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Interview: David Simon Talks Treme, The Wire, Tragedy, and More

Simon spoke with Slant about the challenges and rewards of telling stories from the inside out.

Interview: David Simon Talks Treme, The Wire, Tragedy, and More
Photo: David Simon, Paul Schiraldi, and HBO

Given the richness his career as a journalist brought to his previous works of narrative TV fiction (Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire, and Generation Kill), critical expectations for David Simon’s new series, HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme, were understandably high. And while Treme is an entirely different kind of television drama than what audiences may have come to expect from Simon, it nevertheless represents a logical progression of his vision, branching out from political and economic analysis of urban America to address questions of culture, community, and creativity. Simon spoke with Slant about the challenges and rewards of telling stories from the inside out, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of writing for the small screen in general.

You began transitioning out of Baltimore-based shows with Generation Kill a couple summers ago. What was it like shooting in Africa, and now working on Treme in New Orleans?

It’s the same as filming in Baltimore. The truth is, filming in poor or working-class neighborhoods anywhere in the world is benign. As long as you’re honest with people, as long as you don’t take advantage, as long as your crew is careful not to disrespect people and not leave a mess behind, people are really very accommodating. It’s when you get into affluent areas that it’s a pain in the ass. It was true in Baltimore and it’s true in New Orleans. It doesn’t matter if you have a permit, it doesn’t matter if you’re paying money to the city, it doesn’t matter if you’re making a donation to a local community center. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not enough. You try not to stay so long [in working-class areas] that you become an irritant. You move around the city, you don’t come back to a location for a couple weeks. And if they see you’re trying to get something a little bit right, they become even more tolerant. So it’s been very easy.

One of the things that excited me most about The Wire and also Generation Kill was the realism that you brought to your dialogue, the way you respected Black American English and corner slang and Marine speech patterns. With Treme, it seems like this respect for maintaining the integrity of dialogue is directed more at the way New Orleans musicians talk about music.

We try to get interior dialogue wherever we can. Mostly we’re working off people we know. [Series co-creator] Eric [Overmyer]’s lived down there for a couple decades and I’ve been visiting since the late ’80s. We obviously have spent a lot of time talking to people who are in many ways—I guess “muse” is probably too strong of a word, but templates for some of the characters—and how they talk, and trying to avoid vernacular that is Baltimore-y, or from somewhere else in the country. On the other hand, everyone makes a big deal about how New Orleanians talk, but the truth is, there are some distinct accents. There’s a Yat accent that sounds like deep Brooklyn. Louis Primo had that accent. He was from the Irish channel of New Orleans. But a lot people in New Orleans are from somewhere else. There’s a lot of people who are transplants, and there’s a lot of people who have no accent. You walk around the city and you hear a variety of different accents.

But as to how the musicians speak about their gigs and stuff, any time you hear something, you’re writing stuff on a cocktail napkin, going, “Oh, man, I gotta use that.” I think novelists do that, [as do] journalists if they’re working on a feature story. If there’s anything immersive about what they’re doing, they do that. It’s about getting what you can from life.

It seems like when a lot of the musicians start to talk about music, it’s insular in some ways, or it indicates belonging to a certain kind of group, being able to speak about music in certain ways, being able to describe time signatures or refer to certain performers. Did you consciously choose to maintain a fidelity to that?

You want people to speak as they would speak. You want them to be in their world. That doesn’t mean the writers are musicians who can access it at the drop of a hat or always get it right. Beginning from [our 2000 miniseries] The Corner, the TV that we’ve tried to do is from an interior point of view. It allows for a certain kind of tourism on the part of viewers, but only if viewers are willing to extend themselves. What we perceive of people from the outside can only take you so far. When you walk into a bar and you start meeting people on their own terms, and talking to them in their own vernacular, and trying to understand them, you don’t understand everything right away. And you’re a little confused, or a lot confused. And the next day you understand a little bit more and you go back to the same bar three days later and all of a sudden you’re sort of immersed in a place in a way that tourism doesn’t often allow. And that’s the kind of storytelling that interests me, and it’s from that logic that we’ve preceded.

