Words from Brian Bird
Executive Producer and writer of When Calls The Heart
Answers to Heartie Questions
by Brian Bird
Q. We all know this type of programming is so needed in this day and age. Did you feel this was truly lacking? It's seems there has been a wave of family, faith oriented programs lately and you, your cast, crew and Hallmark Channel are in the forefront turning the tide to positive, heartwarming television shows. Your insight into the human spirit is a blessing to all of us. –Mary O’Connor
A. Mary, as Michael Landon and I have said now in many press interviews since “When Calls the Heart” got off the ground, family programming is nearly extinct in today’s TV landscape. I have challenged many reporters to name me five programs on TV today that we can watch with our families. I have yet to hear an answer to this challenge. Of course, there are some reality programs, game shows or contests that you can watch as a family, but as for scripted programming, the category has nearly vanished.
Most of us have great memories of sitting around the TV with our families and watching special programs together. But for the most part, I believe that is a lost experience in our culture, and it comes at a high price. We have never been more fractured as a society (and as families) than we are now. I think the absence of family television has something to do with that. The picture I have (and it’s an unfortunate one) is of individual family members off in their own separate places watching their own programs on their own tablets, phones or TVs and not spending any time together. Talk about separation anxiety. And most of the content on TV today would be inappropriate for families to watch together anyway.
As recently as a decade ago, most of the networks competed with each other to put family friendly shows on during prime time hours. Today, nothing could be further from the truth. They are chasing each other over the cliff into the dark and depraved -- and the world is full of zombies, vampires, crystal meth dealers and dead-body shows. I am not even asking for a moratorium on those kinds of shows. I’m just asking for a little balance. And that’s what I believe the Hearties are doing, too, by championing not just When Calls the Heart, but the idea of a renaissance of family friendly TV. It’s a cultural movement, and you Hearties are on the front lines. I commend you for it, and I challenge you to shout it from the mountaintops!
Q. Now that Abigail has opened the cafe and Jack has funded the new church and school, will there be any new businesses or any other new additions coming to Coal Valley in season 2? –Verda Shurtleff Ferrin
A. Verda, without giving away any spoilers (which apparently some Hearties love, and some view as wolf’s bane), all I can say is get ready for growth in all ways! And keep your eyes peeled for photos across social media posted by the cast members. On a daily basis they are inadvertently (accidentally on purpose) leaking bits and bobs of the town which should give you some hints.
Q. May I ask, as a rule, how long are the days on the set? –Katie Corbin Spurgeon
A. Katie, I’m sure the cast and crew would love it if my answer was “banker’s hours,” but in the film and TV business that has never historically been the case. A traditional “regular” workday is 12 hours. Most of the time, we do our best to keep to that because it’s also a budgetary issue. Overtime gets expensive when you are paying upwards of 100 people for extra hours. The challenge is that there are hundreds of moving parts to filming a TV show. If you could see what (and who) is just outside the rectangle border of your TV set, you would be amazed at all the people and processes required to create the reality of our world for you. It is a methodical process and each scene requires several hours to finish and get right. On average we film between 5 and 7 pages of a script every day. When everything is going well, we can get it done in 12 hours. But not everything always goes right, so extra hours are not uncommon. In fact, our final day of filming in Season 1 went 18 hours because we were playing catch up and the production could not go past that final day (either on a financial basis or a schedule basis) in order to get the final episode finished in time for broadcast.
Q. As with all books turned into series, why did certain scenes change from the book? For example, the idea of how Elizabeth came to Coal Valley: In the book her mother encouraged her to go west, but in the series her parents were against it. Can you explain? –Charmaine Lipa
A. Charmaine, I always love answering these kinds of questions because during my career as a film and TV writer, I have adapted at least 20 novels for the screen, and it is always a challenge to do well, not to mention make those who love the original books happy.
Specifically, as to your question of why we changed the motivation of Elizabeth’s parents regarding her going west, we needed a little more conflict in the family relationship. Whereas an author has 350 pages to build the drama and to create all kinds of emotional nuance, we have to get it done much quicker, especially in a one- or two-hour format. Our scripts range from 55 pages (for 1 hour) to 105 pages (for 2 hours). Somehow we have to synthesize as much of the novel as we can into that limited page count. There is no room for all of the sub-plots or a slow methodical build to a climax either in the plot or in the character arcs. It has to move quickly and the motivations have to be obvious, not buried within pages and pages of prose.
Remember, authors of novels can be very internal or inside a character’s heart and soul. We don’t have that liberty in a TV show or film. Everything has to be seen or spoken in dialogue. Film writers don’t have as many writer super powers as novelists. The only way we can get inside a character’s head is through voice-over, dreams and flashbacks. Those can get very old very fast in a TV show, so they have to be used very sparingly. A book author can go for ten pages reading a character’s mind. There is no such thing in film stories.
What is the thing each of us says when we see a film based on a book we love… “It’s just not as good as the book.” Right? You have said it. I have said it. There’s a great reason for that. The world and characters of each book we love first comes alive in our individual imaginations. In fact it comes alive for tens of thousands of individual imaginations. How in the world are filmmakers supposed to compete with those unique visions of that world? It’s impossible to meet that expectation. My advice to lovers of books is to judge the media adaptations of those books as separate creative endeavors and either love them or hate them based on their own merits, not on whether they live up to the book upon which they were based.
– Brian Bird
