Bruno Heller's Interview about The Mentalist

TV Time Machine has interviewed The Mentalist's Creator Bruno Heller.
You can listen to audio HERE
It might contain spoilers for Season 5.

Click on Read More for a transcription of a part of the interview.



Bruno Heller on Jane and Lisbon: (Thanks to webuiltthepyramids for the transcription)


Jim Bensen: Tell us about the relationship, the rather complicated relationship that (Lisbon) has with Jane.

Bruno Heller: Yeah, that relationship is and is meant to be a kind of...well, Rorschach test would be wrong, but it stays in an ambivalent area because it's...it's not necessarily (potent? important?) but I like that the audience is never quite sure, as those two are never quite sure where the relationship might go, and it's been growing in real time over the course of the five years of the show, but again, it's one of those things that I think is very important to show, and to reflect the genuine passing of time in the character's life but also in the actors' lives. And as Simon Baker and Robin have been working together for the five years now and have grown very close and are very good friends, um, and have a great deal of affection for each other, that has increasingly come through, and again, that's one of those things, like, in a movie or a cable show, you can work against a natural slope of a character or a natural course of events, on a network TV show it's important to work with the characters and the actors, and where their relationship with each other is actually going, and how they feel about each other. So it would be foolish to build animosity between them when in fact what you can catch on screen in a beautiful way is two people who have a telepathy between them and have great affection for each other and are amused by each other and are exasperated by each other. All of those things are real things that happen to any two people who are working together that long and that kind of intimate situation. And that's what people see on the screen. At the same time, some people think they are secretly in love with each other, and some people are horrified by that thought. And...it's a brother and sister relationship and it can't possibly go that way, but...in truth, it's like life. If they find each other in the future, it will be a wonderful, inevitable surprise to them. Or, if they remain good friends, and colleagues, that is also natural. It's really about letting that relationship flow as opposed to coming up with story ideas for it and, you know, and like, "how can we..." which isn't to say we don't tweak it occasionally, I...I mean, from a male writer's point of view it's very hard not to fall in love with Robin Tunney as an actress and as a character, so inevitably, as time rolls on, more of that affection appears in the scripts and on the screen, but who knows? Who knows where it will go? I think, speaking as the characters, they're too deeply into what they're doing, and the journey they're on, to be able to step back and look at their relationship. I think it would be very scary for them to do that. And you know, they will do that, in the future, but that's for the future.