DirEcToR: PaUl SchEuRiNg

Paul Scheuring is a writer and director for movies and television shows. His work includes the 2003 film A Man Apart and, more notably, the creation of the television drama Prison Break.

Prison Break, a drama series about an engineer who commits a crime solely so that he can help his brother break out of prison, was rejected for almost two years before a pickup by FOX. Now it's a hugely popular series delivering solid numbers in the U.S., the show has gone on to post high ratings in markets like Australia and the U.K.

WS: What was the inspiration for the series?

SCHEURING: The real idea came from a woman I was working with at the time, who had an idea about a guy committing a crime and being put into prison to start a prison break, that was pretty much all she provided. I thought it was an intriguing idea, but very stupid for a human being to do. No one wants to go to prison unless they have to. So, there were two ideas to go forward with the story. The first was there had to be a situation that presented no other recourse, so that’s where the idea of the condemned brother who was wrongly convicted came in. And then, the second piece was that the protagonist had to be absolutely certain that he could pull this off.

WS: How long did it take for FOX to air the series?

SCHEURING: For television, it was an extraordinarily long time. It was about a year from the time I wrote the script to the time we shot the pilot, and about another five months before we were picked up to go to series. In total, from the time the script was written to the time the first episode aired, it was about 20 months.

WS: Why do you think it took so long?

SCHEURING: Obviously, it’s an unorthodox show, and this was before Lost, so the only thing out there like it was 24. I told FOX what the larger story was and they initially saw it as a ten-episode mini-series. At that point they went to look for a big marquee name to present this mini-series, and that’s when we got Steven Spielberg involved. But he fell out to do War of the Worlds, so for the next three or four months we were in the process of looking for another big name. And that’s when Lost actually had its big numbers, and suddenly two or three days later, we had it greenlit for a series, not ten episodes.

WS: Do you have this entire first season planned out, or do you modify things as you go along?

SCHEURING: We just finished the scripts for the first season, and we stayed largely true to the original template that I had. Before I even wrote the pilot, I needed to know where all the story lines went for every character, and the conspiracy of the escape, and so I followed all of those up for two seasons. You know, people were asking me, deep into season two and season three... can this show exist without the prison? I assured them that if Michael Scofield is still sitting around Fox River in the middle of season two, saying, ‘I have the perfect plan,’ I think the audience will roll their eyes. So the escape’s coming.


WS: Were you surprised by how well the show has been received, both in the U.S. and around the world?

SCHEURING: Absolutely. When we conceived the show, we were pretty confident in the story, we knew we had something very special on our hands. But I was very doubtful. This is network television, and this is not HBO, this is not a movie. Do people want to come every Monday night to watch a show about prison? It’s one of those things where you do the best you can and then scratch your head and say, Is anybody going to even show up and watch this? So, yes, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. It’s been very, very nice.

WS: There’s been a lot of talk about your protagonist Michael Scofield’s tattoo. How did that idea come about?

SCHEURING: The blueprints of the prison had to be complex enough that you would need to bring them into the prison, and obviously you go into the prison with nothing but your naked body, so the only way you could really do it is if you had it encoded into a tattoo. And we wanted the tattoo to be an allegory. The surface images of the ascension of devils on the left arm and the ascension of the angels on the right say that Scofield is an antihero. He’s doing something wrong to do something right. And that’s one of the bigger themes of the show that no one is completely good or completely bad.

WS: What kind of research did you do into prison life?

SCHEURING: I did a lot of different things, looking at prisons, scouting them. But there were two big resources for me personally. One was reading a lot of books written by the incarcerated to get a first-hand, man-on-the-ground feel for the prison, particularly the parlance, you really learn the language. Prison lexicon is such a unique language. And there are a lot of resources online, like prisontalk.com; it just humanises the whole thing.

WS: Are there any particular producers or shows that have inspired you?

SCHEURING: I can’t say television shows, because in all honesty, I don’t watch serialized drama on television. I probably would if I got HBO at home, but I don’t. But in terms of something that might be relevant to this show, some of my favorite films are Cool Hand Luke, The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption. There was just a coolness to the characters, a grace under pressure in this very absurd world of prison.