Warning: some potentially spoilery info follows...
Bates Motel co-executive producers Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights) along with cast members Vera Farmiga (Norma Bates), Freddie Highmore (Norman Bates), Max Thieriot (Dylan Massett), Nestor Carbonell (Sheriff Alex Romero), and Nicola Peltz (Bradley Martin) were all in attendance at the Paley Center this weekend for a special panel moderated by The Shield creator Sean Ryan. While there, the group discussed the obvious and not-so-obvious influences for Bates Motel, what we can expect from the finale, and the road forward for what is essentially an action-packed thriller with a previously established, inevitable and, in the world of this series, tragic end.
Here are things 5 we learned.
Yes, This Is A Twin Peaks/Psycho Redux
Bates Motel is a contemporized prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's seminal horror film Psycho, but critics and audiences alike have also been quick to compare this series to David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Like Twin Peaks, Bates Motels takes place in a gloomy, but strangely lush and inviting town in the Pacific Northwest; a town that appears to be seductively innocent, but is filled with dark and dangerous citizens.
"We pretty much ripped off Twin Peaks," Cuse quipped. "If you wanted to get that confession, the answer is yes. No, Kerry [Ehrin] and I loved that show and it only lasted 30 episodes, so we thought we would do the 70 that were missing."
In truth, the Bates Motel setting works on multiple levels. It acts as a perfect metaphor for Norman's fractured psyche. Additionally, like Twin Peaks, though there is one central focus in the series, there are several mysterious characters and story threads which give the show room to evolve.
The project began when Universal, who owns the right's to Psycho, approached Cuse and Ehrin. They were immediately intrigued by the idea of tackling a prequel, even though there was a high degree of difficulty to it. "Just the unanswered questions of the movie were intriguing to us," Cuse said. "Like, who was Norma Bates? Who was this woman who ended up like stuffed in a fruit cellar in the movie? And what was her relationship like with here son?"
The team wrote the pilot with the intention that the audience would fall in love with the characters and hope against hope that the doomed mother and son would not meet their fate.
"Initially I was a little off put," Farmiga said about tackling what is, as Ryan described it, one of the most iconic corpses in cinema. "The purist in me was skeptical about the interdependence with Psycho, because there are a lot of things that can go wrong. But they got me on page two with the dialogue when Norma, in the same breath said, "You're such an a**hole Norman, I love you." It's that pendulum swing of everything that Norma is: twisted and nurturing. It's all the secret places of the mother's heart."
The landscape of the town also added a cinematic quality to the series that the creators were interested in. "Because the subject is so dark and sad we wanted it physically look sort of gorgeous, so it wasn't just relentlessly dark," Ehrin said.
"These characters are all crazy," Ehrin added, laughing. "It's exhausting to write," she says, but great, "that's major awesome dysfunction."
"There's also humor too, I think that that was important," Cuse added. "I think that there are other serial killer shows that are really straight. I mean if you watch The Following and Hannibal, they're really well made, but the tone is very consistently dark. I think we tried to introduce moments of levity. We don't ever really think that we're writing a show about a serial killer, we think that we're writing a show about a family."
"Bringing it into the contemporary setting also gave us some freedom to re-imagine these characters," Highmore added. Indeed, the new setting and reboot has opened the door to a multitude of possibilities on the show, the town's primary source of income among them. However, there is a timeless quality that helps to connect it to the source material as well.
When she was initially thinking of a template for Norma and Norman's relationship, Kerry Ehrin envisioned an old forties movie couple. "It's two people that just work together in some way," the producer said. "So you take that beautiful dynamic and put the oedipal knife thing around it."
"We decided very early on that though we were telling our own story that it couldn't really be Psycho without the iconic hotel and the house," Cuse added, "Those things needed to exist in the same way that Christopher Nolan did his own take on the Batman story but he kept the Batsuit, the car, the cave, Alfred and all those things."
Ultimately, the creators say that Norma and Norman's relationship exists out of time and that in a perfect world they could be really happy. But the world isn't perfect.
We Will Learn More About Norma's Past
What makes a woman like Norma Bates?
Bates Motel is a series-long imagining of the answer to one core question: How did Norman Bates the boy become Norman Bates the killer? As it works it's way through that though, other questions are raised. Perhaps the most pivotal of which is: What made Norma, the woman who birthed the psycho, who she is?
"As we approach the finale, we're going to learn more about Norma's past," Highmore says. The trauma of her life before she came to White Pine Bay has been repeatedly hinted at, and we've seen some of her relationship with her ex-husband, but there is still more to be revealed. How her history shaped her into the - often inappropriate - mother she is, is something that audiences may have different opinions about.
"The great thing about Bates Motel is that everyone has a different interpretation of the relationship between Norma and Norman, and which side of the line that falls on. Even among us, there's a difference of opinion at times as to if it is slightly dodgy or not."
"Norma is determined in her love for her child," Farmiga, who is of the opinion that the relationship is decidedly not dodgy, said. "She is a troubled woman who is trying to give her troubled son a life that is enhancing to him and there is no clear path to how a woman who has an atypical, neurologically damaged child makes him healthy. Particularly when she's not all that healthy herself and she has her own dark past."
"I approach the sensuality in a very innocent way," the actress added. She likens Norma's approach to attachment parenting. "She believes that his anxiety induced emotion has something to do with bonding, so her cure is to bond. She's going to love him through his madness."
Dylan's Character May End Up As The Most Sympathetic
Dylan has a body count of two to Norman's one (that we know of) at this point. So the question becomes: Who is the killer, here? Yet, as his time on the series has progressed Dylan has become, as Cuse says, "a breakout character with the audience." We are able to connect to him, even through his questionable choices.
"I started out hating him," Sean Ryan said, "but by the time of the finale he may become the most sympathetic character."
"It's funny, when Tucker [Gates] was directing my first episode, every scene he would say, 'Just be more mean, walk into the house like you don't give an F and tear up their house,'" Theriot recalled. "And the whole time we were filming I was thinking, 'Man people are going to hate me. I'm being really rude and disrespectful to my mom.' But obviously, it sets up for Dylan to evolve into who we learn he is."
"The most sympathetic pot farm protector," Ryan quipped.
"It's fun to screw up their world a little bit and mess with their dynamic and yet always be so close to it," Theriot added. "The relationship with Norma will continue to evolve. He takes out his hostility on Norman sometimes. It's hard because Norman is Norma's favorite, but he realizes maybe they should be sticking together a little more as brothers."
"They are blossoming together," Farmiga says of her character's relationship with her eldest son. "But their history is complex as we will see, and as she starts to see he has influence on Norman she takes that as a threat. He's a reminder that she failed at maternity."
One thing we're sure will play out is the googly-eyes that he and Bradley have been making at one another. Bradley's now-deceased father was connected to Dylan's work and that will start to become more of a focus on the show heading towards the finale.
Continue on for more on the mystery Sheriff, Norman's ladies and the road to the finale...
Source : ign[dot]com
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