Heroes's first season finale ended with a tease for what Season Two will entail. Hiro lands in Feudal Japan as a result of his latest time jump, and it looks like he's staying a while. So how does a TV show based in Los Angeles create Feudal Japan?
Tim Kring on Hiro's Final Destination
"Well, as you know, LA has doubled for many, many things and on this show," said creator Tim Kring. "It's doubled for lots of things. So it's a fairly rural view of Feudal Japan which allows us a lot of the outlying areas. Feudal Japan is within 50 miles of here and various locations in Northern [California,] Santa Monica Mountains, some north valley. As I said, we're keeping it a very rural story. We're not trying to depict a city in Feudal Japan."
Hiro already faces a small army in the brief preview, and such a storyline should entail more massive hoards. "Obviously not huge. We're doing some stuff with CGI and designing the story so that they're not completely dependent on anything that's going to have to look like a $200 million feature. That's always been our dilemma on a show like this. It circles in the same world as a lot of big giant budget movies but it has to come at things from a different way so that we can actually produce it every week."
You'd think after a hit first year, they'd give Kring more money. "One would think that that would happen but it's a very large company with a bottom line so there is a natural bump in every budget every year because of contracts and cost of living and all that kind of stuff. So we've been held to the standard that we were. The good news about a second season is that we learned a tremendous amount from mistakes. You learn how to get more efficient, how to move faster. For us, number of days of shooting has always been our big issue and that usually centers around how many pages we can do. That has to do with efficiency."
So as of now, Feudal Japan is as far back as Kring wants to visit. He hasn't thought of any other historical storylines. "Not as of now, no."
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