Eliot Laurence – Motherland: Fort Salem

By starrymag | April 22, 2020

By: Lisa Steinberg

 

 

Q) Is there any chance Sheryl Lee Ralph would be available to run in 2020 as President?

 

A) How great is she?  She’s such a legend.  Broadway star, TV star and movie star.  She was such a light and a joy.  It’s such a strange show.  I don’t know if she has done much of these kinds of things.  I had the pleasure of working with Sheryl Lee on a show called “Claws” that I created.  I loved her then and I was like, “I gotta get you back as President of the United States!”  She just went with it and it was so much fun.  Towards the end of the season, there is some President stuff that is pretty wild.  There is more.  I think you’re going to like it. It’s very dramatic.  The way that we ended up shooting it was incredibly stylish and it’s just real, real cool. It lands towards the end of the season.  Stay tuned for some Sheryl Lee Ralph magic!

 

Q) I can’t believe that last week’s episode was the mid-season, I can’t believe that we’ve reached that marker already!  

 

A) I am glad you are feeling that way.  During this crazy time, that kind of engagement I think is very sustaining to people. At least it is for me.

 

Q)  We end up waiting all week for Wednesday nights and our witches!

 

A)  I feel like we need these witches right now!

 

Q) We definitely could use some of Raelle’s (Taylor Hickson) healing abilities.  

 

A) Oh, my goodness.  Big time!  It’s all so strange.

 

Q) I am not sure if it’s purposeful or not, but it’s the second time a big balloon has such a major meaning.  We have the red balloon in the movie franchise IT and then with “Motherland” we see the Spree as blue balloons.  

 

A) “Motherland” was a labor of love for many years and Freeform saved us and gave us such an incredible home.  I was working on some stage of this idea of whether initially it was a book proposal or maybe movies or graphic novels.  I have always been kind of in the “Motherland” world while I was working on other stuff.  I don’t know. When this all happened, we were hopeful that this time would give people the chance to really, really dive in because the world building is really dense and I never want to be too heavy handed with it. But everybody has a little bit more time to be curious, I think.

 

Q) There seems to be a great deal of Easter eggs too that are riddled throughout the series, for sure.

 

A) Kai Bradbury has one of my favorite lines, which is so thrown away and is in the midst of all of this other stuff.  He’s like, “Yeah, everybody knows women are stronger than men.”  I was like don’t shine a light on it, keep it moving.  I just loved that so much.

 

Q) That was one of my favorite lines that didn’t get lost on me, personally. The significance of a man saying that is incredible.

 

And a man wrote it, too!

 

Q) We have these women leading the charge and we don’t have enough of that in our reality right now.  That’s what makes me love a large part of the series so much as well, that it is female empowerment forward.  

 

A) I hope it trickles upward, down, or around, or something.  I really hope it does.

 

Q) These characters have baggage and underlying emotional vulnerabilities, but these things also don’t define them either.  

 

A) That’s true. That’s a really cool observation. I like to build characters that always want to surprise and you see a new layer to them. You thought you knew what somebody was and you find a new layer to the onion.  I love doing that.  That’s the kind of thing that makes me lean into the TV a bit.  That kind of character work is so important.

 

Q) That’s such a great analogy, it’s very much an onion.  We are still in the forefront of the series and stripping away these layers every new episode where we see these different sides and emotions to the characters.  The situations that they are thrust into by being a part of this legion.  That’s important to remember too, that these women are multifaceted and whatever they are weighed down by or holding on to, it doesn’t define them.  

 

A) Yeah.  Even their sexuality.  When you think about Raelle and Scylla’s (Amalia Holm) relationship, and particularly Raelle, it’s not the first thing you know about her or the most important thing that you know about her.  And in this world these definitions that are so powerful in our world within this kind of pocket matriarchy of “Motherland,” those things get really blurry and unimportant in the face of the commonality of witch-hood.  For me, it’s an analogy for queerness. It’s something that kind of cuts across race and class and everything.  These people are sharing this and it’s a strange commonality.  It’s a commonality that defines your entire life. When you turn eighteen, they’ve got you.  That’s kind of The Spree’s point of view.  How is that okay that this government controls these bodies?  That’s one of the tensions of the show that I think is kind of endless and fun to explore.

