The Seeker’s Omnibus

Firefox News interviewed Rob Tapert about several of his projects, including LotS. There’s more to the article, of course, but here’s the LotS snippet:

[Laughing] Yeah, you’re probably right. Now I know we’ve only got a couple more minutes, but I’m not going to be forgiven if I don’t insert a couple of quick THE LEGEND OF THE SEEKER questions from my colleague Tracy Morris. Is that okay with you?

Yeah, please do. I arrived from New Zealand a little over four hours ago. So I just flew back from being in New Zealand overseeing the mix on the two-hour pilot.

Great, then this is probably more on your mind. Now, the syndication market has changed so dramatically since XENA and HERCULES were launched. And in the past you’ve expressed dissatisfaction with the way things have changed, so why jump back into syndication now?

Everybody said it was dead, and because they all said it was dead and there is not a single show in the genre, in the fantasy genre, or in first-run syndicated action, we believe that there is still an audience who has just been mis-served over time. And I have to give a huge amount of credit to our partners at ABC Studios for taking the leap of faith in financing, in these very troubled and difficult times, a first-run syndicated action series.

I know so many people are looking forward to this series. But the second question is, Why Wizard’s First Rule?In other words, what is it that drew you and Sam Raimi to the novel, and do you see that essence in this finished product so far?

All right, so first the book came to Sam from his partner and my partner, Josh Donen who’s involved in this project, the son of Stanley Donen. Sam gave the book to me. Eventually through another person, we got into Tribune, [and] they said they wanted to do it. And what we all loved creatively about Wizard’s First Rule was the world Terry Goodkind created, the characters within that world. Richard, Rahl, and Kahlan Amnell and their relationships, so that’s what we liked. We liked Zedd.

So we liked the characters, we liked aspects of the world, but there was subject matter in the book that just don’t lend itself to television. They had to be changed to downplayed or played with a little bit. But the unrequited romance, the story of a young hero finding out who he was, the story of a beautiful young woman who could never experienced the full joys of sex without terrible repercussions, that all had an appeal to us and to our partners at ABC. In terms of what the series is on a weekly basis, we are taking threads in this first season from the Wizard’s First Rule and the villain, Darken Rahl, and his henchmen and some of the events that happened there. And then [we’re] just doing stand-alone versions of stories that have nothing to do [anything] within the book but are true to the nature of the heroes and the characters that Terry Goodkind created in his universe.

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