What was it about the Reconstruction era that first appealed to you?
Tony Gayton: It’s like the D.W. Griffith movie The Birth of a Nation -- it’s the birth of this country more as we know it now: the slaves were free, and it’s like the war was supposedly over, but it really wasn’t over. In a lot of ways it may still not be over. It’s that friction that still existed from after the war and the fact that, in trying to build this railroad -- as Durant (Colm Meaney) says in the opening in the first act -- there’s a healing population of East and West out of this conflict of North and South but not everybody’s ready for that healing yet.
Joe Gayton: We wanted to look at racism in this show and shine a light on it. That’s why one of our characters is a freed slave.
Tony Gayton: It’s the whole idea of freedom and gradations of freedom. You have on paper they’re free, but how free are they? How free is anyone because where this takes place is out in the middle of the Nebraska territory where there’s really no law.In a lot of ways, there’s unlimited freedom and what do you do with that?
Joe Gayton: Right. Very simply, we thought it was a great sort of new way into a Western. To do a Western which has all the iconic images and characters but it’s coming at it from a different angle.
How much will you let history be your guide with this?
Joe Gayton:We have the historical signposts; we’ve researched it. We know where the railroad was built, what areas it went through, what kind of people were involved. So far, in terms of historical characters, all we’ve done is Durant, and even he is kind of an amalgam. He’s definitely not literally Thomas “Doc” Durant, especially physically, but a lot of the stuff we have in the pilot and some of the continuing episodes have actually taken from very kind of underhanded things that he did, so we’re trying to cull from him as a historical figure, but we’re not trying to be 100 percent accurate.If we go on, we’re hoping down the line to introduce historical characters. You know, Sherman came out. There was a great character called Grenville Dodge. We’re hoping if the series goes forward to include more historical characters; but right now, the only one taken actually from history is the Durant character.
Tony Gayton: The truth is that a lot of our stories played out in Hell on Wheels, we’ve created these characters. A few represent the Irishman and an ex-slave and ex-Confederate soldier, so that gives you the freedom to enact the railroad story, which is historically accurate, making the first 40 miles, making the first 100 miles, the government subsidies, the bribery that went on. You also have this freedom of creating your own characters in this incredible place called Hell on Wheels, this tent city that moves along with the railroad, which there’s really not a hell of a lot of historical information about, so you can use your imagination a lot more with that part of the story.
Source: Full interview @ The Hollywood Reporter
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