 

Q) With a lot of shows, sexuality gets used as secondary subplots or ways to propel the heterosexual or male characters forward in their stories.  These complex queer characters that are in “Motherland,” it’s not what leads them or it’s not where they are led to.

 

A) Yep. Exactly.  I think that’s kind of refreshing.

 

Q) We also see so much light and darkness juxtaposed so stunningly throughout the series in so many different ways.  We see it in the costumes, the cinematography, etc. Talk about how this is purposefully layered and how visual aspects really help to drive the plot, tensions and characters forward.

 

A) I love that you said that.  Thank you so much.  That’s a cool observation and it’s a testament to our brilliant cinematographer Jon Joffin and our directors who came in and just executed this brilliant kind of new vision of what Fort Salem looks like.  And like you were saying with the lights and the darks, one thing we focused really early on is…You probably noticed a lot of shots where the female form is a silhouette and behind her is this huge light.  There is this kind of radiating power from a female silhouette which felt like a very potent way to talk about the military and female empowerment.  The light and the dark, yeah, it needs both.  Even in the composition of the unit. Raelle has so much baggage and is learning a lot about herself and is dropping some of her pain, but she’s also been through a lot.  Abigail (Ashley Nicole Williams) is like forward momentum, don’t ask questions and hyperconfident.  Tally (Jessica Laura Sutton) is sort of endless curiosity and slight goofiness sometimes and I mean that in the best possible way.  And you’re right, that plays out visually with those rich, rich blacks and, like I was saying, those blazing kinds of radiating lights.  It feels really integrated that way.  I feel lucky that I was able to work with such talented craftsmen and artists.  It’s a beautiful show.

 

Q) You really have interwoven everything so beautifully and phenomenally well, even with the pounding or driving of the music that accompanies everything as well.  How does the music also become such a key character within the series and add an extra element as well?

 

A) We were very lucky to work with our very gifted composer Brandon Roberts that just is mind-blowingly kind of intuitive about how to make things sound witchy.  I mean, he created The Spree sound, the sound that we associate with The Spree.  Even the music in the title sequence literally sounds witchy.  Like, how do you make something that sounds witchy that’s not a haunted house soundtrack?  He was able to capture this.  And our sound designer Paula Fairfield. That was a really tough job because the vocal magic in the show is really unique and strange and has to sound cool, but it also has to sound new and it can’t sound goofy.  Goofy is the thing it can’t sound because when you see these young women learning how to use their voices this way, I want the viewer to be like, “I wish I could do that!  I wish I could learn to do that with my voice!”  That was a tall order to make the sound stuff work.  It took a lot of work.

 

Q) Seeing the girls together as a core, when they use their voices as a call or a weapon, and how that also plays a part of their power – power in multi ways of meaning – it’s just extraordinary.

 

A) Absolutely.

 

Q) Ashley, Jessica and Taylor really are this incredible fierce force and the dynamic that they share as the characters play so well off of one another, but also as actresses.  Like you said with Jessica’s character Tally, she has this underlying pureness to her, and we are sort of just scratching the surface for her.  They all balance one another so well with Abigail being so headstrong and driven because of her family and bloodline as well as Raelle’s family and bloodline too with the trauma she has been through.  Then we Tally’s pureness and good nature and it’s kind of this great masterfully put together trio.

 

A) I know!  It is.  And thinking back on what you were saying about balancing the light and the dark and finding those moments in humor, which I grant you there are not that many, but there are a few that just make me laugh so hard.  Whether it’s Abigail’s ornate insulting, which is super fun to watch, or just some of the stuff that comes out of Tally’s mouth. Even Raelle with her snarkyness.  It’s not supposed to be a funny show; which is a little strange for me because I have always worked in some sort of dark comedic vein.  So, it’s different, but it needs some humor because it’s a serious show in some ways.  It’s very light and beautiful in a lot of ways, but it’s tackling kind of big stuff which feels fun to play with.

 

Q)  Is there anything you’d like to say to fans to keep in mind for the back half of the season? Or is there something you hope that fans have taken away so far from watching the series?

 

A) I would just say I would love people to revel in the newness of the show because it’s an audacious idea and such a big swing conceptionally.  It is something that has not happened before, and I think we all kind of need that right now.  That’s my biggest hope for the takeaway, that it just feels new and fresh like, “I haven’t seen this TV show before.”  That’s my dream.