Maxance Vincent
When supervising editor and associate producer Vikash Patel joined the Lanterns team, he hadn’t read any prior Green Lantern comic book, as he told Awards Radar on Zoom. However, the editor had previous experience working on other superhero-related pieces of media and had a close collaboration with showrunner Chris Mundy before helping him bring his latest series to life:
“I came in not so much with a blank book, because whenever I’ve done a series which is an adaptation, like when I worked on Smallville, I never read the comic books, or I would never read any literature regarding the comic book series or comic franchise. To me, the Bible is the script. I focused on the script and told the story from that point of view. For Lanterns, I read all eight before I started. Of course, I had many questions for Chris and some of the team, and just making sure that some of the comic book elements were portrayed correctly.”
From the very beginning, Lanterns was “always meant to be a grounded take on this series. In many ways, it made it easier for us because I’ve known Chris for over ten years. I did the whole run of Ozark with Chris. For me, the grounded element, the crime drama, the buddy cop drama, is kind of a walk in the park in many ways, given that we’ve worked on grounded series together. Most of my work is where I gravitate toward.
I think it was really important for me to be mindful of the comic book elements because ultimately we’re a comic book series, and we should never forget that. And we didn’t. Any time we did, I was always holding my hand up and saying, “Chris, I think we need to showcase this. I think it’ll be beneficial to potentially shoot a couple of pieces here.” A prime example of that was episode four. There are a couple of moments in episode four when John Stewart manifests the kettlebell, and before that he manifests a boring machine.
In those moments, a couple of elements were missing. The key element was a close-up shot and a really cool moment with the ring. I said to Chris, “I think we should pick those couple of pieces up, so we can highlight that.” John’s got the ring; he’s going to use the ring, we light that up, and we go into the comic book part of the series for those couple of beats. We did, and again, it was multiple times throughout the series. It was really important to make sure that we’re always, as much as we were grounded in our storytelling, we were also grounding the comic book part of the series too.”
Listen to the full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]
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