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quiATTENZIONE SPOILER ATTENZIONE SPOILER ATTENZIONE SPOILER"To a great extent I think of myself as a philosopher more than an artist. The issues of right and wrong, that's what I find really interesting," mused David Shore, creator and executive producer of FOX's House, during his Master Class at the recent Banff World Television Festival.
He spoke about his career, his early doubts about House, and the writing process to an audience of television industry professionals. But he was at his most passionate when he launched into an explanation of his philosophy of writing, where having a point of view doesn't mean providing answers for the audience, but raising questions.
"You shouldn't be trying to convince anybody, you should be trying to get them to think a little bit," he said, after divulging the homework he used to give his writing team on Family Law: to write both sides of an issue convincingly. "If you come into the story saying HMOs are evil, you're going to convince all the people who think HMOs are evil that HMOs are evil. If they already have that point of view, they'll agree with you. They're not going to think about it again, they're not going to talk about it the next day."
His desire to present equally compelling but opposing opinions is evident in House's second season finale, "No Reason," which showed House getting shot by a former patient. He then hallucinates a scenario that pokes holes in his philosophy that reason matters beyond emotion.
Shore said he enjoys scenes where House gets shot down (as opposed to shot), pointing to one in another episode, "Deception," where Foreman tells Cuddy that if every doctor acted the way House does, people would die:
"All he stands for is the right for everyone to grab whatever they want, whenever they want. You tell doctors that’s okay, your mortality rate is gonna go through the roof."
"I created this character, and I love him, and you might think I'm saying, yeah, we should all be like that. No! We actually shouldn't be like that," Shore protested.
"The finale was almost me talking to myself about this character I created," he said about the episode that had House talking to himself, in the guise of the man who shot him. "I love House, but the other guy had some good points."
"This character's bread and butter is shocking people, and he's shocking people for a reason."
That doesn't mean season three will start with a doctor tamed by the epiphany that what he says matters as much as what he does. "The death of this character is when he becomes too nice. I think I can have him be almost as evil as I want," Shore asserted, though with the caveat that there has to be a motivation for the evil. "In the writers' room, the notion is the punishment doesn't have to fit the crime, but there has to be a crime. When he does something mean, there has to be a reason."
That reason is sometimes hard to detect with the naked eye, but the dichotomy of nice and evil in the same character is one of the most rewarding aspects of the show. Frustrated with preachiness, Shore tries to inject respect for differences of opinion – even in the character of the arrogant Dr. House, who often refrains from eviscerating those who reasonably disagree with him and whose own moral code is both upheld and challenged within the show.
"That's where you get interesting stuff. That's when you make people think, that's when it'll stay with them. You're not going to change people's minds during the 45 minutes they're watching, but maybe six months later, when they've seen six other things, or maybe six years later, it will occur to people to think."
"The one thing I've found is that the people who disagree with you are not just straw men. They are usually equally good people, though they might be slightly misguided," Shore said. "They've thought about that issue and come to a different conclusion than you have. And so often in writing, I don't see that."
Earlier, he had pointed to an example of a black-hatted villain on his own show. In season one, FOX insisted on the introduction of a nemesis for Dr. House, board chairman Edward Vogler (Chi McBride).
"Chi McBride was great, but I didn't think it was a great idea. But that was when we weren't doing that well, and the network had that power over us and were able to force us to do some stuff we didn't want to do,” Shore recalled. "They wanted that to be the series — House versus Vogler, House versus the archenemy. That's not subtle. That's not clever."
"We can't say somebody got laid. We can say somebody got action. Things like that are weird."
For the most part, Shore said the network has always understood the show and the character, and not tried to tamper with his vision. He seemed almost surprised at the lack of interference from FOX, after experiencing worse with other shows. "The better the ratings get, the more we get away with," he laughed, pointing to a scene in "Who's Your Daddy" where House gives Cuddy an injection. "They actually said, 'you get a 24 share, you're allowed to show a little more ass.'"
