HUGE I’m so desperate for someone to say no to me. When you hire writers, you’re surrounded by people pleasers, and I get that. But what we’re looking for is people to help us build the best show. And sometimes that means telling us, You know what? Personally, I don’t think that’s going to work, and that’s why.
LINDELOF The worst thing you can say to me in an interview is: I am a big fan of your work. Because it either evokes a certain amount of discomfort or self-loathing, or it’s very flattering and a lot of fun, but it goes against what you’re talking about. Can’t this person tell me I’m an idiot? The fact is that most of the time I’m an idiot.
Are there times when your writers have opened your eyes to a way of thinking that you hadn’t thought of before?
HUGE Always.
LINDELOF Always.
HUGE I think the higher you get, you lose all sense of proportion. You don’t have to worry about money anymore. You are less hungry. You are exposed to fewer different people. Age just bubbles at you in a way that is for better or worse limiting in terms of the human experience. So what I love about the writers’ room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is that my sense of the world suddenly widens. Now I see it through the eyes of seven or eight people.
LINDELOF See, in the rooms I started in, the reality was that it was mostly white guys. And so I was like, Oh, what you’re doing is just copying yourself. That way there are all these different versions of you and you don’t have to waste time explaining things. That led to a culture of tokenism, for which I take full responsibility. On “Lost” we had characters speaking Korean, and Harold Perrineau as a black dad, so it was like, We should probably have a black writer and a Korean writer for their episodes. But of course those writers are whole people who also have perspectives on all the other characters.
The idea that came up later – to put together a room that is nothing like you and has a completely different life experience than you and with which you can occasionally conflict more – I think has produced better and more interesting work.
As writers turned producers, how did you learn to get a big crew rowing in the same direction?
HUGE I’ve found that my job as a showrunner is mainly to say: It’s not good enough but to put it with a smile. What can we do? How do we push it forward?
LINDELOF I think when you produce something, as opposed to writing, it’s the act of making. For example, if you are a novelist, you are sure that you are creating a novel. But then you say, Now, Jonathan Franzen, manifest “The Corrections” in a television series, and it becomes an entirely different skill set. It requires daily and constant sacrifice and compromise from people who are not necessarily used to it. Every day every email we get is a version of, I know you wanted to do this, but what about instead? If you always say yes, what are you actually for? Where do you put your heels in? It will seem random to someone outside our body, but we have to take the random thing and make it seem essential.