The creators of ‘Once Upon a Time’ talk Season 2 and ‘Lost’

Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz created the ABC fairy tale series “Once Upon a Time” after six years on the mega-hit “Lost.” But they carried the idea for the show around with them for over a decade before they were able to see it realized.

The series was a ratings hit and got picked up for a second season, which debuts Sunday night.

Kitsis and Horowitz sat down to discuss the series, their new characters and their writing process in the show’s offices in Burbank.

Does getting a second season give you a boost of confidence?

AH: I don’t know if it’s a confidence that comes, because I don’t know if it ever comes. But I think that there’s a thing in the first season where you don’t know if you’re going to be on for more than a week, so that once we premiered and got picked up for a back nine and then it looked like we were going to get a second season it allowed us the freedom to design the story in a much larger way so that by the time we got to writing the premiere for this year it was something we had been able to think about for most of last season. It gave us more time to generate the idea and develop it.

EK: We ended the season in such a way that the audience was thinking “Now what are they going to do?” That’s what keeps you up at night because you want to answer that question. You want to come back and be like “Whoa.”

Have you been able to keep the series to what you originally conceived all those years ago?

EK: When we first came up with the idea we were young writers. We were just coming off of “Felicity” and we didn’t really understand our idea as well, in a weird way. We had a general notion, which was we have the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming who would have a son and come to this town, but we weren’t quite sure how to tell it. But through our time on “Lost” we started to come up with ways. We called it a nine-year writers block. We never thought this show would get picked up. Because you’re never supposed to work with dogs and kids and we worked with dogs and kids and wolves and fairies and dwarfs. So we wanted to make sure that even if we didn’t get picked up we could look at that one hour of TV [the pilot] and say that was exactly what we wanted. And I think that we’ve been very fortunate that ABC supported us.

AH: When we did the pilot, we were shocked that we were able to do what we did, which was to tell a story with all sorts of effects and kids and two different worlds. And the network was, to their great credit, saying “Give it a try. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But do what you guys want to do.” And they’ve been incredible partners in the process. Because succeed or fail, we’ve been very clear about what we wanted to do that’s allowed us to tell the stories that we want to tell.

Has being part of the Disney corporation given you special access to using any characters?

AH: This is how naïve we were as writers. When we cooked up the idea almost 10 years ago, we had no idea about copyrights or any of that stuff. And the truth is that to do the show how we wanted to do it, we could have only done it with Disney. Yes, Snow White is public domain but the names of the dwarfs and those kinds of things are Disney brands.

EK: We met with brand early on and said “We’re not looking to retell Snow White. We’re not trying to retell Cinderella. We’re trying to tell the story of why is Grumpy grumpy? Why is the Mad Hatter mad? They loved that. We weren’t just going to retell what they had, we were going to do our version on it. As Adam says, we didn’t realize that Grumpy was a Disney-owned property. So last year, when we added an eighth dwarf and killed it, we had to go through brand. Thankfully, they were OK with it.

AH: They’ve been super supportive. They look at the scripts and the cuts. I think the problem would have been if we’d tried to redo Snow White or redo Pinocchio. Instead of redoing, we’ve done our take on the things we think you don’t know. It runs parallel to that. As long as we’re being respectful of the lineage while doing something new, they’ve been cool.

What other characters have you gotten access to?

AH: Jiminy Cricket. The Jiminy name is a Disney thing. The dwarfs. Maleficent. Our version of Mulan takes a page from the Disney version. Every time we open the field a bit wider, they weigh in. And they’ve been great and supportive. As long as we’re doing this thing and not trying to retell their thing and be respectful, it seems to co-exist. They’ve come down the rabbit hole with us.

Do you look back to the original Grimm stories for inspiration?

EK: When we first got started the book that was most influential was “The Uses of Enchantment” by Bruno Bettelheim. We looked at the Grimm stuff, but at the end of the day we just like to make it up. Like the Mad Hatter. We love that character. “Alice in Wonderland” is one of my favorites. I love the surrealness of it.

AH: We all heard these stories as kids, but we don’t remember them exactly the same. I tell my little daughters these stories at night, but I’m kind of messing it up, forgetting parts. Then I realize that the letter of the law isn’t what’s important. It’s the spirit of what these characters were. And because we’re not going to retell the stories, we think of the iconic things we can remember and use that as a jumping off point and then say, “This is about the Mad Hatter, but why did he get mad?” and go off on our tangent.

What are some of the overall themes for Season 2?

EK: Be better than the first. A lot of Season 1 was about belief. And I think Season 2 is a lot about parenting. Because everybody is connected in this way, Emma realizes that Snow is her mom, but they’re the same age. And she realizes Henry was right. And Regina wants her son back.

AH: I’d say what you saw in the pilot and the premiere of Season Two is indicative of the themes of this season which is what will a parent do for her child? What is sacrifice? Season 1, you have a character, Emma, who has been alone. You see her blowing out a lonely candle on her birthday. Coming to the end of the season, where she makes a big leap of faith for her kid. And now in this season, we have that family and we’ll learn what it means to be a mother, to have a child.

