#Smallville20 Interview: Smallville Creators Alfred Gough & Miles Millar

Over 20 years ago, this very website made its debut with the most important feature being an earlt interview with Alfred Gough, the Executive Producer and writer who, with Miles Millar, created Smallville. It’s quite possible that without Al & Miles, KryptonSite would have never existed. It’s also very true that without their work, Smallville would have never existed. And yet now, we are on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the show’s premiere which aired on The WB on October 16, 2001.

KryptonSite is continuing our run of #Smallville20 interviews by catching up with those series creators – Alfred Gough and Miles Millar – for our first interview in over 13 years. Now that time has passed, there’s a lot more that can be said… and we’re here for it. How would they have ended the show? Did they see Tom Welling in the Crisis crossover? How does it feel to have paved the way for The CW’s current roster of shows? We were able to ask those questions and more…. find them below. And don’t feel we are done with #Smallville20 content just yet… more interviews will spill into next week, including someone who played a certain bald villain, a music meister, and someone whose character name would make Batman say “WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?” Here goes:

KRYPTONSITE’s CRAIG BYRNE: At what point in doing Smallville did you realize it was something that people would be watching, enjoying and talking about 20 years later?

MILES MILLAR: Never.

ALFRED GOUGH: At no point. The fact that it, obviously first through syndication and DVD and now streaming, it’s pretty incredible that it’s still out there and it’s still gaining fans. As you do, we see Tom and Michael out there at the different conventions, and it still manages to fill fill halls and things, so it’s pretty incredible.

The first announcement of the “Teenage Clark Kent Project” in the trades talked about the show having the high school adventures of Clark, Lex and Lois. Was that a misprint, or was she a part of the story from the beginning?

AL: That was a misprint. It was always Clark, Lex and Lana.

MILES: I don’t think anyone really had heard of Lana at that point. I mean, people who are diehard Superman fans had heard of her. But suddenly, the general public weren’t really that aware of her, I don’t think. So I think that’s the most obvious that they thought we’d done a typo, which they had.

Is it true that when you came in for your pitch meeting, I think it was with Susanne Daniels at The WB, you just completely won her over, even though she was skeptical at first?

AL: That’s very true. She had heard just the logline from the studio, which was “Superman in high school,” and just from that, wasn’t terribly interested. So we had gone to FOX that morning and pitched it, and they bought it in the room, and wanted to do it.

MILES: Not only did they buy it in the room, it was also going to be straight to series, 13 [episodes] on the air, and we left that pitch at FOX thinking we were going to FOX. We had also had back channels with an executive at FOX about what they were looking for, so we had always prepared to go to FOX. That was our goal to go to FOX, because we knew The WB weren’t interested.

And also, the year before that, Al and I had met with The WB and they had told us point blank that they didn’t think we were “WB material.” They didn’t think we were the voice of The WB, literally. The executive was a good friend of ours, but she told us “we love you guys, but you’re not the voice of The WB.” They had a special black book of writers who were approved to be WB writers, and we were not in it. And we never got to be in the book!

And then you created one of the most successful shows in the network’s history. Go figure. Moving on from that, there was a Wizard magazine interview before Season 2 that mentioned Bruce Wayne showing up as a possibility for the second season. How close did that actually come to happening?

AL: To be honest, that was more of a pipe dream, only because at that point, the feature side and [Christopher] Nolan were developing Batman Begins, [but] we always thought if we put it out in the press, maybe we could get them to turn the corner.

MILES: It was always our dream to have Batman… young Bruce Wayne. It was always our dream to have young Diana Prince, and both were shattered at the feet of Warner Bros. features. It all changed when the head of production at the feature studio left. And the idea that you couldn’t make a movie and make a TV series of the same character at the same time… that also is a really old-world notion that that has now faded completely, obviously, in this day and age with the Marvel Universe and everything else. I think, for us, and we were definitely pioneers in that sphere in a way, and I think it created a environment where these things could prosper after us, but as early pioneers, we were really thwarted in many of our efforts to do what we wanted to do.

On the subject of dreams coming true, how far in advance did you know that you had Christopher Reeve on the show?

AL: That, we worked on for probably six months, trying to do that, from initially talking to his agent, contacting Chris, talking to him about what we wanted to do, him agreeing, and then then the logistics of how we were going to do it…. that was a good six months.

For Miles: “Memoria” is one of the fan favorite episodes of the entire series, and you directed it. Was there ever talk about you directing another one? And can you talk about that experience?

MILES: That was an amazing experience. I had always wanted to direct, but Al and I were so busy doing other things. We always had a movie we were writing at the same time, and running the show, and writing and rewriting episodes. I think I delayed it by several seasons, and that one just felt like a great episode to cut my teeth on.

