by Ramona Zacharias.

Alex Kurtzman (image: ID Public Relations)

At a mere 40 years of age, Alex Kurtzman is a powerful creative force in Hollywood. In the last seven years alone, he and longtime writing/producing partner Roberto Orci have brought us the Transformers and Star Trek films, not to mention small-screen successes such as Fringe and Hawaii Five-O. In 2011, Forbes magazine named the duo “Hollywood’s Secret Weapons” in light of the billions of dollars their films have generated in a very short period of time. With the success of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and remakes of The Mummy and Van Helsing underway, Kurtzman and Orci’s starpower shows no signs of dwindling.

2013 saw yet another successful project for the pair: Fox’s primetime series Sleepy Hollow, which premiered last September and was co-created by Kurtzman, Oric, Len Wiseman and Phillip Iscove. Starring Tom Mison, Nicole Beharie, Orlando Jones and Katia Winter, this modern adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story has Ichabod Crane (Mison) and the Headless Horseman brought back from the dead in the present-day fictitious small town of Sleepy Hollow. Obviously bewildered by his surroundings but determined to learn about his past, Crane joins forces with local police lieutenant Abbie Mills (Beharie) to untangle the mysteries surrounding his resurrection and stop the decapitated horror, who, as it turns out, is just one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and about to kickstart the End of Days.

Sound crazy? It is. Does it work? Totally. I spoke with Kurtzman about the project, its inception, and working with a cast and crew up to the challenge of developing a series that uses classic literary characters to intertwine American history with tales of witchcraft, demonology and mythology.

Tell me about the creation of Sleepy Hollow and about working with your production team to realize the vision you had for the series.

Phil Iscove was an assistant at UTA (United Talent Agency) when he had the idea of doing a modern-day Sleepy Hollow. He came to us and we developed the idea, wrote the pilot and then it was picked up to series…and that was where it all started.

When Phil came into the office and had this sort of sketch of an idea, the first person we called was Len. Because we have a real adoration for the kind of genre that feels like it’s bending the rules a little bit. There was something so impossible about the idea of doing the show that I knew that only somebody with Len’s skill and intuition about threading the needle between the humor, the drama…creating a world that was so kind of off-kilter and yet grounded in an emotional reality – those things are just very intuitive for Len. And this is one of those shows that we knew would always be one molecule away from ridiculous at any moment – it needed to be so tightly controlled by someone who wasn’t frightened by that but by someone who was inspired by the challenge of it.

So I called Len that night and said ‘I don’t know what happens after this, but here’s the opening – a guy’s fighting in the Revolutionary War, he suddenly is attacked, he cuts off the guy’s head but gets hit, passes out, wakes up, he’s in a cave…he stumbles outside and he’s walking over branches of dirt and all of a sudden his feet touch concrete and he’s never felt concrete before and he looks around in horror and he turns around and he’s almost hit by a truck and we realize somehow he’s…’ and Len says ‘I’m in…that’s it, I’m in’. It was that fast. He said ‘What happens next?’ and I said ‘I have no idea’; he said ‘Great, just let me know’.

So from that point we just started building it out and I think just really reveled in the delicious craziness of the whole thing. I think to us it wasn’t that odd…it felt like something we just would want to watch and it was very straightforward. So we wrote the pilot and the pilot got picked up. With the series, a lot of the ideas that we had had that we weren’t able to put in the pilot form the basis for many of the episodes over the course of the season. Everyone has been very intimately involved in every aspect of the show from the beginning…Len didn’t just direct the pilot, he came in and we did the story together on the pilot and then he ended up being in the editing room 24/7 for the whole first season. It’s been a real team effort.

Nicole Beharie as Abbie (Image: Fox)

It seems like a script you have a lot of fun with – how do you balance the playfulness with the elements of genuine horror you are able to incorporate?

