Interview
Matt Nix
by Chris Kompanek December 16, 2010
As a self-professed geek, Matt Nix is extremely interested in how things work. Prior to Burn Notice and his short-lived retro buddy-cop show The Good Guys, Nix made a few short films, one of which caught the eye of a former intelligence operative Michael Wilson. They became friends, and Burn Notice evolved from a desire to set the record straight about what it’s like to be a spy and demystify the gadgets and techniques of the trade. The show, which wraps up its fourth season tonight, focuses on recently “burned” spy Michael Weston, who’s dropped back into his hometown of Miami after 10 years of covert life abroad. He divides his time between investigating who burned him and taking on private-eye work to make some extra cash, along with ex-Navy SEAL buddy Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell) and ex-girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), who has a knack for blowing things up. The A.V. Club recently spoke with Nix about the evolution of the show, the prequel he’s in the process of writing, and why Michael Weston eats so much damn yogurt.
... The A.V. Club: How did the idea for Burn Notice evolve?
Matt Nix: I’d known a guy named Michael Wilson for a long time, who is a consultant on the show and has a background in private intelligence. My conversations with him had sparked an idea for a show about private intelligence consulting firms, which I thought was sort of an interesting arena. Then I realized over the course of thinking about that idea that I was really more interested in who spies were as people than I was about writings stories about people running around the world doing spy things. That evolved into an idea where we kind of take the espionage out of the spy, if you will. I had heard about this thing called a “burn notice,” and it seemed like an interesting way to take a spy, clip his wings, and make him use all of the things that made him a spy in a non-espionage context. That allowed me to explore the stuff that I was interested in without having to build fake sets of Turkey and pass-coded messages.
AVC: To what extent is Michael Weston based on Michael Wilson?
MN: There are aspects of Michael Weston that are inspired [by Wilson], but he’s also a combination of many influences. There are certainly aspects of Michael’s character inspired by that, but other aspects that are drawn from other sources or from my head or heads of other writers. Or indeed, from Michael Wilson’s head. The character’s not meant to be him.
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