Creator Matt Nix

They get BURNED...

This summer, USA Network presents the third season of Burn Notice, a sexy, action-packed original series starring Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, a blacklisted spy. Dumped in his hometown of Miami without money or resources, Michael struggles to put his life back together and find out why he's been burned. In the meantime, he uses his unique skills and training to help people in need ... mostly people who can't get help from the police.

Burn Notice also stars Gabrielle Anwar as Fiona, a beautiful ex-IRA operative who happens to be Westen’s ex-girlfriend. Bruce Campbell stars as Sam, Michael’s closest buddy in town, a washed up military intelligence contact who is keeping an eye on Michael for the Feds. Also starring is Emmy Award-winner Sharon Gless as Madeline, Michael’s hypochondriac mother, who couldn’t be happier to have her boy back in town.

Created and written by Matt Nix, Burn Notice combines the best of the action/thriller elements with surprising humor and an iconic new breed of spy. Burn Notice returns with all new episodes on Thursday, June 4  at 9/8C. New episodes will air throughout the summer on Thursdays at 9/8C. 

Matt Nix and Kevin Harris, special effects coordinator for the hit series recently answered questions about what we can expect in season 2.

Question> Can you tell us how this season is going to compare to season two and season one.

 Matt Nix>  I think it’s better.  I think it’s going to be – this season has given us an opportunity to explore kind of the characters and the stories in a new way, because now that the format for the show has been pretty well established, like we know kind of how a Burn Notice goes, it gives us a lot more freedom to explore ways of turning that on its head or turning things around or doing new kinds of episodes, because I think that we’re at the point now where the audience is less likely to be disoriented by, you know, Michael going off and doing something in a different environment.  And I think that’s a process that started in season two, but we’ve been able to sort of push it further in season three.

 So I would say in terms of the A stories you see that, and as far as the ongoing seasonal arc goes, we’re exploring more things from their past and a different angle on Michael’s quest to get his old life back.  So at the beginning of the season we’re dealing with something that we haven’t dealt with before, which is Michael’s interactions with the police and how to get them off his back.  And then as the season progresses, you know, Michael sees this as an opportunity to be reengaged with the intelligence community, but that comes with a whole host of challenges and difficulties, especially with folks from his past coming back.

 And as far as the relationships go, in some ways those just kind of get deeper and deeper for us, and we know more about the characters, and so this season is also about dealing with, you know, what does it mean for Michael’s family to know more about what he does, how does that change his relationships with them, and how does it affect his relationship with Fiona that he is trying to be engaged with the intelligence community, how does she feel what that means for their relationship.

Question> Were  there any spy stories, either real or fictional, that you’ve wanted to work into the show, but you couldn’t?

 Matt Nix>  We are always working on different kinds of spy stories.  And I guess I would just say that we end up setting ourselves little challenges and things that we want to do, and then we just kind of bang our heads against them until we can figure out a way to do them.  One of the things that we did this year that we’ve been trying to do for two seasons and just not able to crack until this year was reverse interrogation, which is the technique we used in the second episode of finding out the information from someone’s questions in an interrogation, rather than from asking them questions.  So that was a fun one for us.

 And so now, I’m not done writing the season, so I don’t want to say that there’s anything that we haven’t been able to do, because we’re still trying.  But yes, so we have a whole kind of laundry list of different techniques.

 One of the challenges for us is that a lot of spy techniques take a long time to do, so we’ve done aspects of certain spy techniques, and other aspects are harder for us because we’re usually dealing with problems that take about a week, and a lot of the best spy techniques take a couple years.  So just finding a way to pull that off is always a challenge, but we sort of end up doing the greatest hits of the world’s traitors and spies.

Question> How many episodes are we going to have this season?

 Matt Nix>  Sixteen.  Again, nine in the first mini-season, seven in the second.

Question> It’s been mentioned that season three will focus on the back stories of Michael, Fiona, and Sam.  I’m just curious, how far back are we going to go, and how much more will we see Nate Westen?

 Matt Nix>  How far back are we going to go?  We will be exploring some of the period where Michael was meeting later in the season.  And it’s a little bit difficult to put your finger on, because the idea is over the course of Michael’s career he has had lots of interactions, some of which took place over several years.  And so to be perfectly honest, we try not to nail down a really specific timeline in Michael’s career because it’s not terribly interesting, and it also ends up kind of restricting the kinds of stories we can do once we start saying Michael, these three months in 1997 he was in Belarus.  Well, okay, but what if we need him to take a quick plane flight to Moscow during that period?  We don’t want to nail our feet to the floor with regard to that.

