Abbie Bernstein of Buzzymultimedia recently interviewed Alan Ball. Below is an excerpt from the interview. For the complete transcript please click here. I know that the items in BOLD below really really made this Eric fan very very happy!! Can't wait for season 3 to finally get here!

What does Ball feel is important to preserve from Harris’ books? “The main story is the same. We diverge mostly in the secondary characters. The books are sort of Sookie’s story, what happens to her. The other characters disappear if they’re not in a scene with her. And so we have diverged, certainly in the storylines for Tara [played by Rutina Wesley] and Lafayette [played by Nelsan Ellis], but we’ve tried to remain very true to the spirit of the world.”

The treatment of the supernatural elements in True Blood is fairly naturalistic. Ball explains his thinking on this subject. “Certainly the supernatural element of the show is a character in the show. We didn’t want to make it seem like something that is outside of nature, we wanted to make it seem like it was something that was a more primal aspect of nature. Maybe we’ve just lost a little bit of our perception to see it. It’s right under our noses, but we just don’t know it. [In] the books, but vampires are just the tip of the iceberg. I also like the fact that as writers on the show, it really opens the door for a lot of that in the way that we can create situations that the characters really have to [deal with] who they are and their emotional strength. So I really enjoy that aspect of it and it is something that I’ve never done before.”