Last week Syfy hosted a conference call with Karl Shaefer the exe
cutive producer of the new show Z Nation. This new zombie apocalypse starts this week on Syfy and the show looks great.
Thanks so much for joining the Z Nation conference call today. On our line we are very excited to have Karl Schaefer, the Showrunner for Z Nation and Executive Producer, answer your questions. And as you know the show premieres this Friday, September 12th, at 10:00 pm
So, without further ado, let’s turn it over to Karl and your questions. Thanks so much.
Operator: At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press pound then the number one on your telephone keypad. We’ll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Your first question comes from the line of Jamie Ruby with SciFiVision.com. Your line is open.
Jamie Ruby: Hi. Thanks so much for talking to us today. I really enjoyed the premiere.
Karl Schaefer: Oh, good. Thank you.
Jamie Ruby: So, obviously it’s inevitable that this is going to be compared to other shows of similar subject. Can you kind of talk about how it’s different and how it stands out from what’s on television now?
Karl Schaefer: I mean, first off there is obviously a great zombie show in The Walking Dead already on, so our mission is sort of to go where they don’t, and I think the biggest difference between us and them is our series has a sense of hope and also a sense of humor. We’re kind of trying to put the fun back into zombies. Our heroes have a mission that they’re on, so we’re traveling every week. We’re going across the country. They’re not just sort of fighting for survival and hunkering down into one place. They really have somewhere to go and something to do.
Our characters aren’t afraid of zombies necessarily. I mean, they’re wary of them and zombies are certainly dangerous to them, but they take the fight to the zombies. We try and have as much action in an episode as The Walking Dead has in half a season. There’s a lot of black humor in our show, a lot of social satire, but primarily it’s that sense of hope and mission and that the characters are really taking it to the zombies as opposed to being afraid of them and hunkering down. And if you were going to go through the apocalypse, I think you would rather go through the apocalypse with our guys, because they’ve got somewhere to go and something to do, and I think it’ll be triumphant in the end.
Jamie Ruby: Can you talk about maybe some of the challenges you faced?
Karl Schaefer: Well, I think we’re a reasonably low-budget show, so trying to give it a sense of scope and scale and also just that somebody has thrown down the gauntlet. The bar is set pretty high for zombie shows, but I think we face the challenge of any show, just making great characters and interesting storylines and doing it all for a price. And making a show that travels across the country was really hard to do, but we found a great location. We shot the whole thing in Spokane, Washington, which has been fantastic and just has so many different looks within the Spokane area, from mountains and lakes and beautiful rolling wheat fields and farms and desert and – so we really, I think, did a good job of making the show feel like it’s traveling across the country and we’re in a different place every week.
Jamie Ruby: Great. Well, thanks so much. Like I said, I’m really enjoying it so far.
Karl Schaefer: Good.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Tim Holquinn with ScreenFad. Your line is open.
Tim Holquinn: Hi, Karl. Thanks for talking with us today.
Karl Schaefer: Hey, Tim. Happy to do it.
Tim Holquinn: Got a couple quick questions here. Given Perrineau’s fate in the first episode, which obviously will be a surprise for first-time viewers, can you just talk a little bit about what it was like working with Harold during the pilot?
Karl Schaefer: He was fantastic. First off, he’s just a great guy, but he was totally committed to it and didn’t treat it like he was coming in to do a low-budget show for the money or anything like that. I mean, he really had a big influence on the rest of the actors. We have a lot of local Washington talent and some people who’re much less experienced in the cast. We also have some other very experienced cast members, but he just brought up every scene he was in and really brought a sense of commitment and drama to what he was doing.
And also it was great with the rest of the cast. We had some of our sort of younger, local cast members who were a little intimidated on the first couple of days of shooting, I think, and he would pull them aside and say something to them that – and I don’t exactly know what it was he was saying to them, but then the next take they would just be a whole step up better at what they were doing. So, he was a blast to work with and it was a shame to see him go, and I think he had a really good time, too, and was a little wistful about leaving just after one episode. But he was great to work with, and you could certainly see why he’s worked so often and is in so many classic sort of genre movies and programs and things like that. And you look at his resume and he’s just in – he’s one of those guys that everything he’s in is good, and I think he helped make this one of those good things that he was in, so he was great.
Tim Holquinn: As a fan, I was really happy to see him in it. What can you tell us about the makeup effects company bringing your zombies to life?