It’s a mistake on the part of some critics at times to think that if you’re writing from the point of view of a recon Marine, everything the recon Marine says ergo is what the writer wishes to say. That’s insane, and yet you see that, you see people—they believe that because you’re allowing the characters to voice in an interior fashion that you’re embracing that, so the benefit of writing that way is that people really feel as if they’re experiencing some other world, other than their own. That’s a wonderful journey.

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I’m currently working on an ethnography on urban culture in Mexico City, so I can relate to what you’re saying.

I have a very funny story about this. When The Corner came out, I [was getting] good reviews, but the book was sort of quietly slipping below the waves, except for anthropologists and sociologists. They wanted to discuss ethnography. Sociology Today wanted to write something on the book.

I also teach an introductory class on ethnography, and we watch the first two episodes of Generation Kill because I feel like the Evan Wright character makes it very explicitly clear what the job of an ethnographer is.

That’s right. And Evan was brilliant at it. Which is to say, your job is to get out of the way as much as you can and sometimes the way to do that is to let everybody get it out of their system that there’s a funny guy standing in the middle of them with a notepad. He was great at that. “I’ll make myself the butt of the joke and then you’ll move on to other business and I get to watch you.” He was great. Even the Marines I met afterwards were like, “He fuckin’ really wrote that book, we thought he was goofin’.”

So, I want to come back to the question of music a little bit. More than just being a source of livelihood for these characters, and more even than being a kind of national heritage, which you’ve alluded to previously, it almost seems like music—and then, to a lesser extent, cuisine—act as sources of a kind of transcendence in the series, at least for those who are initiated in these cultures or subcultures. So, for instance, when Kermit Ruffins laughs at Davis MacAlary’s suggestion that his talent be reason enough for him to tour with Elvis Costello, is the idea that music should be its own reward? Or that these musicians have a kind of social responsibility to the community that gave birth to them?

That moment actually happened, although it didn’t happen with Elvis Costello. It happened with, I think, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, who came into Vaughn’s. And Kermit didn’t know who the Rolling Stones were, or had not experienced them on the level the rest of America might have. For him, they were a couple of musicians who came in, “That’s nice, you’re in a band, that’s great,” and somebody was urging him to go make a friend and he just sort of shrugged. So, in some ways, we were referencing a legendary moment of Kermitism. He is his own unique character.

But you’re on to something, which is that down there, the act of culture becomes, by default, political. That’s not to say that people are aware they’re committing a political act when they play a song or go out and listen to a song or dance. They’re just living. They’re being as New Orleanians. And yet, the truth is, it was culture that brought that city back from a near-death experience. It wasn’t political leadership, because there was none. It wasn’t significant urban planning, because there was no plan. What brought New Orleans back, to the extent that it’s come back in five years is, people couldn’t figure out how to live any other way than the way they’ve been living there for years and years and generations and generations. And there’s something beautiful in that. Because American culture is not exactly a heralded thing. And as most of the country becomes more and more homogenized, and as more of a chain-store ethos pervades our culture, this one strange little island has given the world something that the world didn’t have before America, which is to say African-American music. And it was in danger of dying out. And it didn’t die out because of hundreds of thousands of individual acts of ordinary life.

In a way, it would be enough if we were writing the show just to be a celebration of American roots music, which is reason enough to pause and enjoy a drama, perhaps. But actually, to me, in the wake of Katrina, it’s a political story. And it’s about what Americans are capable of, in the best possible way, when left to our own devices.

I think I know what you’re referring to when you say culture, but it seems like you’re specifically referring to maybe three different things. Cuisine and music seem to be linked up as being part of this culture that you’re talking about, but then there’s also a sort of sense of community. So if The Wire was organized by an impersonal concept of political economy—

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It was “Follow the money.” Follow the money, follow the power. Yeah.

But Treme seems to be organized by something more like a concept of solidarity, of community. Is this a function of actual qualitative differences between Baltimore and New Orleans or does it indicate a different vision of your own as to how to approach urban life in America?