That’s the fun of it for us – figuring out how to find that balance. I think it all comes back to the core idea of grounding your characters in an emotional reality that the audience can relate to. And if you can do that, it gives you license to have tremendous amounts of fun and wink at the audience in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they’re being patronized. We’re all taking it as seriously as we would take a heavy drama. And that tone is critical because you are asking the audience to suspend its belief and you are asking them to jump into this world and say ‘it’s crazy, but it’s totally real’. So hopefully when you’re watching the show, the reaction the audience is having is ‘yes it’s crazy, but man if I were in that situation I think I’d probably be reacting the same way’. If we can get the audience to that place, then they will accept anything. I think that’s our job as screenwriters in anything that we do – we’re asking the audience to suspend disbelief and to go on an emotional ride and to say ‘I accept the reality of this world. Even though it couldn’t possibly happen actually, I’m in it, I believe it, and I feel like it’s happening.’

Reading Irving’s short story, I was struck by how many interpretations there have been over the years – to the point where many people probably are not familiar with the original. Were there specific elements of Irving’s work that it was important for you to retain in this adaptation?

Yes, and a lot of those elements ended up in the show. I think it should also be noted that Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving’s other short story that is really famous, was sort of the second piece of the inspiration that Phil brought in the door. ‘I want to do a time travel show that isn’t about time travel.’ We didn’t want to get stuck in the rules of time travel storytelling.

And that was the reason to do the show too – as you said, there have been so many different versions of Sleepy Hollow. And really another straight portrayal of it is sort of pointless because it’s been done really well by many people. It was the idea of doing it modern-day and also tipping our hat to Mr. Irving’s other short story as a conduit to why I created it here-and-now…it just felt very organic. We’re always looking for the ‘Lego click’ – that satisfying feeling that comes when you click two pieces of Lego together and it just feels right and it fits. And that’s exactly what we felt when Phil had taken those two ideas and clicked them together – strangely, they were perfect for each other. I’m not sure if Washington Irving ever consciously intended that, but they certainly both came from the same narrative so it would make sense that they would fit together.

Tom Mison as Ichabod Crane (Image: Fox)

Let’s talk about your cast. What does Tom Mison bring to the role of Ichabod Crane?

I think the question is, what doesn’t he bring to the role of Ichabod Crane! Tom is as extraordinary an actor as he is a person. He is a classically trained British theatre actor. And so he could pick up absolutely any piece of text and make it sound like Shakespeare, which is huge for us.

And he’s an absolute genre fan. So he was just giddy at the prospect of playing the character in this world. It was sort of a fantasy of his – he said, ‘look, all I want, just one time, is please make me walk down a dark tunnel carrying a torch. That’s all I want. That, and I want my own action figure. If you give me those two things, then I’ll be the happiest man on earth!’ So we definitely got the torch, I do think the action figure is coming, maybe in the next year or two.

But again, it goes back to that incredibly grounded reality…there were so many things that could go wrong, particularly with Crane. How many lame jokes could there be about how he looks at a cellphone and doesn’t understand why the little man is trapped inside, and all the stupid things that you would go to? And we very consciously wanted to avoid those things. Tom, in his performance, I think has such an intuitive sense of where the joke lies – because he’s not trying to play the joke. He is playing the character’s genuine reaction to something he doesn’t understand.

He’s also one of those actors who radiates intelligence, you just see it in his eyes. And so he can say so much without a single word, just with the way he’s assessing something. One of the things we talked about early on is that Crane was somebody who may be reacting in absolute awe to things but that he is mostly keeping his cards very close to the vest. And you need to see in his looks and in the dancing eyes that he’s taking everything in and he’s assessing it and he’s processing it. And he just brings that in spades, he just couldn’t be more in the moment. He’s tremendously funny. And easy on the eyes, so that’s always helpful with the leading man.

Nicole does the exact same thing, from a very different angle. She’s just fierce. She is fierce and she’s a presence and she’s a force. And I think what we loved in the design of the show was the idea of that Mulder-Scully paradigm of Skeptic and Believer…we wanted to turn that on its ear a little bit. It would have been really easy to make Crane the Believer and Abbie the Skeptic – but when the show really opened up for us, it was because we realized that Abbie’s backstory needed to be a bit more insane than Crane’s. And that his presence in her life was touching off something that she had been actively been trying so hard to deny for so long. I think that opened the door because it shifted the paradigm; it made it so that she wasn’t just a skeptic, it was that she’s been working so hard not to believe it because she’s so scared to face her fears, fears that have been there since childhood. And that’s what Crane’s emergence into her life represents. That requires an amazing and poetic combination of utter intensity and real vulnerability. And I think Nicole just radiates that on every level.

