Question> At what point throughout the series are we going to learn who’s ultimately behind the burn?  Is that something that’ll happen in the very final episode of the final season, and if it is revealed earlier than that is that is there a way for the show to keep going and still be Burn Notice?

Matt Nix> We could always change the title.  Has anyone ever done that?  Let me put it this way.  Clearly, we’re not just going to sort of resolve everything and just kind of call it a day.  I think USA would have strong words with us if we did that.  But really, let me step back a second and just say in general when you look at an episode of Burn Notice, it’s not really a whodunit ever.  It’s not a show where we spend a lot of time investigating who is the secret person behind this week’s case of the week.  Is it this person?  No, it’s the person you least expected.  No, typically the sort of whodunit aspect is dealt with pretty early in an episode and then the real question for the episode is, what are you going to do about it? 

 And I guess I’d say that that is generally a more compelling question for us and fits with what we do on the show better because the show is four series regulars.  It’s not really a show that is about gigantic revelations; about different characters.  We had no idea that that’s who Sam was, that’s not what we do.  We deal with issues, and so when I think about who is the person behind Michael’s burn notice, Phillip Cowen, the guy who got shot in episode 10 of season one, and that information and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.  And so really the question that I think Michael’s always going to be up against is what can he do about his circumstances, and that’s a question that can grow and evolve and will always involve the fact that he got burned but doesn’t necessarily need to always involve the endless hunt for a particular name of a particular person because, I guess I’d just say, well, that’s not the kind of question we deal with on Burn Notice and it’s not a particularly interesting question to me.

Question> The show is kind of a dark subject matter but it’s also very humorous and very funny.  Is it difficult to balance those light and dark sides of the show?

Matt Nix> I think if I wasn’t so naturally inclined in that direction it might be very difficult, but it’s not as if we sort of sat down and said, “I’m going to come up with a formula for a show, let’s do a interesting contrast of dark and light.”  To me, it was really borne out of what I found interesting and what I found funny.  I mean, one of the core inspirations for the show was my conversations with our consulting producer, Michael Wilson, who I’ve known for some years and who had the background in private intelligence.  And he’s a really smart guy and he has a lot of resources and he also had this way of giving me advice that I couldn’t imagine the circumstance that I might be in where I might use it.  But he’d say things like, “When you’re firing a gun, don’t ever turn it sideways because it’ll jam and it’ll stovepipe and then you’ll have really big problems,” and my response was, “I don’t own a gun but thanks for the advice,” and I just thought that was funny.  And so really I’m a guy who was accused of having a dark sense of humor in second grade, so it’s always been part of me.  But it’s kind of a combination of what I naturally find funny—I really enjoy those tonal contrasts—and what I find interesting and what makes for a fun show.    

Question> How did doing the voice over explanations come about?

Matt Nix> Well, as I said earlier, the inspiration was these conversations that I’ve had with Michael Wilson, who I’ve known for many years, and we’d just be talking about stuff, science fiction books and stuff, I’d be writing a movie and I’d say, “How would you do this?” or “What’s the kind of thing you could do for this?” and he’d have ideas.  And so we had talked for a long time and then he would give me this sort of idiosyncratic advice, and so that was kind of the jumping off point.  And then since then it’s been interesting because it’s an unusual kind of voiceover.  I mean, we never say anything like, “And then this happened and then that happened,” or “This happened off-screen,” or anything like that. 

Jeffrey Donovan describes how he does them as he thinks of himself as being in some sort of seminar on spying and then he’s talking to a seminar or something.  But it is an opportunity to do, as we’ve gone on with the show and indeed from the beginning, one of the things I realized is there are a lot of things that you can do on a show like ours that are really cool, but what’s cool about them is knowing about them or knowing how they work or highlighting some counterintuitive technique, something that you would think works one way but actually works another way.  And I realized that short of having characters who kind of talk about that with each other, there’s not really any way to highlight all of these fun things that are surprising. 

