Steven S. DeKnight [Scénariste]

Je l'adore! Il a travaillé sur trois de mes séries préférées: BTVS, Ats et Smallville, que demander de plus?

Quand j'ai vu qu'il avait travaillé sur Smallville, j'étais pratiquement *sûre* que tu réagirais lorsque je le posterais, je sais pas pourquoi

Je dois dire que j'ai toujours été un peu "réticente" à ce scénariste, tout simplement parce qu'il a écrit pas mal d'épisodes de la saison 4... notamment Pluie de feu. Et je sais que c'est bête parce que l'idée du sexe Connor/Cordy ne vient peut-être pas de lui... mais j'y peux rien, j'ai regardé ses commentaires de l'épisode, et depuis, je l'aime pas trop (le gars disait voir de la tension sexuelle dans leurs scènes de l'épisode, moi j'étais: WTF? )

Enfin, mon aversion est plus psychologique qu'autre chose hein, mais j'y peux rien, quand je vois son nom, j'associe à la scène de fin de Pluie de feu *frisson dégoûté*

Duhhh !! Effectivement, je comprends ta réticence "Tension sexuelle" = Hahaha. T'es sûre que c'était pas ironique ????

Forcément, perso, je retiens des épisodes comme Dead things, donc tout de suite ça passe mieux perso Mais sinon, ouais, ça c'est sûr, c'est pas son meilleur épisode (remarque, comme tu dis, c'est sûrement pas son idée, vu que les grandes lignes sont prédéfinies dès le départ, et je pense que "Cordy-couche-avec-celui-dont-elle-a-changé-les-couches" fait parti des grandes lignes ).

Nan, c'était bien sérieux parce qu'il avait l'air de dire que ça préparait un peu le terrain pour la dernière scène (enfin, de ce que j'en souviens, ses commentaires m'ont tellement dégoûté que j'ai plus jamais regardé )

Mais je peux comprendre que tu l'apprécies pour Spuffy

Ah ouais en effet Bon après, perso j'adore Pluie de feu, donc ça veut rien dire. Y'a juste la dernière scène qui est parmi les pires de la série. Mais bon, ouais, je pense pas que l'idée venait de lui, surtout que comme le dit si bien Miss Kitty, faire coucher Cordy avec son beau-fils (en quelque sorte), bah c'est ce qu'on peut appeler une grande ligne

Citation :

Steven S. DeKnight
"Spartacus: Blood and Sand" (Starz)

In his next life, DeKnight wouldn't mind running a show that takes place in the real world. "You know, a nice quiet family drama where people sit around and talk about their feelings -- that'd be great," he says. The "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel" and "Smallville" alum scored this year with Starz's gladiator action series, which premiered to record-setting viewership in January. He's currently in Vancouver filming a six-episode prequel. Favorite TV Moment: "I've been rewatching old TV movies that scared the crap out of me as a kid, like 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.' I remember being really young, in the '70s, and sleeping with the lights on for two years after that."

Big Break: "Joss Whedon plucked me from obscurity to write for 'Buffy' and taught me everything I know, especially about running and producing a show. But technically, my first paying TV job was on MTV's primetime soap, 'Undressed.' And I share that honor with Damon Lindelof."

Citation :

We got a chance to chat with Rob Tapert and Steven DeKnight about their upcoming one-hour drama for Starz, Spartacus : Blood and Sand, which stars Andy Whitfield and sci-fi icon Lucy Lawless in a retelling of the sword-and-sandals tale.

Tapert (Lawless’ husband and producer of Xena : Warrior Princess) and DeKnight (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) explained why they decided to "bend history," as DeKnight put it, for the new show.

Andy Whitfield has the title role in Spartacus : Blood and Sand

"It’s a tale everyone knows, that nobody actually knows anything about, so the chance to work within history and take ownership of it in a different way, ... it’s a great human drama story of a guy who has an emotional awakening," Tapert said. "It’s a great journey."