EK: I think another big theme for Season 2 is identity. Everyone got their identity back at the end of last year, but now this curse, in a lot of ways, gives you a second chance. So for Leroy, who was Grumpy, it makes him remember he was Grumpy, but he was once Dreamy and who does he want to be now? The Evil Queen is broken. Last year she had a choice between saving her curse or saving her son and she chose saving her son. So now that her heart is back, what path does she take? Will Rumpel follow a path to redeem himself? Will he fall in love with Belle or will he once again make bad decisions? So Emma was the savior, but her job’s done, so what’s her identity now?

AH: It’s all about discovering who you are and what your purpose is going to be. That’s one of the interesting things for us this season. These characters, their cursed selves are not gone. The last 28 years actually happened. Now they’re these new characters that have to deal with all this: the good and the bad, making new lives for themselves. Emma has gone through a version of that. She had a life, lost her child and was on her own. Now she’s part of this crazy family. And does she reconcile those two parts of herself into the person she wants to be?

Do you have a complex plot worked out in advance?

AH: I think you can work out a plot in advance, but not a complex plot. Meaning you can know end points, places you can go. But you have to allow yourself the freedom to get to those points.

EK: Last year we knew the curse would be broken. But to get there, there were a lot of twists and turns we allowed ourselves to discover. Kathryn’s disappearance was going to be one episode. Then it turned into three. Then it turned into a whole arc that separated Snow and Charming. We have to allow ourselves inspiration.

AH: Last year, we knew we needed Emma to believe [in magic] before the curse broke, but we had that happening around Episode 15. We realized as we were telling these stories organically that she needed to believe just at the cusp of the curse breaking.

EK: And only her son could make her believe.

AH: It didn’t matter how much magic we showed her. It had to be her son. So once that came into focus: break the curse at the end of the season, have Emma believe, have this relationship with Henry solidify. It’s just where the pieces fell.

EK: It was a lesson we learned on “Lost.” Damon and Carlton said this is a character show, mythology has to come second. We loved that. That’s what’s fun to write. Character. We never want mythology to trump that.

The visual effects appear to have improved in Season 2.AH: There’s a learning curve on anything you do. And I think one of the greatest lessons of Season 1 is time. If you have the time, what you can achieve is amazing. So it’s incumbent upon us to write the episodes in a timely fashion to give our effects people the time to execute these things.

EK: We didn’t want to lower the ambition because the technology might not work. There were some episodes where the effects were better than others. But by the end of the year, I look at that dragon and I think that’s pretty awesome.

Figuring out the real identity of some of the fairy tale characters has been fun. Is that a conceit you hope to continue through the whole series?

EK: Hopefully. I think it’s fun. I think part of the fun of the show is to have the mysterious identities about these people and then give the audience a hint. So for instance, Dr. Whale is someone we’re excited that we’re going to reveal in Episode 5. Once they know, they can go back to Season 1 and see that we’ve planted clues along the way.

Your show came on the air right in the middle of a flurry of fairy tale projects.

EK: It feels so good to have right timing. Because so much of our career has been wrong timing.

Is there any anxiety that the fairy tale projects will beat you to an idea you’ve been planning to do?

AH: Creative people do things the way their voices are. “Snow White and the Huntsman,” they’re following their vision. The odds that their vision is our vision are astronomical. We’re going to do what we’re going to do.

EK: I think fairy tales have become a genre unto themselves. I like sci-fi. I’ll watch any TV show or movie about people going into space. But “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica” and “Prometheus” are all different versions of a genre but I love each one of them. Adam and I are doing our thing, Rupert did his thing and people are doing their thing somewhere else.

Is running a show what you expected?AH: It’s a strange thing. Having been on the sets of show, six years on “Lost,” watching Damon and Carlton work, we could see what the job was. But until you do it, you have no idea how it feels.

EK: We started as staff writers and worked our way up to every level to eventually EPs and Damon and Carlton were fantastic mentors in that they would allow us to come in and we’d wonder why they wanted us on this call and they’d say, “Because you’re going to need that some day.” When we got the job, I think I spent the first month sending them emails saying “I’m sorry I complained about that... Oh I get it now.”

Do you get people asking if their favorite characters will be on the show?
EK: Yeah. My favorite personal fairy tale is Peter Pan. So Season 1 was spent trying to get the rights and we finally did. So this summer at Comic-Con we showed that Captain Hook is coming. To get to play in that world is fantastic. So the question is, you can’t just go do Captain Hook because we think it’s cool. Like you’re playing “Star Wars” figures in the backyard and then you bring in G.I. Joes. How does that world connect to ours? Why is it relevant to tell the story? Otherwise you’re just bringing toys off the shelf for no reason. We always try to earn the toys we bring off the shelf.

There’s been rumors that you’ll be working Oz into the narrative?

EK: That’s a world we’ve teased. But I don’t know if we’re going to make it Oz this year.

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‘Once Upon a Time’: Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Captain Hook in Season 2

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