Andy Duncan on Bullrun Season II

By Rob Einaudi

Editor-in-Chief

Earlier this week I shot Andy Duncan a few questions about the new show. As you might imagine, he’s a busy guy, but he took the time to get me some answers.

How do you feel about the new season of Bullrun now that it’s finally on TV?

It’s great to finally get the show back on the air, it’s been a long road making this show AND getting it on air are two massive challenges, but we feel we’re back where we belong with a great show. I drove past FOX studios in LA yesterday and Bullrun had a billboard at FOX right between billboards for The Wrestler and House..that was a kick ass moment!

Obviously we have some nostalgia for season 1 and we have a tendency to view that season through rose tinted specs ourselves but to be honest this season eclipses season 1 in pretty much every department – that’s just our opinion, but I think you’ll have to watch the whole of this season (like we have!) and then decide for yourself what you feel about it.

It’s a reality show, we create the game, get the cast and then see what happens….how you view it will depend on how you ‘connect’ with the teams and cars and I guess that can take some time.

Continue reading after the jump!

Any interesting behind the scenes moments from the show you can share with us?

Where do I start? It’s difficult to be TOO specific without giving stuff away but we encountered everything from waking up in one location to find 18 inches of snow had fallen during the night which was interesting…and kind of makes filming (or anything for that matter) tough too.

We had cast members arrested during filming, cops turning up on set, cast fights… is that a good enough taster?

I think we endured every type of weather in the 20 days we were shooting too…it was crazy, but we had an amazing production team with us and they all help delivered a great show.

The format has changed in this new season. Can you explain the background behind these changes?

Yep, we’ve made changes for a number of reasons. The main reason is we wanted to simplify the format and make the show a tougher, more brutal. All the challenges in the show are devised by myself and David (we did 80% of the last ones too) and we were trying to think of things that would be tough, would look great and most importantly would be fun – it was the ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we did this with our car?’ factor. And we did do it with our car, that black Mustang we pretty much total as we highlight the challenges is ours.

Secondly, there were changes we employed to make the show easier to film – which if we hadn’t done would have meant no Bullrun on TV at all.

For the season on Spike we had ‘My Way or the Highway’, the challenge format was different (and in the middle of the show) and we had time bonuses. There are numerous routes the teams can take on each leg of the rally in this show but we don’t make them select a highway or non-highway each epsiode they can just make these decisions for themselves which still provides great story as you’ll see in future episodes.

We felt the challenges definitely needed to be tougher and have more consequences this year for the losers. Also, unlike last season, there’s no spikes to protect cars this time around, all these guys put their cars through hell and never once complained… a big difference from season 1.

Last season, teams were picked out to go against each other by the top two teams into the first checkpoint – the winner of the challenge had to switch out times with the loser (or keep their better time) but this meant they could be only a few minutes difference between the teams and so they we’re playing for no real stakes. Also, teams could still save themselves after the challenge and we just wanted to simplify this whole process.

So now, if your in the last 2 at the end of the days driving you’re in the challenge and with the challenge at the end of the show now, if you lose, you go home, simple as that – it’s the ultimate punishment for poor performance. Also, we reward the best drivers and give the winner of the days driving leg a chance to really get rid of their competition, or try to at least by putting them in a challenge.

What was the toughest moment of production on this new season?

Probably all 18 months, from start to finish and beyond… This show is a monster to make.

Also, what’s the reasoning behind some of the look and feel changes to the show?

Well it’s all shot on HD now so the production quality is vastly improved and we have our friend Scott Weintrob (director of Top Gear in the UK) as our director on the show – there’s almost no comparison in the quality of footage from this year vs season 1, the show now looks great.

I guess in general we don’t want to get too stale and always want to do something different, it can be annoying for some fans maybe who like some of the old stuff and get invested in ti but that’s the way we’ve always been as a company. We’ve changed some of the graphics around too, the old map used to digitally show where people were located on the route but with every epsiode beginning with staggered starts and penalties applied to teams etc this doesn’t really give the audience any meaningful information of who is really placed where so we reduced this too.

Any major drama between the contestants this year?

Volatile is a pretty good word to describe this whole show and some of the characters on it, you’ll see this develop in future epsiodes I don’t want to ruin the fun! As I said before we saw a lot of the ‘po-po’ on and off screen.

Bullrun III?

Yep…we’ll start casting in about 3-4 months.