by Mike Sacks
I've never really understood that idea of likability. When the executives did the preview tests on the American version, audiences were given a knob to turn. “Do you like this character? Do you dislike this character?” The problem with doing something like this is that audiences aren't supposed to really like Brent at first. I mean, of course you're going to turn the knobs to the DISLIKE section! If you give someone a knob, they'll turn it. But is that representative of how you watch TV? Or anything? It's crazy. If you go to a movie, say a new Jack Nicholson film, do you always like Jack Nicholson? Well, no. Sometimes he's a villain. He kills people. Should you then cut him out of the movie? Everyone knows and understands that he's part of the dramatic dynamic.
When we first showed The Office to test audiences in Britain, we received one of the lowest scores ever — the only show that beat ours was one that featured women's lawn bowling. That's why you can't judge these focus groups. It's madness, because you need time for characters to crawl under your skin and for worlds to sink into your subconscious and get into your blood. I think that's what the best sitcoms are about, such as Cheers, Seinfeld, Roseanne, and all those shows — they're about creating an environment in which you want to return and poke around for another half-hour.
I think that especially holds true for comedy. Two-dimensional characters aren't necessarily as funny as fully-formed characters, who may not be as endearing at first glance.
It really frustrates me. I always think of some of my favorite movie comedies, such as The King of Comedy. The Rupert Pupkin character is in so many ways unlikable, and yet he remains completely endearing and compelling to watch. That movie will never be a popular mainstream film, but for the kind of movie it tried to be, it succeeded magnificently.
Was The King of Comedy an influence on The Office?
Without a doubt. Both Ricky and I wanted dead time for The Office and we didn't want to have too many laughs. The King of Comedy is a good example of that. It has weird, jarring tones. We liked those tones. Any episode of The Office could potentially end on a sorrowful note, or it could end on a melancholic one. It was just what it was. It didn't have to have the sitcom beats.
Besides The King of Comedy, what were your other influences?
Ricky and I have taken mood and ideas from a lot of different things. A big influence for us, particularly for the [two-episode] Office Christmas Special, was The Bridges of Madison County, which a lot of people dismiss as being melodramatic. But for those who've seen it, it's a wonderfully made, very slow-burning, very low-key romance. The film has a wonderful ending, in which Meryl Streep's character is trying to decide between her husband and Clint Eastwood, and her hand remains on the door handle inside her car. Does she get out and run to Clint? Or does she stay? It's beautifully bittersweet and wonderfully made.
There is a scene in The Godfather that we both love. It's where Al Pacino fires the gun in the Italian restaurant, and you can hear the train nearby, clattering, getting louder and louder. We tried to re-create that in one episode, in which Tim is photocopying and staring at Dawn. The copy machine gets louder as the camera closes in on his face.
We had a lot of influences. We also both loved Billy Wilder's The Apartment.
For the combination of comedy and romance?
I was always very keen on romance in movies and on television, and I wanted to insert that aspect into The Office. Ricky was a little bit hesitant initially. Would it work? Would it be done badly? Would it be overly sentimental? The saving grace for him was that because we were so rigid with this documentary style, it created this brilliant, inherent drama where these two people — Tim and Dawn, these star-crossed lovers — could not express their emotions. It was like a Victorian drama, where social conventions don't allow people to declare their love for each other; if a gentleman's hand just touches a lady's glove, there is a sort of electricity in the air. Everything signifies so much more.
The documentary structure gives you such tight parameters that it makes you, as a writer, work even harder to find ways around those restrictions.
Can you give me an example?
Initially, the flirtatious dialogues between Tim and Dawn felt a bit creepy to us. There's something about writing flirtatious dialogue that is very difficult; unless you're very good at it, it can be slightly sickly. So we told Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman, the actors who played Dawn and Tim, to just improvise, but we never asked them to flirt. We told them to just have a conversation, because the characters were friends. If you show flirting in this documentary-style format, the very fact that you're showing it implies that it has some kind of significance. Nothing gets shown in this format by chance — everything is clearly pre-meditated. Suddenly, these things take on significance, providing you've loaded them with a certain meaning beforehand. Everything counts and is magnified. The payoff is big.
I think my favorite moment of the whole series is when Tim unhooks his mic and talks to Dawn behind the closed doors of the meeting room in the final episode of Season Two. We can still see both Tim and Dawn through the glass, but we can't hear them. Ricky and I were so thrilled by that, because it felt like it was the perfect fusion of the documentary form and the type of dramatic storytelling we wanted. You couldn't do that in any other television show, because it would just feel kind of mannered; a little like the end of Lost in Translation. And nothing we could have written would have been half as powerful as what the viewers imagined those two characters said.
Did you know from the beginning of the series that you wanted Tim and Dawn's relationship to end happily?
I used to get a little frustrated whenever the show was accused of being cynical and trading on the more unpleasant side of human behavior. I always did want the show to have a happy ending.
