The comic is the comic, and the show is the show,
and you don't want to worry about that too much.
Just make it your own.
But don't fuck it up, Dom.
Open my heart to you.
Ah!
I wrote Preacher 20 years ago.
It's been those nine or six books on the shelf.
And that's not going to change.
So for me it's very, very interesting
to see someone come along
and take a different angle on it.
Preacher is something that
I never even dreamed of thinking of trying to make
until I already could maybe make stuff.
Then I tried for a long time and got rejected by everybody.
Action!
Oh!
We didn't get the rights,
and other people were trying to make it,
and we've been pretty much trying for the last 10 years,
and we get to be the guys to ruin it.
Steve Dylan, the artist and I,
we'd seen an attempt to make it as an independent film, fail,
an HBO show, fail.
Bigger budget film, fail.
And at that time I think we quite cynically decided
that it was unfilmable.
Along came Seth and Evan to prove us wrong.
Cut!
Literally 10 years ago,
Seth handed me the copy of Preacher book one,
and he said, "You have to read this.
It's the best comic ever."
And his name
is the Word of God!
Evan's brother gave him the comic
when he was little, like really little,
and said, "This book will change your life."
I am the chosen one.
That was a great alchemy between Seth and Evan and myself
because they're huge fan boys of the comics,
knew it backwards and forwards, and I did not know it.
So I was like,
"Well, guys, it's got to work on this level.
I've never seen this,
I don't know who this person is."
Once you focus on like,
how do we setup these characters,
then it became very filmable.
Evening, Padre.
What's the matter with you?
Someone beat you up with a dark and handsome stick or something?
Dominic's character by far is the hardest thing though,
because he's like a Clint Eastwood kind of cowboy.
And the more we do it, the more we realize like,
"You only get to say, like, 10 words every 20 minutes.
You better say them really well."
I'm still learning lots about Jesse Custer,
and, you know, however much I read the comics,
which I get a great deal from,
I'm still learning, as are the writers,
where is this character going?
What's he going to become?
Who is he trying to be?
It's like smacking his hands out of the way,
hitting him in the face, you know. It's like amusing.
Seth and Evan just saying,
"Just really, really-- just try one.
Because you're so kind of focused in fighting."
So you're trying to look scary, strong,
and actually he said, "Don't do any of that."
Having learnt the choreography of the fight,
then just smile your way through it."
You could, like, literally, laugh, like, at how easy it is.
Jesse loves every minute of it.
Hopefully, it plays as a very dark character,
revealing that this guy is the most dangerous man.
Jesse is a hard character to get,
mostly because he's an anachronism.
He really belongs somewhere in the 1870's,
walking down to the O.K. Corral with a pistol on his hip,
ready for a gun fight.
Eugene told me that he left you some messages.
The characters are what made us think
it would be a good TV show more than anything.
Once we had Joel and Ruth and Dominic
and so many of these other great actors,
it really felt like this is the world of Preacher.
Tulip has a pretty good intro in the comics.
She's trying to kill a guy and she misses
and shoots a guy's jaw off and is shocked.
But we've altered her character a bit.
Awesome!
So awesome!
She discovers that there's two kids
that watched the whole thing.
So she compensates for that by making it
into a sort of a play world for them.
Who likes arts and crafts?
I think she's described in the script as like
the coolest babysitter ever.
Action.
- So more bad guys are coming? - Mm-hmm.
Coming to kill you?
Well, they're going to try.
Ruth creates a bazooka out of peach cans and moonshine,
which is actually one of the many terrible things
you can see on the Internet.
Who wants to play hide-and-go-seek?
This is the plane set we've built for the fight scene,
basically what's happened is
he's met a bunch of hedge funders--
just smashed that guy in the head with a bong...
...five times.
As for Joe, obviously born to play Cassidy,
not a huge leap, I'm guessing.
Go to hell, abomination.
When will you idiots learn, huh?
It's embarrassing.
Cut!
- Like he's more of a human... - Teapot, yeah.
Tip me up and pour me out.
Push it forward.
Yeah.
Nice, oh there we go!
We're saying he should take the shades off the pilot,
like after he fills the bottle.
The shades were my idea,
right, you just took credit for my shade moment,
I'm fuming.
That was awesome over there.
Yeah, great.
Woo!
You don't see this side of vampires.
Usually vampires are quite cool, cultured,
they've been alive for a long, long time.
You could have had children that have died.
Everybody leaves him because they die.
There was quite a few builds on this show
that there's typically not in a pilot.
The plane is a huge build going to worlds like Nairobi.
And we had over 40 locations.
Cable TV has evolved only recently to the point
that it can financially and stylistically
support a show like this.
You couldn't have turned it into a film.
There's too much in it.
Even a two-and-a-half-hour, three-hour screenplay
would be completely overloaded with bizarre characters
over-the-top situations.
But a TV show does give you that room to breathe.
In regards to the comics,
it jumps from one genre to the next.
It's a big challenge of this show, because it is a drama,
it's a crime thriller.
Don't worry, father, I ain't going to shoot you.
It's a dark comedy.
Mrs. Root, how are you tonight?
It's a martial arts movie.
Action!
Road trip.
Satire.
I just read the Japanese
let a fellow marry his own pillow.
That's a big challenge for all of us as writers,
and for actors, for directors, everyone.
It's pretty crazy a bit.
I can't believe they're letting us make it.