What sets the television show "Homeland" apart from its counterparts is its ability to infuse real-life events with fiction.
The show's screenwriter and producer Alex Gansa said that they want to give a nod to real-life events, such as the recent terror attacks in Paris. But once they hit production, Gansa said that very rarely do they make changes to the script.
"We are shooting these episodes months before actual events, but in the case of Paris, we did make a few minor adjustments to the Dec. 6 and Dec. 20 episodes," he explained to the New York Times. "We did ADR, which means additional dialogue replacement, a line over Allison's back in the Dec. 6 episode where she says, 'Nobody wants to see another Paris.' So occasionally we will adjust when we can. In the finale, there is one scene that was rewritten as a result of what happened in Paris."
As for the recent shootings in San Bernardino, California, as well as the anxiety felt by the public because of the growth of Muslim radicals, Gansa said that they will "undoubtedly" integrate that into their show moving forward.
"But since we have no idea where we're going to shoot next season and what next season's story is going to be, it's hard to predict how it will influence us," he said. "But the threat of terrorism not only in Europe but here in the United States seems to be growing and it seems to have captured people's attention in a significant way, and I imagine that will be reflected in next season's story."
Right before they filmed season 5, Gansa and his team were trying to figure out where to bring Carrie Mathison and the rest of the CIA group. They decided on Berlin because it is a "great spy town," and it was at the heart of so many social issues.
"When we did it earlier this year, the Charlie Hebdo attack had just happened, ISIS had just burned a Jordanian pilot in a cage, Vladimir Putin was rattling his saber in Ukraine, and Edward Snowden was all over the news. Laura Poitras had just made a film called 'Citizenfour; about Snowden and was living in Berlin because of its quite strict privacy laws. For all those reasons, we decided that Berlin was the perfect place, right smack in the middle of all those stories," said Gansa.