DeKnight added : "It’s a guy who was an absolute no one and almost brought down the Roman republic. Almost, kind of by accident. He never set out to do that. The Romans basically sent him into slavery and trained him on how to defeat the Republic inadvertently, and it’s such a great story. ... The way we’re telling it, Spartacus is not a golden person. He learns to be something more than a man."

Viewers can expect lots of action. "Somebody’s ass gets kicked every episode," Tapert said.

Tapert sets the scene. "They begin before Spartacus was captured by the Romans," he said. "We start when he actually joins the Roman auxiliary. Historically, the Romans had invaded Thrace. So a lot of the Thracian soldiers had signed up for the auxiliary. So we have a whole story before he actually gets to a ludus [a gladiatorial school], where he’s sold into slavery. This is based on some scraps of historical evidence. Some say that he was a soldier in the auxiliary, and he deserted and got sentenced into slavery."

Tapert said that it seemed like a traditional comic-book origin story (a companion graphic novel is available now) and that it naturally had breaks for seasons. Convenient of Spartacus to hook that up. DeKnight gave us a little insight to what historical evidence there actually is about the man. And there is actually very little. "It’s .. .a bunch of scraps here and there that you can read about in an hour and a half," Taper said. "And even those scraps, before he broke out of the gladiator school, there’s practically nothing known about the man. What is in these historical documents is all contradictory. ... So it left it wide open for us to actually craft who the man actually was."

The footage revealed a very graphic novel/300 look. "We were liberated by 300," Tapert said. "300 was a bold statement. And Gladiator, to its credit, was beautiful, and I felt like I was in Rome. And when they made Rome, which was a very expensive series, I felt like I was in Rome. But we didn’t have the financial resources, and those guys has already covered that all, ... and Zack Snyder brought a style, brought Frank Miller to life. And the upside of that we’ll see going forward. Hopefully, there are other TV shows who are doing it. ... And we’ve done it in this style, which is to ... generate backgrounds that don’t have to mimic Rome 100 percent, or Capua, as ... a lot of our series is talking heads inside empty rooms, and that’s what’s actually going to carry the series going forward."

Obviously, the producers were pretty happy to take on a topic that didn’t actually have a lot of facts to stick to. Tapert talked about approaching DeKnight about the subject. "I said, ’Do you know anything about history ?’" he said. "He said no. And I said, ’Good, g-ddamn it, because I don’t care about it.’"

Tapert said that if the historical facts didn’t fit the story they were trying to tell, they threw it out, believing that the "average punter, as they say in New Zealand," wouldn’t have a problem with it. This is hardly a surprise, considering that he did the same thing with Hercules : The Legendary Journeys and Xena : Warrior Princess. DeKnight called it "bending" history, saying that it had to be done. "But we try not to break it."

Interview audio de Steven DeKnight :

Une interview de Steven DeKnight sur Spartacus, Dollhouse et The Man.

Seconde partie de l'interview :

Un nouvel article où Steven DeKnight est concerné :

Steven DeKnight, dans sa dernière interview, parle de BTVS, de la saison 8 et de la saison 9 en comics à venir, et on apprend qu'il ne pourra pas écrire pour la saison 9... Je suis déçue.

Citation :

Exclusive: No BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER – Season 9 for SPARTACUS creator Steven S. DeKnight

He also talks BUFFY – Season 8, his love for Joss Whedon and Vampy Cat toy!
By SEAN ELLIOTT / Contributing Writer


Steven S. DeKnight is a man best known to fans for shows like SMALLVILLE, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and most recently SPARTACUS (in it’s many forms). DeKnight also contributed to the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER SEASON EIGHT comic book series from Dark Horse Comics, with a story about Vampy Cat toys and vampires in the mainstream.

ASSIGNMENT X talked to DeKnight recently about his involvement with SEASON EIGHT, and whether he would be back for SEASON NINE.

“They just had a big summit with all of the writers and Dark Horse that I couldn’t attend, I was actually doing commentary for the SPARTACUS: GODS OF THE ARENA DVD,” DeKnight explains. “I’m just so consistently swamped on this show that I can’t do anything.”

