REIMAGINING ANNE
The Emmy-winning creator of celebrated Anne with An E, Moira Walley-Beckett talks career with the Star,
It would be hard to overestimate the seismic impact of Canadian Moira Walley-Beckett’s Emmy Award win for outstanding writing for drama for her work on the crime drama Breaking Bad. For one thing, no solo woman had won the award in two decades. What’s more, she was competing against some of the best writers in contemporary television. Writing the episode “Ozymandias,” in which Walter White’s world definitively falls apart, got her the prize even when judged against the creators of Game of Thrones, House of
Cards, True Detective and her own mentor Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad — all men. The talented Walley-Beckett is the most significant showrunner to emerge from Canada in a generation. She joins the ranks of fellow Canadians David Shore ( House M.D., The Good Doctor) and Hart Hanson ( Bones, Backstrom) and Graham Yost ( Justified) as one of Hollywood’s most prolific producers. “I was seriously hoping Vince would win,” says the Vancouver native in an interview with the Star. “It was his baby. It was his show. Every good thing I know about showrunning and writing I know from Vince Gilligan. It was an extraordinary moment.” Walley-Beckett’s Breaking Bad script for “Ozymandias” — in reference to the poem by Shelley — is already considered a classic and one of the finest hours of television, a piece of literature to be studied in film school. After Breaking Bad, the former actor and ballet dancer created the limited-series ballet drama Flesh and Bone for Starz, which garnered a Golden Globe nomination. But it is her nuanced, eloquent work retooling a Canadian classic for Netflix and the CBC, using an all-female writers room, that has solidified her credentials as a showrunner. This year her work on Anne with an E earned her a Showrunner of the Year award at the Banff World Media Festival and a Writers Guild of Canada award for best writing on a drama series. It also received 13 Canadian Screen Award nominations, the most of any series, winning for Best Drama. The show was renewed this month for a third season by Netflix and the CBC. The Star caught up with Walley-Beckett in a frank, thoughtful, and wide-ranging interview about the second season of the show, female showrunners in Hollywood, the #MeToo movement, wage parity, and the state of Canadian television. Anne with an E — just renewed for season three by Netflix this month — airs on CBC September 23.
This Anne is very different from prior incarnations. You feel the mud and the earth and the grime, the sense of a very hardscrabble life — that Anne’s cheer is perhaps a coping mechanism for some very hard things she’s had to deal with. And there are issues of sexual abuse and suicide. But this isn’t the Anne that many viewers were expecting. And some fans perhaps didn’t appreciate this bleaker vision of a beloved classic. Did you get pushback?
I’m going to offer my piece of art and people will make of it what they will. When I set out to make my adaptation, I just thought I wanted to open up the spine of this book — I was really inspired about her life before she got to Green Gables. I had to approach it from a point of emotional reality. Anne is a damaged person. She is a wounded person, as are Matthew (R.H. Thomson) and Marilla Cuthbert (Geraldine James) in my mind. I felt that it was extremely important to honour what it was like to be an orphan back then when you were viewed as a delinquent and unlovable and ungodly. There was great prejudice and great harm done. And I just thought how much more can I love this person who has endured what she has endured and used her imagination as a way to be anywhere but where she was and to be anyone she wanted to be. And to step forward with such optimism is incredibly endearing and that was my interpretation. As for the documentary level interpretation, the red mud, the wind burnt people eking out challenging lives was just really important to me to depict that world.
Season two of Anne with an E starts off with the introduction of the first recurring Black character in Avonlea. It took 110 years. But it seems even Avonlea is getting a little more diverse.
Even though there are officially no people of colour in the book, I have strayed so far starting from episode two that I feel that I’m really doing my own thing here with the series. But it was important to me to add diversity to the series in order to keep it real. I think Gilbert’s character needed to go on a journey after his father died. He needed to chart his own path. I decided to say he was trying to get a job on a steamer, Gilbert could see the world and get a broader world view that is more colourful than Avonlea. I had that in mind before I first conceived of the show. Then I convened my fantastic, all-female Canadian writers room and we sat down and figured out the particulars and built the story. I wanted Gilbert (Lucas Jade Zumann) to be on the ship and meet a person of colour who would be a friend and mentor. That was the jumping off point. And we came up that he would be from Trinidad, had worked on a steamship with no opportunity for advancement because of his race. And it kicks off in a very exciting way from there.
