Check out the transcript of a recent Q/A with Burn Notice Executive Producer, Writer and Creator, Matt Nix.
At what point throughout the series are we going to learn who’s ultimately behind the burn? Is that something that’ll happen in the very final episode of the final season, and if it is revealed earlier than that is that something—is there a way for the show to keep going and still be Burn Notice?
M. Nix: We could always change the title. Has anyone ever done that? Let me put it this way. Clearly, we’re not just going to sort of resolve everything and just kind of call it a day. I think USA would have strong words with us if we did that. But really, let me step back a second and just say in general when you look at an episode of Burn Notice, it’s not really a whodunit ever. It’s not a show where we spend a lot of time investigating who is the secret person behind this week’s case of the week. Is it this person? No, it’s the person you least expected. No, typically the sort of whodunit aspect is dealt with pretty early in an episode and then the real question for the episode is, what are you going to do about it?
And I guess I’d say that that is generally a more compelling question for us and fits with what we do on the show better because it’s not really—the show is four series regulars. It’s not really a show that is about gigantic revelations about different characters—we had no idea that that’s who Sam was, that’s not what we do. We deal with issues, and so when I think about who is the person behind Michael’s burn notice, Phillip Cowen, the guy who got shot in episode 10 of season one, and that information and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee. And so really the question that I think Michael’s always going to be up against is what can he do about his circumstances, and that’s a question that can grow and evolve and will always involve the fact that he got burned but doesn’t necessarily need to always involve the endless hunt for a particular name of a particular person because, I guess I’d just say, well, that’s not the kind of question we deal with on Burn Notice and it’s not a particularly interesting question to me.
The show is kind of a dark subject matter but it’s also very humorous and very funny. Is it difficult to balance those light and dark sides of the show?
M. Nix : I think if I wasn’t so naturally inclined in that direction it might be very difficult, but it’s not as if we sort of sat down and said, “I’m going to come up with a formula for a show, let’s do a interesting contrast of dark and light.” To me, it was really borne out of what I found interesting and what I found funny. I mean, one of the core inspirations for the show was my conversations with our consulting producer, Michael Wilson, who I’ve known for some years and who had the background in private intelligence. And he’s a really smart guy and he has a lot of resources and he also had this way of giving me advice that I couldn’t imagine the circumstance that I might be in where I might use it. But he’d say things like, “When you’re firing a gun, don’t ever turn it sideways because it’ll jam and it’ll stovepipe and then you’ll have really big problems,” and my response was, “I don’t own a gun but thanks for the advice,” and I just thought that was funny. And so really I’m a guy who was accused of having a dark sense of humor in second grade, so it’s always been part of me. But it’s kind of a combination of what I naturally find funny—I really enjoy those tonal contrasts—and what I find interesting and what makes for a fun show. Does that make sense?
How do you feel about revitalizing the whole Florida film industry? There’s been a lot of press about that.
M. Nix: Good is the answer. I feel good about it. I mean, actually one thing I do, we do have a lot of opportunity to explore because we are outside so much on location, it’s very easy to say that Los Angeles can double or Vancouver can double for anyplace, and it’s true that anyplace can have the inside of a police station because you can build it or you can find a few palm trees in any location or bring them, but one of the nice things about working in Miami is that it’s a big city, it’s a distinctive city, and they’re really are a lot of distinctive things about it, and if you’re not here you can’t get all the fun deco architecture. The light looks different. The clouds move differently. The weather’s different. It is hot, though, I will say that.
Do you have plans or hopes for how many seasons Burn Notice will go on?
M. Nix: Not particularly. I mean, I think for right now we’re really focusing on what are fun new ways of doing episodes because it’s a pretty specific box we’re in because Michael solves problems in a particular way. It’s not a cop show, it’s now a PI show, and we need to come up with new sorts of problems that are best dealt with in this sort of spyish, covert-operative kind of way. And so it’s great fun for me to work on that stuff and I guess I’d say I’d like—I don’t know how everybody else feels—but I’d like to do it as long as we have fun new ways of coming up with that stuff and I’d like to stop when I no longer have that instinct that I have that inspires most of the shows which is, oh, this is really cool, let’s do one like this. And so that’s where I’m coming from, so when that goes away we’ll stop the show.
Will Michael’s search ever lead him out of Miami? Like is he set there, is he always going to stay in Miami, or do we know that?
