Episode 2: Banshee (The Forge) with Monis Rose and Jonathan Tropper

We went to this place called The Forge. And The Forge is a general store or it's like, excuse me, it's like a general store and it's off the beaten train tracks. It's actually on the wrong side of the train tracks. It's near Highway 39 in Pennsylvania. Next to (for those who are not familiar with Pennsylvania), it's next to Amish country.

Why and how did we pick The Forge?

So we like bars that are not really hidden. And they're not really hidden gems. It's just no one goes to that. No locals go to them. And no regulars go to them. Who really visits places like The Forge are drifters. They're like vagabonds. These are the men and women who come and go. And really people you they don't really want people to know about them. They just want a good stiff drink.

That being said, we liked The Forge because when you go inside, it's dark, it's dank, it's dreary. You get the impression that people have either died in this place in The Forge, or they have actually sought redemption. And that's actually a good thing. So, in terms of the actual liquor itself. It's pretty much top shelf hard liquor. They have a really stiff, Balvenie Doublewood. Of course, being in Pennsylvania, there is Yun Ling on tap. You got to have Yun Ling of course. Underneath the bar, if the bartender does like you, he does have an unmarked bottle which we have deemed Grandpa Pete’s sauce and it tastes like it's pretty much a place for fights. We don't condone fighting. We don't condemn fighting, but there are many bars in the world in the US that are meant for fights. We particularly like a bar called the Double Deuce. And this one in particular, you know, there is always for whatever reason a fight that's going to happen. And that being said, and if you are at The Forge during this particular time, everything is on the house, the food, the drink. I mean, it's really meant for you to keep quiet. It's also meant for you to hopefully, come back again. And at Restaurant Fiction, we always like free drinks and free food.

How was that review? What was wrong? What was right? And what would you add or enhance about it?

I think that's pretty much on the nose, you know, it's a bar that's really a no frills bar that was set up more as a place for the bartender's sugar bass. It’s just a hideaway and while you know his twilight years, you know, he’ll pour you whatever you got to drink. If you want to order food, no matter what your order, you're going to basically get, you know, steak and fries. Unless it's the morning where you might be lucky enough to get some eggs. And I think the menu is probably pretty basic, unlimited, no matter what. I think it'd be really hard to find a good salad in Banshee. But you know, it's the kind of bar that the people who would want to go to a bar like that will find and no one else will ever find. Because it's really not on the beaten track, that's for sure. You certainly don't ask for a cocktail.

How much time goes into the development of The Forge?

With the show Banshee we had a notion that everything about Banshee is that everything used to be something else.

We have a gangster who used to be Amish. We have a cop who used to be a criminal. Our police station, working on those themes of identity, used to be a used car dealership. So, you know, we really try to go at everything in Banshee having sort of a repurposed identity. So The Forge, the notion was that before it became a bar, it was an old blacksmith shop. And that's why it's called The Forge.

And there are still tools of the trade left there, there's a huge melting pot. And there's some of the gears and the tools that blacksmiths use, the hammer. And whatever you call those big times they use to get things out of the fire, as well as the fire pit. All of those are still in The Forge and on the walls. It hasn't been removed, because it probably would take too much effort and work to remove it and then repair the floor. So it just becomes part of the atmosphere. And the idea is that everything else in Banshee used to be something else. That's also why the dimensions of the bar are kind of unusual. Like, you have the bar and you have these tables, but you also have sort of a high ceiling and a cavernous room because of what it used to be. And so that was the initial idea then. And we wrote that into the script. And then, once we were getting made and we had production designers involved, they began imagining that what that really looks like it feels like and we ended up with The Forge.

How does The Forge enhance the characters, either Sugar, or the sheriff or anybody else?

I think it really just grounds them into the kind of characters they are. All the other characters you meet on the show live in luxury, and some of them live in more modest accommodations, but Sugar lives behind The Forge. Lucas lives above the bar next to The Forge.

When you live in a place like that you're basically kind of admitting to yourself and printing out to anyone who watches that you're somebody who hasn't lived a conventional life, who doesn't have conventional attachments, and who basically has nothing in the world can pick up and leave tomorrow without having much to leave behind. And so I think when you see Lucas' accommodations, which are very much an extension of The Forge, and when you see, Sugar in The Forge, you just kind of realize that these are people who sort of have gone through life, had some highs and lows and ended up in a place where they recognize each other as sort of misfits and outcasts.

