We talked about when and where to do it, and how to do it and how to lay in enough bread crumbs and clues that while it was a big “holy shit” it wouldn’t be such a left turn that you feel like you had been abducted and dropped into something else entirely. You’d feel like the back of your brain has been leading you to some sort of reveal. It’s a big swing and the good news is that people like the show enough to stick with it through the end of six episodes, so the actual film noir detective mystery worked on its own.
The even better news is that it seems like people certainly stuck with the show and appreciated the ambition of the swing and that it could actually deepen the character as opposed to taking anything away from the complex, unique character that we all, and especially Colin, created.
The twist completely reframes the context of the story and the character. We had seen Sugar deplore violence, show compassion, and appreciate film and the other things Los Angeles has to offer. With this twist, how was it viewing humanity and these things through the unique lens Sugar provides that us homegrown humans take for granted?
That’s a lovely way to describe it. We talked a lot about the character, because he’s an alien and, in so many ways, so many people live in Los Angeles specifically are aliens, meaning that they’re not from Los Angeles. I moved here when I was five or six, so I was a little bit of a transplant. I lived here for most of my childhood and the vast majority of people who I know that live in Los Angeles are not from Los Angeles. They come here because they want to work in entertainment, because they want to get away from somewhere; they come here for many different reasons.
In our core team, Fernando Meirelles, our director, is not American, he’s Brazilian and coming to Los Angeles from the outside. Colin is obviously not American and came to Los Angeles from the outside many years ago. Something I think that’s interesting about L.A. is not only is it full of outsiders, but it’s also a city, as much as any city in the world, whose identity has been created through film, specifically film noir. There is a lot of film noir that takes place in Los Angeles, a lot of the classic film noir and the contemporary classics – whether you consider Chinatown as contemporary; L.A. Confidential certainly is.
We all felt like there was something people would relate to, being a little bit outside the human experience. Also, like you say, it would be a fresh lens into things that we take for granted, like simple acts of compassion, the kindness of a dog, good movies, cool cars that are slightly forgotten. But through an innocent lens – another thing that we thought was exciting about the character was that, while he’s obviously physically formidable and really intelligent, there is an innocence to him because he hasn’t been, in some ways, ruined by all of the different moral complexities of living in our world. He is fresh to our world and we like that idea very much.