Karl Schaefer: Synapse? Synapse is great. They sort of came to us through the Asylum, and what they brought was just the ability to do a lot for a little money, and we worked really hard on trying to get the physical effects and makeup to look good with the photographic look that we were doing with the show. We’re trying to make a real specific look for the show, so if you’re just tuning around the dial and you come across our show, it looks different from all the other Syfy shows and most of the other shows on TV.
And getting the makeup to look right after going through that process was a lot of work, and for the small team they have, they just do a great job cranking out 25 zombies a day of all different types, and they’ve been fantastic. Corinne Foster and her team have all really come through. And it’s been a tough, long shoot with a lot of work and not enough resources normally to do it, but they’ve delivered every time.
Tim Holquinn: Being that Corinne was a Face Off contestant in Season Six, it was nice to see it kept in the Syfy family.
Karl Schaefer: Definitely, and she’s like a real trooper and a total pro.
Tim Holquinn: Thanks a lot.
Karl Schaefer: Thanks.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mary Powers with TVGoodness.com. Your line is open.
Karl Schaefer: Hello.
Mary Powers: First question – first of all, I’ve viewed the premiere, and it’s great. I love it, and also I am a fan of The Walking Dead. So one of the questions that came to mind as I was watching is, you call, I guess, the zombies Z’s. In comparison to, say, the walkers in The Walking Dead, are there any fundamental differences between the creatures that you can talk about that we will see now in the pilot and going forward?
Karl Schaefer: Well, one thing about The Walking Dead is they’re taking a very realistic, straightforward look at – and they won’t call them zombies. They’ll call them anything in the world but zombies, and our show, we wanted to put it in a universe, where people know about zombies. They’ve seen zombie movies, that they’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead.” So, we have all kinds of zombies and we wanted to be the zombie show that says, “Yes, we’ll do that kind of zombies.” We have fast zombies, slow zombies, animal zombies. We had a zombie bear. We have zombie babies, and our zombies are evolving, too. Our main character, Murphy, who’s been infected with the zombie virus and given a vaccine, is going to be evolving over the course of the season into what eventually may become a human-zombie blend.
So, we wanted to leave the world wide open for the zombie virus to evolve and the type of zombies we deal with to evolve, and I think every week you’re going to see our zombies doing something different that you haven’t seen zombies do before, because kind of our goal was to put the fun back into zombies, and we wanted to be the show that said, “Yes, we’ll do that.” We come up with a cool idea, we’ll definitely do that, and I think the audience is going to enjoy that sort of aspect of it, that we’re not kind of stuck in stone as to what our zombies are like and what they do. Hello?
Maureen Granados:We can proceed to the next question.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Tony Tellado with Sci-Fi Talk. Your line is open.
Tony Tellado: Hi, Karl. Great to talk to you. I’ve been a fan since “Eerie, Indiana” and multiple speakers, so …
Karl Schaefer: Thanks.
Tony Tellado: – I like as well Strange Luck.
Karl Schaefer: Great. You are a fan, then.
Tony Tellado: D.B. Sweeney, he’s great. With this show, with Z Nation, there is humor, but were you conscious of not kind of crossing that line so that it wouldn’t be too silly and kind of dilute the premise a little bit?
Karl Schaefer: Absolutely. When I first came to this project with the Asylum, one of the things we all agreed on right up front was this would not be a campy mockbuster like Sharknado or some of the other projects that they do, that we wanted to make a real show. And my sort of view of life is that real life is – there’s black humor in the most serious of moments, and the humor’s all character-based in the show. It’s more like M.A.S.H. than it is like Sharknado that I think a sense of black humor is almost a survival skill, that if you didn’t have a sense of humor in the apocalypse, you’d probably just curl up and die and that my experience in life is just that in the midst of some of the worst, toughest times you’ll see a lot of humor on a battlefield, in a hospital emergency room, with cops. People that have to deal with danger and hardship on a daily basis sort of have to have a sense of humor. And we kind of sort of thought a lot about what goes into somebody who survived for three years of the zombie apocalypse, and a sense of humor about it all was one of the ingredients that we thought all of our characters would have.
Tony Tellado: As far as the casting besides Harold Perrineau, how did everything kind of come together when you were casting?