What can you tell us about Season 2, especially in light of such an intense season finale?

We’re leaving the door open to many different options – we have a very strong and clear sense of what we want the second season to be about and the writing starts up again next week which will be really fun. I think I can say that there will be as many surprises in Season 2 as there were in Season 1 and we’re really excited about that.

The thing about the season finale that was really, really fun to write – and exciting to write – was that we knew from the beginning where we were going to end at the end of the season. It was one of the ideas that had emerged while we were writing the pilot that was just far too much story to put in the pilot. Knowing where we were going allowed us to set the trail very deliberately and lay the architecture down for the way we were going to mislead the audience in a way that hopefully they wouldn’t see it coming and be completely surprised when we got there – and yet also feel like ‘Oh my god, of course, it was there in front of us the whole time’. The best stuff does that, the stuff that inspires us the most. The Sixth Sense does it beautifully, The Usual Suspects does it beautifully…and that’s because when you get to the ending, your mouth falls open but you go ‘of course, god, it was staring me in the face! And yet it was somehow clever and emotionally true enough to misdirect me in a way that I didn’t see it’. And so knowing where we were going allowed us to plant the seeds and hopefully lead the audience down the path that we wanted to, while not making them feel betrayed by…well, by our betrayal! So it was a lot of fun and it allowed us to be very targeted and strategic about our storytelling.

The Headless Horseman (image: Fox)

The episodes are full of history, mythology, biblical references… are there certain texts that you reference for your research?

We reference so many different texts. There’s a book, I think it’s the first book ever written on witchcraft, called The Discoverie of Witchcraft…I can’t tell you exactly what year, but it was a long, long time ago. That was a very interesting book, just because it clued us into the way people perceived witches and what they imagined them to be in its time.

There were texts like The Lesser Key of Solomon, which we discovered when we were doing our research, that ended up becoming the subject of an episode. And all these deep mythologies in different cultures around the world that were all in one way or another connected to the Bible. The key for us was, how do you take these disparate and different religious ideas and mythological ideas and unify them in a way that felt like we weren’t just patchwork quilting them together. That was part of what we endeavored to at the beginning when we said that there were going to be seven years of tribulation and that the seven years were going to be these tests that tested Abbie and Crane – and that ultimately their ability to pass or fail the tests was going to determine the fate of the world. Once you set that as your general idea, it allows you to say, well tests can appear in many forms. All religions had to come from one kind of unifying idea in one way or another to allow different interpretations of it. But that also gives us something that we can funnel our show episode ideas into and through. So hopefully that worked for people.

You have years of experience with taking on projects that hold much nostalgia for people…Transformers, Star Trek, Spiderman… does that ever cause any trepidation when you take on a new project? How do you find a good balance between breathing new creative life into something while keeping the purists in mind?

Always trepidation, I always want to pass on everything! I also want to pass on it because I immediately feel the burden of responsibility to get it as right as it was when I was a kid and saw it and loved it. Star Trek is a good example – Star Trek was something that we both loved so much as kids, and the minute it sort of crossed our desks we said ‘There’s no way. We’re not going to mess that up, no way!’

And then after awhile it struck us that if we passed on it and let somebody else mess it up, we’d actually feel even more responsible for not having protected it. And that led us to think, ‘well look, if anyone knows what needs to be there in Star Trek…’; we felt like we were qualified to protect everything that Roddenberry and so many other writers afterwards did so beautifully. And that ultimately was the thing that inspired us to do it. There will be more Trek writers after us, we know we are in a continuum of many people.

But mostly it’s about letting your inner kid play around and have fun and be wide-eyed in wonder and experience awe and experience the joy of story twists and turns and fall in love with characters…and if we feel like we can genuinely make that happen, then we say yes. But it’s a process for us in that we have to really believe we can do that. Otherwise it’s not worth the time, because it will be painful for people who loved it to feel it didn’t meet their expectation and it will be painful for us because we don’t want to be the guys who did that to anybody. Especially to ourselves.

Sleepy Hollow returns this fall to Fox Primetime. The series stars Tom Mison, Nicole Beharie, Orlando Jones and Katia Winter and is co-created by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Len Wiseman and Phillip Iscove. Executive Producers are Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Len Wiseman, Mark Goffman, Ken Olin and Heather Kadin.