Matt Olmstead sat down with iFMagazine.com to chat about Prison Break Season 4!! Check out what he had to say. Warning, this tidbit might contain spoilers!!
PRISON BREAK is a lot like its characters in some ways: the show is a survivor, but lives every day as though it could be its last. Season Four of the Fox series, which airs Monday nights at 9 PM, has brothers and erstwhile convicts Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) and Michael Schofield (Wentworth Miller) out of jail and trying to turn the tables on the Company, the entity that has set them up for the past three years of woes. Executive producer Matt Olmstead gives iF MAGAZINE an exclusive on what’s going on with the thrill-a-minute series’ new season.
iF MAGAZINE: At what point did the PRISON BREAK team know you were coming back for a fourth season and at what point did you come up with the plot of Season Four?
MATT OLMSTEAD: As soon as the [Writers Guild] strike ended. We sat down and realized that we had no back nine [the last nine episodes of a traditional twenty-two episode season, which had been curtailed by the strike], so we all got in a room and thought, instead of picking up [the story] moments later, let’s use this to our advantage and jump ahead and then drop back and address what happened. We’re jumping ahead a month, so it’s at once surprising where are these people and how did they get here, and we’re also able to fill in the mystery of what happened.
iF: Did you guys pretty much hit the ground running once the writers strike ended?
OLMSTEAD: Absolutely. I think most people did, partly out of relief, but also out of necessity. As soon as it ended, we were all at my house, brainstorming about what we would do with Season Four, so that’s an apt term. We did hit the ground running.
iF: Was one of the big challenges for Season Four coming up with a premise that would put all these characters back together? There’s no way most of them would associate with Rob Knepper’s character T-Bag voluntarily.
OLMSTEAD: That’s exactly right. He was the most difficult character to accommodate. We found a way and believe me, it happened luckily fairly quickly. We would have spent weeks, because we’re not going to lose Rob Knepper, but we were able to get a conceit that did get the guys together, because one of our favorite dynamics of the show are the yard scenes where you have all the cons together. They hate each other, but they all want the same thing, so they have to band together.
It’s a difficult process on a serialized show, keeping it going forward, especially with the con dynamic, but ultimately it’s very rewarding. It’s not a police procedural that you could take a whole hiatus off, show up on Monday and know what you’re going to do, essentially, because the sets are the same. We had to figure out what country we were going to set this show in.
iF: Did you know that William Fichtner as Alexander Mahone was going to pop the way he did when he joined the cast in Season Two?
OLMSTEAD: No. I was aware that he was talented as an actor, but when he came on, that’s one of those things where it was a mutual decision. He only made a one-year deal [for Season Two], and he made a one-year deal last year, so each year, basically, at the end of the year, simply he and I sit down, I tell him what we have in mind creatively, he tells me what he’s looking for, and thankfully, he’s given us what we need, we’ve given him what he needs and so he feels creatively validated and enthusiastic. This year especially, [Mahone] is completely just knocked sideways with a real major tragedy in his life and he’s at once broken and vengeful. [Fichtner] really brings it.
iF: Are there any changes on the writing staff?
OLMSTEAD: We kept the writing staff intact. We’ve brought in a new great new writer named Graham Roland and we were fortunate enough to get a guy named Nick Wooten, who I worked with for a long time on NYPD BLUE, a very good friend of mine, and he ran LAW & ORDER for a couple of years recently. We were able to get him on as a consultant.
iF: Sarah Wayne Callies’ character, Sara Tancredi, is still alive after Lincoln apparently found her severed head in a box last season. Was explaining that a major difficulty?
OLMSTEAD: It actually wasn’t. First, the Sara character gave us the motivation through Season Three and now it’s given us the motivation for Season Four in that, we came up with the idea that if her character was killed, it would turn Michael towards vengeance. So we had that. Sarah was pregnant [in real life] at the time, so she couldn’t come down and film it, so right away, when we shot it and aired it, on the boards, people were saying, "Look, she might really be alive, because you didn’t see her get killed." So we thought, "Well, you know what, let’s put that in our back pocket and see what happens." So we get to Season Four, we have to figure out a motivation for Michael to move forward – what if Sarah’s really alive? It doesn’t take that long to explain it. Basically, the Company thinks if she escaped and the Michael character "knows" that Sarah character has escaped, he won’t do what they want, so let’s keep up the ruse. The explanation is fairly quick. This is addressed in Season Four. Here are the main things. When Michael gets to find out what the deal is, he says, "My brother saw a head." And it’s like, well, what did he really see? When he presses Lincoln, [Lincoln says],"Did I hold the head up and check dental records? No." Nobody would. You see a severed head in a box – if you work someone into a frenzy, they’re more likely to believe something. And then it comes down to, well, L.J. [Lincoln’s son] said he heard her being killed. He didn’t see her being killed. So now you have to figure out what the Company did and you realize they actually pulled it off. They wanted [Michael, Lincoln and L.J.] to believe it, they psyched them up into a state where they were more inclined to believe it, and it worked.
iF: Was moving the storyline and production to Los Angeles after spending your first year in Chicago and your second and third years in Dallas a narrative decision or a production decision?
OLMSTEAD: The latter. It actually cost more to move to Los Angeles than to stay in Dallas, but essentially, we had run our course at the end of two years. We’d kind of shot Dallas out [used all available locations] and the conceit of Season Four was that [the main characters] were going after the Company, so it could be located in one of two places, L.A. or New York, so we had to get out of Dallas.
iF: Is it easier for production now that you’re back in L.A.?
OLMSTEAD: Yes and no. It’s easier because now the writers’ offices are right next to production, whereas [before] we were in L.A. and they were in Dallas, so we have more accessibility. It’s more difficult because now you’re in the mix with a lot of other shows. In Dallas, we were essentially the only game in town, so we could really shoot anywhere, we had much more access. Now you’re in line here, basically. We went to look for a place in the harbor in San Pedro for an exterior for our show. They had ten other offers [from other productions] to film [there]. In Dallas, literally, we could shoot anywhere. There were no competing offers. People were falling over themselves to accommodate us, so that was a real plus.
iF: Is there something different people will get out of Season Four than seasons past?
OLMSTEAD: It’s a culmination of – and I think that the three [seasons] that are behind us laid the groundwork – this feeling of this desperate pursuit of freedom and how special freedom is really reverberates through the show in general and certainly this season. Even though they’re out of prison, they’re still being handled, managed, contained and forced to do something, and you get this feeling that it’s just beyond their grasp and they want it so badly.
iF: Do you have to once more create a season finale that can stand as a series finale or segue into new season?
OLMSTEAD: Yeah. I think that we’ll know halfway through, but this is a serialized show and you’ve got to approach every season as your last, so if it changes and they want another season and everyone wants to be a part of it, then we’ll go from there, but right now, we’re not saving anything, we’re blowing it all out, and if it’s the end, we’ll be ready for it.
Info credit: iF Magazine
Info Credit: iFMagazine.com
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