can do so much on TV with gestures and movements and facial expressions, so that leads to a different style of writing between the two mediums.

Possession stories aren’t new territory. Is that the biggest challenge on a project like this, to find ways to keep it fresh, new, and exciting for people so they don't feel like they're seeing what they've already seen?

Robert Kirkman: Yeah, that's a great challenge that we knew going into it. We rose to the challenge greatly in the first season, but going into Outcast we knew that, like the zombie genre, there have been dozens of movies based on this subject matter. We know what the audience expects from these stories at this point.

But I'm very excited to say that we're not doing any of that. We're taking a very different track with this storyline and we're doing some very cool, very different things. We're looking at this as a solvable problem. I don't think anybody's ever really handled exorcism the way that we have. Most exorcism movies, you watch somebody who calls in the priest, the priest comes over to the house. He's like, "I know what to do here. This guy's got a demon in him." He takes the demon out and then he goes, "All right, well, I'm going home. You guys have a good time." That's the movie. That’s it.

And so, watching those movies, I always thought they don’t really address how to keep it from happening again and they don't do any work to figure out why it happened, if it can be prevented, if it can be stopped, or if you can make it to where this doesn't happen to anyone else ever again. The fact that the priests in these movies are like, "Well, it's going to happen again and I'm going to get called and that'll be great"—is it job security? Is that what they're after? I don't really know [laughs].

This is a show that's going to evolve. The exorcisms are going to be very different. The tactics the characters use in order to exorcise the demons will evolve and change as they learn more, as they figure out what this phenomenon actually entails and how to better address it. This is over the course of many, many seasons, somewhere between 10 and 100. I'm not nailing it down [laughs].

Chris Black: Wait, what [laughs]?

Robert Kirkman: Okay, just 50. But we'll actually be looking at the phenomenon of demonic possession as if it might be a solvable problem. Could we eventually get to that point? That's what our characters are invested in.

Chris Black: Knowing where you're going is important. When Robert says that, it's not like we know what every episode of this show is precisely going to be. I do think he knows the endgame, though. Vince Gilligan knew how Breaking Bad was going to end. Marc Cherry knew how Desperate Housewives was going to end. Along the way, through the process of crafting the story, you don't know what twists and turns that road is going to take to ultimately get you there, so things will probably evolve, but we know where it’s all going. That's the fun of it.

Adam, coming from a feature film world, what was the biggest change for you in terms of directing the pilot? Was there any change in your approach to storytelling?

Adam Wingard: There's definitely a different kind of time constraint. You're on a much more accelerated schedule than any film. So that in itself was scary for me. But the main thing that was different was that when you're making a feature film, you're making something that exists as a singular event. Unless you're setting up sequels, but a lot of the time that's “so, maybe if this movie does well…” and that kind of thing.

But with this, you know that you're trying to set up at least one season’s worth of episodes, which in this case was ten episodes. So I was trying to make my decisions based on—when picking locations, when we were casting and we were designing the look and feel of it—is this something that's duplicable? And one of the biggest things that helped me out was working with someone like [cinematographer] David Tattersall. He also shot The Walking Dead pilot; he's a veteran. He's shot so many movies from The Green Mile to Speed Racer and everything in-between, and he helped me look at how to get through something like this by being smart, by picking your lenses and lighting it in a way where you can get a really dynamic look, but it doesn't take a ton of time because you just don't have that time.

On the flipside of that coin, you know the network and everybody is putting all this money into it, so they still want this thing to look and feel like a motion picture. They don't want it to look like a network thing. You have all these pressures of how it has to feel and look like a movie, but you have half the time to do it. You have to really adapt to it, but once you get in the flow of it, it just starts happening.

Following up on that idea of pressure, with directing the pilot, you're setting the tone for everything that follows in this season of Outcast. Is there a certain kind of pressure that comes with that as well?

Adam Wingard: Well, fortunately for me all I could really do was just try to put what's on the page onto the screen and Robert was a great guy in the sense that he had a very distinctive idea of what the tone was. I come from a more humorous horror background. A lot of stuff I have done has humor in it, and the horror that I've done in the past has a lot of jump scares and things of that nature. There's actually a moment in the pilot where I was approaching a creepy scene in which there's a character sitting, and in the script this possessed woman comes up behind this little boy and is kind of looking over his shoulder, smelling him, and then grabs his hair and pulls him out of the chair.

Whenever I was blocking it out, I thought this might be cool if I did a jump scare version of this where it's the same thing, but instead of her looming over him, we creepily push in on the boy and a hand comes into the frame and yanks him out. I was doing a couple takes of that and I was a good ways into it, and Robert comes out and he's like, "What are you doing right now?" I'm like, “Well, I'm doing this”, and he's like, "Why don't you take another look at what's on the page and just shoot that?" [Laughs]

He reiterated to me that this isn't a show filled with jump scares, this is not a show about the moment of violence, it's about the creeping dread of that violence. And that was a big turning point for me because at that point, luckily, that was really the first scene we had done. We hadn't shot all the possession stuff, which didn't come until later. But that really made it all click for me. I realized this isn't a show that's about that kind of scare, it's about the anticipation of the scare.

Patrick, can you discuss your approach to the character of Kyle Barnes?

Patrick Fugit: Well, one of the things that's always interesting to me about a character or story is the duality. And for me, what's interesting about Kyle is that his story is dark and his circumstances are very dark. But I try to get across that Kyle is a very bright person and has a very bright mark, and sort of has these circumstances that surround him that shroud him in darkness. That's what he's succumbed to when we meet him in the first episode. Any character that appears one way but is something else is interesting to me. I wanted to get that across. I didn't want him to feel too dark or down or depressing or sad, more like he was simmering or restraining himself.

I feel if a character is portrayed one way and carries that momentum throughout, whoever plays that has to be really, really good at that note. There are actors who are really good at that one note, but most actors need more texture, more variety, for you to keep interested in them.

If there's more going on, or if there's a motivation to the character that they don't get to express until they've discovered more about themselves and the world around them, it makes it more compelling for me to watch. I feel more of a desire to root for them or keep going. Because if a character's just a sad sap or subject to his circumstances, it's kind of annoying. So somebody who wants to be proactive, or at least finds that capability within them to be proactive and not be subjected, is more interesting than the other way around. I really like that about Kyle.