More SXSW catch-up.
During his SXSW Film Festival Q&A, David Gordon Green revealed a few small, but key details about “Eastbound & Down” the HBO show created by his good filmmaker friends, Ben Best and Jody Hill, starring Danny McBride. The trio were the team behind Hill’s breakthrough film, “The Foot Fist Way” and Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are executive producers on the show. The show, if you haven’t seen it, centers on Kenny Powers (McBride), a former professional baseball pitcher, who after a disappointing career is forced to return to his hometown middle-school in Shelby, North Carolina as a substitute physical education teacher.
While Green isn’t one of the creators of the show or a writer, he did direct three episodes (2-4) of the first season and he basically said they got away with murder. “We approached it like a movie, he said. “We also did it under the radar for HBO. It was like the biggest student film ever. A lot of our buddies were in it. We just kinda slipped a lot of things into it.”
While Green wasn’t able to discuss too many details, he did say second season would be longer (season 1 only had six episodes) and things would get even more out of hand. So where are they going in season two? “Dangerous, dangerous places,” he laughed. “We’re leaving the country and leaving most of the characters behind. I don’t know that I’m allowed to say where we’re going, but it’s pretty dark. I just read the first episode and we’re going doing 8 episodes and it’s going to be a longer and more complicated view of Kenny Powers fucking up.”
No word on when that second season will hit, but considering they haven’t started shooting yet, it may be late 2010 at the earliest.
