Heroes Unmasked (2007) s01e05 Episode Script

The artwork of Heroes is one of the stars of the show.
From canvas paintings to comics strips these colourful creations hold the key to our heroes' destiny.
Everything that we see in the pilot is in the comic book and everything we will see in future episodes have been shown before in one of Isaac's paintings.
Dreamt up behind the scenes by a team of comic book legends, this artwork has defined the look of the series, and become sought after and celebrated in its own right.
It's kinda cool to be a comic book character and have a bunch of people asking "Hey, can I have the copy of the one where you fly off the building?" Put up an easel and find out when this artistic journey began.
I wanted to incorporate some comic book pieces into the actual script itself when I turned it in to the network to try to get it picked up, because I thought it would be important for them to to see some of the comic book genre element on the page.
And so I went to my friend Jeff Loeb who I've known for many many years.
He called me and he said: "I need a guy that can paint, I need a guy that can draw, I need a guy that can keep up with the production and I need a guy who lives in L.
A.
" So, you know, fortunately, the little card-calendar that I carry around in my head, I said: "I think you need to meet Tim Sale" Then, when it became apparent that this character in the show, Isaac Mendez, was going to paint the future and that we'd need somebody to actually paint those paintings, Tim became the perfect choice for it because I had also conceived this idea that that the Isaac character would have made his living by doing comic book illustrations.
So we needed this artist to actually have somebody who can paint this stuff, and that's where, that's how Tim Sale was hired.
With a lasting history in comic book illustrations, Tim Sale has insured that the artistic tone of Heroes has been in good hands from the start.
Tim Sale's been great.
He's a comic book artist and he's doing my character's drawings and we've established a relationship since the pilot.
The first time we met he came out to my studio and we talked about art and maybe the way that my approach could be.
And since then we've been, whatever I had questions about that world and about, you know, his job he was always there for me and he's been sending me kind of attachments in e-mails of the drawings he's been doing.
So it's great.
So when I do see them on set, they seem familiar to me, and that's a good thing.
For Isaac Mendez, who lives in a world of haze and heroin, his pictures carry a heavy burden.
As try to paint the future and save the world is no easy task.
No wonder he's feeling a little off color.
Isaac Mendez is a New York-based artist and I would say he's someone who is self-destructive, tortured, but within that he has the ability to be an artist and he can paint the future.
There was a bright light.
Like an explosion that wiped out the whole city.
- Like Hiroshima or - Shhh.
It's ok.
It was only a dream.
No.
I don't think so.
- Yes.
- I shot up last night, I had to.
- I painted what I saw.
It is there.
Do you see it? - Yes I see it, but you need to rest.
We have to warn them.
Like of many artist and many people that because of that hypersensitivity that he has, I think he needs he thinks he needs the drugs.
At the same time he's discovering things that are supposedly gonna happen in the world, I mean bombs and explosions and really these terrible things that are, that are, happening.
So I think it's a bit of a nightmare.
Look around you at all these paintings! Everyone of them has come true.
Oh, and does it include this big one on the floor of New York going nuclear? Yes.
I knew that this was a very powerful ability, for a storyteller to have a character that can tell the future.
In some ways too powerful.
As a as a kind of writer's crutch, you can always just have a character who's gonna tell you what's gonna happen.
And so I think I undercut it by having it be only accessible through this very self destructive activity.
The drama of having a power that can only be accessed by taking drugs, in this case heroin which is, you know, is killing him, or could kill him, I thought that that was a fascinating idea: this idea that in order to access this power I had to be high.
We have to stop it.
He's painted New York exploding, going nuclear, so that's something that's very essential to the story and essential to, in a way we could say Isaac's mission, which would become "I need to stop this, I don't know how but this is gonna happen because I know that what I'm painting is happening".
The only person he has is Simone.
And she doesn't believe him, she wants him go to rehab.
I don't want to lose you, Simone.
But if you don't believe in me, then you shouldn't be here.
It was inevitable that Simone wouldn't have stuck around.
Fine.
You think that you paint the future.
Make one without me in it.
You know, you could blame it on the drugs, but I think there was something that, that Isaac wasn't giving to Simone as a catalyst for her to not stick around.
And to question what he was doing and why they were together, I think heroin's addiction just compounds that.
He is very intense by nature, but he sees a sketch of Peter and Simone kissing under the rain under the umbrella and that kind of, among all his problems, that kind of crashes him.
So there's a love triangle that'll keep you know, people wondering or cheering for one side or cheering for the other.
- You in love with him? - I don't know how I feel about him.
And I don't know how I feel about you.
So here we are not knowing how we feel about each other and this entire city's gonna go Boooooom.
Unless I stop it.
I think his focus is on saving the city by doing anything possible to do that.
And that's the very joining element, is kind of a a nucleus in that way beacuse his paintings reveal something, as clues, that there's gonna be something withing the story that's gonna make a lot of these characters come together; which, you know, makes this loft a very essential place in the story.
Isaac's home is a work of art in itself, a set created by the design team to perfectly match his taste and temperament.
Isaac has style.
