Q&A: Creator Alan Ball Has a Ball with 'True Blood'
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Monday, September 08, 2008
Alan Ball admits he stumbled across his latest project by accident. Meandering through a Barnes and Noble, killing time before a dentist appointment, he spotted Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. The tagline, “Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend wasn’t such a good idea” was just too much fun for the creator of Six Feet Under.
“I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down,” Ball confesses.” It’s the kind of book that you think, ‘I’m going to read one chapter before I go to bed,’ and you read seven.” Ball did more than that, he went on to create his own HBO show based on the series about Louisiana’s bloodsucking population and their integration into normal society--thanks to synthetic blood.
He might be the macabre but, Ball sure had a ball telling us all about True Blood, premiering Sept. 7 on HBO.
Hollywood.com: What are some of the differences between your version and Charlaine’s?
Alan Ball: It is very important to me to be true to the spirit of Charlaine’s world. Now, the books are basically Sookie’s story, Sookie basically narrates everything. All the other characters exist only when they’re in the same room with her. I felt like that would be a production impossibility because then Anna [Paquin] would be working 12 hours a day, five days a week. All the other characters were really interesting, and I wanted to just flesh that out a little.