Exclusive Interview with David Andron - Part 1

ANDRON: My pleasure, man. Thank you for the request. I appreciate it.

ANDRON: Yeah, I'm aware of the site. I just recently started looking through it when I found out this interview was going to go down... It really is cool to see how excited most people are and open-minded. It's encouraging.

ANDRON: And I understand that completely. I was young when the original was on. I was born in '79 so I was 4 years old up to 8 years old. And I loved it. I had a little KITT car, was the hugest fan and we lived in Los Angeles so I could to Universal and sit in the car there. I loved the original. All those other incarnations of it... 2000, Team Knight Rider, were so bad. It kind of seemed like a travesty compared to the original. We really wanted this to be something that was special. It's like the Batman movies. They made a good one or two, and then they made all these horrible ones. But then you get Chris Nolan (screenwriter) involved and you make Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. You kind of find that new tone for it and you make it work. When this came up and we were approached about doing it we kind of watched the original. And as much as people love the original and basically want to see the original again, you watch it now and there really is a need to update it. As much as I loved it as a kid it's just a different audience, it's a different world out there. The technology is different. And I understand people's skepticism, but at the same time... looking at the new car, we couldn't do a Trans Am. We just couldn't do it. And there weren't any options. It had to be an American car. And in the world we live, there's going to me marketing ties. That's just how you're going to get those things done and on the air. You want to sell out as little as possible in that regard, but there's only so much you can do for the money. This thing is going to be so much cooler and look so much better because we're able to use the Ford product. We're able to get a little money from Ford, but beyond that more the advertising. Lots of people don't realize we were scrambling to get money together for this anyway. So having that, it gets you a better cast, it gets you better effects, and the car is still cool. I just don't know what else we would have gone with. There's no way you can go with a concept car. And we discussed other cars. But with the Mustang, and how excited Ford was, and how cool we knew we could make a Mustang we thought it was the best option for moving forward.

ANDRON: Yeah I hope so. I was never a fan of the version of the Mustang in the late 80s, but the KR and that new version is a pretty cool-looking car.

ANDRON: Yeah... And there were cars like Dodge who was really interested but we ended up not going with them. We didn't want to do a Charger. We didn't want to do a 4-door. There were some things we tried to stay true to with the idea of a sports car. It's a little more muscly, but he inside and the intelligence of it... The computer aspect of it, I feel will still give it that intelligence even though maybe it doesn't look as streamlined as the original KITT.

ANDRON: I did see that in articles that cropped up when I first got the job. They were like this kid has no credits, what the hell? But everybody has to start somewhere. I moved out to L.A. 4 years ago and I had written fiction in college... I'll give you the abbreviated version... When I moved down to L.A. I started writing spec screenplays. I wrote a feature and then wrote a couple of episodes of TV and a pilot. And people would send them out and people really responded very favorably. But this was only two-and-a-half years ago. And it took me that first year, year-and-a-half to really get these writing samples out. And things snowballed immediately. I got signed with a great manager I met at CAA which is a huge agency, and got this job on Raines. NBC really wanted to shoot the original pilot I had written. But I had kind of written it for cable and really didn't want to change certain things so I politely declined and they offered me what is called a blind script deal while I was on Raines. Which is basically, write a pilot for us. We don't know what the pilot will be, but we'll make the agreement now. And when the time comes, we'll sit down and talk about what to do, whether it's something that I bring to them or it's something they want to do. And that was all last year. And I wrote a pilot that they didn't end up shooting but they liked the pilot enough to get me another one of these script deals. So this year, when the network came to them and said listen, we really want to do Knight Rider, the studio stepped up on my behalf and said we've got this kid who's great, read his stuff. let us know if you think he can handle it. And the network read the pilots I had written and got behind me. And then we got involved with Dave Bartis and Dutch Oven. And accordingly Doug Liman who I talked about doing another pilot with, which NBC would not let us do, because it was an Iraq hospital show and they wanted no part of that. So we went from Iraq hospital show to Knight Rider.

ANDRON: Quite a jump is right. To be honest, from my point of view, at this young stage in my career, it's really important to have that first thing get made and do well. And again, Knight Rider was something I was really passionate about and I feel like it needed a younger voice. Somebody who really appreciated the original, and was going to try to stay true to the mythology but just knew how to make it cool. Give it something that the new generation really appreciates and give it a fresh voice. They obviously thought I'd be able to do it, and I think so far we've matched expectations if not exceed them.

ANDRON: I'll tell you, I had no time which was another factor in this. I've got a reputation for being pretty quick. This is 2 hours, so you're talking about a feature. The difference between an hour pilot and a 2-hour I think is more than people can imagine. It's obviously double the running time, but just as far as having to create arcs and then close off the arcs, with an hour pilot you just create all these problems and leave them open. So to bring a story full-circle is a much bigger challenge. They came to me in mid-August with the would-you-like-to-do-this thing, and I had a full shootable script locked on November 3rd at midnight, right before the script happened. You're talking about two-and-a-half months to come up with the idea, do the outline, go through all the notes. I wrote the first 110-page draft in eleven days. And we whittled it down and whittled it down, and I thing it wound up being something like 79 pages. Even then, I had a 90-page script that everybody loved, then we got our budget (laughs). And everybody said take 10 pages out. Change that scene and change that scene. It's such a hectic process anyway. But there's more going into that than most people would ever know. But Dave Bartis and Gene Klein, the other executive, were amazing along with Doug Liman... we got them a script in 2 months that they were really excited about shooting. And then I just sat on set and watched (laughs). We couldn't rewrite anything. What we shot is very, very close to the original script.

ANDRON: Yeah, because nothing is ever really done. You know when you've shot something, you got it in the editing room, you're always thinking, boy I wish I could go back and do this. And with something that had to happen that quickly anyway, it's like I could have rewritten every night before the next scene. I couldn't rewrite for our actors when we started casting them. Everything was done. The problem with the time crunch was really frustrating. Dave Bartis and Steve Schill, our directors could work with the actors and they could kind of change little things that weren't working, but it's hard to sit by. Not that something isn't working necessarily, but something that you know could be better.

ANDRON: For us it really started when we sat down... the first element is the relationship between this guy and this car. It was a great element, kind of an odd-couple element to Michael and KITT. KITT being the sound logic and reason, Michael maybe being a little more emotional and that was certainly a dynamic we wanted to keep very much alive. The main theme of One Man Can Make A Difference... you can argue it now and it can seem a little cheesey but that was a huge part of the original, and that's something also that we kept going back to. We were struggling to kind of find through-lines. This needs to be about...you know, the world right now is kind of an ugly place. You got a war going on, you got a lot of people who maybe aren't happy with the direction of politics in this country, there's just so much chaos. But the theme is actually strangely and maybe possibly always will be, but it's still really relevant. The idea that one person is out there without a political ideology, just trying to go out there and help people and do something for the better. I think that's something that we really tried to keep alive as well. And then just the cool guy and the cool car, which is as old as entertainment since cars have been around.