John Hugginson and John Banas, creators and writers of City Homicide, are industry veterans, with more than twenty years experience. They met four years ago while working together on All Saints and a formidable writing partnership was born. Here they talk about their inspiration for the show, casting surprises and why working on the show is a 'fantastic gift'.

You've said time has allowed you to 'get the formula right' for City Homicide. What is the formula and what's the secret to a successful drama?

[banas] Finding the right balance between the crime story and anything you might want to find out about the cops as characters. In the end it turned out the crime story had to be at the heart of every episode and what we find out about the characters along the way was a bonus. Because all the crimes are so different, the formula turned out to be that there isn't a formula and if you can let the facts of the crime and the different energies that different crimes generate, if you can let them drive the story, then it's necessarily going to be different every time and that's what we've found exciting about it.

[hugginson] Another example is in some of the episodes we've used flashbacks to tell the story because it's more effective to do so, but only because for that particular story it works, we haven't set a template for each episode. The only real formula I guess is a three act story, making sure we get the set-up, the turning points and climax right.

Where do you get your story ideas?

[hugginson] Anywhere. You can be reading the newspaper; you hear about it on the radio; you can be in the shower and it just jumps into your head.

Have you ever eavesdropped? Have you ever overhead someone talking in a random place?

[hugginson] Nothing as exciting as that!

[banas] Writers are vultures; you might hear a snippet of conversation on a bus or in a cab.

[hugginson] Like John said writers are vultures and people close to you, you might use things they've said. For example, when my son was young, I used to ask him questions because I was doing a story about a young boy of about eight and his replies ended up in the script verbatim. You tend to feed off things like that.

There's a lot of emphasis on getting more Aussie drama on the screen. Besides the accents of course and location, is there anything else that defines Australian drama?

[hugginson] You take Australian actors, they physicalise the characters on paper and they automatically take on an Australian bent. The main thing we were looking for when making the show was to get away from lab work, we wanted to be more character driven, no CSI stuff, because it's been done by Americans and they do it so well. You try and avoid copying anybody.

[banas] Sense of humour too...

[hugginson] Also, sometimes you start plotting a story and then you realise, hang on, you can't suspend disbelief on this in an Australian environment.

Did you have any of the actors in mind when writing the parts?
[hugginson] No, what happened was we wrote the bible and the idea for the show and then we wrote the first few scripts so the TV network could look at it. Then a producer comes on board and they start casting the show.

Then we go back to the script and sit down and talk to the actors, who have read the script, we talk to them about how they feel about the character and we encourage the actors to come up with backstories.

[banas] In fact we've had some very pleasant surprises about casting haven't we? Things that we wouldn't have even thought about that you look at it and you go 'wow, that's a really interesting idea' and it gives you a whole new perspective on the characters.

[hugginson] Well Shane Bourne as the boss, never would have thought of him ever, but the fact that he can make this transition from comedian to a serious actor and suspend disbelief is extraordinary.

What's your favourite storyline or crime so far that we should look out for?

[hugginson] I would pick two. 'Victims of Crime' which is episode eight and the other one would be 'The Promised Land' that's episode ten, and the reason I like these is they are a little bit topical.

Regarding 'Victims Of Crime', you read in the paper constantly about how victims feel they are being abandoned by the justice system and the criminals are being looked after and so we devised a story to try and get across what we felt were their reasons for being angry and we felt were justified. Not all episodes are topical in the sense of what's actually going on today, but quite a few tend to jump out like that.

[banas] 'Promised Land' was interesting because we got the script to a certain point and then we got a Muslim advisor on board and had a really interesting dialogue going with him and then a very strong Muslim cast...

[hugginson] [Promised Land] is about boat people, detainees, it's nice to do stories like that.

The fact is when you nail a story you get so excited that the one you're actually doing at the time is your favourite.

Do you have police consulting on the show? What kinds of things do they check for and what's the most interesting thing you have learnt from them?

(Sue Wearne is the police technical advisor on the show)

[banas] We've been freed up a little bit by making the decision that this would be about state police rather than Victoria police so although it's very clearly set in Melbourne and it's about urban environment kinds of things, it's not Victoria police so you're not absolutely bound by all the details of procedure, so we tended to use the police consultant as a means of being as close to the real thing as possible.

Sue comes up with different spins on events and opportunities inside the story, but we're not bound by the absolute details of procedure, if they constrain the drama too much we were at liberty to take a little bit of licence, with the notion that it's gotta be absolutely believable.

[hugginson] Suspension of disbelief is everything for a drama and we find while we can't pick out anything in particular that was most interesting, on every script Sue would write notes and come up with alternative ideas about how to get from a to b and she gets the first draft and then the second and the third; we feed off her ideas quite confidently.

Suspension of disbelief is a fine line?
[hugginson] You're quite right, you can tip over, it's the key to any good drama.

[banas] It's certainly true of crime stories

What's the typical day in the life of a scriptwriter like?
[hugginson] It's actually quite boring (laughing). Sitting in front of the computer writing scripts, pulling our hair out trying to think what we're going to do next.

Other times we will sit down with producers and discuss the scripts, and [with] directors, and sometimes with the actors as well. The majority of the time we are either sitting in the same room on different computers, or we are working at home sending emails to each other, as we develop scripts.

[banas] What's freaky about it though is you can sit down at your laptop at six in the morning and look up and it's you know eight at night.

So it's mentally all-consuming at times?
[banas] Oh yeah

[hugginson] How great is it to do a job that you really love?

What cop films or TV shows do you admire?
[hugginson] I can answer that one for both of us. The current cop show that we are really engrossed in is a show called The Wire. And the other two would be Deadwood and The Sopranos

What's the one piece of advice you would give to a budding scriptwriter?
[hugginson] Head down, bum up, work work work. Practice makes perfect. I mean we've been doing this for twenty years and when you kick off now the hardest thing is you are doing an apprenticeship but there's noone there to pay you any money, you just have to keep writing and keep sending things out and hope someone in the business will read something and say well hang on we'll bring this person in and see if they can do any work for us.

[banas] My advice, one word: write. That's it. If it ends up in a drawer in your desk just do it every day. I mean John [Hugginson] had 'Water Rats' in his draw for seven years. One of the good things about this has been that it's only us, you know, we don't have a big writing department, it's only me and John, and our associate producer who does nuts and bolts stuff for us. But it means that we work on every episode and have a big overview of the series

[hugginson] It's a culmination of 20 years work. To be able to write a whole series is fantastic, it's a real gift, because normally you write one episode for a show, and then come back and write another one 8 weeks later and all this stuff gone on between. It's wonderful, it really is.