Interview with Supernatural Executive Producer Robert Singer – Comic Con 2016
Mr. Singer took his seat and in a pleasant surprise, recognized Nightsky right away. It could have been from last year’s Chicago Con when Singer made an appearance (we were both there), but also back in season nine when “Bloodlines” was shot in Chicago, Singer was the director. Nightsky went to the filming sites and she talked with the producers for a bit. It’s all in the report she did for us back in season nine . Trust me when I say, the behind the scenes filming report is way better than the actual episode!
After having a few mishaps with adjusting the camera (as you see in the video clip), we were on our way. This ended up being our longest interview of the day, clocking in at over 8 minutes.
Bob, I’m going to come in big. What can fans expected from this season. What excites you about it?
I started with this show from the beginning and we’re going to go back to our roots a little bit, the kind of stories we’re going to tell this year. I’m excited about that. We don’t have as big of an “uber story” as we did last year. Not sure how you top God and the end of the earth. The British Men of Letters will play a big part this year. Ultimately our guys and the British Men of Letters will butt heads because their methodology is way different that our guys, the way they do work. The first half of the season we have the hunt for Lucifer, who’s body jumping. The bodies that he jumps into are pretty interesting, so we’re excited about that. Our first Lucifer is Rick Springfield, playing Vince Vincente, an aging rock star. We’re happy about that. We’re just getting started and feeling our way about now through nine episodes that we know we’re going to do. So far so good. I think Andrew’s doing a great job running the staff. We got three new writers that we know we’re happy with, so yeah.
We spoke to Sam (Smith) before and she mentioned that there’s going to be some Mary Winchester kicking ass. Are there going to be some other women kicking ass? Is that something you can tell us about?
Mary was a hunter, she’s trained as a hunter, she knows her stuff, and probably the only thing she feels comfortable with at this point is that. She’s not comfortable with the guys. It’s an odd relationship meeting your children thirty years later. Hunting is something she can turn to, something she knows. So yeah, Sam will kick some ass.
Are there any other characters returning that you can tease?
Yeah, Jody will be back, Sheriff Donna Hanscum, the two girls that Jody’s looking out for will be back. I’m sure I’m leaving somebody out. But yearh, we like to recycle these people.
What’s happening to the Winchester brothers in the premiere episode? Can you tease anything about that?
Sam is missing. The first couple of episodes is the hunt for Sam. Sam doesn’t know that Dean’s alive. He wasn’t aware of what happened at the end of the year, they thought that Dean was on a suicide mission. As far he knows Dean is gone. These are interesting dynamics to kick the season off on. When they get together, they’re much more single minded this year than they were last year in terms of what their mission for the year is. Not to say that they won’t be butting heads or disagreeing about things but for the first time in a couple of seasons they’re on the sor t of same page to begin with. Which is sort of the way this thing started. Again, we’re getting back to our roots a little bit. As the season progresses, there will be stumbling blocks to that.
(Nightsky) Fans got a little bit nervous with the change over in the writing staff, so many different people leaving, and Todd (Aronauer) and Nicole (Baer), post–production…
(Smiling) Boy you’re really up on it.
(Nightsky) A little bit. Can you give some perspective on that at all?
We’re very happy with the new writers we have. We have three new writers. The staff has kind of pared down. Andrew will probably do a little more writing than Jeremy did the last couple of seasons. Brad and Eugenie are there, Bob Berens is there, it’s a good solid base. Personally I’ll miss Robbie. Robbie was there a long time and wanted to explore new avenues, but I think the new writers are giving us a little shot in the arm. They’re younger, they’re really energetic, so far they’re come in with terrific ideas, so I’m pretty confident in the quality of the scripts we’re going to have out.
Nicole, who started as an assistant editor for us and who we made an editor and she moved on. I’ll miss Nicole but one of our assistant editors that worked for Jimmy is now one of our editors. That’s sort of what we’ve done over the years, we’ve brought people along. Same thing with PJ who’s taking Todd’s place. He’s been with us a number of years, he’s really competent. So, post-production I don’t think is going to miss a beat. I’ll miss those people but I’m not concerned that we can’t fill their shoes.
With the British Men of Letters, do we have to potential to see any International hunting?
That’s a little hard for us shooting in Vancouver. We’ve gone international a little bit, with the graveyards in Scotland and things like that. To really do it effectively is probably outside of our capabilities to do a big story about that. If you say it’s London you want to see London, if you say it’s Paris you want to see Paris. You can do only so many stock shots or put up French signs in the street. That’s a dream of ours to be able to do that but I don’t know if that will ever come to fruition. It’s a little expensive to get everything up across the pond. It would be nice.
Are you going to address at all where the Men of Letters – British chapter have been this whole time? They kind of let the boys run free and now they’re coming in to punish them it seems.
They’re very secretive, as the Men of Letters in the states were. Basically what we’re saying is that they’ve been aware of Sam and Dean and they’ve been aware of what’s been going on in America, staying at arms length but this whole bringing Amara in and doing this and doing that they really felt, “Geez, these guys are getting out of hand.” When Toni Bevel shows up basically she says if the world survives, which apparently it did, great but you guys have had it. And they’ve made mistakes along the way so from somebody looking at it from the outside, you would say, “Yeah, these are loose canons and this is not the way we do business in the British Men of Letters.” That’s the big thing, they’re just very organized, very by the book, they see everything in black or white, either you’re good or evil and if you’re evil you’re gone. It’s all organized. They view the American hunters as just this patchwork of loonies out there picking their own missions, leaving collateral damage…it’s just not the British way. They’ll bump heads pretty hard in the course of the season.
This isn’t on the camera, but it is on my audio recorder! It happened as Robert Singer was leaving the table. He asked Nightsky which outlet she wrote for. She told him The Winchester Family Business, where we post original content on “Supernatural” daily and we do reviews. His response, “That’s fantastic. Be kind to me.” Nightsky said she always is, but she definitely wasn’t speaking for the site’s chief critic, who just happened to be sitting next to her! That’s what I was thinking anyway. 🙂 We had a lot of good conversations with a variety of showrunners over the weekend. I’ll share that in my Comic Con report, hopefully coming out sometime this weekend.
Below is the nice grainy video of the whole interview!
Alice Jester is the founder, editor-in-chief, head writer, programmer, web designer, site administrator, marketer, and moderator for The Winchester Family Business. She is a 30 year IT applications and database expert with a penchant for creative and freelance writing in her spare (ha!!) time. That’s on top of being a wife, mother of two active kids, and four loving (aka needy) pets.
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