 So we are going to see some of the folks from Fiona’s past and learn more about their past together.  And we’re going to interact with some characters that Michael dealt with over the course of his career.  We’re not really – if your question is are we going to see a lot of characters from Michael’s childhood, the answer is not so far.  And I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s just not something we’re doing.

 And then Nate is in the third episode, and we’re planning on bringing him back in the second-half of … for at least one.  And yes, we love Seth and love having Nate in the shows.  It’s a bit of a challenge for us, just because with the burdens of having a client and a bad guy and usually a couple bad guys, and truck all those actors out to Miami and cram them into 42 minutes.  Seth always hates hearing this, but Nate Westen starts off in more episodes than he ends up in, because we will jump into an episode going, “This is one with Michael’s brother” and then two weeks later we’re tearing out hair out because the script is going to come in at 60 pages or 50, and we’re like, “Okay, maybe Nate comes in next week.”  And Seth sobs into his pillow.

Question> Kevin, what’s been the most complicated effect that you guys have pulled off so far?

Kevin Harris>  So far, they all have their little twists and everything.  Ours is basically location-oriented.  Where we would like to do a huge effect, but because of restrictions and EPA rules, we have to be careful of what we do around water, environmental issues.  Mainly coming up with different types of looks which do not hurt the environment, and different types of debris that’s very lightweight, that is biodegradable.  Those are our biggest challenges here in Florida.

Question> Now what type of effects are you looking forward to in the upcoming season?  Is there something that you’re really excited about?

Kevin Harris>  Basically with this season here is they have stayed away from the normal just blow-it-up, and have really gotten into more of technique style as far as them doing different types of gags.  And that’s really the most fun stuff for us, is doing gag-work.  Blowing a car up or blowing a house up, that’s pretty much easy for us.  Doing a cryogenic gag or doing any type of an electronic gag, that’s more of a challenge for us and it’s really what we’re – you know, we like to do the most.

Question> Matt, now that Michael is supposedly completely on his own and has to deal with the police, I understand there is a specific police detective that is kind of on Michael’s tail.  Could you tell us about that character?

 Matt Nix>  Detective Paxton is played by Moon Bloodgood, and the idea is for a long time Michael was not really showing up in the police computers and he was being protected from some of the consequences of his activities around Miami.  And then once the folks behind his burn notice back off, their sort of going-away present to him after he jumps out of the helicopter is calling the cops on him.  So in the premiere episode he goes to jail for a little while.  And so after that he ends up with Detective Paxton on his tail.  And she’s a really good cop.  And a lot of the resources that Michael would use against – or has used in past seasons against people that have come after him are not available to him with Detective Paxton.

 So for example, in the first season, when Jason Bly came after Michael, Bly was pushing the envelope some; he was doing some things that he ought not to do, and Michael was able to use that against him and get him off his back.  And the problem that they find with Detective Paxton is she’s just a really good, really committed cop, who is really smart and is on to Michael and knows how to mess with him.  So she figures out that – in one of the later episodes she figures out – well, in the fourth episode she figures out that given the sorts of things that Michael, Fiona, and Sam are doing around Miami, if they have a police tail on them all the time, that’s going to make their lives very, very difficult.  So she does that. 

And they can’t really get any angles on her to blackmail her or get her off the case, and so Michael essentially has to convince her that they’re on the same side, which is difficult because Michael’s not really following proper legal procedure in taking care of problems for his clients, and yet at the same time, he is doing things that the Miami PD ought to appreciate. 

And so a lot of times what’s interesting for us is finding adversaries for Michael who are in some ways mirrors of himself.  And in the case of Detective Paxton, she is committed and kind of dogged in the same way that Michael is, and that turns out to be a real problem for him.  And I think that there’s a bit of an understanding between them that if Michael were a cop he would be a cop not unlike Detective Paxton, and if Detective Paxton were a freelancing burn spy then she might not be so unlike Michael, but they are clearly adversaries.  She cannot have people pulling the things that Michael pulls on the streets of Miami, and he can’t be hauled in by the cops, and so there really is no middle ground between the two of them.  Michael has to figure out a way to get her off his back, and she’s not in the mood to compromise.