Shore isn't a fan of writing to the whims of either the network or the audience. "Ultimately you have to write what you like. If you're writing to your audience, you're screwed. It's very basic: you won't do it as well. So I write what I find entertaining. It's an interesting character and I've been lucky enough that people have responded to what I like."
That doesn't mean he has a rigid plan for the show's future. "To a great extent, you see what's working, you see where relationships go, because quite often things just happen," he explained, offering an example: "House and Cuddy, there seems to be a sexuality to them no matter what I write."
"The reason the show succeeds is about the characters, not what blood test they're doing."
If ethical dilemmas are his strength, Shore feels romance might be his weakness. Asked about the relationship between House and Cameron, which was put on a backburner in season two, he admitted, "I have a tough time with love stories. If somebody wants to be an ass to somebody, I'm good with that."
"We can't forget Cameron felt that way. There were hints of it, but we had played that out. We're going to have to rekindle it in some way. The problem is the stories become repetitive. That's the real challenge, to find new and different ways to do things."
But if he's not sure what to do with that particular storyline, he does know the show's success hinges on the relationships between characters as much as the medical stories. "I don't think of it as a medical show. I mean, it's in a hospital, there's doctors involved, it clearly is a medical show," Shore had to acknowledge. "But I think about it in terms of a character study, usually of the patient and who the patient is in relation to House, and how House and his team relate to the patient."
He is resigned to the fact that the show will be labeled formulaic because of its medical mystery elements, even if the character stories are at least as important. "I could surprise everyone and have them discover the cure at the end of act one, but then acts two, three, and four would be really boring. So yeah, there's a formula. That's not bad in itself. The challenge is to work within that formula and to surprise people."
The crucial mystery of each episode for him is not the diagnosis, but what that particular patient is hiding and what we learn about the characters, or what the characters learn about themselves, because of it. The trick, though, is to not have the revelation come out of the blue. "You want to set it up. You want to have your audience say 'oh!' and then, 'oh yeah, I see,'"
"Hugh walked in the room and I said 'Okay, that is what I wrote.'"
Hugh Laurie makes the challenges of writing a comedic drama that's also a character-based procedural much easier. "He frees you up to write almost anything," Shore said. "You can have the most dramatic, heavy, emotional scene, and you can throw a one-liner in the middle of it, and he'll pull it off. People will laugh, and yet you'll still have all that emotion, which is really unbelievable."
Though it was a minor challenge to get FOX to agree to a 40-something lead actor, "the script really didn't change that much after he came on board. What he did was he made it work. It's very easy to sit in a room and write 'the character is tall yet short, crusty yet lovable.' You want characters who are complex and tricky and who have characteristics that are self-contradicting. But it's much easier to write that than to act that."
Shore also had praise for fellow executive producer and pilot episode director Bryan Singer (X-Men, Superman Returns) for helping bring his writing to life in those early days. "It was such a pleasure as a writer, having a director who you'd hear talking to the actors about what was going on in this scene, and what the character is all about, and he'd identify stuff in my own work that I didn't know was there. I'd say 'yeah, that's good, that works really nicely.' He really, really got the material."
Shore was amusingly self-deprecating about his own first directing experience on the season two finale. He felt pretentious saying "action," and had to sheepishly say "cut" minutes after the first scene he shot had already ended. "I executive produced Family Law for three years. I've been around television and on sets for years. And I was so far in over my head," he said. "The character stuff worked well, the medical stuff was good, but the cameras … apparently they have different lenses, and it's important to know about that."
"I don't know that I had that clear a vision, but the weather was good."
Writing is obviously his true talent, though he's still dumbfounded by how he discovered that. He recounted his decision to quit the Toronto law firm where he was a partner to drive down to LA. "It was one of the great stupid decisions of all time."
"The smart thing to do would be to write a little bit first and figure it out from there. ... I went down there, I bought a computer, I started typing."
Unlikely as it seems to him now, his "stupid decision" was the beginning of an award-winning career that saw him work on respected shows such as NYPD Blue, Due South, The Practice, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Family Law, Century City, and Hack, before his own creation, House.
