Working in the Sin Trade
R.J. Stewart is one of the major creative forces behind Xena. Here he discusses the origins of the show and the job of writing the warrior princess. By Jon Miller.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 01
Of all the writers on Xena: Warrior Princess, none are more prolific than R.J. Stewart. The writer of many classics including Fallen Angel, Adventures in the Sin Trade, Callisto and, of course, the pilot episode Sins of the Past, Stewart was drawn to the character of Xena from the very beginning, seeing many possibilities in the first episode alone for character development.
“The great thing about Xena was that dark past,” Stewart explains. “I recognised right away that there'd never been a hero on television who had such a dark past. Xena was, as portrayed in the Hercules episodes, a war criminal. She was a monster. And now, she’s had this major conversion to good, and I wanted the pilot to be about the ramifications of that. Not about the actual conversion - because that happened on a three-episode arc in Hercules - but about the consequences of that to her life.
“If you notice, in the first scene [of Sins of the Past], she’s burying her weapons, and the subtext of that to me was that she was giving up. I won't go so far as to say she was committing suicide, but she was giving this up because she had looked back on what she'd done in the past and realised it was a horror, what she did, and she was burying her weapons to just walk away from the whole thing. Then the next thing is she hears the cries of people in distress and something clicks right there: ‘Waitaminute... I know how to make this pain go away inside me, or at least to channel it, and this is doing good, dedicating my life to doing good'. So. for Rob [Tapert, Executive Producer] and I, that opening scene was really central to the transition of the bad Xena to the good.
“Then once we'd got there, we had this great, great backstory for her,” he recalls. “Once again, I don't know of any other hero on television who has such a dark past, and I've always said that the biggest monster Xena ever fights is the one inside of her. The opportunity to revive that - the idea that the dark Xena is still inside her, and could come back - gave a great tension to the series. So the pilot was about setting those things up, and then establishing the relationship between her and Gabrielle. And that, of course, evolved into the heart of the whole series.”
The chemistry between Xena and Gabrielle is undoubtedly one of the series' greatest strengths, and Stewart happily takes credit for the creation of everybody's favourite sidekick, although he admits the end result came from several different sources.
“I'm going to say it's my creation,” says Stewart. “I wrote the character. Rob did the story, so Rob was certainly very much a participant. Here's the deal... The first thing you do is hear the [character's] voice, then you put it on paper, and then you read it back. And if the voice starts making sense - a character you can feel is real, as part of the ‘adventure world’, and useful to storytelling and sympathetic and attractive - then you've got it. The whole process is an experimental one, when you're inventing a character like that. It came fairly easily, and certainly on the first day of dailies [the rough shots which are viewed at the end of a day's filming], seeing Renee O'Connor read it, I realised there was a whole new dimension to this character that Renee was going to give her... It should always get better when the actress does it. That goes without saying.”
As well as creating Xena’s best friend, Stewart created one of her greatest enemies, the ever popular Callisto.
“I was driving to work one day thinking ‘Boy, Xena got off easy. She did all these terrible things, [and now] she doesn't have to deal with the consequences’. So I thought, What if she comes face- to-face with somebody she did wrong to? What if that somebody has become evil and is actually trying to out-bad the old Xena? Then I said ‘what if that someone is a beautiful woman?’ By the time I got into work, I had a great story to pitch to people. It really went rather effortlessly from there - it was one of those pleasant experiences. The first draft worked, T.J. [Scott, the director of the episode Callisto] totally got it, and they cast the right gal. It just worked.”
When it comes to writing the series’ scripts, Stewart finds a flexible approach to a story works better than making rigid plans before a word is written. “I do beat sheets [an outline for a script], certainly. I know where we're going. But I like to get to a scene and have the fun of inventing it. Certainly some of the scenes that I’ve written on Xena that are my most favourite, I didn’t know where to take those scenes until I got to them.”
