How did this series come about for you?
JOE GAYTON: We hadn’t worked in TV a lot. We’d mainly done feature stuff. Tony had some movies made, and I had a few movies made, and we got a feature made together, that came out this past summer. The first time we got involved with a pilot, we wrote it for Fox and got a shot. We really loved the project. Madeline Stowe was in it, and it was called Southern Comfort. 20th Century Fox was the studio and Fox was the network, and we shot the pilot, but it ended up not getting picked up to series. So, we went back to our feature stuff and subsequently wrote another pilot that didn’t get shot, but we enjoyed the process. And then, Jeremy Gold at Endemol brought us in. He had been at Fox and had hear about us, and offered us a blind deal after we met. So, we were going to write something for him, we just didn’t knwo what. So, we came up with an idea, pitched it to him, and he liked it. We still want to do it one day, but it was a very convoluted psychological thriller.
TONY GAYTON: It was about an insane man who sees the truth, basically. We couldn’t quite figure it out.
JOE: So, we pitched it to AMC, and they scratched their heads and said, “We like you guys a lot, but we’re going to pass on that idea. Come back with something else.” And then, I don’t know if it was Jeremy Gold or AMC that brought up the idea of a western while they were talking. They thought that would be great. They called us and we said, “Oh, hell yeah, we’d love to do a western!” And then, we started talking and remembered this story, American Experience, which was this really great documentary, and I thought, “God, that’s great. I just learned a bunch of stuff I had never learned before.” You just have this cursory information that the Chinese and the Irish built the railroad, but it got in underneath all the dirt and stuff that went on, with the financing of it, and the greed and corruption. And then, I heard about this Hell on Wheels place and I went, “What a great setting for a western.” So, we pitched that to Jeremy Gold and ended up taking it to AMC, and they loved it. We developed the script, and got it made as a pilot and picked up to series.
TONY: And, it’s been a long process. That was over three years ago.
Source: Full interview @ Collider
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