Exclusive! Our Wendy and Lisa interview, part 2
House Petrelli: What makes the themes for the different characters unique to them? Instrumentation, obviously, but are there certain keys or scales that you’ll use for certain characters?Lisa: Yes.
HP: (laughs) Would you like to elaborate?
L: (laughs) Sorry, suddenly the finger pointed at me. There are different ways to establish those things. My favorite that I like to talk about in terms of that is, Hiro. Yatta! Because of his ability to move through space and time, the space/time continuum, and stop time, and it’s all pretty much about time and that sort of thing. We used a marimba for Hiro specifically and I’m sure you’re familiar with his “ticky-tocky ticky-tocky” kind of...
HP: Oh yeah.
Wendy: That’s the sound of his cues.
L: And so we end up layering different time signatures and using delays. There’s a composer named Steve Reich who composes similar music, and he had a big influence on us in that regard. Just layering different time signatures and textures and things like that for Hiro. Also, when he went back to the 1600s in Japan, it was kind of fun to do the actual ancient Japanese instruments. We had a koto player come in who gave us wonderful samples. Again, we always make our own samples and play in two or three different keys and have a musician play over that. And then our very beautiful and talented engineer, Michael Perfitt, edits the samples and puts them across the keyboard so I can play them in the scenes.
HP: Very nice.
L: He’s sitting right in front of me right now.
HP: Is he? Hello!
Michael: Hello. I’m doing all the things they’re talking about.
L: We don’t let him get a break ever.
M: I sit on a bucket.
HP: (laughs) Okay... “Flyboy Patrick” wants to know how you personally feel about the new Heroes volume.
W: By Episode 19 it started to change for me, and I connected with it more. You know, I had high hopes for the beginning of the season, the first three episodes to me were really quite good. Then it changed directions, and most of the viewers it spoke to were young 18 to 25 year old boys, and we started losing all the women, and the 30 to 49 demographic. I knew why we were losing them, because we were losing that really cool psychological heart the first season was about, which didn’t rely just entirely on the special effects. It was “Wow, why do I have this power? What’s happening to me? I’m tortured by this” instead of being hunted. I didn’t really get into the hunting storyline.
L: It was odd to see so many guns in the show all of a sudden. It didn’t seem like the kind of show that needed guns, especially when people have superpowers and psychic abilities and there’s so much psychology that goes along with that, and the stories with the families. That is more interesting, the personal stories.
W: Absolutely.
L: Once you start seeing a bunch of guns showing up... it used to be kind of the “odd man out” was HRG, because he was the guy that you weren’t sure if he was a good guy or a bad guy, does he have powers or doesn’t he have powers...
HP: Morally gray.
L: Yeah. And he was the one that could pull a gun or something, and it was sort of tense. But then all of a sudden everybody had guns and were shooting at each other and... I don’t know, that was really strange. It was great to meet some new characters. We really loved the Puppetmaster.
W: The Puppetmaster, to me, was the best character of the season as far as the new people go.
HP: Have you met him? David Lawrence?
W: No.
HP: Oh my god, he is hilarious!
W: Is he?
HP: He is my favorite interview so far! He’s a total cut-up, and he’ll do these perfect impersonations of people. You have to meet him. He’s a total kick in the head.
W: Well, he was fantastic on the show. And we loved composing his theme.
L: It was so great scoring him.
HP: So what would you like to see changed, and what do you wish hadn’t been changed. We heard about the guns already...
W: I wish we could have stayed more focused in the discovery of the powers, and it hadn’t gone so global. I wish that we could have stayed a little bit longer with the struggle of these normal people and what it would be like for a normal person to one day wake up and have these insane powers, and what that would psychologically do to a person. The show was so good at being borderline “this could really happen” in the first season.
HP: Yes, exactly!
W: Then going to Season 2, and definitely in Season 3, it became so... “there’s no WAY I can suspend my disbelief, there’s no way I can.” But I did on the first season, and I wish that could come back for the fourth season, and I’m hoping it will. And I want the whole...
L: Well, just seeing Claire’s character go from...