It was a really amazing experience for me to work with the cast and the crew up there, as a director, so it was always a disappointment that I didn’t get to do more. Looking back, I would definitely have done more. It was one of those things where in the moment, we were so busy. We did Spider-Man 2 and a bunch of other features… we were always swamped with assignments. So it was one of those things… I definitely put my directing career on the back burner. It’s a regret of mine, now looking back.

I know you wouldn’t answer this over a decade ago, but now that it’s been a decade since the show ended: Are you allowed to share anything about how you would have ended the show differently from the series finale we had?

AL: You know, honestly Craig, we didn’t watch the last three seasons, so I’m not quite sure how it ended.

Is there anything you can tell me about how you would have ended it?

MILES: We always wanted to go back to — there’s the the scene in the Cassandra episode (“Hourglass”), where we see Lex in the white suit, and the sunflowers, and the White House and him, as President. And the idea that we see Clark interview Lex as President, we always felt would a really good framing device for a finale.

But, yeah. As Al said, I think for us once we had a clean break, it was too painful to watch. I mean, I have no idea. I think fans love the last few seasons; I haven’t seen an episode. I have glanced at DVD boxes that at Best Buy and seen costume choices that I would not have approved; that sort of thing.

But yeah, we did have a plan to have this flashback episode with Lex making it to the White House and Clark as a storied reporter for The Daily Planet interviewing him. I think it would have been good.

Did either of you see Tom’s appearance in the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover?

AL: I did see that, only because the showrunner [Marc Guggenheim] reached out and actually sent me the scenes beforehand. I thought it was actually pretty clever. And then I saw it, because my my kids watch those shows. So I did see that. I thought that was a nice nod to the show.

How do you feel about the notion that Smallville really paved the way for most of The CW’s current lineup?

AL: We obviously tried with Aquaman and other things back when they weren’t interested in doing those sort of things, back in the era when they just wanted to be the Gossip Girl Network.

MILES: Aquaman was very bad timing. Literally, we were making the pilot and The WB got cancelled and taken over by UPN, so it’s one of those really weird, surreal experiences.

The Aquaman pilot is available, but it’s an unfinished pilot. We would have gone back and reshot things. It’s not a perfect work by any stretch. It’s a incomplete work. So once UPN came in, the next four seasons, we were fighting for our lives. We had a President of the network who really did not respect the show, did not want the show to be on the air, and tried to kill it off on numerous occasions. Lucky for us, we had fans wouldn’t let that happen, but we were always in a fight for survival.

Actually, bizarrely, it helped us in terms of making the stories more exciting. I think we moved faster because we thought “okay, this is this could be our last season. We want to make it as exciting as possible.” So I think we actually thwarted their attempts. They moved us, and things like that, which also were attempts to kill us, and it never happened.

We had left by the time the new regime came in. They were much more supportive of the superhero shows. Those shows are fantastically successful. You can never take anything for granted. I think Smallville did pave the way for that to happen. I think it gave people a sense that what you could achieve on television, and establish that network as genre network that could do superhero shows. I think without Smallville, those shows would not happen. Not to take anything from their success, or the greatness of those shows. I think it’s remarkable what what the Arrowverse has done.

Was there a character a concept on Smallville that wasn’t even intended to be a big deal that turned out better that expected, whether it’s a character like Lionel, or something like that?

AL: Lionel was initially going to be a guest star in the pilot, and then John Glover was great, and then we brought him back through Season 1, and then made him a regular in Season 2. We realized that one aspect of the show was really teenage alienation and angst, but the other one was a tale of extreme parenting, with the Kents and Luthors.

MILES: That was a happy accident, and was something that that emerged in Season 1, that this relationship between Lex and Lionel became so juicy and delicious. The two actors had such a great chemistry, and John really elevated everyone’s acting. So I think that was a happy accident, and we ran with it.

I always think it’s interesting in terms of the process of television, that it’s organic, that people in characters that you don’t think you’re going to become important do become important. The show would not be the same without him and that relationship with Lex.

Even Lois [was a surprise]… With Lois, we begged and hollared, and Peter Roth actually helped us in this regard to get Lois for six episodes. That was it. That’s all we could have her for, they said, because they wanted to keep here for features. And we just kept going. No one told us no. We just kept writing episodes with Lois in, and she became a fixture of the show. Some of it’s just like you’re playing your cards, and you keep playing.

Beyond the obvious big Batman-Wonder Woman type characters, was there anything you really wanted to do that the movie people just said “no” and you weren’t able to go there?

MILES: I mean, Lois took a long time. Lois took years of “no, never.” And then some of it was just they had no idea the characters were. It was like “well, sure, you can take that character, take Cyborg, or take [Green] Arrow… all of these things, they had no idea who they were … “Flash, Flash is cheesy, that’s fine. Take that one.”

At that point, the DC movie universe was really just about Batman and Superman. And even Superman, it was like he came back into prominence with the Bryan Singer movie, and there was JJ Abrams script as well, which caused all sorts of problems because in that script, Krypton don’t didn’t explode, so when we wanted to do episode on Krypton, they were like, “well, you know, you can’t do that, because in the JJ script, it never exploded!”