The scenes that really thrill me throughout the series are the ones in which Tim and Gareth are kind of getting on with each other — as opposed to fighting — when they put aside their squabbles, and one tries to hug or kiss the other. You're reminded that they're not going to kill each other. They wouldn't socialize outside of work, but there is a sort of unspoken warmth there. I always felt there was so much warmth in many of the show's relationships.
For me, a happy ending is never a cop-out. I think the viewer is kind of hardwired to want romance and a nice ending. It's such a fundamental human thing. As a viewer, you want that sense of good fortune. People do find love in real life. What's wrong with that?
Viewers never seem to tire of a happy ending, as long as it holds true to the story. Even when they see the ending coming, it's still very satisfying.
It almost hits a pleasure center in the brain, like a good melody. When you listen to a song, you don't say, “I can't believe it! Another song with a chorus and a verse and then the chorus again! What a cliché!” No, you think, That's a great song. It's very primal.
But it's really the job of the writer to pull off that sleight of hand. It's like a magic trick. Look this way, not that way. When we introduced the box of paints into the Christmas special, the gift that Tim gives to Dawn, we were really worried that viewers would see the ending coming. We thought they would be able to figure it out. But if you do it correctly, people won't look for how it's done. And maybe they don't even want to know how it's done. They want, and need, that surprise.
A lot of viewers weren't expecting that ending, when Dawn leaves her boyfriend, Lee, for Tim. I know it took me by surprise.
At the end of the series, Brent says that the most important things in life are to find a job you like, to make a difference, and to find someone you love. Well, to both Ricky and me, those are the three important things in life. It doesn't get more precise than that. Especially if you come from a fairly comfortable, white, middle-class background, in which you don't have the anxieties and the worries that others might have. We can't relate to a life growing up in a brothel, so our concerns are making the little corner of our world as comfortable as we can.
What was your specific office exp
erience?
I graduated from the University of Warwick in 1996 and then signed up with a temp agency. They assigned me to an office job here and there, and I did maybe three or four different ones before I came to London. All of them were exactly the same. I saw all of the little power plays and the office politics and the hierarchies that go on in these places, such as the boss that goes with workers to training day but then refuses to join in, because he feels it's beneath him. It was extraordinary. It doesn't matter whether you're in the Mafia or working at NASA or in a paper factory, it's all the same. In the end, you still have the same squabbles over who stole your chair, who took your stapler, those type of things.
Ricky also worked in an office for ten or twelve years. So we could both draw on real life. And, actually, it does now feel frustrating that we're unable to go back to that position and to experience the more everyday aspects of the work life. I try to cling to any moment where I'm forced into a position with people with whom I normally wouldn't socialize. I enjoy getting into that mind-set, that different point of view, as opposed to the rarefied world of the TV writer.
What is it you miss about the office environment? The camaraderie? The sense of belonging to a group?
No, I don't really miss that. I just miss the sense of the unpredictable. You can't make up that life. You have to have lived it. I had a temp job once where a woman had a nervous twitch that made her arm jut out at a right angle. I was next to her, stuffing envelopes on my first day, and her arm involuntarily jutted out. It almost hit me in the head. I didn't realize what it was, and when I asked someone, they told me it was this condition she couldn't help. So this meant that for the rest of the day I had to time my movements so that I would avoid her elbow. I didn't want to be impolite and say, “I'm sorry, but could you move a little farther away? You have a little weird nervous twitch, and I don't want to get hit.”
Who could even make something like that up?
How did you write the scripts for The Office? The dialogue is so natural. Did you and Ricky improvise it between yourselves?
Pretty much, yes. Initially, we started off trying to improvise, and then we typed the dialogue, but that was a very slow way of working. Ultimately, we bought a Dictaphone tape recorder. We would improvise into it and sort of refine the dialogue a little, and then we would edit it down later so that it could be typed up. It just seemed the only way to create that ebb and flow of real dialogue, where people stop and start and they don't use proper grammar. Speech patterns are very different from what you would get if you were to just write dialogue.
We started by discussing the type of people we had met in our office jobs. We would tell anecdotes, and pictures would form. We had never worked together before, so for four months or so we just sat around talking about things we liked, as well as things we didn't want to see on television. By the end of that process, we felt as if we had this common language.
We actually spent a great deal of time deciding on the characters' names.
Why?
It made it much easier for us to create their backstories. The name David Brent came to Ricky in an epiphany. What we loved about that name was that it was so utterly bland. There is nothing about that name that is evocative or emotive in any way. It's almost like the name James Bond. It's a completely neutral name for a character who has to remain sort of shadowy. It's a nowhere name. It's white noise.
How about the names for the other characters?
Ricky was on public transport one day, and he phoned me up and said, “I've got the name for the rat — Chris Finch. I just heard a guy saying to another guy, ‘I spoke to Chris Finch last night.’” And, again, it just seemed exactly right. There is something about the word “Finch” that's got this slightly hard consonant at the end, but it also sounds like a tweety little bird.
The name “Gareth” here in Britain has a very specific association with a particular kind of social group, and it tends to be the working class but with slight pretensions. It's also slightly outdated, probably mid-seventies, early eighties. The name just said a lot to us about Gareth's parentage — subconsciously, without ever being explicit.