W: ...A sixteen-year-old cheerleader to a girl with a gun just didn’t make any sense to me.
L: She was troubled and really trying to just figure out what was going on and then she became, again, a girl with a gun. “Come on! Come with me! We just need answers!”
W: “We can get ‘em!” No, nonono... you’re sixteen, no you can’t. Let’s be sixteen. I loved that story with the mother, with Sandra, and I thought that stuff was fantastic and really full of heart and psychology. And I loved that Peter and Nathan had this struggle together with their parents. And I did like Linderman a lot, meeting him and that whole thing, I really dug that, and meeting the father was good too, but to kill these people off, which is something you have to do, was fine with me, but they took away the psychology and relationship those people had to the characters.
L: It was better left unknown.
W: It was unknown, and, this is just me, but I don’t understand why there isn’t some psychology where Hiro talks about what it was like to lose is mother, or what it was like to have been stalked by Sylar and almost killed by him, and have some repercussion of that and refer back to that in these stories. Just stuff like that where you see these characters go through this stuff, and get affected by it instead of just... the lightness of Matt Parkman... “I was a cop once!” No, no, no... you were married, you had a kid, and then you fell in love with this Daphne character, and Daphne’s gone and now... I want to get back to that deep place. Does that make any sense...?
HP: Absolutely, because I agree with basically everything you’re saying. One thing that made me CRAZY was how they totally threw out the best redeeming value of Season 2, Nathan’s entire story arc where he hit rock bottom, came to terms with who he was, and then came back out and was the hero. And it seemed to me that they just completely ignored that it happened and threw it all out and it’s like... “wha happened?”W: I know. That’s very true. And then in this particular season it was very difficult to see Nathan going in and out of good.
HP: Yes. Agree completely on that. So let me ask you then, who is your favorite Petrelli and why?
W & L: (together) Angela.
W: She’s an amazing actor. She has been so consistent in her role as Angela Petrelli, and there’s something ironic about her, which is something this show in general has been lacking this past season, the general sense of irony. And she has maintained it for me, and I just think she’s stellar at it, and so does Lisa.
L: Fantastic. Really, in the beginning, I totally loved little Peter Petrelli, and Milo is such a cutie, and you can tell everyone I said so!
HP: (laughs) That’s okay, Tim Sale called him “dreamy.”
W&L: (together) He is dreamy!
L: He’s such a cutie, and he’s so sweet, and I liked his little hair that used to hang down over his face all the time.
HP: Yes, we all miss the hair.
L: It was cute!
HP: That’s kinda sorta back. Season 2 was like...”No! His hair’s gone and his personality’s gone, and... fail!”
W: I know. But it’s kind of back.
HP: Yay. Okay... for each of you, and possibly the gentleman who is still there...
M: Hello!
HP: (laughs) Hi! What ability would you pick and why?
W: Oh, yeah, we’ve talked about this before.
HP: Not with another interview, I hope.
W: No, no, no, to each other. The ones that are existing, or...?
HP: Anything. If you could do anything you want, what would your power be?
L: Well, I cheated and just asked that on my Facebook page what people would want for their ability, and I said that I would want the ability to choose the ability that I needed in the moment.
HP: That’s almost like Peter, sort of.
L: I could fly over the ocean and then dive down into the sea and breathe underwater and then...
W: Beat the crap out of somebody with super powers...
L: Exactly! And then get up and walk over to a piano and play better than anybody else.
W: (laughs)
L: It could be all kinds of things. But I did like the breathing underwater thing, because I love swimming.
W: Breathing underwater would be cool. What would I want...? Um... well... gosh, what would I want?
M: I know what mine is!
L: What, Michael?
M: Mine is, um... there’s a character that appeared that can control the weather. Alice. She’s a really cool character and she controls the wind, basically.
W: All weather. She can do anything.
HP: That’s pretty frickin’ powerful.
M: Pretty cool. She’s a really interesting character. And the ability not to put my foot in my mouth.
HP: We’ll give you two powers. Those can be your two.
W: I can’t make up my mind on this, Willow, I don’t know.
M: You could take away everybody else’s powers.
W: Like the Haitian? No, I can’t do that.