Listen, community as an experience, communal living and how Americans learn to live in cities together—that’s the question for the 21st century. We are never again going to be a rural people. Forgive me, Republican National Convention, but small-town values do not matter in the grand scheme of things. What matters is quite the opposite: how we learn to live together as an urban people, because we forever more are going to be an urban people, with all those attendant problems and opportunities.

Now, when we were doing The Wire, we were speaking directly to the country’s political priorities, to its hypocrisies and frauds vis-à-vis the drug war, and to its economic priorities. You watch The Wire by following the money, following the power and the votes, and by acknowledging the dissonance between policy and reality on the street, and how power and money moved around that dissonance. It was a political story, overtly. The one thing it didn’t deal with—there was no room for it, and there was also no opportunity—was the idea of community and culture. The Wire was never trying to say that human beings are completely without agency. It was saying that our political agency is marginalized, our economic agency is marginalized in this country, but not our humanity, and not our ability to act as individuals and to assert our own dignity. I was not interested in burdening that piece, which was already as complicated as complicated could be, with an overt discussion with what was at stake. What was at stake in The Wire was implied: the life of a city, our ability to live decent lives together, compacted as we are in places like Baltimore or St. Louis or Cleveland.

The one piece that was missing was culture and community. Culture in the sense of what a community’s creative output might be. What I was really interested in was, in New Orleans, unlike anywhere else in America, including Baltimore, the creative impulse of community is overt, it’s in the street. In Baltimore it might be in an art museum. It might be in how people go down to the Christmas parade once a year or go to an Orioles game. In New Orleans, culture is the raison d’être for the city being at this point. There’s no manufacturing base, the port could move up to Baton Rouge in a heartbeat. The reason the city exists is because it reaches our imaginations, generations of imaginations. Musically, aesthetically, in terms of its architecture, in terms of its dance. There’s something about what happened in New Orleans in terms of their retaining these very dramatic, very visual elements of culture that gives us the opportunity to tell the story there and to have the power of culture understood in a way that they wouldn’t understand it if I did it in Minneapolis or Baltimore or St. Louis. New Orleans was the best possible opportunity to speak to American culture and what it’s capable of.

When you were talking about The Corner, you mentioned these moments of tourism. I’m curious about the role of these uninitiated, tasteless, uncultured people who show up in the series, these naïve, ignorant tourists who go on the Katrina tour, or who want to experience the “authentic” New Orleans. To what extent are your non-New Orleanian viewers meant to identify with these characters? Are we all that different from them, by consuming these visual and narrative riches of the city from the safety and comfort of our homes?

I think most of what America understands about New Orleans is very surface-level and very crude. It’s Bourbon Street, it’s some mansions in the Garden District, it’s some fattening food cooked with a lot of butter and sauce, and it’s somebody playing in a Dixieland band. If seeing that New Orleanians from the inside have a different perception of tourists than the tourists would like them to have, if that’s so off-putting that I’m going to lose viewers, I’m going to lose viewers. I don’t want [the tourists] to be caricatures. I wouldn’t want the kids from Wisconsin to go to Bullet’s Bar and see some black guy with a chicken foot around his head and a gold tooth and get all scared and go running back to their hotel. I wanted them to be human about it and to enjoy it and to have a good night in New Orleans. There were Katrina tours and they did stop and hostile moments like that did happen in the lower Ninth Ward, [so] I wanted the bus driver to perceive that he had crossed some boundary, not thinking about it, and I wanted his last moment to be of great humanity, when he says “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

So, I guess my feeling is, if I was going lose anybody because they feel alienated because they’re not an instant expert on New Orleans and they’re being told that, fuck ‘em. I was never going hold on to them anyway. And I’m not sure I can write for somebody who’s that self-absorbed. And typically the reviewers who have the hardest time with it— which I took some private delight in—were from New York. You know [that great New Yorker cover from 1976]—it’s a map of New York and then there’s the Hudson River and then there’s Jersey, then Kansas and then China? Nothing was ever truer than that poster.