He went on to say that while he won’t be return to the land of Buffy at the moment, he was a big fan of SEASON EIGHT and everything creator Joss Whedon and the writers got to do with the series.

“I’m one of the biggest Joss Whedon fans ever,” he says. “I thoroughly enjoyed SEASON EIGHT. One thing about it that I just loved is he kind of got to do what we wanted to do with the BUFFY animated show that we could never get off the ground. In a comic book we could do all the stuff we couldn’t do on the show – you can make Dawn a giant or make her a centaur. It was so fantastic to see that unleashed.”

The experience of writing even the one comic of BUFFY – Season 8 was a good experience for DeKnight who loved being back in that playground and he hopes that his comic will spawn a new BUFFY merchandise item.

“I absolutely had a blast doing it,” he exclaims. “I keep hoping that Dark Horse will release a Vampy Cat plush toy, that’s all I want. I want a Vampy Cat toy!”


SPARTACUS: GODS OF THE ARENA has ended a trifle happier than one would guess from the previous season of BLOOD AND SAND. True the six episode series was bookended with death, but that doesn’t mean the story within didn’t have a bit of a happy ending.

Steven S. DeKnight, series creator and executive producer, has had a blast writing within the world of SPARTACUS and was more than happy to re-visit favorite characters and the Ludus of Batiatus once more.

ASSIGNMENT X got to chat this week with DeKnight now that the second season has ended and we picked his brain about some of the origins of GODS OF THE ARENA, his favorite moments that were part of the series, and even some things that weren’t.

ASSIGNMENT X: How far back did you decide to do a prequel series to the first season of SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND?

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT: I had talked in season one about the possibility of doing a flashback episode in season two. John Hannah had expressed to me that he really loved being on the show and wanted to know if there was any way he could pop back in. I’d been talking about doing a mid-season flashback episode of Batiatus and having his father turn up. It was actually jotted down on the board when we were trying to figure out season two. We had written the first couple of scripts for season two when we found out Andy was sick.

AX: What did you do at that point?

DEKNIGHT: We had to stop and figure out what to do. We were heading towards shutting down for seven to eight months, and everybody’s concern was that once we shut down the writers’ room and shut down production it was infinitely harder to convince Starz to keep going. It was easier to write everything off at that point. So I hatched this idea of this flashback episode that I had in mind and blow it up to a two hour event just to air over the summer to keep the show in front of the fans. I was worried that if we were shut down and then started back up again, it would be a year and a half to two years before we had any more SPARTACUS on the screen. So I suggested that idea and nobody wanted to do it. Basically Starz had a hole in their schedule and that didn’t help. It didn’t make dollars and sense to do a two hour one shot. The thing died. So a couple of weeks later, Rob Tapert, my producing partner called me up from New Zealand, and suggested four episodes. I shot it down. Four episodes isn’t enough time to build an intricate story, and it’s too long for a one-two punch – it was neither here nor there. So it died a second time. Then a few weeks later Starz called up and said six episodes would really help them out. It was like Goldilocks, the bed was just right. It worked for production, it worked for Starz, and it worked story-wise. Then we dove in to try to figure out how to make the story work.

AX: So you really should have called it SPARTACUS: PHEONIX by that point?

DEKNIGHT: Exactly! The odds were really against us from the start. Everybody had a lot of concern if it could be as good as season one, or had we mined everything out of Batiatus’ Ludus that we could. On the writing side we were very confident and excited that we could tell a story that the audience would find exciting. There is also the TITANIC concern, we were doing a prequel and everybody knows what happens. Everybody knows who lives, and who dies. They know new characters that pop up probably die. I wasn’t really worried about that. I knew there were a ton of twists and turns that we could do, even though you know Crixus doesn’t die and Batiatus and Lucretia don’t die. It was actually an unfortunate circumstance that caused us to make the prequel but it turned out to be a great opportunity to go back and fill in so many character blanks that we would never otherwise have the opportunity to do.

AX: Did you enjoy going back and taking characters that were “lovable bastards” in the first series, and making them the heroes of this series?

