Insufferable Nic Pizzolatto Says Insufferable Things About 'True Detective' Season 2

By Dustin Rowles | True Detective | August 11, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | True Detective | August 11, 2015 |

I have been wondering where True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has been lately. Most writers and showrunners give interviews, do press rounds, promote their shows on social media, and give post-mortems after each episode.

Pizzolatto has been dead silent this season. The man hasn’t so much as tweeted since May. He’s given no interviews. He’s spoken to no publications. He’s not even appeared at events promoting HBO.

Except … over the weekend, he did do a Live Q&A for HBO Connect, where he answered a few softball questions he no doubt chose himself.

Even then, he was insufferable.

On how he chose the distinctive names this season:

Some of it’s as simple as paging through an old phone book and finding surnames that fit, which is an old habit. The way people you know all seem to fit their names, right? I think about the characters, their ancestries and natures. Their identities suggest something phonetically, at a rhythmic level (like, the name ‘Bezzerides’ rises up and down and sounds jagged, like a buzzsaw). That stuff’s probably married to my affection for the pulp tradition of indelible names.

Their identities suggest something phonetically, at a rhythmic level ? Is this guy for real? Can he really talk like that? Can he not hear his own words?

Here’s how he answered whether “We get the world we deserve” was this season’s thesis:

I’m not sure that it’s a thesis statement, but I do think that line and the themes you noticed amplify and echo one another. Everybody’s external world is reflective of their inner life. Velcoro’s outlook sort of casually asserts that the world and the systems that govern it are products of our choices and desires. It’s a statement of culpability, more than anything, the idea that the condition of our world is the manifestation of human character.

I bet he’s a goddamn delight at dinner parties.

And just so you know, even though Stan may have been a very minor character on the series, there’s a lot more to him — and other minor characters — that we don’t know about because Nicky Pizza devotes a lot of effort to their backstories:

A lot of backstory. Pages and pages of biography go into every character, even minor ones. Most of these things never appear in the show, but still inform a character’s identity and choices, and give the actors more to pull from, even if onscreen we only see the tip of those icebergs. Backstory is still being laid out, even in the show’s final movements, but there is definitely much more than ever sees the screen.

Stan might have just been standing next to a guy in the bar saying nothing, but his extensive backstory informed the way he stood, y’all. THERE WAS MORE TO HIM THAT WE WILL EVER KNOW. He had pure gold inside of him! PURE GOLD.

You can read the rest of the answers here, but I wouldn’t advise it.