Сначала я хотела пожаловаться, что не только у Кэллиса, но и у Бамбера британский акцент разбирать приходится, но потом заговорили их специалисты по дизайну. Я согласна на акцент.
В общем дело движется со свойственной тормозу скоростью, но всё равно я постепенно эту мелочь добью, из принципа.
From Miniseries To Series
David Eick: Well the goals of the miniseries were nothing short of reinventing the science fiction genre. We wanted to present people in a catastrophic situation, in a wake of a tragedy, responding like human being actually would. Through a prism of a science fiction genre.
Ronald D. Moore: The thing going it to that we all wondered, you know, what the [?] numbers were going to be, especially given all the internet sort of controversy and general sort of, you know, falter all about what we were doing, and people objecting. And was it going to be a failure, was it not. The first night’s ratings were good, but not great, and we were all sort of waiting to see, what the drop off in the second night would be. ‘Cause there is always the drop off in the second night. And then the ratings actually went up.
Michael Rymer: That’s the most exiting thing to me. That second night performed better than the first. And that says to me that we actually got people in, who would never have watched Battlestar Galactica. We got a non-sci-fi audience to watch science fiction.
Edward James Olmos: I’ve done enough work in my life to understand how difficult it is to create something. And then it’s even more intense to do a miniseries and then to go on and make it into a viable series.
Mary McDonnell: That’s exiting. To try and bring something new to people who are already in love and devoted to a certain genre or a certain story.
Edward James Olmos: I can also say that the series is better than the miniseries.
Ronald D. Moore: The miniseries ends with the escape of the survivors of the holocaust. This rag-tag fleet accompanied by battlestar Galactica are on a quest to find place called Earth.
James Callis:The story starts as… almost as soon as where it is left off. From this cliffhanger in the miniseries. And it starts off with us jumping from the cylons every 33 minutes.
Ronald D. Moore: The people on Galactica aren’t aware of why, but for some reason every time the Galactica and rag-tag fleet jump away it takes 33 minutes for cylons to figure out where they are. Then the cylons jump and find them again.
Jamie Bamber: And then newly bedraggled rag-tag fleet is found and is desperate desperate sort of bid to escape from this chasing enemy.
Katee Sackhoff: You have 33 minute breaks. So it’s like long enough to brush your teeth, you know, fuel up your viper, and go back out again.
Grace Park: People are brought right back into that world of it and try to catch up on what’s going on. And you figure it out as you go.
Tricia Helfer: Actors that are playing human had to be very, you know, tired and bedraggled and exhausted.
Jamie Bamber: Insomnia. Nobody’s slept. Everyone is just coming to terms with the fact that they lost everybody that they’ve had (?).
Ronald D. Moore: They are starting to wonder if they are ever going to get away. The body count is stacking higher and higher.
Katee Sackhoff: It was… It was a hard episode because you just… you had to basically fall apart.
David Eick: I think, fans should expect a hard hitting drama. That happens to be a sci-fi show. I think fans should expect something that challenges them. I think fans should expect something that surprises them. They should expect to be at times horrified, at times titillated, at times cheering and at times perhaps deeply struck by the sadness of this people.
Tricia Helfer: Well, I think that the new Battlestar Galactica is kind of opening it’s own kind of doors. And I think it’s a good bridge between science fiction fans, ‘cause we have… we have the action, we have the special effects, we have the science fiction genre, but then we also have a more realism side.
Grace Park: I think, it seems like we are almost carving out another definition or another dimension of sci-fi.
David Eick: Well, I hope that Battlestar Galactica will herald a new movement in science fiction, where reality and realistic characters and a more grounded approach to the genre are something that other writers and producers will explore in different ways as well.
Michael Rymer: The visual style - and it was very much Ron Moore’s and David Eick’s vision, before I was even brought in – was we wanted to make a documentary style science fiction show. We wanted it to feel real. We wanted to feel the grit of what it felt like to live in a spaceship. What it’s like to have the world destroyed.
Ronald D. Moore: That was one of the very first decisions. To make the show sort of documentary look and feel to the whole thing.
Michael Rymer: Episode one is extremely doco style because the characters haven’t actually slept for the five days. And they’ve been running from the cylons and it’s very stressful. And they are all about to lose the plot completely with this… such sleep deprivation.
Ronald D. Moore: I don’t think that this is the only way to tell a story. This is not the only way to do science fiction. This is the way we’ve chosen to do it. This is our take. This is our presentation of the material. This is the story we’ve chosen to tell.
Grace Park: It is dark. We are not apologizing for that.