That raises another of the questions that I had about the nature of your audience, and whether you feel like you’re accomplishing more as a television writer than you did as a journalist, or whether you feel like you’re affecting your audience on a different level than you did as a journalist, and whether or not the entertainment value of the stories that you’re telling ever comes into conflict with the kinds of cultural critiques that you’re elaborating.

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Well, television is shorthand, even with 10 or 12 hours of storytelling, which is extraordinary in terms of the length of film narrative. The Godfather series, including the last film, was nine hours. So just think about the storytelling that got done in The Godfather. If somebody gives me 10, 12 hours to make a television show, I’m not suggesting it’s insubstantial. It is substantial, and I get to say a lot. But I know one thing: I can’t tell the story of New Orleans after the storm. There’s too much. Next season I’ll get to when the schools open up. We’re going to bite off what we can chew.

Television references things and moves on, hits a few points hard, but it’s not comprehensive in the way that journalism or history can be, if it’s properly told. I’m aware of the limitations of the form. I’m also aware that I’m making stuff up. I have too much respect for journalism and for research to claim that I’m doing any more of it than I need to tell a story that we, the writers of the show, want to tell. So, I think it’s a story that ought to be told, I think it’s rooted in the real, I think we’ve parsed what is interesting in the five years since Katrina in terms of why New Orleans came back and what it felt like. But it’s just an opinion, and I’m very aware of that. I’m cautious of what I claim for this reality-rooted fiction that I’m pursuing.

But in answer to your question, by economy of scale, by the time they get done with the On Demand numbers, four or five million people will watch Treme. By the time they get done with the DVDs, 10 million people will watch over the next five, six years, whatever. For me to get a hundred thousand people to buy a copy of [my book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets or The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood] would have made it a New York Times bestseller. It’s epic. So, by the economies of scale, I’m certainly having more impact than if I’d pursued journalism, even in comprehensive form like the nonfiction narrative. That’s just the storytelling nature of our age. People watch movies, they don’t read books anymore. They don’t read newspapers. They read a smattering of stuff online. We’re a nation of watchers, not readers. Clearly, there’s been so much more discussion about urban issues or the drug war or any of that stuff because of The Wire than I managed to achieve with The Corner as a book. And I’m aware of that. On the other hand, I’m very proud of The Corner. It was a story of real people’s lives and it was carefully done and I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.

The other problem with doing this, as you noted, is that it’s an entertainment. And so a lot of people watch this and some of them may have discussions about the drug war, about New Orleans or culture or the nature of our misadventure in Iraq. They may just say, “That was cool as shit, I thought it was funny when the guy said this.” That may be all they get out of it and I can’t prevent that, can I?

I think that the nature of the kind of stories that television tells affects us when we identify with characters, when we laugh with characters. I think that the kinds of resolutions that those characters experience, we tend to internalize them without necessarily even being conscious of it.

I hope you’re right. That’s about as much as you can hope for, honestly. Listen, I’m a didactic person. But you can’t be too didactic with the story you’re telling or you’re insulting your characters and your audience. You can only say what the characters would say at a given moment. And that’s part of the problem. Again, it’s not an op-ed. The Wire has to succeed or Treme has to succeed as entertainment. On top of that, you get to graft a message or two. If it’s subtler than that, if it permeates the way you’re saying, that’s okay. I guess I’ll take that.

Treme’s the riskiest thing yet because nobody has a gun. They’re not wheeling bodies to an emergency room, nobody’s the mayor or the president deciding what to do. It’s guys deciding what key they’re going to play a song in, and what song they choose to play and why, and what they do after the song. It’s drama in very small moments, on a human scale.

You’ve often described The Wire as being a Greek tragedy and you also used the category of tragedy to describe the Iraq War as it was portrayed in Generation Kill. And you seem to have abandoned the mode of tragedy here, as you’re saying. You seem to be pursuing a kind of everyday drama.

There’s certainly elements of tragedy in what New Orleans went through and is still going through. Everything dystopic about the urban environment with The Wire is still dystopic in Treme. The school system’s still fucked, the police department is even worse than in Baltimore, civic leadership is at a minimum. There’s a racial dynamic that is at points good but at points appalling. It’s got all the attendant problems of urban America that were depicted in The Wire and yet the people have this capacity to assert their own meaning and dignity through individual acts of community and culture. And that’s what this story’s about. We’ve taken the camera and we’ve put it on the street level to look at culture.