Karl Schaefer: Well, because we’re shooting in Washington state and we’re getting money from the state to shoot here, we had to have a certain amount of our – not necessarily the cast but the whole product has to be Washington-based. So we looked really hard, first off, at Washington-based actors and found some fantastic people. Russell Hodgkinson, who plays Doc, is great. He’s hysterical and fantastic in the show, and Nat Zang, who plays the 10K character, you only see him very briefly in the pilot, but he has a much bigger role going forward in the show. He’s like an 18-year-old kid. It was his first audition that he’d ever done, his first professional audition, and he’s fantastic. He’s going to be a huge star, I think, because he just has that thing about him.
And so we looked hard in Washington. Also the Cassandra character, who they find in the cage, she’s a Washington local as well. She’s fantastic. Kellita, who plays the Warren character, who we hired out of Los Angeles, she was great. We auditioned long and hard for it and didn’t have the kind of money to throw at big stars that you normally have for a TV show, so everybody kind of came to – on the whole production we’re all working for less than we normally do, and it’s kind of become something everybody’s in it for the love of the project at a certain point, because I think we all found it – when everybody came together, it became something better than everybody expected it to be, I think. I think even Syfy is kind of going, “Wow, this is really good.” And so I am very happy with the cast that we got, and we worked really hard to get them and gave a lot of people a break.
The guy who plays Murphy was working for the Asylum. He acted in a couple of their movies, but he was the office manager at the time that I met him between their movies, and we just kind of read him as a courtesy at first. It was like, “Keith wants to read for you,” and it’s like, “OK, sure.” And he was really good. He kept beating people out at every step of the way, and it was like, “Oh, my God, Keith is going to line up with this thing,” and we wound up sending three actors to the network and they didn’t know Keith was being the office manager at the time, and they thought it was great. And he’s been fantastic in the series. I mean, he’s really stepped up and has met everybody’s expectations and really become kind of a leader of the cast, in a way, both on and off screen, and has turned out to be just a great character, and he’s hilarious in it, as well as being evil and dark and all the things we needed him to be. So I’m very happy with the cast.
Tony Tellado: Great, thanks. I’ll get back in line and let somebody else in.
Karl Schaefer: Cool.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Lisa Macklem with SpoilerTV.com. Your line is open.
Lisa Macklem: Hi. Thanks so much for talking with us today.
Karl Schaefer: You’re welcome.
Lisa Macklem: One of the things that really struck me about the pilot was the humor, and especially D.J. Qualls’ character, which it really felt like Good Morning, Vietnam to me.
Karl Schaefer: Good.
Lisa Macklem: Was that what I was supposed to think? Are we going to see a lot of him? Is he going to …
Karl Schaefer: Yes. He’s in every episode. Well, the idea was to have a character who was stuck at the North Pole, where the zombies can’t get him, because they all freeze before they get that far, who has kind of an overview of the whole apocalypse but very little that he can directly do about it and that he’s keeping what’s left of the Internet and the communications system alive using the old NSA assets spread around the world. So he’s in every episode. He’s fantastic to work with and so funny himself, and some of the episodes revolve entirely around him. He has whole shows that’re just his, so he’s great and sort of brings a – there’s a level of social satire to the whole series, and he helps kind of focus that and is kind of our narrator, sort of the Wolfman Jack of the apocalypse that we use him for.
Lisa Macklem: He’s great. Now, you said that you used a lot of the landscape around Washington, so can you tell us if they’re going to make it all the way to California by the end of the season, or …
Karl Schaefer: They don’t by the end of the first season, no.
Lisa Macklem: So, do you have a specific story arc? Is it going to take us through…?
Karl Schaefer: We have like a five-year story arc. That’s just how cocky we are about this show.
Lisa Macklem: Go big or go home.
Karl Schaefer: Exactly. The network asked me to come up with that before we started, and obviously that may adjust, but – because even once they make it to California, that’s not going to be the end of the line. Nothing goes according to plan on this show for our characters, and the Murphy character’s evolving. Their mission’s going to evolve. The nature of the apocalypse is going to change, and I think the show’s going to wind up going to places that will really surprise the audience. If you see this show even – beginning of next season’s going to be a very different, interesting show from how it started out, and we reveal a lot about the origin of the apocalypse and what’s going on and where things are going with Murphy’s evolving character and other people like him that sort of appear in the second season.