 So actually I learned one last night that maybe will show up on the show someday, but it’s a very common experience that anybody who’s had any encounters with tear gas, when they talk about tear gas they can taste it.  So if you talk to people who were on a bomb squad—it happens that my uncle is on a bomb squad or actually he’s on a SWAT team, and he was just talking about tear gas and he was saying, “Oh, I hate talking about it” because, and all the guys say it when you talk about it, you taste that taste in your mouth.  And I hear that and I go wow, that’s awesome, I love that, but how do you showcase that, you can’t see it.  So the voiceovers are fun for me because I’m that guy at a dinner party who’s like, “Quiet, everybody, I have to tell you about this cool thing that I learned.”  And I mean I got a call from an ex-girlfriend who had seen the show and said, “God, it’s just like hanging out with you for 42 minutes.”  She said an hour but it’s really 42 minutes.  So yes, it’s a combination of the inspiration of those conversations with Michael Wilson with my desire to share fun facts about different stuff.

Question> Do you have any plans for how many seasons the show will last?

Matt Nix> Not particularly.  I mean, I think for right now we’re really focusing on what are fun new ways of doing episodes because it’s a pretty specific box we’re in because Michael solves problems in a particular way.  It’s not a cop show, it’s now a PI show, and we need to come up with new sorts of problems that are best dealt with in this sort of spyish, covert-operative kind of way.  And so it’s great fun for me to work on that stuff and I guess  I don’t know how everybody else feels, but I’d like to do it as long as we have fun new ways of coming up with that stuff and I’d like to stop when I no longer have that instinct that I have that inspires most of the shows which is, oh, this is really cool, let’s do one like this.  And so that’s where I’m coming from, so when that goes away we’ll stop the show.

Question> What’s the latest with getting Tyne Daly on the show?

Matt Nix> We’re always interested in stunt casting and she’s mentioned Tyne before and so we’ve talked about it.  We’ve got a lot of plans when it comes to casting, including her, but when you look at a Burn Notice they’re generally tight little casts, you know what I mean?  I just looked at the cast list for the 10^th episode and I think there are like eight people including the series regulars.  Usually I go, what does a Burn Notice have?  It’s has a bad guy, an assistant bad guy, a good guy, an assistant good guy, and then a couple of other characters to round it out.  So the day we have the perfect bad or assistant bad guy for Tyne Daly or a client, we’ll grab her because it would certainly be fun.  I mean, one of the nice things about the tone of the show, and this is something you kind of explore, and honestly, I think it kind of has something to do with Bruce Campbell, just the energy that he brings to the show, but it kind of allows us to get away with little winks at the audience from time to time.  Like in the first episode of the first season after the pilot, Sam gave his cover ID with Fiona as, “I’m Detective Cagney and this Detective Lacey.”

Matt Nix> And that was an improv, and I was sort of like, I don’t know, it’s the first episode, can we get away with that…I’m sure we can.  Since then we just sort of have fun with those things and so we’ve been exploring that more with casting and it’s also getting a little bit easier now that people kind of know the show, because in the first season you’re out there talking to actors and you’re saying, “We want you for a part on Burn Notice,” and they say “Burn Unit, is that a hospital, what?” and now it’s a little bit easier.

Question> What can you say about the Burn Notice tie-in book, The Fix?

Matt Nix> Oddly, Todd Goldberg, author of the Burn Notice tie-in book, is best childhood friends with a very good friend of mine from college.  So I had actually met him years ago when he was just a novelist who’d sold a book to Hollywood, and then they said, “Oh, we’ve found a writer for the Burn Notice book.  He is Todd Goldberg, brother of the guy who writes the Monk book.”  And I said, “Oh, Todd Goldberg, my friend.”  So it was a very small world thing.  I have to say, though, we were incredibly lucky because we managed to get a guy who has a thriving book career, he’s a hell of a novelist, he has a thriving book career on his own.  And it was just sort of a happy accident that he was kind of interested in doing a book for hire, he knew me, he knew the show, he liked the show, his brother does … books, and so we really lucked out.  We got a guy who is very funny, he has a good sense for the tone of the show, and from what I’ve seen is doing a great job.  And in the books Michael can do all sorts of things that he can’t do on the show like get on big sailboats that we can’t afford.