HP: You really don’t know? You’ve had three seasons to think about this and you don’t know?
W: No, I don’t know. Okay, I want the ability to have Ali Larter fall in love with me.
HP: (laughs)
W: Yeah, I want Ali Larter to have a mad crush on me, or I want the Haitian to fall for me. Either one would be fine.
L: Oooh, the Haitian.
W: See, that’s another thing.
HP: He just... “went away.”
W: He’s hot! He was amazing. His character was great. So... there you have it. That’s what I want.
HP: But if it was forced, though, would they really love you then?
W: No.
HP: So like a Cupid thing, then maybe.
W: Yeah, have the ability to be Cupid, for real.
HP: There you go, I solved your problem for you!
W: The ability to be Cupid. Well, when I was little, my mom used to call me a Cupie Doll.
HP: Nah, that’s not quite the same...
L: Yeah, that’s different. That means you’re a little chubby.
HP: (laughs) Oh man... Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to go on and on about?W: You know... we’ve been sort of a little snarky about this past season, but I just gotta say that it is a really great show, and I really want it to continue and be great. When this show came out, I was just blown away. When we did the pilot and we saw where this was gonna go... I want that feeling back.
L: This is a dream job for us, and it’s such a great show to work on. The people that work on it are all fantastic. I love it. I really do. It’s my kind of thing.
HP: I know. That first season, literally, I have never had a TV show in my entire life grab me like that and throw me up against the wall and say “You are going to be mine now.” And I’m like, “Okay, yeah!”
L: Absolutely. I feel the same way.
W: We stopped reading scripts so we could go in every week and see these episodes just like you would on Monday night. We would get floored by it and then figure out musically what to do. But we stopped reading the scripts so that we’d have that same hit. And I was just blown away by every episode and giving standing ovations every week we’d go in there.
L: Yeah, we’d be screaming, and...
W: The executive producers always want to be in the room with us and our music editor, Jenny Barak, while we’re spotting an episode because we are the barometer. We are the fans. We’re like you, Willow, when we watch an episode, we’re freaking out.
L: Yeah, like, “Noooo don’t go in there!”
W: They read us when we don’t like it, and that can be difficult for them too. Why it’s not working. But then, sure enough, the public is responding the same way the two of us are responding to it.
HP: Wow, so you’re the touchstone.
W: We’re at the very end of their process before it gets to the dub stage. So maybe they get a little nervous when we don’t like something, and they’re thrilled when we’re insane about it (laughs) because they know they’re gonna get some feedback about it. They may not get the numbers they want because they’re not being consistent enough, but they know that the episode’s great.
HP: They lost so many people between Season 2 and the first half of 3 that aren’t coming back, I think, because you can’t just jump into the middle of a season like that.
W: No, they’re going to have to do some...
L: Some more stand-alone type shows. And that’s what’s really kind of cool about these last two shows, especially the last one, I think, because it’s so good. The story. And even if you’ve seen only one episode before, it’s very watchable and you’ll get it. It’s a really good story, like a little movie. We love the show!
W: And we’re here, 100 percent.
HP: And I have high hopes now that Brian Fuller’s back on, and Mark Verheiden from Battlestar Galactica.
L: Brian Fuller write more! He’s such a good writer.
HP: Yep. And I was really impressed with Ollie Grigsby, and oh! Foster and Armus...
W: Yeah, they’re great.
HP: Yeah, they do really good work.
W: They wrote 24 and it’s really, really good. Also, you can spread the word if people want to talk to us about the episodes, we have forums on WendyandLisa.com and we have a fan page on Facebook.
HP: All right, I’ll let you go, I know you’ve got business to attend to, and perhaps someone to unchain from your wall.
W: Yeah, Michael is waiting to be unstrapped.
L: I’m gonna throw hot water on him.
HP: Wow, are you gonna tape it and put it on YouTube?
W: Maybe.
L: Hey, now there’s an idea! I like the way you think!
HP: Viral! I’m telling ya. (laughs) Okay, thanks again so much for talking to House Petrelli!
L: Thanks Willow! We’ll catch you later.
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