Arthur, of whom the series is named after, brings you right into the life of a forty year old man who loves his breakfasts, the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and the quiet environment of his house.
The ten episode series challenges assumptions people make based on outward appearances, as viewers come to learn that Arthur has an underlying darker side.
But Arthur is determined to turn over a new leaf after his fiancé leaves him. The question that follows Arthur’s road to redemption: is nature the only force we simply cannot fight?
Did you do a lot of research about psychopaths and serials killers when writing the character of Arthur?
No, we did not. We clearly had a type in mind – a stereotype – that we wanted to portray as Arthur, but the most important thing about him is that he is an outsider, a man that does not fit so well with other human beings, and the killing thing is just an exaggeration of this aspect.
The real psychopath is Zed – Zodiac: we knew from the beginning that he has to be the real Zodiac, the one that nobody ever caught in San Francisco so many years ago. So we read a lot of material about what we knew about him, from Graysmith’s book to the David Fincher movie that is ultimately based on the book.
Describe the ultimate fan of your series?
Well, have you ever wanted to crash your noisy neighbour’s car, or punch an obnoxious woman right in the face while working? Dude, there you are, you are our fan!
What was the most difficult challenge you had to overcome in production, and how did you go about it?
Every production comes with some problems, that’s part of the fun. Budget is never enough, mostly because you have an idea in mind of the image and the content quality that never aligns well with the online products expectations.
You have to ask people to work hard, and then harder. You have to find screenplay’s solutions that leave a certain type of scene out of the picture (which is also because Arthur is a Tessin public television’s product, so we could not exactly murder Mrs Huber in front of the camera).
And there’s another kind of problem that is strictly defined by social media. Once you‘re done with filming the series, you’d naturally think that your work is done. When actually it is just the beginning: it is not enough to put it on YouTube and wait for it to go viral. It doesn’t happen that easily, you need a strategy and a brand new budget to give it the occasion to be seen.
What’s special or different about your series?
We tried to take an aspect of our everyday life and exaggerate it, to let everybody acknowledge the fact that we are all a bit psycho when we are free of society’s inhibitions. We love Arthur because he’s funny, and cool, and he did what all of us have wanted to do at least once in his everyday life.
The web project behind Arthur was also really peculiar: when the series was released last October it was followed by an online “serial game”. Basically you watched the episode and you had to find the clues in it, clues that will lead you to a mysterious character and a cypher. There was a money reward for the first one who could decipher the letter in the end, and we made an event in our local cinema with all the people that played with Arthur. It was really cool.
Have you achieved the goals you set for this series?
Well, it is going really well internationally, but what we really want to do is to start working on the second season. We really hope to find the necessary funds, although it is quite difficult to finance a web project because basically there’s no economic return from it.
What do you want audiences to take away from your series?
We want them to enjoy it, to have fun watching it and we want them to ask their self “What happens next? I want another episode!”
Arthur on the web:
Arthur’s Website
Arthur on Facebook
Arthur on Twitter