When you were developing the series, how long was your original plan for the show to run?

MILES: A five year plan. I mean, we can say it now. For us, TV is about it’s an organic process. You really don’t know what the show is until you see the pilot, and then you really don’t know what the series is until you see a bunch of episodes. So that’s a an exploration for us as writers. The first season, for us, we were just writing or rewriting every single script. It was a marathon, and then discovering what the show is and what it could do, what we could afford to do, and all these different things… what effects we could afford. No one had done a show like this.

Sometimes, we would write ourselves into a corner and then get ourselves out of it. We had loose touchstone moments that we knew we wanted to do, if we got to a certain point, but we’ve never really had a fully-formed plan.

As an example, would you have killed Jonathan Kent in Season 5 if you had known you had 10 seasons?

AL: Yeah, because it’s a 100th episode, and we knew at a certain point, Jonathan was going to die. 100 episodes in, it felt like that was the time.

MILES: Not that John Schneider ever forgave us. I think he would like to have run for ten seasons. But, you have to play and make those big moments, and give an audience some rewards for their effort watching.

We got criticized, I think accurately, because of the Lana and Clark relationship, that sort of ying and yang, that went on for a long time, and we milked it for what may have been too long. As the seasons went on, we moved faster. I think that was something that we learned along the way.

You had mentioned Tom and Michael doing these conventions. Would the two of you ever be down for like a big Smallville reunion panel or something that would have both of you on it?

MILES: Of course. It’s weird, because you’d think for the 20th anniversary of the show, and as a forerunner and a pioneer that is even significant in terms of even the Marvel Universe… without this show, where I think we showed what kind of depth of emotion and character they could get from from a comic book world, it’s odd that there’s no celebration at Comic-Con for Smallville. I think there’s a huge fan base for the show, and the show sometimes doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

How was the Smallville experience different from anything else you’ve worked on since or even before that?

MILES: Well, the Smallville experience… we’ve had hits, and we’ve had critical hits, and amazing experiences on all of the shows, but nothing can beat a giant hit like a Smallville. It was an exceptional moment, and I think the timing of it… after 9/11, and the fact that Superman is such a significant character in pop culture… I think it all just hit at exactly the right moment. The timing of the show was such, that it was a show that people needed to watch. It met an emotional need for America in particular. We haven’t experienced anything like it, either before or since.

Michael and Tom have talked about the notion of doing a Smallville animated project. Do you guys know anything about that?

AL: It’s something they’ve certainly been been kicking around, and we’ve talked to them about it, but we’re currently in Bucharest shooting our Wednesday Addams show.

Do you think Wednesday will appeal to the Smallville audience, because it seems like it would be right up the same alley of enjoyment?

AL: Well, we certainly hope so. We’d like as many people as possible to watch it. We’re exploring a character who you only have seen in one kind of way, like Smallville did.

MILES: Like Smallville, it’s a part of her life haven’t seen before. You’ve always seen Wednesday Addams as a 10 year old girl. Now you’ll see her as a teenager. So how does she navigate that world? Just like this world of Clark Kent as a teenager was unexplored, and we were able to tell that story, I think this is a fascinating and complex character, Wednesday, and the team that is behind us, and the fact that Tim Burton’s directing… it’s a magical experience so far.

The fact that it’s straight to series and we’ve got eight episodes, we can really make it make it cook, I think, so hopefully our audience will enjoy it. We’ve certainly loved writing it. It was a real blast.

Going back to how you might have ended Smallville, do you think you would have been able to get Tom in the costume, or would you have wanted to?

AL: Yeah. I think definitely, you want to see him in the costume, and fly off and do his thing. That is the the natural ending of the show. It certainly would have been a robust discussion with them. [Laughs]

MILES: That was always the final shot. The final shot of the show, for us, always was him launched into the air with the red cape. That just feels like that’s the end of his childhood. That’s the end of this.

20 years later, are there is there anybody you wanted to shout out to, or give special credit to? I know there a lot of people who are involved, but is there anybody you wanted to mention that I did not ask about?

MILES: Well, you know, there’s someone we can give special mention to, and that’s you, Craig. You were there from the beginning, and were unwavering in everything you did. And all about pioneers: You were a pioneer of this, in terms of fandom. We used to backchannel with you and all of those things… it was a new world for all of us at that point. I remember we used to look at the forums and all of that sort of stuff, and to see where it is now… not necessarily in a good way, much of it’s toxic, and not helpful, and harmful, actually, to everybody, particularly to the cast of things… you were always amazing, and our #1 fan of the show, and you were always there. So, seriously, we owe you a lot, so thank you.

Special thanks to Alfred Gough and Miles Millar for making this interview happen, and for all of the great memories of this show. Come back to KryptonSite soon for more #Smallville20 interviews!