DEKNIGHT: Oh yeah, I love Batiatus and Lucretia. I always say if there is a character that I am closest to its Batiatus. Not quite so villainous, but the long soliloquies of profanity … yeah that’s me. [Laughs] It’s great to explore and take them a step back where they are shifty but not bloodthirsty. The same this is great with a character like Ashur. It was great to take a step back to before he was such a villain, where he had some tendencies but hadn’t been forged into the man he was when we met him. It was great with all of the characters – to see Crixus before he was top of the heap and Oenemaus before he was Doctore. Even minor characters like Gnaeus before he got his net, little things like that delight us in the room. Explaining how Gnaeus became a retiarius.

AX: Crixus was one of my favorite journeys to watch on the show, because he had such a long climb ahead of him from being a street slave to being a champion.

DEKNIGHT: I love the Crixus stuff, and Manu Bennett did such a great job, and to be able to explain Crixus and why he is the way he is. It was an absolute joy and there were little tiny grace notes that we put in that had some of my favorite things. It’s not until the very, very, very end of the final scene of the prequel where a lot of people realized that Gannicus was wearing the same necklace that Crixus wore all through season one. We never draw attention to it and we never talk about it; he just hands it over.

AX: I felt that Lucretia wearing Gaia’s red wig, it was her way of never forgetting and never forgiving what had happened in the past?

DEKNIGHT: Absolutely! It was very symbolic in that way. In terms of back story it almost didn’t happen. We cast Jamie Murray, and it took us a while to find a Gaia that we all were crazy about and we really fell in love with Jamie. By the time we could get her to New Zealand we were very close to shooting, and it takes a month to make these custom wigs, so we didn’t have enough time. We had to see if they could make Lucy’s wig work. I can’t completely remember, if they made Lucy’s wig work from season one, or they put a rush job on it. I think it was probably Lucy’s wig. It was a nail-biter right up until we were starting to shoot to know if we could have Gaia wigged for this thing to work. I was hoping and praying that we could get it done because it is such a powerful image. It’s one of those little things that we love that explains why she wears wigs. We also had a subplot that we jettisoned. We had a whole wig motif seeing Solonius pick out his first wig, but that luckily fell by the wayside.

AX: It was set up to make the audience believe that Batiatus would kill his father Titus, and then in the end it is ultimately Lucretia that does the deed. Was that always the plan?

DEKNIGHT: We knew early on. The broad strokes started out as “Batiatus kills his father”, but as soon as we started talking about it, we decided it was a little too obvious. We decided to have Lucretia be the one who does the deed. Batiatus can’t do it so she does it and can never tell him. The twist in case people saw it coming, one way or another they knew the dad was going to die, but the twist here was Lucretia killing off Oenomaus’ wife along the way. We had a devil of a time and we went round and round for a week, trying to figure out how Melitta gets a hold of the wine and how she drinks it without Gannicus drinking it. It was all a bit of a conundrum.

AX: So is that why Doctore doesn’t drink wine in the first season?

DEKNIGHT: It’s very interesting. I had some broad strokes in the back of my head figured out about some of these back stories, but all of the details like that didn’t exist when we did season one. When I wrote the line about Doctore not having drank in many, many years I didn’t already know that his wife died of poisoned wine. There’s a lot of interesting reverse engineering we had to do from season one that made it very complicated and difficult because we locked into certain things that we had to have to make sense. I’m very proud of the fact that 99% of it matches up. On repeated viewings you might catch something that doesn’t quite line up, but I swear to Monkey Jesus we’ll address that in the second season.

AX: Did you always have the bookend in place for the prequel that it would start and end with Batiatus’ death?

DEKNIGHT: Interesting story there, from the start of actually breaking it, yes. From the original concept, no, there was no bookend. It was felt very strongly from our parent company that they wanted to see Andy Whitfield in this. The whole prequel was devised to keep everybody working and keep the show alive while Andy was going through his treatments for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and for him to recover and come back to the show. Then we started getting calls for DVD and International that it would be great if Andy were in it. They didn’t understand that due to health reasons he couldn’t be in it. It was this real conundrum, and there were many ideas thrown at us about how to get Andy in it. One being that Crixus was telling him the story of what happened, and I thought “Oh God! Throw me out the window.”