Jamie Bamber: Some of this show is quite controversial.
James Callis: It’s too shocking and it’s too dark and the sex is outrageous.
Katee Sackhoff: That’s what makes good TV, I think that audiences are smarter now. And they want to see smart realistic television.
James Callis: Every week the show is going to be different. It’s always going slightly compound your expectation.
Grace Park: Just saw episodes 1 to 6. Oh-oh-oh. So good.
Tricia Helfer: Yes, the next 13 episodes are great. You know, you have some that are more intellectual dilemmas and then some are more the action, when you are… you are literally running for your lives, away from the cylons.
David Eick: As it was well reported, we have Richard Hatch. One of the stars of the original show returning.
Ronald D. Moore: Richard, who is Apollo in the original series, is doing two episodes for us this season. He is playing a man called Tom Zarek, who is sort of Nelson Mandella type figure. Who is a prisoner for 20 years.
Katee Sackhoff: Expect a lot of great action sequences. And I think as far as my character is concerned, you are going to find out a lot about why she is a way she is.
Ronald D. Moore: The backstory between Kara – Starbuck - and Lee Adama regarding the death of Lee’s brother and the fact that Adama doesn’t know what Starbuck did, which directly led to Zak Adama’s death.
Tricia Helfer: Put it this way, I’ve realized that I’m more evil, than I thought I was, when I shot the miniseries.
Grace Park: You are going to find out a little bit more about the cylons. About their true nature. What they’re… what they have in store for the humans. Why they haven’t killed them all off yet.
Mary McDonnell: There is so much romance, sex, adventure.
Michael Rymer: This is not your parents’ Battlestar Galactica. This is an adult show, for grown-ups.
David Eick: I hope, that Battlestar Galactica is an experience that people will find riveting on a dramatic level. As well as fantastical and exciting.
Edward James Olmos: You have to really prepare yourself to take this journey. You jump onboard and it’s a fast ride. You won’t be spoon fed and you’ll be quite surprised with everything that happens. So if you liked the miniseries you will be blown away by this series.
Future-Past Technology
Половину этих людей я понимаю с трудом, поэтому возможна отсебятина
Richard Hudolin: When they first hired me, we did a breakdown. They’ve budgeted for an art department of about 3 people, we’ve wound up for an art department of about13 people. That’s… That’s the scope of what we had to design in a very short period of time. Overall we must have had 25, may be 30 different sets. The biggest ones were the CIC room, which you are in now, connected to a whole series of hallways leading to Adama’s quarters. That set was like 200 feet (61m.) long, a 100 feet (30.5m.) wide and may be 40 feet (12m.) high. So that’s a lot of scenery. The other set was a hangar bay, which is again, it was like a 100 by a 100. And they got floor to ceiling and wall to wall in this stage.
A lot of it is based in fact. We kind of looked at aircraft carries and said that’s a city into itself. And how do they get ships from this level to that level. There is whole lot of logic and functionality that has to go along with what may look cool at a camera. It’s a… You have to have a back-story. You have to have kind of a reason for it. If you look around this room [CIC] everything is laid out and delineated as to what function that room is as opposed to that room, or that area.
Doug McLean: One of the major things that they wanted to do with, have it be a very human thing, where people did a lot of things. Instead of flipping a switch and something printing out somewhere, people physically carry messages back and forth. And that was reflected in the design. The CIC became a very large space, because rather than having 3 people sitting, running the ship you suddenly had 30. We kind of went with an arena sort of concept.
He doesn’t have a chair that he sits in, he goes from station to station to station. And everybody is around him, and he is the centre of all attention and all attraction. So he can orchestrate it, if you chose to put it that way. Like he is literally conducting the ship, where is in the saddle.
Ronald D. Moore: The decision to make production design feel more real was the commandment. “That shall be real” was sort of what we said over and over for every component of the show. So the production design looked toward existing ships, you know what is meant to be on this ship. I was less interested in what is the ship of the future was really going to be like and trying to imagine gleaming surfaces and all sort of magic things to do, the wow-factor “hey, that’s what the door looks like”, you know, in the future and “hey, that’s how they get their coffee”.
Doug McLean: You know, when Picard orders his earl-grey tea hot it’s…It comes out of the machine. If Adama wants earl-grey tea hot, he has to go and boil water, get the tealeaves and pour them over. So we wanted a really physical kind of show. Switches tend to be the real switches. Phones – the big heavy clunky phones.
Dualla stands at her console and this how she works her head-set. And here is a cord that ties her to the thing, because that’s how people in those jobs actually function.
