Creating a prequel story to Psycho is a bold move, given how beloved the film is, but A&E’s upcoming Bates Motel is notably taking the story of a teenage Norman Bates and moving it to the present day. Speaking about Bates Motel at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour today, executive producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) said that it was an easy call for him to move the series to the present, rather than the 1950s (to line up with the 1960 film), explaining, “The idea of doing a contemporary prequel made it clear that what we were doing was something that was inspired by Psycho but not an homage to Psycho, and that was a big difference to us.”
He later added that doing Bates Motel as a period piece “was not interesting to me. Again, I think the idea of an homage is just not… that's just not engaging to me. So it felt like making that fundamental decision to make the story contemporary gave us the freedom to really take these characters wherever we wanted to.” Cuse noted that by the end of the series, ”In some general form, we are going to catch up with a version of the character from the movie,” but not having it set in the past made it so they weren’t bound absolutely to the continuity of the film and to have everything exactly line up.
Cuse elaborated, “it just seemed really interesting to us, this sort of fundamental idea of how does Norman Bates become the guy who's in that movie? And that was just really a fascinating idea for us. And in a certain way, we thought, well, this is a tragedy. It’s a fantastic dramatic form but not one that you get to do a lot in television. And we sort of want the audience to fall in love with these characters, particularly Norma (Up in the Air’s Vera Farmiga) and Norman (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore), and yet we know their inevitable fates. And that tension of knowing what their fate is and seeing how they get there was something that we, as storytellers, just thought was really compelling.”
Cuse said that they were approaching Bates Motel with a fairly clean slate – not only in terms of not being set in the same era as the original, but ignoring anything revealed about the Bates family in Psycho II-IV. Explained Cuse, “the mythology that you think is what dictates the relationship between Norma and Norman is probably not what it's going to turn out to be. A little scene at the very beginning of the pilot, we'll see the rest of that scene in an episode downstream and it may surprise you what you actually learn about what the relationship is like between these two characters and what drives Norman Bates to be the guy that he becomes. And for us it was really a process of invention, not of trying to kind of stick to what had been done.”
The core of Bates Motel is the relationship between Norman and Norma, which executive producer Kerry Erhrin noted is “obviously oedipal.” Farmiga though said that approaching Norma Bates, “I got into wanting to defend who that woman was. I was sent the first three episodes, and she was just such a beautiful portrait of valiant maternity to me. And so therein I saw the challenge. She’s just a real head turner, you know? To me the story is just a beautiful love letter between a mother and her son, and that’s how I perceive the character. That's how how I approach it.”
Remarked Farmiga, “There's an Edvard Munch painting of the Madonna. It's really warped and it kind of exudes the sacred and the profane and it's just psychologically gripping, and that's what I was so drawn to with Norma. She's a playground for an actress. It's, like, when they offer you Hedda Gabler, you don't say no. And that's what it was for me. The character's riddled with contradiction. She’s as strong and tall as an oak and as fragile as a butterfly and everything in between that I admire in female characters that I come across, which is resilience and passion and intellect and, at the same time, she's an absolute train wreck and a magnet.” Farmiga later noted, “She's a cool blonde that, at the onset, appears very lovely, but as soon as she encounters danger, she acts in a really kind of animalistic way.”
As for playing the iconic Norman Bates, Highmore said, “We all know where he's going to end up. It doesn't give anything away to say that he'll go on to be psycho. But is that necessarily because of his upbringing? It's that sort of argument between nature versus nurture. Is he who he is and will he always become the person that he will become, or is it because they move to this dodgy town and there's a sort of weird relationship -- or certainly close, intimate relationship -- between Norma and Norman. And that challenges the audience to think, well, if I was in that situation, if I had had the upbringing that Norman had had, would I be slightly different?" Highmore grinned, unable to resist adding, "You know, we all go a little mad sometimes.”
Asked if he felt any pressure taking on the role and living up to Anthony Perkins’ performance, Highmore said, “I'm very lucky playing Norman Bates. I feel if there is any pressure to do as well as you can with a character, it comes more from the character himself than by previous people. Of course, Anthony Perkins has done an iconic take. But the character of Norman Bates is also iconic. And so I guess I just want to do him justice and make sure that we get the best Norman that we can.”
A reporter referenced the polarizing (and metaphysical) ending to Lost, and Cuse joked that the ending of Bates Motel was, “going to be cryptic,” before adding, “I think there's a story here that has a beginning, middle, and end. I can't tell you exactly how long our story's going to last just yet. I think that's part of the discovery process of us developing the show, but I think eventually there is end point to this narrative, absolutely.”
Cuse described Bates Motel as, “very serialized. The show’s like, I think, all the best serialized shows, whether it’s Breaking Bad or Homeland, it's a kind of a story that takes ten episodes to unfold. And obviously, there's some hooks that will hopefully carry us into a second season. But there are a number of different dramatic things that happen. We're not just solving one particular crime. There's a number of mysteries.”
Bates Motel premieres March 18th on A&E.
Source : ign[dot]com
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