We wrapped for the season late last Thursday night. Intense week, this, with our premiere on Monday and our wrap on Thursday. Well over a hundred people work on Heartland, all with very specific and important jobs. And every person who works on this show does so at an enormous sacrifice to the rest of their lives; the hours are incredibly long, the locations hard and the task at hand is measured in minutes and always under pressure to get it done and get it done well. Those of us who work in this business are really nothing like the way the magazines and newspapers and television entertainment shows depict. We are, for the most part, very workaday people who labor long hours at our very specific jobs and do our best to do them well. Everything we do is handmade; this is no production line of sorts, no template, no easy way to getting it right or to making it good. At our best, we do our work from our hearts and attempt to tell stories that are true. When we do that, keep it simple a...
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We premiere on Monday night. It’s kind of a strange thing; I’m directing the season finale as I write this, literally between takes. We are pushing so hard to get done on time and done well; meanwhile, we’re hiding from all the reviews and speculation that comes with the beginning of a new series. We’ve become a tight-knit family here, living in an abandoned hospital in Hawthorne, California, and shooting 13 hours a day. It’s been an incredible experience to conceive an entire season before being on the air even once. We’ve worked without knowing whether the show will connect with the audience. We haven’t been concerned with how many are watching or what the reviewers are saying. So we can only feel good about the job itself on its own merits. We can only focus on the work we’ve done. Which brings me full circle to how this all began, nearly two years ago.After my last show was canceled, I was in Maine reading a book about what happens to you...
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