You mention the large writing staff. How is it for you working with a large team of people, and given how closely you two collaborate, do you miss having Christopher casting an eye over things?

I do occasionally get his eye on things, I directed my first episode in the second season, which aired here in January, and Chris was nice enough to take a look at it, take a look at my cut. He pops in occasionally and looks at stuff. I’ve always looked at his stuff, he’s always looked at mine, it’s often tricky.

But yeah, when I started the show he was off shooting The Dark Knight Rises, so I was on my own, but the great fun of television is collaboration, which I’ve always enjoyed with Chris, and in television collaboration is the order of the day, every day. You just couldn’t make a show – not an American network show, where you’ve got to do 22 or 23 episodes a year, which is roughly making an episode every two weeks – you have to get over your own bullshit and your own preciousness, and just get in with the writing staff and figure out how to make it work. And it’s great fun, really great fun.

H:你刚提到了庞大的编剧团队。请问这么多人的团队是怎样为你工作的?鉴于你和兄长克里斯托弗的无间合作,你会在工作中想念他在身旁的日子吗?

N:他确实会偶尔来看看我,我执导第二季第一集时,就是这里(英国)一月播出的那集,克里斯托弗很贴心地来看望我,并看了我的剪辑。他偶尔来我这儿探班。我们经常会探对方的班,感觉很有意思。

不过刚开始制作这部电视剧时,克里斯正在进行《蝙蝠侠前传3:黑暗骑士崛起》的拍摄,于是我只好单干,然而制作电视剧的乐趣就在于享受与他之间的合作,合作也是制作电视剧中最重要的。你做的并不是在美国网络上播出的一场表演,你一年得做22或23集,基本上每两周就要完成一集。你的好想法坏想法都必须付诸行动,与编剧团队交流并最后找到实现的方法。这真的好玩。

It strikes me that you have a billionaire and a crime fighter. You seem to be touching on ground you’ve already touched on before. Is that because the themes are universal, or because you’re taking inspiration from Batman?

Absolutely. I’ve been working in comic book movies for ten years, and what happens when you do three movies – I started working on Batman Begins in September 2000, so when you’re working on comic book movies for ten years, you get into that key. But beyond that, you also do a lot of thinking in that word, that sort of heightened vein. I came out of that experience – I’m very proud of that story that we told in the Batman universe, and I felt strongly, along with Chris, that this last film should be our last film in that universe, but for me I had a great deal more to say about urban crime and vigilantism.
For Americans at least, and it’s funny, it translates into some parts of the world, but not to others – the whole superhero thing absolutely dominated the box office for years now, and it’s sort of American mythos. It fulfilled a similar function to the way Greek tragedy or Homeric Epics have done for cultures since time immemorial: it’s an exploration of morality and crime and virtue – exploring the question of at what cost doing the right thing, but also playing in that fun, slightly heightened territory of super villains, and the American city as a kind of an urban playground, or jungle, or arena.

And absolutely, I’m fascinated by the fact that frankly, while you’ve had the explosion of creative energy, and money in the superhero realm in film, but at least in this country it has yet to translate into something, map onto anything in television. Americans for the most part, if not drawn to naturalism exactly, at the very least for their crime shows, for the most part have preferred a slightly more naturalistic, slightly more grounded edge to conventional criminal procedurals, whereas our show is unabashedly, unashamedly sci-fi, cyberpunk crime procedural.

H:在剧里,你同时拥有一个亿万富翁和一个正义战士。这一点让我很震撼。你似乎是在重复你曾经做过的事情。是因为这是个亘古不变的主题,还是因为你从蝙蝠侠(Batman)身上获得了灵感?

N:当然。我从事漫画改编电影已经十年了,当你在做三部电影的时候,你会怎么样?——我从2000年9月开始《蝙蝠侠:侠影之谜》(Batman Begins)的工作,所以说若你将十年时间致力于漫画电影,你就会沉迷于这个主题了。但除此之外,你仍然需要对细节多加思考,要有清晰的脉络——这是我的经验之谈。对于我们在蝙蝠侠的世界里讲述的故事,我感到很自豪,我和克里斯都深深觉得,上一部电影(指《蝙蝠侠:黑暗骑士崛起》)应该是我们在这个世界里的最终章。但就我个人而言,关于城市犯罪和治安我还有很多想要表达的。

很有趣的一点是,至少对美国人而言,这已经被代入到了这个世界的某些部分中,但对其他国家的人来说不是这样——超级英雄类的电影已经统治票房多年了,这也算是一种美国式神话了。这类电影对文化的影响类似于希腊悲剧或是荷马史诗在古老的时代所发挥的作用,是对道德、罪恶和贞操的探索——探索要做正确的事情会付出什么代价。但同时也用有趣的方式来表现,稍稍将超级恶棍的领地和美国某个城市夸大为城市游乐场、或是丛林、又或者是竞技场。

坦白说,在以超级英雄为主题的电影里,当你有了创造性思维的爆发和资金,你还需要代入一些东西,然后在屏幕上反映出来,至少在美国是这样的。这一事实毫无疑问让我很着迷。美国人大多要求真实的描绘出本能,至少在他们的罪案片中,多半会比较倾向于多一点本能,多一点行走在传统犯罪行为边缘。由此看来我们的剧集是当之无愧的,当之无愧的科幻、网络朋克犯罪。

Do you find that, now that you’re doing this on-going series, that when you’re working on other projects ideas bleed into it, or belled across from it, into other projects?

A little bit. My focus has largely been on the show for the last couple of years, but there is a fun kismet where ideas collide with one another. The thing about television, the thing I enjoy about it so much, Is that you have to generate so many ideas, so many stories about the world you get to explore. And one of the fun things about working in TV is that you can bring to – whenever something bad happened to you as a writer, you reach a moment where you say to yourself, ‘I can write about it’. It’s the silver lining in any experience.

I think that collision between ideas coming out of this universe, and the interplay with the other worlds I’m working in, yeah, there’s a fair amount. It’s more, honestly the problem with American broadcast television being 22 or 23 episodes, it’s more a question of ‘what have you got’, ‘OK, here you go’, ‘ that was last week, what have you got now?’. You’re sort of taking everything at a conversation with all the things in your life: the story you read in the newspaper this morning, the book that you just read, the anecdote you just heard, it’s all getting thrown into the blender.

H:你现在制作的这部剧集会启发你对其他作品的灵感吗?反之,在其他作品上会获得对这部剧的想法吗?

N:有时会。这几年我的工作重心都放在《疑犯追踪》上。有趣的是,灵感相互碰撞会产生意想不到的效果。我之所以这么热爱电视,一方面是因为它迫使我萌生许多想法,促使我去探索这个世界,并以此为基础创造许多故事;另一方面是因为作为编剧遇到困难时,你可以告诉自己“我可以写好的”,继续坚持写下去就能克服困难。这个“雨后总能见彩虹”的道理适用于任何事。

我认为同一领域中的想法会互相碰撞,并且不同领域的想法也会相互作用,在很大程度上都是这样。老实说,美剧每季一般都有22或23集,问题就在于一味地编情节而忽视了剧情的连贯性。制片和编剧间的对话往往是这样的——“你有什么想法?”“这个想法可行”“这是上周用过的,你还有什么好点子吗”对话间可能会提到早上在报纸上看到的故事、最近正在看的书、刚听到的趣闻……恨不得用上所有的毕生所见所闻把剧情搞成一锅大杂烩。