Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: lanterns

Lanterns Editor-Assoc. Producer on Mundy and Hal & John's Stories

Editor-associate producer Vikash Patel on reuniting with Ozark's Chris Mundy for HBO's Lanterns, establishing Hal & John's dynamic, and more.

Associate producer and editor Vikash Patel is certainly not short on credibility in adapting comic book projects to the screen, with his experience on TV shows like TNT's Snowpiercer and the WB's Smallville, and bringing those experiences into the HBO series Lanterns. His approach, however, might be a little unorthodox, since he relies more on the showrunners and the writing than on simply referencing the source material. In part one of our interview, Patel spoke to Bleeding Cool about how he got to work on the Chris Mundy, Tom King, and Damon Lindelof-created series, and establishing storytelling balance between the more seasoned Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chander) and Lantern-in-training John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) in the first couple of episodes.

Lanterns Editor-Producer Vikash Patel on Establishing the Baseline with Hal and John, and Infusing the Green Lantern Mythology

Bleeding Cool: What intrigued you about 'Lanterns', and how did you get involved?

Patel: To be honest, I've never really been a comic book person per se, but I've worked with Chris Mundy, the showrunner; we did the whole run of 'Ozark' together. I had heard about the project when Chris was developing it at HBO, and Chris basically said, "Oh, yeah, this is going to be the next thing we're going to do," and that was in February 2024. He'd mentioned it, and then the following year we started, and that was where it all started, and it's been a fun ride.

As you're settling into that universe, did Chris tell you to read some of the comics, or were there any stories that he told you to focus on?

No, for me, it's more about what's in the material that I must work on: the scripts. I've worked on adaptations before, and the question is, should I read that book or not, and it's not? My Bible, in many ways, is the script, so I didn't read any of the comics, but I obviously read all the scripts, and I knew the whole arc of the first season before I started. That's just my conversation request.

How did your previous experience inform and shape how you would approach and tackle "Lanterns"?

Yeah, having such a wonderful relationship with Chris, there's a lot of trust, and there's a lot of shorthand we've developed over almost like 10 years of working together. We did all four seasons of 'Ozark' in 44 episodes, so we finish each other's sentences, et cetera, but we also talked about the music, editing rhythms, the aesthetics, and what he was hoping for, the feeling, and how we were going to use needle drops and score, all those things. We helped to build the template of the series and the style. I often talk about the sandbox that we play in, so creating and helping to define that sandbox with cinematographers, directors, and the sound team with Chris. This is the world of 'Lanterns' that we're allowed to play in, and let's have fun and stay, but as long as we stay in that box and are true to that, then it's going to have this cohesive feel.

Obviously, this isn't your first comic adaptation with your work on 'Snowpiercer' and 'Smallville.' Has working on those things helped you in your experience, or did you isolate those experiences from your work on the show?

Absolutely, I think every project I worked on influences my current work. Great examples there in terms of 'Snowpiercer' and 'Smallville.' Those series and those pilots were very VFX-heavy, so using all the information that I had learned over the years regarding VFX, and then starting to work with our wonderful VFX team on 'Lanterns' was incredibly beneficial. Understanding and helping develop that pipeline with the entire team, with Matt [Colonna], Emily [Greene], and Kiegan [Downs], and understanding, "Hey, we have a pre-vis team, a post-vis team, and then sitting in those creative conversations with Chris and Greg [Steele] to fine-tune the VFX shots. It's a big VFX-heavy show. It may not look like it, but it's extremely large.

I imagine some parts felt like a jigsaw puzzle, especially when you're working on Hal and John's stories. What notes did you get as far as how you want to focus on which part? How do you put it all together if you want to cite a specific episode?

We know who our main characters are. For example, (we ask ourselves) are we tracking with John or Hal in a scene or for the episode? The pilot is very much world-building. We're meeting these characters. We start with young John, and we learn about him until we meet Hal, and then we're introduced to Hal, who's this weathered grizzly guy who's a bit jaded, not really overly friendly. That comes across apparently very immediately in the first scene in the car between them. We find out how Hal got this cocky attitude. He's just disgruntled, et cetera. The pilot episode is interesting because the pilot is a lot of world-building and lays the pipe for the rest of the series.

When you pivot to episode two ("Trust Fall"), where we split our timeline, or the episode in terms of our two main leads, we follow Hal on his investigation of the aliens and what happened at the high school; then John is on an errand for Hal as well. When we have time with John, we get a little bit of the mythology. We're getting to learn about the suit, et cetera. We will also meet Antaan (Paul Ben-Victor). We hear about Manhunters, and then those two worlds collide again at the end of the episode, so it's been interesting building episode two. The structure of episode two is different than what we had, and how we finally made it. We shuffled scenes to start with how to cement his investigational journey. We put that up front, and then we moved away and went to John. It was on the page differently, and that's the thing: as we started watching the series all put together, Chris and I were having those conversations, also with the studio, et cetera, and we leaned into our merits and where we should be focused on our story and attention at that given point.

Lanterns, which also stars Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Ulrich Thomsen, and Nathan Fillion, airs Sundays on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

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