As far as I'm concerned, everyone has style.
I tried to get very specific about colors and forniture and wanted it to look as much like New York as I could, even though I based it on a building in Milan.
It was that kind of 1930's factory look, that's what I wanted, because I felt it had a very clean aesthetic, and having that very clean aesthetic to start with, you could add the chaos to it.
You can read the chaos a little bit more by having those kind of '30s streamline details; I tried to choose all kind of functional type of forniture, as opposed to decorative.
Also just the artist process as part of the, you know, the decoration: paper, pens, books not a lot of, you know, him being a junkie, there's not a lot of food.
There's nothing personal in there, I mean is all personal: his work is his person.
That's all he does.
His work, his art that's where it all comes from.
This loft has brought a lot to building this caharcter, I mean, in a way he became a very messy painter; it's like, you see there's paint everywhere, and paint canvases it's kind of a very open space where you can see, when Isaac's here and he's painting and getting his ideas, he's throwing stuff around, there's a lot of easels everywhere, so it's like his mind is everywhere, not just kind of just staying in one place.
So it's brought a lot to the character and it's been a lot of fun to work here, and make this space your own.
Isaac! Santiago does a brilliant job playing Isaac.
But he can't paint anymore so that Adrian can fly.
But we had to have the paintings, so and now one of the secrets of this is that Tim Sale does not paint either.
The art that I create is relatively small, is about 10 inches by 15 inches.
And then it's blown up and colored and printed onto canvas, so they're not actual paintings: they're more just props.
Then the prop department takes it and they blow it up onto a canvas.
And we can make them small, big and bring them wherever we want.
And the first time we tore up a painting, that audible gasp on the set, it was actually quite fascinating, because they legitimately thought these where things that somewhere, in that sort of Rumpel Stiltskin fashion, Tim Sale was overnight painting paintings that we were then destroying.
To see it transformed, from what I have done on the paper to something that's And then to see that on tv is I've never had anything like it, it's just great.
The process of, on a weekly basis, having to logistically get these paintings ready, it's been really an amazing feat.
The comic book art is generally done from what they call "screen grabs", which is an image from the show that they've already filmed then I will draw and make it look like that, but the paintings are there as story plot-points, so they're part of the scriptand I get the script, look at the descriptions and talk with people about exactly what they want and take from there.
He's given fairly specific frames from the writers of what they want, but frequently he is designing or painting, creating these paintings before we found a location or before we've gotten to that set.
So, in the beginning it was really very difficult to keep up with him because then we'd had to match something that didn't really exist.
After a few episodes Ross, our Prop Master, and I got really involved in trying to get the information to Tim Sale first.
I usually go to the location, where that's at, take a photograph, maybe get a model that looks close to whoever's in the painting whether it'd be Peter or Isaac, and we put them in the wardrobe and we take a photograph of it and so Tim has his digital image and then he paints from that image.
After the first ones, that were a little tricky, we gave him the location, like the school, we actually brought him out to the school; we got him in a van and took him out to the school so he could see the school and the angles and get inspired from it.
I think the school was really very inspiring for, you know, a graphic illustrator.
The whole amphitheatre, we pick specifically beacuse it has a very graphic novel quality to it, the walls were all very graphic and shaped very cleanly.
It's tricky but between all of us we work it out.
That comic book style is maintaining throughout the series and even defines how Heroes is shot.
Tim Kring from the beginning wanted a show that had a look that was different to anything else that was on television.
We wanted a lot of shots to have a graphic novel kind of feel to them, and camera is in places that you very rarely see it.
We sort of have this thing that I tell the directors, I say: "See the spaces, see the faces!".
We try to shoot very big wide cinematic shots and then we come up with very big close-ups of our very beautiful cast.
Isaac Mendez? Who are you? I'm an admirer of your work.
You'll find a high and wide or you'll find a low, very dramatic angle like that.
They will show you the entire room to you and then we can come right in here and sell the face, which is the second half of the expression.
That way the audience has a very intimate way of dealing with the characters, because they're right up in their faces.
They're very much like the panels of a comic book.
So they're really integrating that to the story.
And the comic book theme is never lost in translation, have a look of their own.
American television is not some of the fear early on was that we were going to suffer from a certain amount of fatigue of They made a conscious decision to put these what a comic book would.
We discovered in the editing room as though they were dialogue bubbles from a comic book kind of kept it fresh and had a unique, uhm, look to it.
But again, it was a wink and a nod to the comic book role.
So what does the future hold for our drug-addled artist? People say "Can he only do it on drugs?", he thinks he can only do it on drugs, but I you know, the way I saw the character, I was always thinking it's in him, you know, like any great artist.
I think that his talent is his talent and, if you think it's the drug, it's not: it's what is in him.
So, maybe when he start painting when he's off drugs, maybe he will start to put it into very good use.
So there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
You know, good twists and different places to go to.
But next time, drugs are the least of Isaac's worries.
How's he doing? Heroin's out of his system.
His body doesn't want it anymore, but his mind still does.
- Coherent? Very.
You ready to meet him? Ya.