So I came up with the bookend and a focus of Batiatus’ last moments before he dies and what led him to this fate. The original idea was released in scripts on an iPad application where you can read the original opening, and there was more material. The original plan was to shoot extra parts of the massacre you didn’t see, between the time when Batiatus leaves Lucretia and when he faces Spartacus what happens to him. The plan was to try to shoot some extra material with Andy at the very end of our shoot when he was better. Unfortunately he had a relapse and wasn’t able to come back and shoot anything; so we ended up using existing footage. Ultimately I feel two ways. I think it’s very powerful to do it this way, the theme of the choices you make leading you to your fate. On the flip side I’ve heard a lot of complaints about people who watched this first and are yelling that I ruined season one for them and spoiled it. My feeling is if you get upset because you watched the second part, basically the second season of a series and you haven’t watched the first part; I’ve got nothing for you. [Laughs]

Des tweets de Steven en rapport avec le Whedonverse :



Héhé, je suis contente qu'il soit fier de Dead Things de cette façon ♥

On dirait qu'on a les mêmes épisodes préférés, qu'il les ait écrits ou pas

Le frère de Steven DeKnight est décédé à l'âge de 39 ans d'un lymphome...



Des petits mots de scénaristes de la série :

C'est pas évident de trouver les mots dans de telles situations... je suis juste sincèrement désolé pour la famille et l'entourage du défunt.

La nouvelle de la disparition de cet acteur m'a attristé ...c'est beaucoup trop jeune pour partir ...

Steven DeKnight parle de Spartacus :

Nouvelle interview de Steven DeKnight :

Je passe juste pour dire que je vénère ce type pour nous avoir donné Dead Things !! Je ne sais pas trop ce qu'il a fait à côté, mais juste ça...

Le reste de son travail ne vaut pas du tout les épisodes de Buffy qu'il a écris, mais ça vaut pour tous les scénaristes donc j'imagine que Whedon avait tout de même sa petite importance dans le développement de chaque épisode, même ceux qu'il n'a pas écrits...

Pour le reste, Spartacus est plutôt sympa et s'est améliorée d'épisode en épisode (la série est vraiment partie de très bas, il faut dire ). La deuxième saison diffusée cette année était absolument jubilatoire ! La série est tout ce que True Blood devrait être, en fait.

Ca ne m'a jamais trop attirée Spartacus... ^^

Une autre interview de Steven au sujet de la série :

Une sortie inédite ! Steven DeKnight a parlé du script grâce auquel il a été embauché pour être scénariste dans BTVS ! Pour ce test, il avait choisi d'écrire un épisode intitulé "Xander the Slayer". Je trouve l'idée absolument géniale, j'aurais adoré voir cet épisode, vu comment il en parle :

Citation :

‘Xander the Slayer’: Steven DeKnight details the spec script that got him hired on ‘Buffy’

If you want to work in TV, you have to prove that you can write for somebody else’s characters. This can be difficult, especially when the characters are as beloved as the ones found on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and especially when the name of your speculative episode is “Xander the Slayer.”

It’s actually a well-known rule that you shouldn’t spec a show that you want to work on for exactly this reason: Showrunners and writers know their own characters too well to judge a spec fairly. There will always be something that doesn’t sound quite right. A line of dialogue that doesn’t ring a hundred percent true.

But don’t you dare tell try to sell that garbage to Steven DeKnight, showrunner of Daredevil and writer on Buffy and Angel. You see, early in his career, Steven wrote a Buffy spec script titled “Xander the Slayer” and found himself on the business end of a job offer extended by Joss Whedon himself.

The big idea

“Somewhere in a storage facility in LA is a copy of that spec script,” said Steven DeKnight when we asked him about it. “I have actually no idea what box that particular script is in, but it’s out there somewhere. It’s like the lost ark. Yeah, that was a crazy little story.”

