INTERVIEW: ‘Eagleheart’ creative team talks about kicking butt, taking names

Adult Swim, the slate of late-night programming on The Cartoon Network, has its motley variety of 15-minute laughfests. From classics like Aqua Teen Hunger Force to China, IL, the oddball humor continues to strike a chord with audiences hungry for out-of-the-box comedy.

Eagleheart, an action-adventure show starring Chris Elliott as U.S. Marshal Chris Monsanto, seems to fit right in — mostly by not fitting in at all. The third season of the Texas-Ranger-esque show recently premiered on the network, and this represents the first time Monsanto will fight off criminals in an overarching, season-spanning conflict.

Be prepared to be high-kicked in the face.

“It really takes a lot out of us to make this show,” said Jason Woliner, writer, director and executive producer. “It’s basically like a year of our lives start to vanish.”

The demand of producing the show is high because Woliner and fellow team members Michael Koman and Andrew Weinberg are the only writers bringing Monsanto’s adventures to life. They write everything and try to shoot everything in a fast-paced environment. There’s little time for breathing.

“The three of us pretty much write the whole thing,” Woliner said. “I direct all of them, and then we kind of edit them ourselves as well. So it’s really involved, but we kind of took a deep breath and jumped in.”

Because the shooting of the series, which also stars Maria Thayer and Brett Gelman, passes so quickly, the season needs to be mapped out fully in advance. “There’s a lot of planning that goes into it, and also we try to make it look a lot bigger and have more scope than our budget should reasonably allow,” Woliner said. “So it does take a lot of planning, and we shoot it very fast.”

For a show that is seemingly simple, Eagleheart is rather complicated. The comedy features plenty of action and gratuitous violence, and those explosions seem to come every few seconds. “The post-production takes a long time with a lot of visual effects and stuff like that,” said Weinberg, also a writer and executive producer. “Yeah, it’s a pretty pain-staking process all the way through.”

Here’s how Woliner described production: “We got creative this year by firing the production company that produced the first two seasons, and we hired a new producer. And any time he told us something was crazy, we said, ‘Well, we’ve done stuff like that before.’ So I think that’s a good way to operate … when you just work certain people to the bone and then you bring in new people and work them to the bone and make them think that it’s all possible. It’s really truly insane that we’re able to do what we did. A lot of it involved shooting things very, very fast.”

With union costs placing a price tag of up to $100,000 on any day with a full crew, adding extra shooting time can be detrimental to the budget. To keep it tight, the team shot 13 quarter-hour episodes in 24 days, essentially an episode every 48 hours. Season one was shot in 36 days, so the constraints are growing more difficult as the show finds success.

“Actually the budget has gone up incrementally year to year, but it’s actually gotten much harder to do year to year because the ideas get bigger and the stories get bigger,” Woliner said. “And we just don’t want to let anyone down, and so the show continues to get bigger and more difficult to produce.”

IN THE BEGINNING

The successful comedy series first began with a pilot co-written by Weinberg and Koman. That initial episode was completely different than today’s Eagleheart.

“It was more of a behind-the-scenes look at a terrible action show which was called Eagleheart,“ Weinberg said. “We hired Jason to direct it, and then Adult Swim was not really into the behind-the-scenes world that most of the show took place in. They just wanted this parody action show … and then Chris got involved. So Michael and Jason and I all kind of, we threw out the premise of the pilot and kind of started over just thinking we were going to make some kind of bizarre action show starring Chris Elliott.”

Now they have just that: a bizarre action show starring Chris Elliott, a comedian who is legendary for his unique style of humor.

“Yeah, he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” Weinberg said. “We’re all huge fans of all of his work, and just getting to know him in real life, he’s as funny as you’d think. And so it was a challenge for us to kind of learn to write in his voice and turn this into kind of an extension of his persona that he does so well.”

Eagleheart doesn’t sit still for too long; it’s constantly morphing.

“The second season kind of became about trying to figure out how fast the story lines could move and how many kind of odd turns it could take but still be funny, and interesting, and keep changing up the format,” Woliner said. “And then the third season is just kind of an extension of that where we just wanted to see if we could come up with one through-line for the season, and keep the world of the show as kind of crazy and absurd and surreal as it is, but also tell a story kind of start to finish. … Hopefully it never goes in the direction you think it’s going to go. It was just fun to kind of tell this winding tale that gets bigger and bigger kind of as it goes along.”

Although Eagleheart seems to parody Walker Texas Ranger and other action shows, Woliner said that’s not exactly the case. For example, the TV director has not even seen one episode of the Chuck Norris series. Instead, he counts Quentin Tarntino, John Woo and the original Evil Dead movies as larger influences. “I definitely love kind of extreme and loud and cartoonishly violent things, but if anything, we tend to reference movies more than TV tropes,” Woliner said.

“We don’t try to parody any specific show or genre,” Weinberg added. “There’ll be elements in episodes that are references or takes on an old movie or something, but … they’re just kind of incidental.”

Will the adventures of Monsanto live to see another day?

“We were just focused trying to make this one as good as it can be and fresh and new,” Woliner said. “Every year we try to take the show in a different direction, so if there was a fourth season, it would probably again be pretty different from this one.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Eagleheart airs Thursdays at midnight on Adult Swim.