Evan Goldberg: The season gets a lot more in line with some of the comic stuff, that being said, it’s still fantastically different from the comics.

SR: There’s no one episode I think that reflects any one issue of the comic. Maybe it’s the closest it’s ever been this season but, yeah, I think it is beginning to take the shape a little bit more of the comic. The writers take a lot of creative freedom as far as just trying to make the best TV show that they humanly can, that is just the prime directive that they have put in front of themselves, is: how do we make the best TV show.

EG: People were always trying to make a film out of it and it was a flawed mission because it is just too big a thing. That’s what the general appeal for me was and has been, in both the comic and the show, it’s the universe, and everything’s in play.

SR: In Season 2 we are really exploring the side characters, and the back stories of the characters. More than anything when I watch the show, not just on a story standpoint but a content level, we do things that we would have a really hard time getting away with in a movie. There are characters in the show doing things that, as much creative freedom that movies have, it would be pretty tricky to get some of that by. On TV right now there letting us do it so it’s not just from a narrative standpoint, from a content standpoint, bizarrely. There’s a lot of things in the show that I watch and think, we’d have a hard time convincing a movie studio to let us do that.

EG: We also want to show the Preacher preaching, which is different from the source material. That was a conscious decision from our conversations with Garth and Sam, we discussed how the comic just kind of goes from zero to sixty and tells you a lot of info very quickly and also it never shows the Preacher preaching. You know, he’s got to sell those comics, get everyone hooked, but we have a bit more time.

SR: We want to explore his relationship with that a little bit more. I think if you read comics it’s not that crazy, a lot of the ideas, but if you’re just someone who watches television and don’t read comics, the ideas are pretty out there! So we try to be aware of that and kind of slowly build up to some of the things that if you’re a comic book reader you can just accept. It’s not as jarring if you’re the type of person that is geared towards that anyway and we try to be aware that the people who watch the show are hopefully not just people who are instantly able to throw themselves into these completely alternate universes, with completely alternate rules and very large kind of world building ideas. We thought in order to ground the show we would kind of build up to some of that stuff.

SR: One of the most exciting things is kind of like the different tones the show is able to take on. It’s able, we hope, to be funny and kind of ironic almost, kind of winking at the camera sometimes, and then very scary and very thrilling and shocking. We thought if there was a way to kind of do all those things before the credits even started, that would be very challenging but hopefully show the full range of what the show’s able to do, tonally, in basically one little five minute chunk and one of the most exciting things to us in the show is that hopefully you’ll have no idea what’s going to happen.

EG: One thing we do at the starting point, we never let money stop us from consuming an idea, if a black hole appears maybe we need a [dark] garbage bag, I don’t know.

SR: Production self-awareness is key I think, when swinging between tones, like really taking the time to think how the audience is going to be perceiving any given moment of what they’re watching and really trying to take as much ownership over that as possible, and really trying to have all the necessary conversations with everybody to navigate that. When it’s something like the car chase, that was something that as we were filming it we were saying, we wanted it to look bad because mostly we weren’t able to afford a good one and so we were like, if we can’t take five days and film a good car chase, let’s take half a day and let everyone know that we are not trying to make this look good, in fact the other way. We’re really indulging in the fun, cheesiness of it. It also serves the story because in that moment it’s like all come together in this fun, perfect moment so that was something we had a lot of conversations about and honestly, if we had unlimited resources, there’s a chance it wouldn’t look like that and actually been like a cool, fast and furious type of car chase. But ultimately when I look at it, it looks a lot cooler. So sometimes logistics dictate those decisions, but again, it’s really taking ownership of it and knowing ok, we’re a TV show, you watch the best TV shows and sometimes the special effects are dicey at times; so we’re not the most expensive TV show on television so again, how do we try to do whatever we want and never tell the writers to limit themselves and then to really think, how do we do this in a way that shows self-awareness, and hopefully plays with the tonal expectations of what people are watching.

SR: In the pilot it shows the tonal spectrum of the show. We can have a car chase that has life and death stakes and you’re genuinely afraid someone might die, and we can also have a car chase with the same characters where that’s not at all the case We’re able to remove all the stakes from the situation and make it feel like they’re on an amusement park ride almost, you know? To us, those are the conversations we would have again, just part of the fun of the show. There are a lot of great shows on television but tone is not something people play with as much as we are trying to do, and it’s all from the comics, one hundred percent from the comics.

EG: And I guess also many comics, this being one of them, they have different artists come in, I think that is one of the things that inspired us to do all of this [with different directors]. The covers are drawn differently and that gives you a different emotional attachment to it than the art inside.

SR: We like to give the show different looks, and even when other directors come on we really encourage them to not follow our blueprint. We have no rules and honestly, we didn’t even know other TV shows did! It was out of pure ignorance. We didn’t know when you interview directors for your show you say, oh, our show does this, we have masters and singles. We’d just show them what we had done, and say we’re pretty much just going for it, just really trying to take risks that serve the scenes, the stories and the characters, and we want you guys to do the same.

EG: It has backfired on us three or four times.

SR: Yeah, but in general it’s surprising. You don’t know what you’re going to get. To see how the different directors approach the material, it is like seeing different comic book artists approach the same material in some ways, which we like.