Did you feel like you needed a happy ending to season 1 to keep the viewers coming back?
Theyll just keep suffering with characters over and over again.
Does the action pick up immediately in the new season, after Jamie and Claire get off the ship?
Credit: Ed Miller/Starz
They arrive in France and then theyre off to Paris to stop the Jacobite rebellion.
How do they infiltrate the rebellion, exactly?
They have certain connections.
Jamie has family in Paris.
One thing leads to another so they meet the key people.
Is the second season drafted entirely off of Diana Gabaldons second book in theOutlanderseries,Dragonfly in Amber?
Dragonfly in Amberwas a very different book.
it just took a lot more work.
That was always the crucial decision in season 1.
Whenever we vary, how do we get it back to where the book is?
Season 2, that was the job, too.
The way the story plays out in year two is very different than year one.
Year one was a fairly straight narrative.
Claire goes to the past.
She tries to get home.
She falls in love and gets married.
She goes to rescue Jamie.
Thats essentially the plot of season 1.
Season 2 is much more complex with a lot more moving pieces.
Youve left most of the characters from season 1 back in Scotland.
Its a whole new cast of characters in the second season.Now youre dealing with politics, the secretive rebellion.
Trying to figure out where the moneys coming from.
How do they stop this?
Can they stop this from happening at all?
Now theyre a married couple as opposed to a courting couple in the first season.
Theres a baby on the way.
So, everythings very, very different in the season.
Will you get back to Scotland?
Where does Frank, Claires husband from the future, play in all this?
Hes still in the 20th century.
Hes still looking for her.
How will you work Frank into the plot for this season?
We saw him quite a few times in flashbacks in season 1.
And well definitely see him in flashbacks as well in season 2.
Does Black Jack end up in France?
Its always tricky because, obviously the books are out there.
The spoilers are all there to be had for anybody who cares to look for them.
Will you hold off on showing any trauma for a while in season 2?
There wont be anything like that.
Theres nothing in the books like that.
Were not going back to that place again.
What surprised you the most from the first season?
We were most thrilled with the cast.
We just really scored.
Thats gold in this business.
Catriona Balfe [as Claire] was an amazing find.
Sam Heughan is the perfect Jamie.
And I would say its hard to look at any of the characters and picture them as anybody else.
Obviously Graham McTavish is McDougal MacKenzie and Gary Lewis is Colum.
Before all that happened there was a lot of trepidation about, Okay, can we find these people?
Lets talk about those sex scenes.
Are theOutlanderbooks as erotic as what we saw on the small screen?
We tried to take those elements from the book.
We always felt like thats part of why people read these books.
Thats the heart of the appeal.
Was the rape scene between Black Jack and Jamie literally by the book?
No, we changed it.
The first book is told entirely from Claires point of view.
Some of those scenes werent explicitly laid out in the book.
So we invented dialogue, invented some of the situations and the dynamics between Jack and Jamie.
But the fundamentals were the same.
The story is very much the same.
The motivations are very much the same.
The reactions are very much the same.
Was it ever too graphic?
The web link was very supportive.
They were very like, unflinching and like, Do it.
They werent afraid of it by any means.
Ultimately, it was about the editing.
Usually just a question of how long you linger on an image.
How many frames do you hold on a smashed hand?
How long do you wanna hear him scream?
I also didnt wanna shy away from it.
You should feel upset.
Its a horrible, brutal thing to happen and you should be emotionally challenged by that.
Does Black Jack love Jamie or was it just an exercise in total control?
I think those are hard questions to answer because I dont think theres a simple answer to it.
Can Jack love, absent of someone elses terror or pain or suffering?
Is he capable of that?
He has admiration for Jamie on some weird level.
Hes a complicated man.
I never looked at him like a very simple monster.
Theres a man in there who is screwed up.
Is Black Jack gay?
Diana has labeled him bisexual.
But I dont even know what he thinks.
I think hes omnivorous.
Hes sort of hes a predator.
Oh, its great.
You cant ask for a better way it should work.
Heres an author of successful books who has been doing them for many, many years.
And she said Hey, Im an author.
I dont do what you do.
I have to trust you and Ill make a run at help you as best I can.
We had a really good conversation and good relationship all the way through it.
We cant ask for it to be any better, really.
It must have been frustrating to see how the series was basically overlooked by the Emmys.
Im a part of the TV Academy but Ive been frustrated by it for many years because ofBattlestar Galactica.
Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell never got nominations, which I thought was criminal.
We got the AFI Award and we got the Peabody.
What can you say?
The TV Academy is a specific membership and it also comes down to who actually bothers to vote.
But what can you do?
I think were doing a great show.
Weve got a good audience.
Even the critics have embraced us.
Everything else is kind of icing.