As for Dawn, I'm not sure if you have that name in the States, but in this country, it's a bit simpering and a bit wet in its own way. It seemed kind of perfect for the character. I think it has associations, perhaps with a certain class yearning to reach a higher class. It's quite southern England. It says a lot about Dawn's parents and where they come from, and suggests that she's trying to escape the associations of that name. In some weird way, her aspirations for a better life are sort of drawn up in her name. She's constantly reminded about it.
How much of the show was written beforehand versus improvised by the actors on the set?
A large percentage of the show was written. Very little actor improvisation made its way into the show. We would allow the actors to change the rhythms if it didn't quite work for them. We wouldn't really allow them to change the jokes or the structure, but we did allow them to say their own words, or paraphrase here and there.
It has to be a major compliment to you that a lot of critics speculated that the show was improvised.
It's really a testimony to the actors' ability to deliver the dialogue. The actors were extraordinary.
But I think the problem with the improvised approach is that sometimes there's a slight jarring of tone that can happen, because actors have slightly different approaches. It's also difficult to improvise emotional beats and moments of dead time. If you're improvising, you've got an inclination to fill the silence with something. Whereas so much of what we did on that show was about silence. We would literally script “Extended Pause” or “Agonizing Silence.” That was very important to us.
The characters were never funnier than they would have been in real life. On many sitcoms, each character — whether a teenager or an old woman — crack the same jokes that a professional writer might.
It's funny you say that, because in the original pilot that was one of the problems. The character of Tim would do little bits of stand-up-type material. He would also do a lot more banter with the temp guy. It was like a comedy act. And it just stood out like a sore thumb. It was painful for us to watch. It quickly occurred to us that no one ever talks like this in real life. It just didn't feel right. It felt creaky, and it was the one sour, phony note in the show. You can have a Norm character on Cheers, but not in real life. No one can come up with that many brilliant one-liners. So we changed that.
I assume you never contemplated having a laugh track?
That was always a no-no. It just seemed so bizarre to have one. I mean — why?
It seems that most British comedies, especially from the sixties and seventies, not only have a laugh track but a very aggressive one. The audiences almost seemed angry.
I'm actually not down on the idea of the laugh track. I sometimes think that the words “laugh track” are used snobbishly — the implication being that it's been pasted on afterward, which is very rarely the case. I think shows are mostly shot in front of a live audience, and maybe the laughs are massaged a little bit in the editing room. I think there's a lot to be said for a good studio show. I think Friends is a masterful example of the rhythms of the laughter, where you almost forget that there is laughter. It somehow feeds into the goodwill and high spirits of the show. For example, in Seinfeld, it's really fun to hear Kramer get a round of applause for doing a trick with a cigarette. I quite liked those circus moments, but it's got to be what's right for the show.
M*A*S*H was shown with a laugh track in the States, and it never ceases to amaze me. In England, it was shown without it, and it remains on my Top 10 list of all-time great shows. But I've since watched repeats where the laugh track is included, and I hate the program. I think it's appalling. I think Hawkeye is a snide, sniveling wiseass. It's a completely different show. With the laughter, that character sounds like he's playing to the gallery. It makes him hateful. Without it, he becomes this l
one voice in an insane world.
When I interviewed Larry Gelbart, he told me he hated the laugh track, too. Yet M*A*S*H ended more than two decades ago, and TV audiences still seem so comfortable with the laugh track.
I suppose it's similar to listeners telling a radio station they want to hear more Cher or Phil Collins. In a majority of cases that's all they know, because edgier music isn't being played. There's something comforting about hearing the same songs over and over, just as it's comforting to hear a laugh track. Watching television can be a lonely experience. That's what TV viewers are used to hearing, and that's what they want.
But I think with the advent of the DVD and home cinema, viewers are now increasingly used to watching comedy without an audience, and they don't find silence as uncomfortable.
As well as being the co-writer of The Office, you were also the co-director, with Ricky Gervais. You've said in an interview that when it comes to comedy, the only thing a director should do is point and shoot. Comedy should never be too beautiful; it becomes a distraction. Buck Henry told me the same thing.
I don't know if you've ever seen the TV show The Black Adder, but the first series was a flop. They used to shoot Rowan Atkinson on a horse two hundred yards away, against a silhouette, and that's not funny. It might look good, and it might look real, but it's not funny. But as soon as they put the camera on Rowan's face, it became funny. It all fell into place.
That was something we went into The Office knowing. We knew that viewers weren't going to watch the show on a big screen with the best sound. They were going to watch it out of the corner of their eye on a television in their homes. We didn't want viewers to have to struggle for any of the visual information.
And yet the show does contain many details that the viewer can be rewarded with on multiple viewings.
When The Office went on the air, DVD sales [in the U.K.] were just skyrocketing and everyone was buying a DVD player. This really excited me, because it meant that you could make television for repeated viewing, which opens up a whole new dimension.