Question> How much are we going to see of Madeline and Sam?  They interact so beautifully.

 Matt Nix>  More actually.  That’s really fun.  We basically made – Sam blew up Madeline’s house in the finale of season two, and so he’s kind of on the hook for repairs.  So it means that he spends much of the first nine episodes hanging out at Madeline’s, trying to put her house back together, which is made more complicated by the fact that Michael’s father did a lot of the original building on the house, using stolen lumber and improvised parts, so it’s kind of a complicated enterprise and presents new problems, and so him and Madeline are interacting with that.  And then also that Buick that they borrowed from Madeline’s neighbor, Ann …, Sam ends up dating the daughter of the owner of … Madeline’s next-door neighbor, so that gives him another reason to hang out.

 And then the other thing is actually one of the interesting things about this season is that now that Madeline really knows what Michael does; I mean there’s no more, “Who are you again?” or “What do you do again?” or that kind of thing that we did more in the first and second season, it opens up new opportunities for Madeline to participate with Michael, Sam, and Fiona.  Which is not to say it doesn’t turn into anything silly, like Madeline running around with a gun, but there’s no longer any need to explain to Madeline what’s going on when they’re doing a job.  And there are certain things that Madeline can be useful for, and there are things that are appropriate for who she is, but they are nonetheless useful, and that has been a fun thing to explore.

Question> Kevin, you worked on a lot of action movies, such as Transporter 2 and 2 Fast 2 Furious, how difficult is it to scale down movie-sized special effects for a TV budget, show budget, or is that not an issue?

Kevin Harris>  It’s only an issue in logistics, as far as red tape and stuff, which on television we try and meet with the specific agencies and stuff like that, saying, “We have seven days to produce a show and we need to expedite,” and based on my credentials of doing this for about 30 years, I’m able to get a permit within three days, which normally would take 14 days.  And that is really our biggest problem.

 As far as actually doing the gags, it’s basically taking our years of experience and condensing it to do television.  If you’ll notice, we stay more to the bigger stuff; we kind of stay away from the intricate stuff of doing bullet hits and stuff, only because it’s very costly and very time-consuming, where doing an explosion is not as costly and not as time-consuming.  So it’s really – it’s hard to say.  I mean television you work much, much, much faster.  And in features you get much more time, but it’s on a much more grandiose scale.  A normal gag would take us two to three months on a feature, on television we have two to three days. I mean, Burn Notice, if you watch all the other TV shows, and I’ve done quite a few TV shows, characteristically you do one explosion and a couple of mediocre effects.  On Burn Notice we do two to three major gags, plus all the little spy gags as well.  So they really keep us busy.

Question> Kevin, if budget weren’t an issue, what’s the effects sequence you dream of?

Kevin Harris>  I’m more partial to water-type work, boat work, doing a lot of different types of effects on water and with the boats and stuff; it’s a lot more challenging.  I will say that after doing a couple of seasons of SeaQuest and a Hulk Hogan series called Thunder in Paradise, the thing that really needs to be done when you want to do real deep action is you almost have to run simultaneously.  We have a second unit and a first unit.  And on both of those shows there, pretty much your first year they did all of your walk and talk scenes when your second unit was backing it up with all the action sequences.  And in that case there is my difference as far as time versus money.  There it’s both; you’re going to get double the time, although you’re going to spend double the money.

 And I’m confident that Burn Notice is getting to that point.  This season here we’ve done more second unit work than we’ve ever done before.  And when we did the last episode of season two, probably 70-percent of that was done via second unit, and it really meshed in very nicely.  But to do a good – because the studios are not going to give you more than your seven days.  I don’t care what show you’re doing, they are seven-days bound.  So the only way to get more out of it is to run simultaneous units. 

 And we live in Florida, our biggest scenery here is the water, and it’s a lot more costly to shoot on the water, but you get a hell of a bang for your buck.

Question> Matt, can you tell us what we can expect as far as special guest stars in this season?

 Matt Nix>  Well, we have – let’s see.  We just got Debi Mazar; she’s going to be guesting for us in the – I just happen to be excited about that one.  She’s guesting in the eighth episode.