An executive once told his agent that David Shore wasn't as good as his resume. Shore had to agree. "I thought, nobody's as good as David Shore's resume. She was probably right. I probably wasn't. But I've been lucky enough to get hired on some really good shows. Because if they'd offered me a job on a bad show back then, I would have taken it."
When he first arrived in L.A., he began to write a spec feature film on his new computer. That took him six months, then in the week it took his friends to read it, he wrote a spec television script. "They read both of them and said, 'hmm, maybe you should do TV,'" smirked Shore, who thinks he probably simply got better with practice.
His first paid gig came two years later on a freelance episode of The Untouchables, which he barely recognized when he saw the shooting script. "What you come to grips with is you've got a lot to learn. Now I'm rewriting other people ... but hopefully not quite that dramatically."
Though he doesn't rule out working in features at some point, Shore's grateful for the greater creative control television offers a writer, and also for the respite from the life of a conflicted hermit. "Writing is the oddest profession in the world, because it's all about recreating human connections and human interactions. And in order to do that, we lock ourselves in a room by ourselves," he said, sounding almost philosophical. "Writing for TV is good because there's usually a team, so you're forced to interact with people."
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House creator David Shore was also honoured in Banff, with an Award of Excellence. "Growing up in London, Ontario, it just didn't even register, the idea of going into the entertainment industry or being successful or coming back here to receive an award. Or of being the second most successful writer from London, Ontario. That guy's annoying," Shore jokingly grumbled during his acceptance speech, though he later sincerely thanked Haggis for giving him his first staff writing job (on Due South) and his first executive producing job (on Family Law).
With House, executive producer Shore was the naysayer, not the network or studio. "The typical story of getting something on the air is painful, painful, painful and this just wasn't. It was painful for me because I really was scared of this idea," he said at his Master Class session.
He had been teamed with executive producer Paul Attanasio, who knew the networks were looking for fresh medical shows. Shore tried to dissuade him from pitching an idea based on the Diagnosis column of the New York Times Magazine, of a procedural with germs instead of criminals. "What makes Law & Order interesting is why people do it. Germs don't have any whys. They just do it," protested Shore, whose credits include Law & Order and NYPD Blue. "No germ kills another germ because the other germ is having an affair with the first germ's wife, then hides the knife under the liver. I thought it was a terrible idea."
Attanasio pitched it to ABC anyway, starting a bidding war between networks which was eventually won by FOX. "I wasn't there telling them germs don't have motives," Shore shrugged. "I could either get on the phone with ABC and talk them out of it, or go along for the ride."
Out of his own disinterest in the premise, he was forced to create what would ultimately prove to be the key to House's success – the central character who battles his own demons along with his patients' germs. "Had it been what I considered a better idea, Dr. House likely wouldn't have existed. I would have been much lazier about the concept," Shore admitted, saying he procrastinated for months in writing the script. "I just kept thinking, how can I make this interesting? Then the character developed and grew and I became interested in it at that point."
Though he felt his tastes are common enough that people might respond to what he liked - and he finally did write a show he liked out of the premise he doubted - the enormous success came as a surprise. "I always felt there was an audience for it if they gave it a chance. I never expected this kind of audience."
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quigrazie all'occhio vigile di House_news LJ
bella bella chiacchierata col geniaccio... però
... brutto veder confermati i propri shipperiani timori... bleah... però.... però... mwahahaha...
ahh mannaggia proprio adesso che la nostra "shoriana" per eccellenza è in vacanza!!!
Ora non ce la faccio a leggere l' intervista, sono in overdose da informazioni, dopo una settimana di black-out..
Meglio stare con i piedi per terra, preferisco aspettarmi delle batoste e poi magari rimanere piacevolemente sorpresa da qualche piccola scena...
Io mi sono segnata quello che ha detto la Lo in Spoiler nel malaugurato caso.. e se mi leggi io ci conto eh!?! 
La prossima volta da dove tirerà fuori i soldi Cameron? Quante volte sbatterà è in che modo i suoi occhi da cagnolino? E House come farà a far intendere a Cameron dove vuole mettere il suo bastone?
