Interview: Mickey Fisher

Mickey Fisher’s spec TV pilot “Extant” has become a CBS series which debuted July 9, 2014 and airs weekly on Wednesdays at 9PM E/8PM C. Stephen Spielberg is one of the show’s executive producers.

It turns out Mickey is a longtime fan of Go Into The Story which made it easy for me to reach out to him for an interview. Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I remember, we had one theater across the river from us, which was the Ashland Midtown Cinema, and they had three screens, basically, for most of the time I was growing up, until I was in high school. When something would come there, like E.T. would play there all summer long [laughs], really like for two months.”

Part 2: “By the time I got to writing that after the years of making my own movies and stuff, I just wrote down to the barest, most minimal effective things I could. That’s a lot of what I learned from being just in the editing room.”

Part 3: “To me I was really just writing about a family. That’s where I went from was writing these personal relationships and the story world evolved around it. But I was conscious to want to create a world or story where it could grow and change and there was this bigger thing out there.”

Part 4: “When I signed with the agency and the first thing they said was, ‘Let’s take this to the very top, for this kind of story let’s take it to Steven Spielberg,’ it was one of those moments where I was stunned. I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’”

Part 5: “Now when I sit down to write the script I know scene by scene who wants what and why and all the basic questions of the drama.”

Part 6: “I think the best thing I ever did for myself was to not wait around for someone to give me a break. I kept writing, I kept making my own stuff, I kept raising my own bar and trying to get better.”

Mickey is repped by WME and Energy Entertainment.

Twitter: @MickeyFisher73.

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