To me was just a place where we could foster that really kind of unstated tone of masculine friendship, which is something that I find isn't done a lot on television, but I just wanted there to be an offense. Some kind of man cave where these guys could return to lick their wounds and connect with each other. And so probably my favorite scenes to write overall for years were just the scenes where Lucas, Sugar and Job are in The Forge. Because you could write with a certain tone, and you could really get into the way men relate to each other non-verbally as well as verbally to sort of support each other. And that's what The Forge really became for me.

As a writer, does it allow you to have a breathing room?

Well, that's what it became.

I mean, it started out as the birthplace of Lucas Hood. Because in the first episode, that's where he witnessed the murder of the real Lucas Hood, killed the guys who did it and ultimately picked up the badge and became Lucas Hood.

So in that sense, The Forge was his origin story, was his birthplace. But what it grew into was sort of the place where our lead character could return to over and over again. Some shows have a confessional. Some of the comedies have confessionals where every five minutes or so, one of the actors is talking to the camera about how he feels. And we're at drama, and we certainly are in touchy feely like that. But it was a place where Lucas could go lick his wounds, hear truth from Sugar, and kind of it was a place of sort of no bullshit male bonding and connection. And that's what it became.

For the series finale. You bookended pretty much the whole series with the last scene in The Forge. Why?

This is sort of the psychic energy of Lucas Hood. It’s The Forge. The Forge is where he started. The Forge is where he kept returning to. And that was his base. And he was never comfortable wearing a police uniform. He was never comfortable lying about who he was in Banshee. But when he came to The Forge, he got to be who he really was with the only people who knew who he really was. And so in fact, every time he walked through those doors he was, in a sense, that was the only time that he was his genuine true self. So that made perfect sense that that's the place where he would say goodbye as well.

What's the craziest pitch that you've heard concerning a scene in The Forge?

Well, we did talk about Proctor burning himself.

We just couldn't bear to do it, but we did have a whole pitch when it becomes clear in Season Three that Sugar has sided with Lucas Hood over his old friend Proctor. We had this idea that Lucas would drive up to it one night, and it would be on fire. In Season Four, we had Proctor burn down Lucas’ cabin. But in Season Three, we did talk about burning down The Forge at the end of the season.

We also kind of knew that between Season Three and Four, we were going to move from North Carolina to Pittsburgh. So it seemed like a good way to get rid of a really expensive set. We would have to rebuild, but at the same time, we just kind of barely get rid of it. Because it has the emotional center of the show.

Where would you rather go? Would you rather go to The Forge or to the Savoy?

To me, it would always be The Forge. I like quiet. And I really don't like strip clubs. That said, the Savoy Strip Club that we built, is probably the biggest set we’ve ever built. Because it had a lot going on there. It has multiple levels and it had offices in the back and changing rooms for the girls. It was basically a functional strip club.

I don't think I would doubt the drinks there were as good at the same time the days we shot in the Savoy, the crew always had a little more spring in their steps. Because we did bring in 15 strippers every time we shot there.

How much detail needs to be created and developed when creating a world setting, The Forge, or a bar that you put into one of your shows?

It's tremendous. The thing that production design do, it's incredible. Like every picture hanging on the wall behind Sugar. You would never even notice them. But there's a newspaper clipping about one of his prize fights from when he was a fighter back in the day. We wrote the article. The article was put on age newspaper print and put in there the picture. If you were to walk through the bar, nothing would be fake even the things the cameras can’t pick up. All sorts of pictures and mementos. The creases in the seats. The stickiness of the cables from years of beer slop like it's all in there. And you know, we would sometimes sit in there doing work while they were shooting on the next stage and you just feel like you're in a real place for the most part. Except there's no air conditioning, but probably you wouldn't have air conditioning anyway.

The detail is incredible. Every little thing on the wall. Every dent in them. Every piece of damage and wear and tear. Is all actually crafted.

What advice do you have on writing a bar in a TV show?

You want to sort of think about:

• How is this bar made?

• What's the history of this place?

• Where did it come from?

• How did he come to own it?

• Who are the people who come here?

And that's what sort of gives you the ability to build it on the page in a way that when the production designers get to it, you're going to end up with something unique so that every time you shoot in that bar over the course of your series, the viewer will immediately latch on to the mood because they're very familiar with the place as well.

And did that kind of involvement, that creation, did you put the same time into Warrior in terms of creating the bar?

