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Graham Yost brings Justified to Blu-ray and DVD

Graham Yost is taking a victory lap for Justified, the acclaimed TV series he developed from a short story by Elmore Leonard, starring Timothy Olyphant as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as his friendly nemesis Boyd Crowder.

The show ended its six-season run earlier this year, and now Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is releasing a complete-series collection on Blu-ray and DVD, just in time for holiday gifting. I was a big fan, so now we’re on the phone to talk about it.

I’ve seen movies that couldn’t do justice to Elmore Leonard’s dialogue and tone in 95 minutes, but you did it for six years. How closely was Leonard involved in the production before his death in 2013?

There’s a story I tell – it’s a true story – about Fred Golan, who was the number-two writer on the show, having a conversation with Elmore. And Fred said, before he begins a script he’ll always read a few pages of Elmore’s writing, a chunk here or there, just to get the flavour. And Elmore said that he did the same thing. Before he started a novel, he’d read one of his old ones, just to remind himself how he wrote. So that was how we tried to keep true to the tone and the style, was to read him. And one of our writers, Keith Schreier, has read 30 of the 45 [books], I think? I’ve probably read 20 Fred’s read 20. So that was really our way to approach it, was just to read Elmore.

You also had Timothy Olyphant, who was practically born to be an Elmore Leonard character. That must have made it easier.

Listen, when you have someone like Tim, you hope for the best. We cast him based on Deadwood and his other work, and I think the thing that attracted me to him was the fact that he had done so many different types of movies, and that this would give him a chance to bring all his skills together in one package. He gets to be scary and dangerous, severe and serious – but also funny and sexy and romantic. So really, it all came together. But you don’t know.

When did you know he had it?

Our first day on the set. It was the scene at Ava’s house when he comes up and he has all this dialogue, and what he did when he went outside and Dewey’s got a shotgun pointed at him. And he went and did the scene and it was like, “Okay, we’ve got our Raylan. This is it.” And then later on, just a shot that Michael Dinner did of Raylan walking up the steps with a shotgun in his hand – just this low, long shot. And just the way Tim moved, it was like, “Oh, okay.” We could tell by his previous work that the chances were that he had it, and was right for the part, but we didn’t know how right, you know? Elmore said that he was the best dramatization of any of his characters, and I think Tim’s pretty happy about that one. I think of all the reviews, all the everything, to have Elmore say that is pretty fantastic.

You also had the chance to play around in Leonard’s world, casting Carla Gugino as a character who looked and sounded a lot like Out Of Sight’s Karen Sisco …

Karen who? I’m sorry, I don’t know who you’re talking about. [laughs] Yeah, we had a little bit of the larger universe we’d love to have done more. There was one point where we thought we’d find Winona in Florida married to Ray Nicolet, and we were going to approach Michael Keaton [who played the character in Jackie Brown and Out Of Sight] and see if he would do that – but we just moved off that, for various reasons. Basically because we wanted to [be able] to like the guy that she was married to, and Ray was such an odd jerk of a character. So, yeah.

Was there a reason you chose to end Justified at this point? Could it have gone longer?

I think the risk is that it might have stopped being interesting if we had done another season. And that was the big fear: that it would have stopped being interesting to the audience that we had, and it would stop being interesting to us. We did 78 episodes. The fact that we were able to really enjoy the storytelling pretty much scene by scene, episode by episode, all that time, is a real testament to Elmore, and the world that he created and allowed us to create.

And what are you planning to do next? Does having made Justified give you the juice to do a passion project now?

Oh, god, I’m trying to remember a line from Spinal Tap, where Harry Shearer says “I’m finally gonna get to do my jazz symphony!” You know, listen, I’m a working professional. I just like working. And to add to that, I’ve been one of the most blessed writing professionals of this time. The things I’ve gotten to work on are things that have been really, really exciting to work on. So I hope I get to keep doing that.

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