M. Nix: In general, the answer is we want him to stay in Miami because what’s really interesting and allows us, there’s a—by clipping his wings, right, and keeping him in Miami and putting him on these jobs that he really has no business doing—it gives us the opportunity to showcase things in a different way. There are certainly other spy shows but we just have the opportunity to do spy things out of a spy context and so when you think about what if Michael Westen went to Washington, D.C. Well, what do you do in Washington, D.C.? Spy things, and then he’s—so we really want to avoid the fish in water syndrome. When you’ve built your series around a fish out of water going, “What would he do in that there ocean?” is sort of a dangerous question. That said, I mean, would I rule out the possibility of Michael taking a field trip at some point for some particularly compelling reason? No, but yes, we want to keep him in Miami… Miami’s just a very convenient place for him. It’s a place where you can blow things up and nobody notices.
The show speaks with great confidence and authority. How much of Michael’s narration is factual and how much is just made to sound factual so that people aren’t taking notes on how to build bombs.
M. Nix: We never really give super-specific recipes, like when—well, let me take that in pieces. We’re pretty rigorous with the voiceover stuff in the sense that everything generally works. We don’t say that something is possible, that it’s not possible. That said. oh, a great example would be freezing a lock and smashing it. It’s actually possible to do that. You need a kind of specific lock, right, it’s just I guess I’d say we allow Michael to have extraordinary skill and a certain amount of luck with regard to things working and not working, but we really enjoy the, and I know all of the writers on the show enjoy or the other ones claim to, I certainly do, enjoy the research into what could you actually do. So that when Michael replaces the trigger bar spring with a bobby pin, that’s actually possible. Our armorer did it. It took him, and he’s pretty good with guns, it took him about three minutes. Michael did it in about 45 seconds. So I guess I’d say we allow for the possibility that Michael maybe practiced doing that off-screen so that he could get his time down.
And then with regard to the building of bombs, we either take a page out of the Fight Club book, which is fudge an ingredient, but usually we’re talking through things quickly enough that we’re not really listing all the ingredients in any case. Like, it is possible to make thermite at home, it has something to do with aluminum foil, here are a couple of the steps. If you want to go figure it out on your own, we’re not going to show you exactly how to do it, but we’re going to point to the fact that one can. So we would never claim that it is possible to make thermite at home when it is not possible to make thermite at home; we also would not take you through all of the steps so that you could run into your kitchen and make it.
Is there anything left for Michael to learn as far as his trade is concerned, certain skills? His vast knowledge is quite impressive.
M. Nix: He’s also got a pretty big wardrobe. Is there anything left? Yes, absolutely. I mean, one of the things we—oh, in an upcoming episode he has to, the point is made that although he has training in safe-cracking, safes get upgraded like computers get upgraded. So your training a few years ago isn’t necessarily good now, so you’ve got to kind of brush up on it and practice. I suppose that’s not precisely an answer to your question.
Speaking of Michael, what’s the story on all the yogurt.
M. Nix:What is the story on all the yogurt? Wow. It’s funny, people think it’s a big mystery and I sort of want to indulge that but really it was a combination of things. It was in the pilot. I wrote in the bit about the yogurt and getting the yogurt from the fridge so that you have when breaking in someplace, doing something innocuous, so as to make your break-in seem more innocent and doing something that appears incompatible with your behavior, which was based on some real techniques. And so I just threw out, “Grab something from the fridge, maybe a yogurt,” and then when they were shooting it Jeffrey had the yogurt and then he decided he wanted to eat the yogurt in the scene, and we thought that was funny and so then he ate the yogurt. And then when I was working on the first episodes of the series, well, he needed to have something in his refrigerator. What does he have in his refrigerator? Well, we know he likes yogurt. And then the writer of the second episode, Alfredo Barrios, thought that was funny and so he threw a yogurt into his episode. And once you’ve got a yogurt in the pilot and two episodes, you’ve got to keep going. And so it becomes—it’s just sort of fun.
I mean, at the same time I will say that it was inspired by some research that we did, or actually a discussion that I had had with Michael Wilson, the essence of which is that operatives do find themselves in circumstances where they need cheap sources of healthy protein. Michael Wilson’s preferred source of cheap protein was canned tuna fish, so Michael could just as easily have been a tuna fish man but we made him a yogurt man.
