Writers of Once Upon a Time on Star World talk about how the idea of a fairytale interwoven with reality modern-day characters took root and how technology plays a vital role
A lot of technical questions are being asked. Does that make you nervousIJ
EDWARD KITSIS: Well, that’s part of the journey. I am glad to hear people asking them, because it makes us look for answers to all those questions.
ADAM HOROWITZ: In all seriousness, all the questions that were asked were exactly the questions we were hoping people would ask.
Do you think that our world is a horrible placeIJ
EDWARD KITSIS: I don’t think our world is a horrible place at all. In fact, the underlying message of this show is about hope. That’s why we like fairy tales.
ADAM HOROWITZ: In the series, the Evil Queen takes one to someplace horrible place, but that is just one side of it. And Emma (Jennifer Morrison) becomes a representative of hope on the other side.
The series is a combination of the fairy tales and the modern world. Was there some restriction on the creative sideIJ
ADAM HOROWITZ: The biggest restriction is trying to make sense. That’s the challenge — when you open up a world so widely.
EDWARD KITSIS: There has to be an internal logic to it, which we feel. But the logic we’ve come up with allows us to be able to pull from different stories and different worlds and have that mishmash.
Are you open to suggestionsIJ
ADAM HOROWITZ: It’s not so much being open to suggestion, as is to be flexible.
EDWARD KITSIS: We want to give ourselves the freedom to allow the show to kind of tell us where it wants to go, as opposed to making the show go to somewhere where maybe it feels false. Season 3 of a show is completely different than Season 1. And if you are rigid in what you think that’s going to be, you’ve closed yourself off to the idea of creative possibilities that might actually be better than what you thought of three years earlier.
How did the idea of Once Upon A Time come upIJ
EDWARD KITSIS: We had just finished with Felicity and were literally thinking about, what kind of show would we like to create next. We started talking about stories and how they influenced us, how they were really the first things you see that inspire you. By virtue of being with lost for six years we figured out how to tell another story in a better way.
ADAM HOROWITZ: Eight years ago when we started talking about it, there was Emma, Snow White, a child and all other elements, but they were in a disarray. We knew we wanted to do, but didn’t know how to tell it. It was during lost that we figured it out. From there on, it kept growing and evolving through the years until it finally became what one sees today.