Question> How much of Michael’s narration is factual and how much is just made to sound factual so that people aren’t taking notes on how to build bombs?

Matt Nix> We never really give super-specific recipes. Let me take that in pieces.  We’re pretty rigorous with the voiceover stuff in the sense that everything generally works.  We don’t say that something is possible, that it’s not possible.  That said. oh, a great example would be freezing a lock and smashing it.  It’s actually possible to do that.  You need a kind of specific lock, right, it’s just I guess I’d say we allow Michael to have extraordinary skill and a certain amount of luck with regard to things working and not working, but we really enjoy the, and I know all of the writers on the show enjoy or the other ones claim to, I certainly do, enjoy the research into what could you actually do.  So that when Michael replaces the trigger bar spring with a bobby pin, that’s actually possible.  Our armorer did it.  It took him, and he’s pretty good with guns, it took him about three minutes.  Michael did it in about 45 seconds.  So I guess I’d say we allow for the possibility that Michael maybe practiced doing that off-screen so that he could get his time down. 

And then with regard to the building of bombs, we either take a page out of the Fight Club book, which is fudge an ingredient, but usually we’re talking through things quickly enough that we’re not really listing all the ingredients in any case.  Like, it is possible to make thermite at home, it has something to do with aluminum foil, here are a couple of the steps.  If you want to go figure it out on your own, we’re not going to show you exactly how to do it, but we’re going to point to the fact that one can.  So we would never claim that it is possible to make thermite at home when it is not possible to make thermite at home; we also would not take you through all of the steps so that you could run into your kitchen and make it.

Question> Is there anything left for Michael to learn as far as his trade is concerned, certain skills?  His vast knowledge is quite impressive.

Matt Nix> He’s also got a pretty big wardrobe.  Is there anything left?  Yes, absolutely. In an upcoming episode he has to, the point is made that although he has training in safe-cracking, safes get upgraded like computers get upgraded.  So your training a few years ago isn’t necessarily good now, so you’ve got to kind of brush up on it and practice.  I suppose that’s not precisely an answer to your question.  I will say we have a lot of fun kicking around ideas for things Michael doesn’t know in the writers’ room.  For a while it was Michael can’t swim but then we had him swim and we can’t play with that one anymore, so currently it’s Michael cannot catch a ball when a ball is thrown at him.  So obviously it’s not true, but yes, we certainly talk about the issue a lot of what does Michael not know, but our candidates usually fall into the category of jokes you tell in a writers’ room rather than real things that Michael needs to learn.

Question> Speaking of Michael what’s the story with all the yogurt?

Matt Nix> What is the story with all the yogurt?  Wow.  It’s funny, people think it’s a big mystery and I sort of want to indulge that but really it was a combination of things.  It was in the pilot.  I wrote in the bit about the yogurt and getting the yogurt from the fridge so that you have when breaking in someplace, doing something innocuous, so as to make your break-in seem more innocent and doing something that appears incompatible with your behavior, which was based on some real techniques.  And so I just threw out, “Grab something from the fridge, maybe a yogurt,” and then when they were shooting it Jeffrey had the yogurt and then he decided he wanted to eat the yogurt in the scene, and we thought that was funny and so then he ate the yogurt.  And then when I was working on the first episodes of the series, well, he needed to have something in his refrigerator.  What does he have in his refrigerator?  Well, we know he likes yogurt.  And then the writer of the second episode, Alfredo Barrios, thought that was funny and so he threw a yogurt into his episode.  And once you’ve got a yogurt in the pilot and two episodes, you’ve got to keep going.  And so it becomes just sort of fun. 

I mean, at the same time I will say that it was inspired by some research that we did, or actually a discussion that I had had with Michael Wilson, the essence of which is that operatives do find themselves in circumstances where they need cheap sources of healthy protein.  Michael Wilson’s preferred source of cheap protein was canned tuna fish, so Michael could just as easily have been a tuna fish man but we made him a yogurt man.