OUAT Producers Give Finale Teasers

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Maybe he is cleaned up a bit. Less scraggly.

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‘Once Upon a Time’ Aims for a Fairytale Finale
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/05/13/once-upon-a-time-tries-to-live-happily-ever-after/?mod=google_news_blog

“Once Upon a Time” ends its fairytale first season Sunday night. Introduced last fall, the fantasy series toggles betweeen the familiar world and one of fabled characters such as Snow White and Rumplestiltskin. It heads into its 22nd episode as one of ABC’s biggest hits and TV’s top-rated freshman drama. Not surprisingly, it was announced this week that the network had picked up the show for a second season.

Creators and executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis were writers on “Lost,” an experience that taught them a thing or two about storytelling between parallel worlds. In a recent phone interview, the showrunners wouldn’t reveal much about the finale, including whether Emma (Jennifer Morrison) will finally accept that Storybrooke, Maine, is populated by cursed fairytale characters, or whether her son Henry (Jared S. Gilmore) will recover from eating a poisoned apple turnover. But they did discuss their successful season and how they put the finale together.

The show has been a hit with families. Did you envision a crossover audience from the start?

Kitsis: It’s so hard to find an audience today in any medium. We thought, if we only get this one episode or a few, let’s make it something we love. Our initial inspiration was, let’s do a big summer movie each week, and the great thing about summer movies is they’re for everyone.

Some showrunners put so much effort into nailing the pilot and those all-important early episodes that they don’t have a clear plan for ending the season. How did you pace yourself?

Kitsis: Initially we concentrated on those first 13 episodes, not knowing if we’d get any beyond that. We had general ideas in mind. If we were breaking episode 10 in the writers’ room we might have a nugget of something for the finale. Then when we got a couple months out from filming it, we talked about what we still liked.

How did you map it out? Did have a whiteboard reserved for the finale?

Horowitz: Whiteboards surround the whole room. There’s one where we’d put up all the big arcs and issues of the season, the various plot strands we wanted to pay off and the characters we wanted to get to.

Can you tell me what was on that finale board without giving anything away?

Kitsis: It’s hard. Obviously, the big question for a lot of people is when is Emma going to believe. We even had a character in episode 20 say to her what the audience was thinking: “What will it take to get you to believe?” So that is a thematic question that we will try to answer in the finale.

With Emma, you had to walk a fine line between building anticipation and just frustrating the audience.

Kitsis: We brought her slowly down the rabbit hole, so, like anybody, she’d wake up and deny it and say this is crazy. When the audience got mad with one of our characters, it lets us know it’s working.

Her believing would make a logical bridge between seasons.

Horwitz: And for us that was important because we wanted to earn it for real and think that would follow. It should be a big deal.

Is it safe to say that it’s going to happen in the finale?

Kitsis: I can’t tell you if it’s going to happen, but I can tell you that people need it to, or they’re going to die.

Horowitz: We needed to bring her need to believe to a crisis point, and that’s something we’ve been trying to build to.

Is there anything that you’ve learned from your vocal audience that may have shaped your writing?

Horowitz: What we’ve learned is how smart they are. They really look very closely to search for meanings and answers. Because of that it allows us an incredible freedom to put in clues and hints throughout the season.

Kitsis: We try to do the show in a way that if you want to just lean back and watch it, go ahead. But if you want to lean forward with a magnifying glass, we’ll put stuff in there for you.

Was it tougher to write the finale than other episodes?

Horowitz: I don’t think any of them came easy. In the finale particularly, there’s a pressure you feel. It’s the exclamation mark on the season and you want to stick the landing. You also want to engage the audience in a way that they feel satisfied but also incredibly excited to see what comes next.

Kitsis: And the finale comes at the time of the season where you’re the most tired, and yet it’s the most important episode. It’s like the playoffs. It’s the end of the season, but you’re going into something that’s even harder and more grueling.

Describe the kind of timeline you worked on.

Kitsis: We were picked up almost exactly a year ago, and you have a couple weeks to hire writers. You start to meet the first day after Memorial Day, then you start shooting six weeks after that. The goal is to have at least two scripts and hopefully three done by then. But you never get ahead. It’s usually a month between whiteboard and the thing shooting. Because our job is so effects heavy, we can’t be like, what are we doing today?

It seems like it has become okay to kill off big characters. Look at “Game of Thrones.” What can you say about body count?

Kitsis: On “Lost” we killed a lot of people but it was usually for really good reason. On “Once” we killed the Huntsman. We had that designed from the beginning, because Rumpelstiltskin says, “The final battle will begin.” If there’s no casualties, the stakes seem small. The Huntsman is known in folklore to have saved Snow White’s life, so we thought, what’s the punishment for that? That was the jumping off point.

Are we going to lose anyone in the finale?

