David Hollander ... Show runner of The Guardian

From:AUS US Magazine
Date:2004

David Hollander is the creator and show runner of CBS' popular television series 'The Guardian', which stars Australian actor Simon Baker. Baker plays a Pittsburgh lawyer (Nick Fallin) who is busted for drugs and is sentenced to fifteen hundred hours of community service, whilst continuing to work at his father's high finance law firm. Hollanders other credits include numerous plays and screen plays, including co-writing 'Rated X', which starred Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. AUSUS Magazine spoke to Hollander about creating the show, working with the Australian lead, and the future of the program.

Q: Tell me something interesting about yourself.

(laughs)I'm a pretty mundane person really. I've got three kids and a wife. I couldn't be less interesting at this point in my life. I basically work twelve to fourteen hours a day, go home, tend to my kids, and sometimes come back to work. I try to stay out of here on the weekends if I can help it. If I'm directing I could be here at 5:30 a.m. But it's awesome. It's a good job.

Q: What's your background?

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, went to Mount Lebanon high school and Sewickley Academy and then college at Northwestern University. I started out as a playwright. I actually came to Los Angeles wanting nothing to do with film and television. I came here to work in theater and was living between here and New York, writing plays and having them done. Scott Rudin saw one of my plays and gave me a movie deal. The golden handcuffs so to speak. The money was interesting and I thought I'd experiment with Hollywood for a while and pretty soon ten years had passed. It's been one job after another, not all good, but that's just how it's all unraveled.

Q: What was the play Scott Rudin saw?

A play called 'The Sun Dialogues'. It played out here (LA) and in New York at the Soho Rep. I was also the resident playwright at The South Coast Rep and have worked at the Coronet (LA), Chicago, Seattle, all over the country. I was lucky enough to have my plays produced straight out of college. It's not much money though. Twenty to twenty five thousand is a good amount for a play. It's a very academic pursuit.

Q: What are the similarities and the differences between writing for theater and television?

TV is really just theater but with money and time pressure. Theater is also about ideas and language and its relationship with the audience. TV is, for the most part, plot driven. You grab an audience and try to hold on to them. The thing that's nice about TV is because you use the same characters week in week out plots can slowly be taken over by character & it merges with character in a way that movies cannot. In time, on this show, or any show that I like to watch, you don't really come to the show for the plot. You maybe watch 'CSI' or 'Law and Order' for the plot but on a show like ours you don't. You come to it, I believe, for the development of the characters, which is a bit of the merging of what TV and theater can do.

Q: How did 'The Guardian' come about?

Well I had this idea and I thought there was no way I wanted to take the character I was thinking of and put it into a movie about a guy that sees the light. I didn't want my character to change that much...ever. And I thought my characters' problems were much more subtle, not as acute as in movies where they want a major problem and then they want it solved now, such as putting the fire out. I knew that I just wanted to sit with this character for a while. I pitched it to the network and for whatever reason they bought it.

Q: How did you find Simon Baker?

Simon came at me from two directions. I first started to look through the usual fifty suspects and none of them seemed to make any sense to me at the time so I started scouring the agencies and we happened to share the same agency and one of these agents was a friend of mine and she said, '... why don't you meet this guy'. So we did, we had breakfast together, and he seemed nothing like the character. Sitting across the table from me he didn't make any sense to me at all. He was a very gregarious and very smiley person. I found nothing of the 'lawyer type' in him and even though he'd lived in Sydney for a long time he has that real sense of the outdoors in him, a very free spirit and I just didn't see it. But I was also sick at the time, I had a fever, so I thought we'd better meet a second time and we did and I liked him. I really enjoyed his company, we had a lot of things in common. So I left the meeting and talked to the networks and I said I liked him and they agreed.

Q: Tell me about working with him.

It's a collaboration. It began with what's going to make this character work and what's going to make this character work for you (Simon). What I like about Simon is his silences and his ability to think on screen. He's a highly emotive, visceral person who likes to have a good time and who likes to express himself. Simons not at all buttoned down. I'm pretty buttoned down which is probably where the character comes from and from the energy where I grew up which is a relatively small working class industrial city where we don't really talk about feelings. What's interesting about Simon as the character is what's going on behind his eyes, because he does have all these feelings and thoughts which is that he just wants to bust out of this suit and never have to shave and never have to cut his hair and just be able to wear jeans. But this is his job and this is what he has to do. And then this allows him to do what he does best, which is feel it and think it but not speak it. That's what makes the character work and that's the nice combination of literary ideas and Simons literal acting ideas...how do you find the beats, how do you find the way to the end of the scene. We're very interested in challenging each other in the sense of me putting less on the page and seeing what he does, or him asking me certain questions and seeing what I do. It'll be interesting when the show is over to look back at this relationship and see what's come of it from the perspective that when you're on the show you're constantly at it, in a very healthy way, but you're constantly in debate.

Q: What's the future of 'The Guardian'?

Just to keep writing and producing it and hope that thirteen million people keep watching it each week. And just keep being creative on the show, making no judgments.