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That’s a really hard story to tell. [laughs]

It is a hard story to tell, but that doesn’t suggest that “Oh, because people can manufacture a second line and because she’s cooking her ass off and because the music sounds sweet,” because of all that, all of our problems are solved. That’s not what Treme is saying.

You were renewed for a second season almost right away.

Yeah. That happened pretty quick. It almost took the fun out of it. [laughs]

For being something so different from what we have come to expect from you in terms of the sort of microdrama that you’re pursuing here, it seemed kind of ballsy for HBO to say, after one episode, “We’re into it.”

It did. I was surprised by it, but they’ve seen through the Mardi Gras episode. We sent them the producer’s cut of episode eight and they renewed us. It was a genuinely pure response. In some ways—dare I say it?—it was from the heart. You vote for the show with your heart, because it doesn’t explain itself through the head. Again, it’s not an easy show to discuss, the nature of creativity in human beings in the city. It doesn’t lend itself to the obvious tropes of serialized drama. You could do a movie on that. That’s fine. There are lots of movies about time and place and spirit that don’t involve violence or politics or the fantastical. But as a sustained drama it is pretty tricky.

People ask me what the show’s about, and sometimes I’m tempted to say, “If I could explain that to your satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to do it.” It’s so delicate that it can’t be explained, it has to be experienced. I have to make people feel like they’re on those streets, like they wake up in New Orleans every day, that they’re part of a city that they’re not actually a part of. And that because they’re a part of that city they’re going to feel differently, perhaps, about who we are, about what Americans are capable of. I’m not ashamed that it has a warm place in its heart for people.

I’ve read that you have another miniseries project planned, about Abraham Lincoln?

Yeah, there’s a couple things on the boards actually, but that’s one of them.

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Is the renewal of the second season of Treme going to push that back or affect that in any way?

No, I’m doing that with Tom Fontana and he has the capacity to make stuff himself, in the event that it got picked up. We turned in two scripts and they ordered all of them. I’ll get back to it in probably about two weeks now after I finish up post on Treme. We’ll turn in the rest of the scripts and then it’s about them finding the money for it. HBO has to decide when to give it a green light and if they have the money to make nine hours of a 19th-century period piece. I find it interesting because there are a lot of parallels between April 1865 and the post-9/11 moment in terms of terrorism in the country.

Will you be telling the story thinking in explicitly allegorical terms then?

At points, yeah, I will be. In my head. Whether or not it plays well, I don’t know. [laughs] But yeah, I’m a little down on doing just history for history’s sake. I feel like HBO’s a unique venue and they should concentrate on doing things that no other channel can do. They should do the things that are politically and socially provocative, because I think we need a little more provocation than we have in our mass-media culture. I thought it was a relevant piece, so I signed up for it. That doesn’t mean it gets made. We’ll see.

I was very sorry to read that Treme co-writer David Mills passed away last month. Could you tell me a little about his contributions to the various collaborations you guys have worked on, what it was like working with him?

I wouldn’t be in TV if it wasn’t for David Mills. When Tom Fontana offered me a script on Homicide, I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. At the time, I really didn’t watch a lot of televised drama, but David Mills did. And I’d worked on my college paper with him and I knew how much he loved shows like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, and so I called him and we wrote the script together. His sensibility was such that he could probably write anybody, write any situation and be able to find commonalities. One of my happiest memories of working with David is, he did an episode the last season of Homicide that starred Charles Durning as a white, retired, racist detective in Baltimore and David gave Durning’s character a lot of the attributes of David’s own father, David being African-American. David wrote a love letter to his father and buried it in the context of this white, retired, racist, sexist detective. It was a beautiful character. It taught me something about writing that I’ll never forget. He made something transcendent out of his best memories and out of a character that could have become a stereotype villain. And that’s who he was. He was a guy who had no interest in cant, or ideology. He was just interested in story, and telling stories about interesting people. He was great at it.

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