Just a few weeks ago, we were dealing in Warrior which takes place in the 1870s in San Francisco. We have a bar in Warrior, an Irish pub. When the first drawings came through, it looked a little bit plain to me. And so I began talking to the production designer, I said, “This is a bar that an Irish immigrant put together over probably 15 or 20 years. First people one little shop, and the shop next to him went for sale, and he bought that. And then he had a way to save the money to knock down the wall between them. And then he finally got the third shop. So this can't look like a clean square bar. This has to look like a bar that was cobbled together over 20 years by an Irish immigrants living the dream.” And that greatly informed the way.

The production designer went back to the drawing board and came up with something much more irregular. Much more kind of makeshift. Something that's just coming into its own now. And you can feel that when you look at the drawings. I can't say what it feels like to stand in it yet, because they've only just started building it. But that's how you try to go about it by giving the locations as much character development as the characters.

Well, and it'll also probably even enhance your actors that you cast when they walk into the set, it wouldn't even feel more real to them.

And then at the same time, you have the practical considerations, like we plan to have fights in this bar. So we need to make sure there's room for that we can't have all the tables fixed to the floors, we don't want boots, because that won't give us enough room for fights. And you have to also know where the cameras gonna go? There has to be logistical planning that comes in. But that's always convinced after you first sort of arrive at what the character of the bar is.

What elements do you look for when staffing a writer’s room?

I do a different kind of writer's room than a lot of shows. And I don't like a writer's room that goes on for months and months and months. I think that's a big waste of resources that comes out of your shows budget.

So I generally only like to do a writers room for two or three months, break out the episodes, you know, 10 episodes, premium cable. Obviously, if I were doing network and I was doing 22 episodes. That would be different. But I like to do a room for just a few months. Breakout 10 episodes in pretty good detail. And then send writers off to write.

When they're draft come back in, either reconvene again for a month or else just give them notes and keep going. But I've never had a writer's room going while the show was being shot, which I think makes us rare. Usually, the writer’s room is still ongoing while the show starts to be shot. And I just always like showing up on location with all of my episodes written so that you can develop a lot of efficiencies in terms of how you plan your shooting once you have all the episodes.

So it's just a very short, intense writer’s room that goes for a few months and then two or three of the writers in there stay on and become producing writer then write episodes with me and, you know, around to produce them and then we could start the next season with another room.

How often do you take new writers versus well established writers?

I used to only hire pre-established writers.

My philosophy on that has changed over time. I now feel like a good writer who's still young, but a good writer can write every bit as good an episode as an established TV writer. To me, I just want them to have enough experience that I know, they've written 60-page episodes before that they understand how to work off an outline. But beyond that to me, it's not about how long they've been around. It's more just looking at some samples of their own original work and seeing if there's a strong voice there that I think would lend itself to my show.

How many rewrites do you do on a script?

It never stopped, honestly. Like I've probably done on the pilot for Warrior. Probably up to my sixth or seventh draft now. And it'll keep going until after we shoot because you're constantly making adjustments. Like first, you're just getting notes from the other producers. You're getting notes from the network. Then, you started the physical production process and you realize we're not going to have the budget for that crazy helicopter shot.

So I got to come up with something different for that. And, we're building these sets, we're not going to have that exterior, so I got to come up with something different for that. So then you start rewriting to budget and to actual living sets. And then you're casting and then depending on who you cast, and what their strengths and weaknesses are, you may start rewriting to them a little bit. And then the actors get involved and start troubleshooting the scenes. And, you start hearing them out loud, and realizing that's a little too talky. And I mean, you're constantly fine tuning it until you shoot it. And then, if they shoot it, you still sometimes end up fine tuning it and post a little bit.

So I couldn't really tell you how many, but it just never stops.

Why put a bar or a restaurant in a TV show or in any TV show?

Nobody wants to watch characters just standing in a room talking or sitting in the living room talking. A bar and a restaurant gives you a place where you can fill it with extras, you can put them in the public, you can give them distractions, you can give them something to be doing, you can include other characters. It's a plot engine as well as a good place to talk. They've been using it since time again. There's always been restaurants and bars in movies and TV.

We couldn't have said that better ourselves because honestly, that's what Restaurant Fiction's about.

Now, that was one hell of an interview. I mean, we learned a lot. My highlights were, there was a functional strip club. That was pretty, pretty funny. Also, what was really insightful, that sort of writer’s room that Jonathan creates, or that anti-writer’s room. And it brings to the question, I guess makes me think and makes maybe writers out there think, “Is that going to be a trend? Will paid cable streaming networks and also broadcast, diminish the generic or whatever one thinks of is the writer’s room and just do it, Jonathan Tropper's way.”