‘Hell on Wheels’ exclusive: EP John Wirth on Cullen – Swede showdown, finding closure, and much more

After a rather lengthy delay, the final seven episodes of “Hell on Wheels” are going to be premiering on AMC come Saturday night at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. Within this span of episodes, there are many things that you can expect to see, from the competition of the railroad to end points for the stories of Cullen Bohannon, Thomas Durant, and many other characters we’ve come to know through the journey on this show. There is certainly a chance they will live on beyond it, but to use the railroad metaphor further, we’re getting set in a matter of weeks to get off of the car and allow the survivors to keep on riding.

Who better to preview the final episodes than the man who oversaw anything and everything behind the scenes the past few seasons? We had a chance to chat with executive producer John Wirth, a man responsible for bringing so much depth, power, and fantastic storytelling into this world. In this interview, we spoke to him about the themes of these final episodes, paying off stories to popular characters, and also if there is any interest in continuing the story of this universe in some other form.

CarterMatt – You’ve been away from filming the show for some time now [with production having been completed last year]. Has that time caused you to think any differently on the process of making it, or some of the decisions that you made? Has it just boosted your confidence?

John Wirth – I’m going with [the latter]. Anytime you make a creative decision, you’re not making some other creative decision, and there’s no one way to do anything. Every decision we made about how to end the series, we had to weigh against many other options that were sometimes almost equally viable, but just for whatever reason on the day with that group of people, just didn’t feel like the way to take the show. It’s kind of a hard thing to understand or diagram, but in looking back at it I feel confident that we made all the right decisions, that we had exactly the right number of episodes to finish out the show, that we sent everyone off– everyone who survived, anyway — in the right direction, to live their lives beyond the series.

As far as we’re concerned, the disconnect is [now] happening. We were all so connected on the show; I think it’s one of the things that made this show so special. The family element of this show is very strong … It’s been a hard thing to let go, only because it was so enjoyable to make and I am so proud of the work. It’s the strongest thing I’ve ever been involved in, I did my best work on the show, and I honed some of my skills and took them to another level. All in all, just a fantastic experience.

One of the things that I was looking over when thinking about talking points for this interview was just how much television has changed over the past few months when it comes to fan reaction, especially to cliffhangers. Obviously ‘Game of Thrones’ had a huge one last year, and ‘The Walking Dead’ has one that was certainly polarizing earlier this spring. You guys certainly created one last season with The Swede that I felt was certainly effective and it worked for your show by comparison. Is there some secret to making a cliffhanger that succeeds in creating tension, without generating so much frustration?

That’s a good question. I don’t think you can really apply any rules or characteristics to cliffhangers out of context. They’re contextual to every circumstance or every story. Some stories are friendlier to the notion of the cliffhanger. I don’t think we really set out to write a cliffhanger to the first half of this season; I think all of the elements were just kind of pulling towards each other, and you know as a fan of the show that there has always been a strong attraction between Cullen and The Swede. The underpinnings of the emotional story in the first seven episodes revolved around Swede’s plan and Cullen’s desire to thwart his plan, and they came together because of the needs of the railroad story. Cullen kind of being there as a roadblock to Swede’s plans, because he was there for the railroad, kick-started a cliffhanger. It set Swede off in a direction, and of course Cullen had to follow. It led up to this wonderful event that we’re going to have for our premiere, which I think everyone has been waiting [to have] for five years, which is a really big confrontation between Cullen and Swede.

To answer your question, I think sometimes cliffhangers work better than other times; often the amount of time between the cliffhanger and the premiere is a factor, and I think sometimes the audience gets antsy when you have to wait, and I know with our audience there has been some displeasure with how long they had to wait for [these episodes] to come. I know some are at least happy that this season is coming a month earlier than usual. It’s a difficult thing [to deal with] as the show is strung out [live], and it’s a much more palatable thing in the afterlife when there is only a few minutes between episodes. You get the cliffhanger and are like ‘holy s–t,’ and then you go to the next episode. Because with our show the cliffhanger is imbued with so much DNA from our show, this ongoing essential conflict between Swede and Cullen, I’m hoping it served as a way to fan the flames of interest for our fans, to bring them in.

To touch on something else, I’ll be interested in seeing if doing our final episodes brings more people to the show. I’ve been reading a lot of remarks on the internet where people are watching and binging the show and are just getting caught up, and there are a lot of people who have just discovered the show through the notion that these are the final episodes. They’ve been trying to catch up and get into it. I’ll be interested to see if our ratings stay the same, go up, or go down because these are the final episodes.

To continue on that subject before I bounce over to a few separate things, how have you felt about the show being on Saturdays the past few years? I’m not sure we’ve ever really touched on it. Did you find that an asset, or a hindrance? 

I thought it was a good move, because the roughest night on television is Sunday night, and it’s a super-competitive night. I think AMC rightfully so did some diagnostics on the show, and they were able to pinpoint the core audience of the show. These were not people who were going out on a Saturday necessarily, there are some number of them staying in. That combined with AMC wanting to open up another night of television, it turned out to be a good gamble, I think. It was pretty bold on their part. I don’t think it hurt us; actually, I think it helped us. Anyone who is out on Saturday night is probably not watching us on broadcast anyway, I think.

