Hollywood writer Bryan Fuller has roots in the Lewis Clark Valley and this week, he is back in town to help raise funds to revamp Lewiston's historic Liberty Theater.
The event itself is on Saturday, Aug. 8 from 5 to 9 p.m. at Lindsey Creek Vineyards in Lewiston. Ahead of the fundraiser, Lauren Paterson sat down with Fuller to talk about some of the television shows he's worked on and how growing up in a small town influenced the stories he's brought to the big screen.
Click play on the audio player above to hear the interview, or read the full transcription of their conversation below:
Lauren Paterson: The writers are sometimes behind the scenes. People definitely know the shows you've created, but they may not know you as a person. So how could you give us a little context about where you are in your career and some of the work you've done?
Byran Fuller: I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, and after writing for Star Trek, I wanted to be a writer. And the first show, my last season on Star Trek Voyager, I wrote a show on spec, and that was a show called Dead Like Me, which was about a young woman who dies and becomes a grim reaper. And then that led into Pushing Daisies, and then that segwayed into a show called Wonderfalls that I did with Todd Holland. That was also about a young girl in some sort of spiritual, existential crisis. That's kind of a fairy tale. And that led me to Hannibal, which was an extrapolation of the Thomas Harris novels. And we all know silence of the lambs. And and it was the first time we were telling a story that we got to see Hannibal Lecter in practice as a psychiatrist, cooking and eating people. And that was a ball. So from there I did American Gods and then relaunched Star Trek and recently did a movie called Dust Bunny that I wrote and directed. And that's my first kind of directing duty.
Lauren Paterson: And so tell me about your history in the LC Valley. You grew up. Was it in Clarkston or Lewiston?
Byran Fuller: It's one community, I think, and Clarkston was where I was born in Lewiston and raised in Clarkston, but went to Lewis-clark State College for a few semesters before I transferred to USC. And, you know, there were so many things that growing up there that I thought it was kind of a boring, small town existence. And then I started telling the stories about my experiences there. They start to take on a very vivid David Lynchian quality of surrealism with, you know, a serial killer in town and, you know, the Lewis Clark Valley murders that were sort of in the sweet spot of my adolescence from like, uh, 78 to 85.
Lauren Paterson: So your childhood here, sort of out on the periphery of society, helped inform some of the sci fi or horror elements of your writing as you've gone through these projects.
Byran Fuller: Oh, absolutely. And I was already bitten by the the horror bug by cable, stolen cable TV. Then when the real life horror story was unfolding around me in. In the Lewis-clark Valley, I. I had a kind of detachment from it that I saw myself as a background character in a horror film who was riding his bike out to the bridge to look at the bloodstains where a body had been dumped and, you know, had that kind of detachment that you have as a child where the danger doesn't feel immediate. Also, you're not realizing the human impact of these events because you're looking at them through a narcissistic prism of childhood. So all of these things kind of leached out a an appreciation for horror storytelling.
