HBO’s “Lanterns” Director Talks Series Tone

HBO is currently in production on “Lanterns,” a grounded take on the DC Comics “Green Lantern” property that looks to play out like a GL story blended with a gritty investigation drama.

The series is set primarily on Earth and sees new recruit John Stewart teamed with Lantern legend Hal Jordan as the two intergalactic cops are drawn into a dark mystery involving a murder in the American heartland.

So it begs the obvious question – just how grounded can you go when your leads are pair of guys that can fly through air and space and have rings that can generate energy projections of any shape and size?

Key to that will be James Hawes, the British TV director who will helm the first two episodes of the season and set the tone for the rest of the series run.

Hawes recently directed the Rami Malek-led film “The Amateur” but is mostly known for his work on TV on shows like “Black Mirror,” “Mad Dogs,” “Penny Dreadful,” “Doctor Who,” “The Alienist,” “Merlin,” and “Snowpiercer”.

However its his most recent TV gig, directing the entire first season of the highly acclaimed Apple TV+ series “Slow Horses,” that will seemingly inform how the series will work in terms of tone. Speaking with Collider, he discussed his vision for the show:

“There is a very particular humor that they brought to this. It’s very rooted in a way that I like to think we achieve with Slow Horses, that I achieve with things like my Black Mirror’s, and yet there is a rich vein of humor running through it.

So, again, it was about that tone. I’m such a huge fan of Damon [Lindelof] and Chris [Mundy] and the writing that they’ve done in the past…it all starts from the script.

Superheroes are not somewhere I’ve really played before, but it’s created in such a way – and I can’t tell you much – that it bewitched me. It doesn’t lack its sci-fi magic, but it’s done in a world where you accept that these things just are. They don’t need that extra sprinkle of sci-fi fairy dust. It works within a physical world that we’ve come to know.

You get people who are just so classy and so busy inhabiting their roles, so you never doubt it. They’re not on the outside – they’re deep in those skins.”

Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Nicole Ari Parker, Jason Ritter, J. Alphonse Nicholson, and Jasmine Cephas Jones co-star in the series which sees Chris Mundy (“True Detective: Night Country”) serving as showrunner and executive producer while Damon Lindelof (“Watchmen,” “The Leftovers”) and comic book scribe Tom King write.

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