 Moon Bloodgood is our Burn Notice sort of arc character for the first bit of the season, and Ben Shenkman for the second bit.  We’ve got Brian Van Holt in the first episode.  Hope McElhany in the second episode does a great job.  Third episode is the return of Brennen, played by Jay Karnes from The Shield.  The fourth episode we have a fantastic performance by Nick Turturro. 

I think this episode – oh, actually this is a fun one.  In the fifth episode the actor Michael Weston stars as a schizophrenic client.  So we have Michael Weston meets Michael Westen.  He plays a character named Spencer.  It’s not confusing, but it was fun for us.  And he does a great job.  We didn’t cast him because of his name, but it was a fun accident.

In the sixth episode – let’s see.  We have some great actors, but I’m not thinking of anybody that would jump out as….  Seventh episode we have Jay Harrington, who did a great job.  And then that’s basically as far as we’ve cast.  So there should be another – there’s going to be another big Burn Notice character in the second half of the season, and we’ve got a fun list that we’re pulling together for that, but we haven’t nailed down who that’s going to be yet.

Question> Matt, did you have sort of like a blueprint in mind in terms of who Fiona was going to be, who Sam was going to be, who, of course, the central star was going to be?  And then, Michael, and then as you knew who the actors were going to be a part of the show, did you start making some modifications in those characters?  So I really was curious in terms of the character templates themselves, how much did they really differ from what the stars did?  And then how did you align it?  I know that’s a complex process, but I’m just curious what went on in the conception of the show and then the actualization of it.

 Matt Nix>  Yes, I mean actually the truth is it’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s a pretty straightforward answer.  It’s actually a lot is the answer.  I mean they evolved a lot.  It’s probably easiest to give you a few specific examples.

 In the case of Michael I had an idea in my head.  I didn’t really have an actor template, because that’s just so fraught, it’s just so difficult; you never know who’s available and who wants to do television and stuff like that.  So I didn’t really sell myself a particular actor that I wanted.

 In finding Jeffrey, I mean one of the things that you notice in the pilot is that there’s a little bit of role-playing in the pilot, there’s a little bit of him taking on a different persona to get a job done, but not a ton.  And what we discovered was – or what I discovered in working with Jeffrey was that’s just something he’s really good at, and it’s something he enjoys and it keeps the character interesting for me to write and interesting for him to play.  And he has the range as an actor to do that.  And so having him take on different personae is something that emerged as a feature of the show over the course of the first few episodes and became a feature of the show basically because Jeffrey could do it.

In the case of Madeline, Madeline started out less canny and less sort of sophisticated and wily, and Sharon, as an actress, she spent a lot of years playing a pretty iconic cop.  And in working with Sharon I just realized it’s a shame not to use that part of her, like that part of her that’s really clever and canny and she can play that, and her toughness.  And so a lot of her whininess fell away than the original conception of the character and evolved into – I should say all of these characters are indistinguishable from the actors in my mind now, but thinking back to then, her character started off less smart and more whiny, and now is more like Sharon.

I would say in the case of Fiona, also Gabrielle taking on personae, which she doesn’t do as much as Michael does, but it was something that’s fun for Gabrielle to do, fun to see her do it.  And I would say also part of it was we are still amused by the fact that Gabrielle is so physically small and she is the heavy on the show.  So I’d be lying if I said that like – it’s just so much fun for us to make her really tough and kind of scary, because she is the size of like – she’s just so tiny.  It’s just fun for us and it makes the character more fun.  And she just does that – she is that.  I mean she’s so feisty that I’d say that it evolved with Gabrielle more in the direction of that kind of feisty spitfire kind of thing that was there at the beginning, but she just turned out to be great at that. 

And then I have to say, with Sam, if you look at the pilot, Sam has a handful of scenes.  He’s there, but he’s not a huge character.  I mean I knew that he was part of the series, and to say that it evolved from my original conception, like Sam is a guy who likes to have a good time, he likes to drink, like all of those things are true and were true in the pilot, but like Sam simply is Bruce Campbell; it’s not like – I can’t even remember who he was before Bruce Campbell, other than the fact that he liked to drink beer and he wore Hawaiian shirts.  That’s it.

Question> Kevin, I am curious to know with the special effects and the filming and such, I know on particular shows they have several days where they have the dialogue and the actual filming of the characters interacting with each other, and then they set aside a couple days where they do special effects work.  So they shoot the scenes out of sequence or out of order.  Is that pretty much the same thing with Burn Notice?

