Interview: Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller

Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies, talks to us about the hit series as season one comes to DVD...

Where did you get the idea for Pushing Daisies?

I was working on the show Dead Like Me and because I was writing about grim reapers taking lives the opposite concept popped into my head. I thought it would be interesting to create a foil for the lead character in that show - that, since she was taking lives, she could come across someone who would restore the souls before she could take them. This new character would be an adversary but would ultimately touch her and give her her life back. Then I left the show halfway through the first season so I put the idea in my back pocket. It evolved, the biggest evolutionary step being the romance, the impossible love, a Ladyhawke-like story about it being impossible for them to be together and how do they cope with insurmountable obstacles.

How did you arrive at the fairy-tale-with-a-twist flavour?

As I started writing and exploring the idea it seemed the subject matter was on the surface a little morbid so to give it a different spin and make it more of a happy show and more of an uplifting show, that seemed an interesting direction to go in. Also, the movie Amelie is a big inspiration. One thing I particularly like about it is how it gives you a lot of emotion out of human kindness as opposed to human tragedy, which is more easily mined. When Amelie walks the blind man through the shopping district and explains every bit of business that he can't experience it always makes me well up - it's so sweet. I thought that would be a more fun headspace yo play in. I don’t think I could necessarily write a Criminal Minds or a CSI because you have to be in a negative headspace for a long period.

You also worked on Heroes. Are there any similarities?

What I liked about working on Heroes was that it was a comic book, it skewered more towards a male audience and there were dark elements to it. You have to have great stakes because it’s all about turning the page and having a very dramatic image - that was the template for that show. The template for Pushing Daisies is a fairy tale, a children’s book, but it also has subversive qualities to it, like a Grimm's fairy tale. We use a lot of tableaux images, we don’t use many handheld cameras and the framing is very precise.

Has it been a tough sell?

I’d been trying to do this project for years and previously it had proven to be a tough sell, but that was because I was working for a studio which favoured more down-the-middle sorts of television shows and this was a little bit more out-of-the-box. Once my contract was up there I got a contract with Warner Bros Television and the head of development was so encouraging when I pitched the original to her. I’d been so used to people saying 'No' to it for so long that it was such a surprise.

Were you involved in casting?

I executive produce the show, so yes I was. I’d worked with Lee Pace on the show Wonderfalls and when I was writing Pushing Daisies I’d imagined him as the lead. I knew he could handle my dialogue, which tends to be very dense and stylised, and he has a way of delivering it that makes it sound not so written.

What about Anna Friel?

She was an interesting find. On the page Chuck is very comedic so we saw a lot of actresses who had that comedic sensibility, but it felt like bananas on bananas, that it was a bit too much for it to be comedic on the page and also delivered in a comedic style. Anna is a very dramatic actress and she tends to do a lot of intense, emotional scenes in all of her projects, but when she came in she had such levity and was so infectiously fun, sweet and charming, and I thought 'Here's an actress who can give all the comedic stuff an emotional weight, an emotional honesty'. In this grand, fantastic fairy tale world, you need an actress of her calibre to really ground it. Of course there’s always pressure to cast the big names, but a lot of time is wasted going after stars who simply won’t do television. It's a game everybody plays every year. But Anna is the best of both worlds because she has an extensive career but she had the air of not looking down her nose at it - she was very excited to do television in the States and make a name for herself over there.

What are the advantages of television for you as a writer?

When a movie is over you don’t know where the characters are going to go, so it's nice in television to have the scope to see how characters will evolve. It feels more realistic because you have a chance to throw lots of curves at the characters and see how they react. That's one of the fun things - you can change the game a bit whereas in movies it tends to be one story and you're done, unless it's a franchise.

What was your view on the writers' strike?

As a member of the Writers Guild of America, I think the strike had a very valid point, but the producer side of me was very conflicted because I saw all the damage it did. Television is changing and the strike may have hastened that change to its next incarnation, which could be having a computer monitor instead of a TV set where you can pull up shows whenever you want. After the strike in 1988 something like eight per cent of viewers never returned to watching television. There was also damage to the economy from the recent strike and damage to people's personal lives - if you’re a single mother and you're working on a TV show, to go months without a paycheque is a lot to ask when you're not a writer and you don’t have a dog directly in the fight.

How do you feel about people waiting for the DVD boxset and having a marathon viewing session?

The shows that I love I tend to watch when they air because I can't wait that long to see them, but then I want them on DVD because I like to have them in my library and I’ll watch them again many times.

What are your favourites?

I love Heroes. I worked on it for the first season so I'm biased, but I also loved the second season. I’m a huge fan of Lost. I kind of lost interest at the start of the third season but then it totally pulled me back in, which is a huge feat - usually if people disengage from a show you’ve lost them forever. And I think 30 Rock is probably the best show on TV right now. If you see the pilot, it's really developed brilliantly.

Season One of Pushing Daisies is out now on DVD - watch the trailer: