INTERVIEW. Like a dogged On Your Side nightly news reporter,
Ira Glass is dedicated to telling your story (though he is much
less grating and exceptionally more entertaining). The host of the
fascinating Public Radio show This American Life crafts
stranger-than-fiction real-life tales of the nations public, some
of which are set to air on Thursdays premiere of the TAL
television adaptation on Showtime.
Television and radio are obviously very different media.
How do you take such a beloved radio program and make it work for
TV?
Part of the power of radio comes from the invisibility. Theres
just something more powerful about hearing somebody talk in that
radio darkness. And we have to give that up. The show is based on
people coming in and just quietly telling these amazing stories.
Really quickly, we got into the question of what in the world do
you show when they tell those stories? There are traditional ways
that you can do that. You find old photos, and you do the Ken Burns
things where the camera pans across the photo, but that has totally
been done. We were going to have to invent something new.
How did you figure it out? Previewing the first couple of
episodes, it seems youve already created a signature look for
the show.
Weve tried to be really ambitious with the way its shot and what
it looks like and tried to invent something that looks different
than anything else on television. And, I mean, truthfully, to turn
the radio show into a television show, we could have just put
people into a studio and filmed them telling their stories. But it
felt like that wasnt ambitious enough. It felt like that wouldnt
be exploiting everything you can do with pictures to the degree we
wanted. We wanted the pictures to be part of telling the story, so
we committed to a more documentary kind of look.
Are there any established TV journalists youre taking cues
from?
I love The Daily Show so much that I turn to it as an actual news
source. I feel like there is something in the tone of that show
where [Jon Stewart is] talking in a normal voice and in the normal
way that people talk about the news that you just dont get on the
actual news. And I keep telling my friends who actually are in
network news, Why dont you do a show thats actually the real
news, but just talk normal like the guy on The Daily Show?
Thats something I couldnt have more admiration for.
'Postcard' production
In the televised episodes of This American Life, Glass appears
with a BBC-style hefty wooden desk in the most unusual locales.
Director/co-executive producer Christopher Wilcha explains
why:
We didnt want to shoot [Glass] in a studio, and we didnt want to
shoot him walking through gardens in some sort of Stone Phillips-y
kind of way. So we had this epiphany one day: What does every TV
host have? A desk. But what if the backdrop, the sort of void that
appears behind them, is not a studio but, in fact, an American
landscape of some kind? It would have a certain sort of slightness
to real quality but would also be like a piece of
photography.
So, they dragged Glass around in a desk to locations such as the
mountains of Colorado, the salt flats in Utah and nuclear cooling
towers in Pennsylvania.