Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [18]
Ball’s conscious decision not to spend a lot of time and effort on CGI vampire effects will leave some fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s transforming vampires wanting more, but in keeping with the books, which also focus more on the interpersonal relationships of the characters, less their stereotypical markings. “I always wanted the effects to be minimal . . . it’s a little scarier to leave the effects to your imagination,” Ball says. “I don’t want any of that blue light from the Underworld movies, and I’m not going to give the vampires weird contact lenses or have the shape of their heads change when their fangs come out. . . . The effects are just the shorthand to get us from one stage to another . . . [Bill’s] been alive for a hundred and seventy years . . . He’s in a changing world and he’s given up on the idea of having any sort of love in his life until he meets this girl. That to me is way more interesting than what [a vampire’s transformation] looks like.”
If Ball lost any fans early on for not appearing to be the right fit for the genre — he came off as dismissive of the massive and loyal fan base of the paranormal genre — he quickly proved them wrong with his unabashed love of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels. “It was an impulse purchase and it was just so much fun . . . I got into Sookie and the world and the characters, and I looked forward to going to bed every night . . . I would tell myself, ‘Okay, I’m just going to read two chapters,’ and I would read seven.” Ball called Harris, who had already given the rights to another producer. But when that producer failed to develop the books, Ball took another stab, with Harris in full agreement. “I trust [Alan’s] vision,” she’s said. “I am sure he will be true to the spirit of the books. I am delighted with the talented cast, Alan’s scripts and direction, and the look and feel of the production.”
Many fans of the show are also fans of the books, and as the series progresses the question remains as to how the writers will treat each storyline’s adaptation. Ball has already diverged from the books in his treatment of Tara and Lafayette, and created larger plots to flesh out the lives of the other characters, whose stories were limited by the novels’ Sookie-only perspective. “The main story is the same,” he says. “[But] the other characters disappear if they’re not in a scene with [Sookie].” But Ball has no plans to stray too far from the original stories. Reading the books, Ball recalls, “I loved the world; I loved how funny it was, how sexy and romantic and dramatic and scary . . . [vampires are] not constrained by conformity and traditional moral codes. You can live vicariously through them.”
Psychologist Andrew Bates thinks that Ball’s inspiration may hearken back to a repressed Victorian society that once explored sex via the metaphor of the vampire. For his own part, Ball has conceded that America is “weirdly dysfunctional in its relationship with sex,” that it’s become fetishized, with true intimacy replaced by consumerism, and a denial of sex as an important aspect of our psyches, ideas his characters reflect. “[T]heir sexuality is a way to explore who they are as characters and I feel like that’s always [an] underlying part of everything we do.” Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, Ryan Kwanten, and Alexander Skarsgård have all voiced their beliefs that American culture sees the naked body and sex as taboo, and that the frequency of nudity and sex on the show doesn’t make them uncomfortable. Ball defends all the on-screen nookie, saying, “[I]t’s important