Kevin Harris>  This show here we pretty much – first unit is hand-in-hand.  We do everything practical.  Basically if we’re going to shoot a scene, we shoot the entire scene, and then when the effect comes due, which usually is at the end of the scene, we will film that scene that day.

 Now there’s very little second unit work done on this show.  As a matter of fact, last year was our biggest as far as having two units simultaneously.  This year we’re doing more car stuff second unit, and a lot of the big setup stuff for car chases and stuff like that are – and they’re not calling it second unit; they’re calling it more or less a splinter unit, which will have two units running simultaneously.  Different VPs, different operators; I’ll even split my crew up, one on first unit, one on second unit.  But they’re calling it a splinter unit.  And as these seasons evolve they will get more and more separated to where we’ll start doing bigger and bigger gags. 

But typically, yes, you are correct, most episodic they try and shoot out most of your walk-and-talk scene and save your dramatic stuff until the end.

Question> Have you ever had a sequence that just, it takes forever to get it right?  Was there ever a sequence in Burn Notice which took multiple takes?

Kevin Harris>  I’m happy to say that – as a matter of fact it went up I think, 90% of the stuff we’ve done first take, which for us is very good.  We have really – I mean everybody is a true professional.  Really.  We have a very seasoned crew here.  And we have all worked together, and I mean all of us, probably for the last 20 years.  So we’ve worked on multiple, multiple shows together. 

 So on this show here, pretty much when we all get together we discuss it, we say this is what we’re going to do, and we pretty much do it.  I really can’t think of a time where we had to scratch an entire gag and do it all over again on any three of these seasons yet.  Pretty much everything has been letter-perfect for us.

 Matt Nix>  Yes, actually I’ll back you up on that, and also say that it’s funny, I’ll talk to other show runners about effects and things, and one thing that people don’t – people will just assume, “Oh, you’ve got a Miami crew.  How do you do that stuff you do?”  Because we’re doing everything. 

We probably had like ten frames of CGI last year.  I mean we do everything for real, except for the occasional cleanup thing, and that’s just like little stuff around the edges, where we needed something there, we needed this thing erased or something like that.  Really.  Our CGI on Burn Notice is erasing a cable or getting rid of a mat.  That’s it.  Everything else is if you see a house blow up on Burn Notice, we blew up a house.  And when that car flips, a car flipped; it’s not a miniature, it is always real.  And it’s something we’re really proud of.

And the thing, as I say, I’ll get asked about our crew, and the assumption is because we don’t have an LA crew, that we are somehow handicapped by that.  But the thing that I always tell them is it’s not like there are ten crews in Miami and one of them does television and one of them does movies and one of them does this and one of them does that.  No, there’s really just the one.  Or there’s like 1.5.  So I benefit hugely from the fact that Kevin not only worked on every big movie or nearly every movie that came through Miami, doing the effects for them.  He worked with our stunt guy, Artie, our stunt coordinator, Artie, who also worked on those movies whenever they came through Miami. 

And so if we were in LA we would probably be working with a crew that did tons of television, and when we say, “We’d really like to drive a car off the fourth floor of a parking garage and have it crash into a city street,” they’re going to say, “Yes, we don’t do that.  You know what I mean?  I don’t even know what that is.  We wouldn’t even know where to start.”  When I say that to Kevin, Kevin’s reaction is like, “Fourth floor?  You can get a much better effect on it if you go on to the sixth floor.  Anyplace below the sixth floor you’re not going to get a good effect.  In Transporter we threw it off a mountain” or whatever it is. 

And we really benefit from the fact that they have been on all these big movies and they really know what they’re doing, they’ve all worked together.  So we’re just running through the playbooks of every big action movie that has come through Miami.

Kevin Harris>  Yes, pretty much everybody that works here in Florida chooses to work here in Florida.  It’s not a necessity for them.  I’ve been here for 35 years.  I’m originally from New York.  So for us in motion picture business it has always been a father-and-son trade.  So my son is working for me right now.  He runs the set for us.  He’s not necessarily my second-in-command, but he does run the set.  I have people that have been on a lot longer than my son, and basically that’s it, you win by attrition.  But there again, it is our livelihood and it’s all we do.