In Hollywood, showrunners — the people who create television, like Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal) or J.J. Abrams (Lost) or Lee Daniels (Empire) or your former boss Vince Gilligan — are household names. They are part of the pop-culture ecosystem with a fan base. In Canada we don’t seem to nourish a star system or even care. What’s the difference?
It’s hard for me to answer that. There’s not a lot of Canadian content that is reaching the world. And (for) a lot of Canadian television, there are not many places to broadcast, and the budgets are small. We do have a lot of fantastic writers and artists who don’t have enough of a platform. Until Netflix and streaming companies pick up a project and show it around the world, there really isn’t that kind of echelon to occur to develop that star system.
Canadian broadcasters frequently get criticized for playing it too safe. Smaller countries like Denmark can make critically acclaimed dramas like Borgen or The Killing, but we seem to have trouble with telling our own stories in a compelling way. Why do you think?
The broadcasters in Canada really aren’t interested in risky programming. And I wish they were. Because Canada is a diverse and fascinating country, it’s certainly big enough. I wish I could start my own network there and do make all kinds of amazing programming that just isn’t for Canadians, but is Canadian generated.
Anne is a co-production with Netflix. I developed the project with CBC, and they are doing everything they can, but the bulk of our budget comes from Netflix because I can’t produce a show I want to make, in the way I want to make it with that kind of budget. And that kind of budget isn’t available in Canada.
You’ve had a multi-disciplined career. You started off as a ballet dancer, you were a musician and actress. How did that path take you to where you are today as a writer?
I’ve had a long journey in the arts. When I moved to Los Angeles and joined a theatre company that wanted to do a modern-day adaptation of (Maxim Gorky’s play) The Lower Depths. And for some unknown reason I said I’d like to take a pass at that and wrote the adaptation and we produced it and I caught the bug. And I became obsessed with writing. The way I was obsessed with every art I participated in, whether it was acting or dancing or singing. From there I entered into writing for television pretty fast.
How has being an actor informed your writing. And as an actor were you ever in a role where you said to yourself, this is absolute crap and I could do better?
(Laughs) No, not at all. I didn’t know I was going to be a writer. Certainly on some shows you just do your best with the writing. Most of the time I was a guest star and when you’re a guest star you’re just a log on the bonfire of the show. Your job is to show up and do your work and don’t slow them down. Although I really liked playing a single mother with HIV on E.R., I did a lot of crying and got killed a lot. But it wasn’t as rewarding for me as working in theatre, whether it’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Damn Yankees. But acting has informed my writing enormously and in every way possible. Not only do I know what it is to have speakable dialogue, but also the intricacies of the character work. I also have a vocabulary, having been an actor so long, to be able to interact and speak with actors on the set and help them delve into the character. It’s a really important skill set. I tell my fellow writers that if you haven’t ever taken an acting class, you should.
You’re working during a real watershed moment in Hollywood where the conversation about gender parity and the #MeToo movement is causing a real shift. But what’s the permanent longterm solution?
As an actress, I have been preyed upon enormously as a young woman. As a writer in this business, I have always been treated with respect and parity. And I’ve landed in some really excellent workplaces. Wish I didn’t have to feel grateful. I’d like to be at the point where we never have that dialogue. I think what we need are more women at the top, we need gender parity. We need men to respect women in the workplace as equals. The rampant predatory behaviour inflicted on innocent young women has been out of control. They’re not necessarily going after the veterans. They’re going after young women who, because of the demands of the business, trade on beauty and youth to get a job, but that doesn’t mean they have to be sexually harassed to get that job. There should be no confusion about that: Employment is employment. The casting couch, the unchecked violating men in positions of power, must end. Time’s up.
You’re still mining some very Canadian themes. Your next movie (The Grizzlies) is set in Nunavut about a lacrosse team. On one level it feels like a feel good sports movie. But in your hands, I’m not so sure.
It’s a very exciting project. Graham (Yost) and I worked on this story with a team of Inuit producers, based on a true story and it’s directed by Miranda de Pencier ( Anne with an E). It’s uplifting in the sense that this community comes together to help some of the issues, but it’s an important movie because there’s an epidemic of teen suicides as a result of residential schools and this kind of cultural genocide that was perpetrated on them by the Canadian government. So it gets into some serious issues which I think are important to all Canadians.