Al Jean on The Simpsons: "Let's Do Something That Could Blow Up in Our Faces — At Least We'll Be Trying"

Al Jean said it plainly: "I really love the Sound of Music Live and Grease Live and I thought: this is exciting. Let's not be comfortable. Let's d…" — and Premier Guide Miami was in the room when it happened.

On May 9, 2016, FOX hosted a press conference call with The Simpsons executive producer Al Jean ahead of the landmark "Homer Live" episode airing Sunday, May 15 at 8/7 Central on FOX — the first time Homer Simpson would appear live in real-time during the final three minutes of an all-new episode. Premier Guide Miami was among the outlets on the call. Below are the key exchanges from the conversation.

Technically, how will Homer Live work?

It's motion capture, which has been in existence actually as long ago as the year 2000 — we made fun of it. We considered doing a live appearance on The Tonight Show by Homer to promote The Simpsons Movie in 2007, but what we saw at the time didn't seem to have smooth enough animation so we didn't use it. Now it's advanced to the point where we think we can do three minutes of the show. Homer is animated live and Dan Castellaneta will be in a booth where he speaks into a mic and obviously what he says goes out live. He's not hooked up by electrodes or anything. His motions are captured and translated into Homer's moves, which will then appear in the animation. It will look like the normal show. We have background animation that's been pre-animated with several jokes, but everything Homer does — the center of it — is live.

Why Homer specifically, and not another character?

There are a couple of reasons. To many, but not entirely, Homer is the central character of the show. Secondly, Dan Castellaneta does improv all the time. He's terrific at improv and it was just a natural fit. The writer of the episode, John Frink, who had the idea to do the live segment, built an episode around Homer failing to give a good speech and then going and learning improv to try to boost his confidence. Dan played both Homer and the improv teacher in the episode. Dan is the natural guy.

What's your best and worst case scenario for something like this?

We've done some rehearsals. The first two were a little rough, which you expect from a rehearsal. Then we kind of got the phone lines down smoothly. The best case is like the last two rehearsals we had where it ran smoothly. Dan is just really funny. If Dan is kind of finding an answer as Homer it's almost funnier than having an answer — the way he kind of stumbles over words and gets to something and you never see where he's going. The worst case: we've actually recorded a fallback, if God forbid there was a blackout Sunday and we had no power or something. We'll air a full episode Sunday regardless, but we already have our failsafe.

What inspired you to do this?

John Frink was the one who pitched the show. What inspired us is that The Simpsons is such a great place — you don't have to convince people that The Simpsons is a success. You get to work not just on the show but on a movie or a short or a ride or a theme park. When something like this comes up we can make it happen. I pitched it to Jim after John suggested it, and he jumped at it. He just said this is great, this is the kind of thing we should do. I really love the Sound of Music Live and Grease Live and I thought: this is exciting. Let's not be comfortable. Let's do something that could blow up in our faces — but at least we'll be trying.

On the toughest part of being a showrunner:

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The toughest part I would say is if something goes wrong it's your fault. I'm lucky to be on a show where nothing really has gone wrong for 27 years, but now that's kind of my fault. Some people are like, why did he continue — and of course it's not just me, it's a million people working on the show. It's funny to me that even our success is something that gets criticized, as if doing a show that people continue to watch and that means so much to so many is in itself something we should not be so proud of.

On the writing room after 27 seasons:

We have two rooms. Once a year we pitch all our ideas to Jim and Matt and me. The ideas that go over well are written up into outlines and then stories. Then the rooms go over the scripts again and again and again until we get to a table read with the cast. Then it's rewritten again and recorded and rewritten several times before it finally airs. My main job is as a writer. I'm the head writer. Most of my days are spent writing. Honestly, the rewarding part of my day is writing. I've written 20 scripts, but I have contributions to over 500 of them that have aired. TV is a really collaborative medium.

On VR and the future of interactive storytelling:

We've actually met with several different people regarding VR and I've tried it. I think it's got enormous potential. I think about Google Glass — we did a show about it and it was supposed to be the wave of the future and it really didn't take off. You have to be careful judging what the medium is going to be of choice in the future. But there's no question the different media that arise will be part of them. We actually do an episode about VR this fall where Burns wants a family so he hires everybody in the Simpson family except Homer to be the voices of his family and lives in this artificial world. What I thought when I put on VR was: you wanted more. You wanted to be able to go more places in the world. And I think people really look stupid when they're doing it.

On the Prince episode that never happened:

I have the script that we sent to him, which he didn't want to do because Jim pitched that Prince play the same character Michael Jackson had, and Prince just didn't want to. The script that was written — I believe by someone who worked for Prince — by that time David Mirkin was running the show and he got that script. I don't know if he still has it but I don't. With regard to our draft I released three pages online and I felt that that's enough and I should respect that Prince didn't want to do it and we'll leave it there. Personally I had seen him in concert several times and nobody was better. He was just phenomenal. It was a real loss.

On how long a regular episode takes to animate:

For a regular show, not the live one, it's about six months — or maybe more like nine months. First they board it. Now the storyboards are on an iPad so it's actually more like looking at an animatic, which is great. You can really see a lot more. Then we have the animatic, which we screen with the staff, and then it goes to the final color animation. The same basic time has been the same since the show started — about nine months. There's a joke I always tell: we've already joked about the Soviet Union and by the time the show came back the Soviet Union had broken up. We had to change the joke. But fortunately it's getting back together. It'll work out.

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Al Jean on the simpsons — this is the kind of conversation Premier Guide Miami was built to have. Follow us for more Love Miami.