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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-323799Even 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.
our editor recommends“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.[adrotate group="5"]"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
Not to mention Snow White’s glass coffin! (Let’s just hope it’s not a dream!)
"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
😮 Amazing sequence for Prince Charming AND Emma! Like father, like daughter!
"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
‘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
Once Upon a Time Finale Scoop: Will Emma Sacrifice Herself?
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Once-Upon-Time-Finale-Scoop-1047426.aspxWhat can you tell us of Emma’s struggle to really believe in the finale?
Adam Horowitz: The stakes have never been higher for what she’s dealing with, which is Henry. She’s from this world, and what she’s being asked to believe by Henry, it’s a pretty monumental leap for anyone to make.
Edward Kitsis: And that was something that we really wanted to do, which was really earn her journey. Such as, the first time she is told this information, like anyone, she thinks it’s crazy. What we love is that when August (Eion Bailey) is yelling at her, “Why won’t you believe?” we know he was not only speaking for himself, but for the audience. For us, it is important that the day that Emma does believe, we feel like we’ve earned it, as opposed to, it’s Episode 2 and now she believes and she is fighting sea monsters.Will Henry’s ailment be the catalyst for her to finally believe?
Kitsis: What I love is that Henry, basically in a lot of ways, is the most heroic because he sacrificed his life to get her to embrace her destiny. We will see if it was done in vain, but we’ve tried everything else. We tried to show her a wooden leg, we’ve tried to show her time moving, we’ve tried to show her all these things and she hasn’t believed. So this was it. This is the last chance.How will Regina and Emma have to team up in the finale because of Henry? And how will the curse ultimately backfire on her?
Horowitz: Regina has enjoyed an uninterrupted reign of 28 years that has now slowly been getting more and more intensely difficult. In the finale, the challenges she faces to her place in Storybrooke and her power are greater than she has ever faced. But she is a formidable foe, so she’s ready to rise to that challenge.It’s interesting that we learned that if Emma dies — or maybe it’s only if Regina murders her — then the curse is broken. Would Emma ever consider sacrificing herself just to break the curse?
Kitsis: Her first step would be to believe in it. I absolutely believe Emma would sacrifice herself because I think that’s the kind of person she is, but we’ll have to keep watching the show and see what happens.Going over to fairy tale land, Charming (Josh Dallas) and Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) have been desperately trying to reunite, but now Snow has eaten the famed poison apple. What can you tell us about the finale for them?
Kitsis: If last week was Snow’s side of it, this week will be Charming’s. We hope that this fairy tale flashback will fill in some holes that we’ve seen through the year, but will also, hopefully, raise some new avenues for next season.There are plenty of returning faces in the finale — Belle (Emilie de Ravin), Maleficent (Kristin Bauer van Straten), the Huntsman (Jamie Dornan) and the Mad Hatter (Sebastian Stan), among them. Is there anything you can tease about their returns?
Kitsis: I would say that you never know where you’ll see them. It is a finale, after all.How about at least something for the Huntsman fans. They’re dying to see Jamie again!
Kitsis: He is oddly more handsome now then he was when you last saw him. He’s actually extra handsome. How we reveal the Huntsman is one of our favorite things ever, so we don’t want to spoil it because it’s oddly one of the things we’ve been able to keep secret. We’re excited to see Jaime come back, and he’s fantastic.How will Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle) feel if he finds out that Regina has been keeping Belle trapped in a mental ward?
Kitsis: I can’t image that if Mr. Gold was told that not only was Belle not dead, but that he was lied to and she’s been imprisoned for all this time, I would start running.Can we look forward to a confrontation in that regard?
Kitsis: In the finale, we endeavor to satisfy some of the things we’ve set up this year. As a fan, I would be completely annoyed if we saw at the end of Episode 12 that she was locked in an insane asylum and we don’t return to that. I would throw something at the screen.The veil between the two worlds actually seems to be getting thinner. Could we ever see them collide? Or see another vortex?
Kitsis: I think the two worlds tend to collide every week. Will they actually merge into one thing? I don’t know.
Horowitz: We saw Jefferson reach across time and space, but a vortex, that’s a lot harder.
Kitsis: I will say this: It’s going down in the finale, and how it goes down, you will have to tune in and watch.There’s been a lot of speculation online that there will be a death in the finale. What can you tease?
Horowitz: I would say to the audience to take everything that you’re reading in the press and about what’s going to happen in the finale — and while we appreciate all the speculation — and set that aside. One of our themes this season has been magic has a price and that that price is going to be paid in the finale.Sounds like a death is coming, no?
"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
ONCE UPON A TIME’: JOSH DALLAS PREVIEWS FINALE. WILL STORYBROOKE STEP UP?
After working on Lost, Once Upon a Time executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsiss know how to tease finales. Proof? This timely characterization of Sunday’s season finale: “They are the gang. They are the Fairy Tale Avengers,” they told EW in a chat earlier this week. Take a moment to take that in. Squeal with excitement. Now, compose yourself long enough to take in some elaboration, straight from Josh Dallas, who stopped by the office just yesterday.“There’s a lot going on,” he says. “Charming’s in prison, Henry back in Storybrooke has eaten the pie. We don’t know what’s going on. He’s in a coma right now. They’re trying to convince Emma that all this is real so that she can be the savior. There’s a lot of things to deal with in the finale, and it’s like a train that will not stop. It just keeps on going.”
