Interview (Written): Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”)

A Variety interview with “House of Cards” creator and showrunner Beau Willimon.

What part of the job do you enjoy most?
First and foremost I’m a writer, and being able to work with my writing staff, that magical time at the very beginning of a season when you’ve got a blank dry-erase board and anything is possible is in some ways the most exciting time and the scariest because there’s infinite possibility. I love that first week or two where we haven’t made a single choice and the entire universe is our oyster. Later on one of my favorite parts is rehearsals before we shoot a scene because so much work has gone into multiple drafts of the script, conversations with the director and with the department heads, scheduling it, and budgeting it, and then here you are on the day, in the room seeing it take shape for the first time, and even then we might discover something new. We might completely change a scene. We might rewrite it on the fly, or if I see something in that rehearsal that completely unlocks something for a subsequent scene, a subsequent episode, as much as one plans and sort of tries to construct what a given day at production phase will look like, it’s all there, in a way, to create a safe space to play and to discover new things in the moment. That’s a kind of magic that can only exist on a set, so I really love that portion of it.

What inspired you to be a writer?
Even though I didn’t realize it then, the thing that made me want to become a playwright was seeing Spalding Gray perform “Gray’s Anatomy” in St. Louis. If you ever saw Spalding perform, you knew it was just a man sitting at a wooden table with a glass of water performing a monologue. I had been in school plays and read a number of plays, and I loved the theater, but I hadn’t experienced anything like that, which was the power of one person’s body and voice alone being able to create an entire universe. To me it was a form of magic. It’s not about all the bells and whistles; it’s about aggressive honesty. As long as you’re brutally honest, if you’re willing to try to make the ugly beautiful, if you can cast a spell, then you’re on the right track.

For the rest of the interview, go here.