Lisa Macklem: Well, I mean, my job was on the ground at the end of the first episode, so that’s awesome. I think that was just such a great way to start. I’m just going to ask one more question, if I can. Are we going to see love interests bloom sort of the same way we’ve seen those characters develop in other …
Karl Schaefer: Absolutely, both between our characters of our main hero team and also with characters they run into along the way. It’s like life. There’s going to be tragedy, humor, romance, action, adventure. Like I said before, we’re trying to put the fun back in zombies and not take it so seriously and dark, because if you look at wartime and battle, even under the worst of circumstances people still fall in love and have a sense of humor and suffer tragedies and things like that. So we’re going to put our characters through a full experience as they go forward.
Lisa Macklem: Great. Thank you so much.
Operator: You have another question from Jamie Ruby with SciFiVision.com. Your line is open.
Jamie Ruby: Hi again. Well, I was going to ask you about the possibility of a second season, but you kind of already answered that, so can you talk about maybe a favorite scene or moment without giving too much away?
Karl Schaefer: Coming up?
Jamie Ruby: Yes.
Karl Schaefer: I have a favorite moment in almost every show. I mean, in Episode 2 there’s flaming zombies. Let’s see. In Episode 3 we have some insane cannibals, and I think one of my favorite moments – we have an episode, where Citizen Z up at the North Pole gets a new friend with a very intriguing, dark, twisted story that I think will surprise everybody where it goes and where it ends, but somebody makes their way to the North Pole and finds him, and he has a companion for an episode.
But I think our show’s so different from every episode that I have – and I hope the audience does, too – will have favorite moments from every episode, because we’re really trying to do – you’re going to see zombies do something different that you haven’t seen them do before in every episode and see our characters react in a way that is surprising and interesting, both either funny or dark or – in every episode I think you’re going to see something really gruesome and gross, really dark and violent, really funny, and very emotional. There’s a lot of episodes where people cry on set when we’re shooting a scene, so I think if that translates into the final product and we get to – you make people cry at one of these zombie shows, I think you’re doing your job. So …
Jamie Ruby: Sorry. Go ahead.
Karl Schaefer: That’s OK.
Jamie Ruby: I was just going to say is it right, then, to assume that each episode, I’m taking it, is going to have some sort of a mystery – well, it’s not necessarily a mystery but mystery of the week type thing but yet still have obviously that overarching story?
Karl Schaefer: Yes. I mean, their overall mission to get to California involves each week they come upon some new pocket of humanity or some challenge. The second episode is all about getting gasoline, and pretty much the whole episode is about getting gasoline, while at the same time Citizen Z has a problem of his own up at the North Pole that he has to deal with with zombie sled dogs. So, there’s all kinds of different adventures along the way, and each week they sort of have a sub-mission, something that they have to get done in order to get to the next point on the compass for them.
Jamie Ruby: Great. Well, thank you so much again.
Karl Schaefer: Thank you.
Operator: Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star1 on your telephone keypad. You have another question from Tony Tellado with Sci-Fi Talk. Your line is open.
Tony Tellado: Hi. Hello again.
Karl Schaefer: Hello.
Tony Tellado: I’m curious. With the arc this season, is it a very firm arc, or as you’re shooting are you going to be a little flexible and kind of – when you see the actors and their roles and that kind of thing kind of morph it a little bit as the season goes on?
Karl Schaefer: Definitely the show evolved. In order to do it properly at the budget level we are, we wrote all the episodes before we started shooting. We have a draft of every episode, but then when I came to Spokane and got up here and we had our cast, I did a lot of rewriting to fit the locations that we found and the cast. And it sort of becomes a living organism at a certain point that kind of finds its own direction, and the characters make relationships and you start writing for who they really are, and so it evolved a lot as we went along and will continue to evolve. And I am a very collaborative, open filmmaker, so the actors are also very involved in where their characters go, and they come to me with story ideas and little relationship things that they want to do between each other.
And the directors all have the mandate of, “If you’re out there doing a scene and find there’s something interesting about the location or something comes up between the actors when you’re rehearsing, do it. Let it happen.” And I think the results keep it fresh and interesting, and it becomes the sum of all the people involved. I try and do that with everybody even on the crew, right down to the effects people and the camera people and everybody. I want them to feel like their contributions are embraced and needed, and after the first couple episodes everybody kind of got into the tone of the show and they understood the sense of humor that I have and how we were trying to keep it funny and different but real.
