Lanterns Editor-Assoc. Producer on E03/E04, Guy, Sinestro & Lianna

Posted in: HBO, Movies, TV | Tagged: green lantern, lanterns

Lanterns Editor-Assoc. Producer on E03/E04, Guy, Sinestro & Lianna

Lanterns editor-associate producer Vikash Patel discussed Hal and John's chemistry, introducing Green Lantern lore/mythos, and much more.

Published Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:37:09 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• Lanterns editor-associate producer Vikash Patel breaks down Hal Jordan and John Stewart’s chemistry and why their contrast works.
• Patel explains why Lanterns Season 1 centers on Hal and John, while Guy Gardner, Sinestro, and Lianna expand the lore.
• Episode 3 spotlights John Stewart’s origin, with Lanterns carefully building his military precision against Hal’s brash style.
• Patel reveals favorite Lanterns scenes to cut, from the pilot interrogation to Episode 4’s rapid-fire “The Weenie” sequence.

Associate producer and editor Vikash Patel had a tall task at hand working with showrunner Chris Mundy on the ambitious HBO DC superhero series Lanterns, not only telling the story of Green Lantern veteran Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), but also the emerging John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), a Lantern-in-training. There's also the matter of expanding on the Lantern Corps, which includes Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) and Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), and Lianna (Laura Linney), a member of the Guardians of the Universe who taps John as a potential Lantern. Patel spoke to Bleeding Cool about balancing Hal and John's stories, how much to infuse the other lore and characters in, and his favorite moments in the first half of the season.

Lanterns Editor-Producer Vikash Patel on Hal-John's Chemistry, Expanding the Lantern Corps Narratives, and Favorite Scenes of the First Half of Season 1

Bleeding Cool: Was there a concern about achieving that balance between focusing on John versus Hal with so much of this lore put out there? Were there bullet points you wanted to hit?

Patel: As you see in episode three ("OutKast"), which is all John's origin story, that's the entire episode of that, so they're very deliberate on the writers' and Chris's part to do that. There are no notes per se from me, but we're cognizant of, or at least I was in particular, of certain character traits that we should be building and looking out for in terms of Hal and how he is and how brash he can be. With John in the 2016 timeline, he's very much buttoned up as a military man. He's, as you see in episode three. You tell him to do something, and he's going to do it. He's very matter-of-fact, so to convey that, and then to have the balance between them in a scene is really funny, because the deadpanness and the seriousness of John really cut well with the kind of playfulness and the cheekiness of Hal. That's where I think you find the comedy, and as Chris and I would talk about it, we would be like, "We're not looking for a laugh. We're not playing to the joke. We're just going to let the joke play by itself," and I think the joke lands, because of the dryness in the yin and yang between these two characters.

As Hal and John front and center on here, was there a talk, and maybe this is more of a writer question, about, "Hey, maybe you could focus a little more on Guy or Sinestro or other certain aspects, or was it more important to establish Hal and John as a whole?

Well, it is a Hal and John story, the first season for sure. There are obviously, as you've caught, Sinestro and Guy coming about, but the A story is the dynamic and the story between what happened in Rushville and the Hal and John of it. Those are our core characters, and then you have our sheriff (Kelly Macdonald); you also have Laura (Linney), who shows up in episode 3 as the alien, Liana. Yes, to answer your question, it's a writer thing. When the scripts are written, those are the scripts. If Chris wrote them differently, we would react to them differently, but that's how the series was broken in the first season, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we get to make another season out of it.

Within these first few episodes, what was your favorite sequence to cut?

Well, in the pilot, I'd have to say the interrogation scene. That was one of my favorite scenes to put together, just the playfulness of: Is [Waylon Sanders] an alien, is he not an alien? Then keeping the worlds alive, keeping Hal and Waylon (Chris Coy) and that side of the scene alive, and keeping our other characters alive, meaning John and Kerry (Macdonald). They're observing…we're essentially them, so they're a proxy for the audience too. We're really just tracking between both these two rooms. Something that I love about that scene is that it is evident in the entire series, which is where Chris and I spoke, and he goes, "I want the dialog to be rapid fire at times and then still," and that is a great scene. It showcases some of the editing style.

You see, there's the conversation between Hal and Waylon where they're talking about Bob Devaney, and it's very fast back-and-forth cutting, and then suddenly, it pauses for a moment for either the joke to land or for the moment to land. Something similar happens in the scene later on when they talk about Obama, and the Harry Potter stuff, etc. It's rapid-fire dialog, and then the moment hangs.

As you go through and watch the rest of the series, there's more of that. In episode four ("The Weenie"), when Hal and John come inside the weenie, and they're talking about when he stands on the pressure plate, they start talking about, "Oh, it's a pressure plate. You're going to set it off." I've cut that in a way which is intense, but rapid-fire dialog, and then you come out for the joke where they say, "Great movie, good movie," so it kind of frames up the joke. I think that was something that Chris was really hoping to look for, and it was fun to be mindful of that throughout the series as we worked our way through it.

Lanterns, which also stars Garret Dillahunt and Poorna Jagannathan, airs on Sundays on HBO and is available to stream on HBO Max.

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