But how will all of these moving parts intersect in the finale? And will it possibly involve a situation that mirrors Regina’s dream in the penultimate episode? “I can say that the people in Storybrooke — some people have already started to wake up and realize what the deal is and what’s going on,” Dallas says. “We also know that some people in Storybrooke know who they are and what’s going on — like August, who is Pinocchio. We know something is stirring in Storybrooke and hopefully some things happen in the finale.”
Cagey, I know. But there’s a lot to protect here. As has been said, the finale is a classic Lost-style reset that will deliver answers, questions, and, surely, frustration, since we have to wait months for a new episode. “You get a lot, and you get a lot taken away,” he says.
http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/05/11/once-upon-a-time-house-burn-notice-vampire-diaries-spoilers/
"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
Once Upon a Time Q&A: Show Creators Kitsis and Horowitz Answer Our Burning Questions About the Finale
http://www.tv.com/news/once-upon-a-time-q-and-a-show-creators-kitsis-and-horowitz-answer-our-burning-questions-about-the-finale-28617/Have I mentioned how awesome TV.com’s Once Upon a Time commenters are? A couple days ago we put out a call for your burning questions going into the finale and I got an amazing flood of really hard-hitting, interesting questions to consider and incorporate. Seriously, there were too many good questions to choose from in the five minutes I had on the phone with OUaT producers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. Also, they were understandably tight-lipped about details but they were clearly describing a fully built world to me that both of them understand inside and out, like a tangible country they’ve often visited. They’ve poured a lot of thought into this show, and their answers were honestly illuminating; they really helped me get a better handle on the multi-reality madness that holds us in its thrall every Sunday, although I’ll confess I have basically no idea what is going to happen in the Season 1 finale (one of my biggest predictions was blown completely out of the water by one of the answers below!). So I can’t wait to see how you interpret their answers. Ready? Here we go!
Why hasn’t Regina used Belle to bargain with Rumpelstiltskin?
Edward Kitsis: That is an interesting thing because if you’re going to enter into a negotiation like that, you need to have extreme leverage, because if you came to him, like, in the last episode, and said, “I’ll give you something that YOU want if you do this, I have Belle locked up,” and I’m Mr.Gold, I would probably just choke you and then go release her. So I’d say that for Regina to unveil that information has to be done in a way that won’t lead to her death. Because once he finds out what she’s done, God help us all.Are we going to see Rumplestiltskin’s son, Bae, in the finale?
Kitsis: No. If the curse were ever to be broken, would the people in Storybrooke age forward? Would Snow and Charming be 28 years older?Adam Horowitz: The questions of what happens when and if the curse is ever broken, we have answers and we are excited to share them with the audience at the appropriate time, but we want them to experience it on the show.
What do you consider your most successful episode of the first season and why?
Kitsis: It’s hard to say because you always love the new episode best, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s exciting. I don’t know that I could pick my favorite but I can say we really love the Mad Hatter episode and we love the Red Riding episode and I start realizing I’m happy with all of them…it’s like saying, “Which child is your favorite?”Horowitz: It’s kind of the way we write the show is, we’ve got an amazing group of writers and we sit in a room and we kind of come up with these stories and these big arcs and this stuff for an entire season, so it’s kind of like one giant episode. So the most satisfying thing for us is to look back at the season and say, there was a story we set out to tell and we told it the way we wanted to. And we’re excited for the audience to see how the season concludes.
Well I know I personally want the show to go on forever, I love watching it and I know my readers love watching it, but how many seasons do you see it running for?
Horowitz: Oh, you know, it’s—that’s up to the audience. We have a lot of ideas for how we’d like to continue forward.Kitsis: I think that, you know, for us we want to do something surprising that moves forward. It’s also an interesting thing that people are already calling for the end of a show that they love. So no, we don’t want to go Season 12 where we don’t recognize any of the cast members. But we’re only in Season 1 right now, we feel like we have a few seasons left in us.
So I have another question about the logistics of the curse: If Henry is the only kid aging in this town, how have the other kids and parents not noticed that he’s progressively aging while everyone else is still frozen in time?
Horowtiz: Well, that’s the curse!Kitsis: In Episode 2—the clock started moving forward in the pilot, and time started to move forward and everyone started to age, and previously to that everyone kind of lived in what we call a “constant present.”
Horowtiz: The way we think about it is, the curse is an organic, active thing that was working on all these residents for these 28 years, and keeping them in this state of a constant present, and adjusting itself for Henry’s growth and aging. And so when Emma arrived and the clock ticked, that’s when all bets were off and things changed.
So Henry’s been kind of trapped in that constant present and vaguely aware of it?
Kitsis: Yes, and it wasn’t until he got the book and started to question it that he started to wake up. And when he started to wake up is when he started to look around and notice that no one was aging and things started to seem the same, like time was frozen, and he wanted Emma. And it wasn’t until the book that even he himself knew it.Should we assume that August wrote the book because he repaired the pages?
Kitsis: I would not assume that.Last question. They were able to snatch the apple in the last episode. Are you going to introduce any sort of time-traveling element to the logic of the show?
Horowitz: No, it’s not about time travel so much as, Jefferson says very carefully to Regina, think about a time and a place where this thing is, and that’s how magic was able to reach across time and space to bring it. It’s not about travelng back and forth in time or changing the past or the present. These are the things that happened."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
Goodwin Says True Love Is Key to ‘Once’ Finale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hE-N7CXnOEUJosh Dallas Promises Charming ‘Once’ Finale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1EFnqKH5FR0"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
Ruby/Red
Resident Werewolf
“Beautiful girl by day + troop-devouring wolf by night = ultimate weapon”"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
