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01.08.2007 | EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS BRUNO HELLER AND JOHN MELFI PUT A HUMAN FACE ON WORLD-CHANGING EVENTS IN THE SECOND SEASON OF HBO'S EMMY®-WINNING EPIC DRAMA SERIES ROME, KICKING OFF JAN. 14
Caesar is dead, brought down by assassins' hands. But what's next for the empire he forged? Season two of the Emmy®-winning HBO series ROME picks up the story in the tense minutes, hours and days following the dictator's demise, rendering earthshaking historical events in intensely personal terms, capturing the human drama behind familiar textbook facts.
"On the broadest level, the second season of ROME is about what happens when a father dies," says executive producer Bruno Heller, who wrote many of the scripts for the new season. "The man around whom the whole world revolved is gone, and now what do the children do? What do his successors do? On a political level, it's a struggle for power; on a personal level, it's a struggle to carry on without that central figure."
As Heller notes, one of the challenges of a series like ROME is bringing a freshness to well-known characters and episodes from history. "We try to balance between what people expect from previous portrayals and a naturalistic approach," he says. "This series is much more about how the psychology of the characters affects history than simply following the history as we know it. There is a tendency in dramas about Rome to take a stiff, formal approach, which is certainly a valid way to treat the material, but we're more interested in the living, breathing people."
Heller adds that this hands-on sensibility is shared by the lead actors, who, he says, "take possession of their roles in a very real way. They have their own opinions on how a character is going to behave in a critical moment, and you have to take that into account in the writing. Actors of this caliber will not do or say something they believe is dishonest."
Like historical consultant Jonathan Stamp, Heller stresses the importance of authenticity, being true to the spirit of the times, as opposed to slavish, letter-perfect accuracy, noting, "One of the most important ways to be authentic is in the portrayal of Roman morality. We couldn't impose a Judeo-Christian outlook on this world. We may not agree with the Roman way of looking at the world, but their outlook was certainly more brutal and unshackled than ours. They were very direct in their attitudes toward sexuality and conquest - when someone wanted something, they tried to go out and get it. They were like us with our ids unleashed."
Executive producer John Melfi is a newcomer to the ROME team this season, but his resume includes numerous HBO projects, including "Sex and the City." While the leap from contemporary New York to the ancient world might seem like a big one, he doesn't see it that way. "In both cases, you look for the key to the scene," explains Melfi. "What are the moments that make this a believable experience for the audience? 'Sex and the City' was about a group of women who were searching for satisfaction in their lives. In ROME, we're trying to make the characters into real people, not just historical figures.
"Just as each of the women on 'Sex and the City' represented a segment of the audience, Titus Pullo represents everyman on this show. You watch him and say, 'What's he going to do next?' or 'How's he going to negotiate his way through this?' "
Continues Melfi, "One of Bruno Heller's intentions this year was to recount the genesis of the original gangs - the people who ran the Aventine Collegium, the marketplace - and explore how the pecking order of Italian society got its start. How did the Mafia come to be? That's the downstairs story. To explore this angle, we built a massive exterior set that makes the Tiber River a major presence in the show."
With the characters established in season one of ROME, Melfi says the second season will emphasize emotional immediacy. "Life in Rome was very visceral - it was based on food and smell and sex. We're exploring the morality of a society where men could do anything they wanted, but women had to behave a certain way. That's an important part of the story of Pullo and the women he's involved with."
Besides the mandate to explore more deeply the essential humanity of ROME's larger-than-life characters this season, Melfi says one of the series' major challenges has been simple logistics. With about 500 people working on the five-acre set at Cinecitta Studios, the production usually has separate units shooting two episodes simultaneously, which saves time and money, but can create major scheduling headaches for both the actors and the behind-the-scenes creative team.
"One season of the average network series involves between 160 and 180 days of production on 22 episodes," notes Melfi. "We're spending 179 days shooting just ten episodes of ROME." But, he notes, while the average episode of an hour-long network show runs around 40 minutes, "ours are between 55 and 60 minutes."
Above all, he says, the ROME team feels an obligation to do justice to their subjects. "The studio is built on Roman burial ground. The Appian Way is nearby. Shooting in the city where the events actually happened influences the atmosphere of the production. You want to tell the best story you can."
HBO's Emmy®-winning epic drama series ROME kicks off its ten-episode second season SUNDAY, JAN. 14 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO.
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