Kitsis: I would say that you never know what’s going to happen in a finale.

Killing off Henry would solve any problems with Jared Gilmore’s growth spurts.

Kitsis: Yes, Henry is in a precarious situation so we’ll have to see what happens, but fortunately for us time is moving forward, so everyone gets to grow.

What did you learn about writing finales from “Lost”?

Kitsis: We had this idea nine years ago. It wasn’t until we got to “Lost” that we figured out how to tell it. Thankfully [“Lost” executive producer] Damon Lindelhof has remained a godfather to us throughout this process as a great red line to call for advice. A lot of people talk about the mythology of “Lost,” but in the writers’ room it was character first.

Horowitz: We learned a lot about how to pace out a season and build toward something. On “Once” we’ve tried to give the audience a ride, but one that is completely character based.

The tension between the parallel worlds is the basis of the show, but there’s only so long you can maintain that.

Horowitz: Look, what we’ve done throughout the season is have the line between the worlds get thinner and the spillover has started to happen with characters who have woken up. But what you’ve seen in the last few episodes is characters that even if they don’t know who they are are having aspects of their true selves seep through. Things are starting to happen and the finale is no different.

It’s interesting to see how all these different fairytale characters can co-exist. Will you keep adding new ones or have you capped that off?

Kitsis: For us, the fun of the whole show is the mashups. It’s like being a 12-year-old. I’m going to get my Star Wars toys out and they’re also going to play with my “Clash of the Titans” guys and my G.I. Joes. We’re not interested in retelling these stories; we’re interested in telling things that were missing or are twists on them. We love things like when the Evil Queen and the Mad Hatter got together, so we think we’ll only do more of them.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

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‘Once Upon a Time’ Creators Talk Finale and Storybrooke’s Twisted Magic
Executive producers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz tease the answered questions and epic showdown on the season finale.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/once-a-time-finale-creators-preview-323799

Even though writers and producers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz worked on Lost for six years, it’s a whole new ballgame to launch a new series. Thankfully for them, ABC’s Once Upon a Time not only found an audience but recently was renewed for a second season.
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“As far as we were concerned, we were starting over,” Kitsis tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So, we said we have to start from the ground up and earn every fan we can and to have them like it a year later is really, really gratifying.”

“As to why people like it, it’s funny because the original Snow White came out in 1937 in the height of the depression,” he continues. “And I think that we are in uncertain times. Our show is not a cynical show. It’s a show for believers and I think, sometimes, people just want to believe.”

THR spoke to the men about magic existing in the show’s “real world” along with other unanswered questions going into the finale and its epic showdown.

The Hollywood Reporter: We recently discovered that there’s magic in Storybrooke after being led to believe that it wasn’t possible. How will you explain that?
Edward Kitsis: That is kind of what gets explored in the finale. And the one thing that we do know is that magic always has a price. But when you introduce magic into a place where it has never been before, it is unpredictable and it is in uncontrollable and I would say that’s kind of how we’re going to go into the finale.

THR: Henry is the victim of a sleeping curse. What can you say about the theory that it can be broken by true love’s kiss – such as his mother’s kiss?
Kitsis: I think that all these things are going to be explored in the finale and I think that the main thing is that what worked in the enchanted forest doesn’t necessarily always work here the same way.

THR: Jane Espenson told us she has a good feeling about Mary-Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin) and David’s (Josh Dallas) relationship in the finale. What can we expect?
Adam Horowitz: Obviously, all year we’ve pulled them apart and put them together and we’ve given David a curse wife that he cheated on and they’ve had a very complicated relationship. And I think that in the finale, we are hoping to really kind of explore more about who they are. Their relationship will continue to evolve and be complicated in, hopefully, new and surprising ways starting with the finale.

THR: Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle) reveals a new layer of his character in practically every episode. As the season winds down, what will we learn about his end game?
Kitsis: We’ve definitely learned, oh, he was the village coward and oh, he chose magic over his son and he has a lot of regret. But at the same time, we never know his motive. He makes a deal to get out of a battery charge with Regina, but then doesn’t follow through with it. But yet, he never lies. He always seems to be able to thread the loopholes of a contract. So, what we love about Mr. Gold is every time you learn something new about him, there’s also something that you want to know more about him. And I would say that definitely continues in the finale.

THR: Guest stars Jamie Dornan, Emilie de Ravin, Kristin Bauer and Sebastian Stan return for the finale. What will they have to do with the episode’s epic showdown?
Kitsis: They come back in fun and surprising ways, which we don’t want to spoil for anyone. But, there is an epic showdown that happens in the finale. But we feel like it, hopefully, is done and executed in a way that will surprise people.

"That’s how you know you’ve really got a home. When you leave it, there’s this feeling that you can’t shake. You just miss it." Neal Cassidy

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