And once they all kind of got that and it clicked in, then the costumers, the effects people, the camera people all started to come to it with their own ideas and input on how to really capture that tone and keep the show edgy, different, and funny, which is what we’re going for. So, it evolved a lot as we went and will continue to evolve a lot.
Tony Tellado: And, I mean, even before The Walking Dead, we just have a fascination with zombies, and they’ve kind of made a comeback as a result. Why are they again so popular in our culture?
Karl Schaefer: I’ve given that a lot of thought, because they’re way more popular than they should be for the genre. I mean, Night of the Living Dead was a great movie, and zombies have always sort of been within the entertainment arena but as a very small niche, not as the most highly rated scripted show.
And as good as The Walking Dead is, that success isn’t all about their execution, because even here in Spokane, when we had an open call for zombie extras we thought we’d have 50 or 60 people come to audition to be extras. We had 800 people show up to be zombies. And these people don’t want to be zombies. They need to be zombies. They’re crazy for this stuff.
And I think that our collective unconscious sort of knows something bad is coming, but we haven’t really figured out what it is yet and that zombies sort of stand in for that thing, that the zombie apocalypse is kind of like what if the absolute worst thing happened, and how would I respond to that? And I think that somehow is part of the attraction to it, in a strange way. I think it really plugs into our unconscious in some deep way we don’t really understand yet.
Tony Tellado: Interesting. Well, good luck. I’m looking forward to seeing your take on zombies and what you do this season.
Karl Schaefer: Cool. Well, we’re having fun doing it, so I hope that people can see that in the show.
Tony Tellado: Definitely. Thanks a lot.
Karl Schaefer: Thank you.
Operator: You have another question from the line of Tim Holquinn with ScreenFad. Your line is open.
Tim Holquinn: Hi. Karl, you mentioned the main principals will be running into new pockets of humanity while they trek to California. I’m figuring some characters they meet will last longer than others. Are there any upcoming guest stars you’d want to tease for us at this time?
Karl Schaefer: I’m trying to think of who we – gosh, I’ve got all these shows in my head at this point. Well, we have not star cast. We don’t really have a lot of people coming up in terms of recognizable named guest cast, but we have some great characters coming up in future episodes. There’s a Russian cosmonaut that meets up with Citizen Z. We have the leader of a cannibal cult. We have sort of a zombie resurrection cult leader coming up, who’s – we have an all-female compound with – actually with Kelly McGillis playing the leader of an all-female compound that’s very dangerous and interesting, and she’s great in it.
So, there are some really interesting characters coming up, and each week they sort of find a different pocket of humanity that they run into that’s trying to rebuild society somehow, and that’s kind of what the show is – there’s a social-satire aspect to the show, so seeing our characters run into these different pockets of humanity and how they’ve tried to rebuild society and how or why it doesn’t work out for them is kind of the fun or the show.
Tim Holquinn: At the end of the premiere, I ran to the Internet to look up who that song was by, Johnny Thunder’s “I’m Alive.” And, of course, given the constraints of your overall budget, I’m just wondering if there might be other classic songs used in future episodes. And whose choice was it to play Johnny Thunder at the end of the pilot?
Karl Schaefer: Well, that was in the promo version. It’s not actually in the on-air version. We did our own sort of take on the song that sounds just as good but is a different song. But generally speaking we’re trying to put in music where we can, but we are limited by our budget in terms of how many actual needle drops we’ll be able to afford. We have a great composer, Jason Gallagher, who’s kind of a first-time composer that’s doing the underscore for the show, and we’re using him and a lot of new, young bands, unsigned bands whose music we can get cheap that’re great. They’re going to contribute a lot to the show.
Tim Holquinn: You could raise their profile. Well, one really fast, quick last question. How far into the season have you shot already?
Karl Schaefer: We’re actually shooting Episode 12 now.
Tim Holquinn: I really like the pilot, so thanks again for speaking with us today. I enjoyed it.
Karl Schaefer: Good. And I think the show gets better as we go along, so I think we actually sort of hit our stride at a certain point and have some really great episodes coming up.
Tim Holquinn: Great.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to the presenters.
Maureen Granados: Great. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining. Thank you, Karl, for your time, and, once again, Z Nation premieres this Friday, September 12th, at 10:00 on Syfy.