In getting back to the story, you mentioned that the premiere is almost a culmination of all of the Cullen – Swede conflict to this point, and the whole nature of the showdown is a big trope in the Western genre as a whole. Did you look elsewhere for inspiration, or did you try to just contain this moment in what was right for your world?

We’re never not aware of what came before, and some of the genre tropes. But this story really came out of what has gone on before on the show, who these characters are, and what these characters are trying to do. It may or may not be the ultimate confrontation between these guys; we all know that Swede is hard to kill (laughs), and Cullen is harder to kill because he’s the star of the show.

I think everyone has been waiting for these two guys to take the gloves off. For a long time we struggled with the idea that if Cullen ever just came into contact with The Swede, he would just pull his gun and shoot him in the face. When I came on the show, I really didn’t know how Cullen could be in the same orbit as the Swede without killing him after the Swede murdered Lily and he escaped from the bridge. That’s how we created the whole Mormon [story]. It was incumbent upon us to find ways to tell stories for those two guys where they wouldn’t just kill each other on sight. I thought we succeed on that really well, and that created that underlying, boiling cauldron of tension whenever these two guys were in the same room together, and I thought Jami O’Brien wrote a brilliant scene at the end of last season’s premiere when Swede knocks on Cullen’s door. That was really cool, and it was the essence of their relationship; then,it became kind of a cat-and-mouse thing until now, where The Swede has been forced to throw off the shroud of cleverness and go after Naomi and Cullen’s family.

This confrontation’s going to be a little more in-your-face than anything that we’ve seen over the past couple of seasons.

I know there is not a lot of time left this season, but were you able to tell some more stories that offered some closure to people like Mickey, Durant, and Eva?

Sometimes you hear writers talk about their characters like ‘the characters took over the story and it went where it wanted to go,’ which I think is kind of bogus because the writer is the person with the pen. Ultimately, it’s up to you where the story goes.

In this case to contradict myself, once we took Cullen west we upended the way in which we told stories on this series. Everyone is not together, and we [cut down] the show into two shows in essence. We had the Truckee story and the Laramie story, and that was necessary to tell the story of the building of the railroad, which was important to me. To be fair, I’m not sure it’s something that made all of our actors happy, because it expanded the world of the show and that cuts into their opportunity to work. Time was limited, and the time we could spend with each character was limited, but it was essential for me and the writers to tell these people’s stories. We didn’t want to leave the series with anyone thinking ‘what happened to Mickey? The last I saw him he was having a beer with Durant. I have no idea what happened!’ We tried really hard to tell stories that would at least imply what happened next for the people who survived until the very end.

Just to give you some context about what we thought about thematically, we were telling the story about the end of the Transcontinental Railroad, which is the end of one story but the beginning of another story. So for everyone who was involved in that enterprise, that enterprise came to an end. It was always an interest for me to see how people approach the ending of something; some people are ready for it, some people prepare for it, and some people are caught completely off-guard by it, some people don’t think about tomorrow. Just think about your own life when something comes to an end; everyone comes to that in a different way. Like with the characters on our show, all of us were experiencing that same thing. Our job was coming to an end, and our family was coming to a point where it would be dissolved by nature of the work.

It was a really interesting experience. It was loaded on every level, and we didn’t let anything slide and we worked really hard on telling every character’s story, with the caveat of those who survived to the end. With some of our decision-making in terms of how we laid out the story, I just didn’t want to get to 514, the series finale, and be like ‘this is the episode where we focus on what everybody’s gonna do.’ I wanted to play through the last seven episodes the resolution of people’s stories so you just don’t get it all in the last episode.

Are you planning to bring anyone new into the final seven, or are you focusing more on the core group?

With the core group being the people who arrived and survived the first season, we do still have the people in Truckee. So we have people like Chang and Mei and Strowbridge and that whole crew, they’re still in the story. We introduce one or two interesting, colorful characters. There’s a guy who comes in episode 514 who I’ll leave a mystery, but for some of the people who read what you write, they will figure it out. There’s a guy I’ve always wanted to have in ‘Hell on Wheels’ out west, and I just couldn’t get him in. He turns up in Washington in the last episode.

As we start to wind down, is there any interest on your part in ever revisiting this world or these characters at some point in the future?

I wouldn’t be opposed to writing some ‘Hell on Wheels’ novels. That’s something I negotiated in my contract last year that I would have the right to approach the company [Entertainment One] who owns the show with any ideas for novelizations. So I think about that on and off.

In terms of doing films or continuing the series, there was some talk about doing three two-hour movies that are basically in the ‘Hell on Wheels’ world, but I don’t think that is going to come to fruition. My sense in talking to Anson [Mount] and everyone else is that as difficult as it is to move on, everyone has moved on at this point in time. I’m virtually the only guy working on the show at this point in time (laughs), and everyone else has moved on. I’m grateful for the experience, loved it, and while I can’t speak for everyone and say their experience was equally enjoyable to what mine was, it was a great experience for most people and they’re professionals. I don’t know what the story would be since we finished the railroad; you could tell the story of the railroad from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or of the Southern Pacific, which went across the south. But, you know, I’m not thinking about going in that direction. I don’t think anyone else is.

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John also mentioned in concluding this interview that he is speaking with AMC about other overall projects, so we’ll see what comes out of that.