Although this approach is good for the writer, Stewart is always careful to ensure that it doesn’t play havoc with the other crewmembers who have to plan in advance for each episode. “We have beat sheets that we stick to. We have to do that, because they’re prepping off the beat sheets down in New Zealand. So, we have to stick to them. In a series like this, the individual scenes I like to keep [a little more unformed]... I mean, my beat sheets are far more sketchy than the other writers’. Some writers, really good writers, will write in such incredible detail what they plan to do in the scene, which is great, but I like to wait till I’m there.”
A constant theme running through Stewart's scripts is the issue of whether or not Xena can ever find redemption for the terrible crimes she committed in the past. “It depends how you define redemption,” Stewart qualifies. “Certainly, a war criminal trial in the 20th Century would say, ‘No, you can never be redeemed for your terrible crimes, you caused the death of many, many people.’ Personally, I think - individually - she can find redemption in the sense that she understood what happened and what she's done since then has been to find some sort of internal peace.
“Adolph Hitler could go off on many missions to India, giving food to the hungry, but no one would ever think that he'd redeemed himself. And I’m not suggesting that the character of Xena in the past was [an allegory for] Adolph Hitler, but we do want to believe that she did some terrible things - for instance, what caused the death of Callisto's family. And there are many Callistos out there, many people who were left homeless. You remember in the pilot when she rides by a young boy? That was one of the first things that I thought of when I was approaching this - that she should meet, right away, a victim of her lifestyle. So, I think emotionally and within herself, she can be redeemed, and yes, I would like to see the series ultimately reach that. But I don't think you can ever really say the world considers her redeemed or forgiven.”
Although the series has a very strong story arc running through it, it also features many episodes that stand alone and don’t contain any references to the past. Despite being the writer of most of the more ‘arc-intensive’ episodes of the series, Stewart doesn't have a preference for arc episodes over those that stand alone. “Sometimes, we can certainly sin in both directions,” he admits. “I think too much serialisation does several things. It convolutes the series in a way that the casual viewer tunes in and doesn’t know what the heck’s going on. The way Rob and I think (and I think this is true of who Rob and I are, we are a great match that way - or, if you don't like this, maybe we're not such a great match!), we see a serialisation as character development. For instance, a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation - which is a terrific show - was frequently serialised. I used to watch it with my son, I would miss a few weeks, I'd tune in and not know what the heck they were talking about. Yet, it wasn’t about the characters changing that much, it was about the stories. And so, Rob and I are so into the evolving characters. We love it, it's fun for us. I think in a way, though, if somebody loves the show and sees it, goes away from it for a while, and then comes back, they think ‘Waitaminte, where's Xena and Gabrielle?’ because they’ve changed so much.
“With the stand-alone episodes, you can sin [when you] start getting formulaic - if you truly are doing all stand-alone episodes. Xena gets called to action in the teaser, she goes and rescues the day, and it's a wrap-up - with her kicking butt in the fourth act. And, even if it’s a comedy, that's really kind of what the formula of the shows have to be. So what the serialisation does, by doing the two-parters and doing the mysteries that are unresolved, is it avoids that static formula. So I think a series needs both of them, and I also think a producer can sin in both directions. I don’t think we have, but I like to think we've continued to make the show interesting and enjoyable.”
Stewart appreciates that one of Xena’s strengths is the different types of story that can be told in the format. “I think the best episodes are ones that are adventures but have - in the adventure - some drama and some comedy. Probably the soundest Xena formula, if you will, is one that balances drama and comedy within the same episode. Callisto is a very dramatic episode, but you have Joxer as the comic relief.”
Probably the most talked about and controversial of Stewart's Xena episodes is The Way. For more information on this, check out the Rob Tapert interview on page 22. The writer, however, is pleased that not everyone had bad things to say about the episode. “Tomorrow night. I’m going to a banquet of Hindus and I will be guest of honour. It has actually been very rewarding, since the original crisis. That was a nightmare, but it’s been rewarding to see that other Hindus appreciated the episode; we got an excellent write-up in a magazine called Hinduism Today. It doesn't totally exonerate us from playing fast and loose with the Hindu scriptures, but it did have some very positive observations about what we did there, and how it was actually a very sympathetic and sincere attempt to portray Krishna in a positive light. So, there are good and bad things that came out of that. I do love the episode.”