Armed with the knowledge that you should always spec a show that you love, DeKnight’s main struggle came down to choosing between his two favorite shows at the time: NYPD Blue, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“I had ideas for both of them,” said DeKnight. “For a couple of weeks I went back and forth, and in a very fateful decision for the rest of my life, I decided to write a Buffy spec.”

DeKnight’s plan? To write a “swing for the fences” stand-out episode that couldn’t go ignored.

“What you need as a big idea,” said DeKnight. “You can’t write an okay spec for a spec to get attention. Not an okay episode. You have to really approach it like it’s sweeps week and this is the episode that’s gonna determine whether or not the show is brought back next season.”

DeKnight also explained that the ideal concept for a spec episode should be a “quick, easily explainable idea.”

Take, for instance, the script that DeKnight ended up penning as an example: “Xander the Slayer.”


‘Xander the Slayer’

“It’s an opening scene, Buffy and Xander are in a cemetery out on patrol,” describes DeKnight. “They get attacked by a demon that blasts Buffy, and in the blast her powers are shifted to Xander.”

It’s an episode that tinkers with the overarching mechanics of the show, which is typically a speccing no-no, but DeKnight had a device that would help him to work around that while staying true to Buffy‘s spirit.

“Later in the script, you find out that it was not an accident, that these demons were trying to kill the Slayer, but knew they couldn’t beat Buffy, so they thought they had a good chance of doing it if her powers were in someone else.”

Not just anyone else either, but Xander, a character affectionately known as the all-human, weak link of the group (at least when it comes to sheer power).

DeKnight had a reason for giving Xander the power of the slayer, and it was this idea that probably caught Whedon’s interest.

“It explores why men can’t be the slayer,” said DeKnight. “Basically, they’re too aggressive.”

In other words, men aren’t equipped to handle the immense power of the Slayer.

“Essentially, the dark side kind of takes over and Xander gets out of control,” said DeKnight. “I enjoyed the hell out of writing it, and it had a very somber ending.”

Going boldly where no spec has gone before



Writing something as potentially monumental as “Xander the Slayer” may seem bold for a typical spec, but according to DeKnight, he wanted to show that he understood the spirit of the show that he loved. Besides, at that moment in time, it was deemed “unlikely” that his spec would ever reach Whedon’s desk. Even if it did, surely Whedon would come to the conclusion that it was off-base, or that DeKnight just didn’t understand the characters like the creators.

“If I had ever received a Spartacus script that was anywhere in the neighborhood of being like the show we were creating, I would have hired that person in a second,” said DeKnight, “You’re trying to hit a very very small target, but even if you don’t hit a bulls-eye, you’ll have a piece of material that people can read and understand what you can do based on a world they’ve already seen.”

DeKnight acknowledges that the industry has shifted to favor original pilots over spec scripts, but he insists that every TV writer should have at least one spec script in their arsenal to prove that they can understand and imitate the spirit of a beloved show. Obviously, it worked out okay for him.


Funding a new kind of pilot

It’s one thing to write a pilot for a show, and quite another to create, fund, and shoot the whole thing yourself. According to DeKnight, Travel Boobs showrunner Jaime Slater has hit gold with her unexpected web series about three girls on the run with nowhere to go.

“The biggest compliment that I could possibly give to the show, is ‘this is a show I would watch,’ said DeKnight. “It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s unexpected, and I think people will really dig it.”

An unofficial part of the process from the beginning, DeKnight has been an incredible resource for Slater, who already has two episodes in the can.

“Jaime’s done a great job showrunning it,” said DeKnight, who is engaged to Slater, the showrunner and star of Travel Boobs.

“I keep telling Jaime that the three of them together is perfectly casting, perfect chemistry. If that’s not enough, if you end up being one of the people watching and supporting the show, eventually you’ll see me pop up!” teased DeKnight, who will be featured in an upcoming episode titled “Nip Slip.”

SlayerRevival en a réalisé une traduction ici pour les intéressés : http://slayerevival.com/2015/12/17/alex-contre-les-vampires-steven-deknight-raconte-comment-il-a-obtenu-son-job-sur-buffy/