Richard Hudolin: If you look at some of the dressing there is the older style telephones, 1940s actually. And they actually are out of submarine. So that kind of came as the natural extension of the design. To have kind of a retro feel and it wasn’t super sleek, it just was… it had nice worn kind of chipped look to it. It was a really fine line at how much aging do we do on this thing. Because the you didn’t want Adama to come across as if he is the captain of some junkie freighter.
Ronald D. Moore: Galactica is sort of emblematic of the idea, that technology had betrayed them. Technology had betrayed this people, had created cylons that then ran amok and then turned on them, and then they had to take a very hard big step backward from what they have created. Leaving them in this interesting place when they had ships that are capable of travelling faster than light and they have a sort of, you know, much more advanced things than we do today, but they couldn’t network computers together and had to do many thing to sort of take some advanced technology away from themselves. Which once again introduces the human element back into the show. Our CIC is manned by easily 3-4 times the number of people that man the bridge of the starship Enterprise. On the Enterprise is a very small group of people and they can just press buttons and everything happens magically. In our CIC there is…it’s a very complicated arrangement. There is many layers of officers, that then have to give orders, like on a real naval ship. There is many more things that have to be touched, and adjusted and looked like by human beings. And it makes you feel like Galactica is run by people as opposed to big master computer that just handles everything.
Ken Hawryliw:We are trying sort of go to almost retro high-tech look. And a lot of stuff we use is.. we take things that have an interesting design flair to them. Also we use a lot of stuff from 50s and 60s. A lot of them are manufactured, because a lot of them are very specific things that don’t exist anywhere in real world. What we like to do is incorporate a lot of found objects, because we like the idea of having familiar looking things, that we give a bit of a twist to. We call it Galacticalizing. We give a bit of a twist to the props so that they fit in the motive of the show. One of the key props in the show is the lighter that commander Adama got from his father, that he then gives to his son. It was actually an art-deco lighter that I found at flee market. And we used that.
The weapons that we use for Battlestar Galactica are a variety of things. We have our own colonial sidearm, that incorporate a real gun into design that we use. And made it look different. And it has a variety of functions. It’s supposed to fire rockets as well as fire regular bullet projectiles. We’ve also got a variety of other weapons. We use actually existing weapons we had modified somewhat. What we’ve done is we’ve found some really interesting obscure sort of weapons, really exotic weapons that you don’t see very often, and we’ve given a bit of Galactica twist to them.
Someone came up with the idea during miniseries I was told. It was sort of a plan, where because they were cutting corners on a budget, they thought we should cut corners everywhere. So they’ve cut the corners off the every piece of the paper that appears in the show. So we ether have to photocopy them, trim them all by hand with the corners cut off and edges thinned down, or we have to print them one page at a time. It started off kind of as a joke that got out of hand and now unfortunately I have inherited it, so I have to deal with it on a daily basis.
Yeah, a Galactica world is definitely analog world, but it’s got a mixture of high-tech and low-tech. Which I really find appealing.
Richard Hudolin: We are creating a vision, an environment. We have to tell you what the hell this world is, and we have to make you believe it. We have to be very careful just not to cross over that line, where people say “oh, that’s phony, that’s fake”. So that’s why we do all this research and try and give people, you know, the style phones to hang on to. They are not flip phones, no cell phones in this ship. You have to go to the wall, crank this thing. Yeah, it’s kind of… Think about it, it sounds funny. But it’s really believable.
Ronald D. Moore: The jobs, the props, the set design has to convey that sense of reality. You don’t want to break the notion, that this is something real. You never want to let that ball drop. Because as soon as you do you shatter the whole illusion of what we are trying to create.
Like Father, Like Son
David Eick: Ron Moore crafted a character based on the idea of military leader as opposed to idealized science fiction captain. And as a military leader commander Adama is a very serious man, he’s seen a lot of violence, he’s seen a lot of pain. And he is reaching a point when he is ready to retire, when we first meet him.
Edward James Olmos: He is about to become the commander of a floating museum. So he’s kind of like being put out of the pasture. And in the process he gets involved in having to actually become the sole commander aboard… of rag-tag fleet, that ends up becoming very difficult to understand and manage. And he has to rise to the occasion, and he does.
David Eick: So this is the man being brought out of retirement effectively, who is having to reawaken the warrior inside of him. And so this is a very serious character to that extent. This are very serious themes that we are playing into. Edward James Olmos for Ron and I, as we were developing outline for the miniseries, was our short-hand reference. We would say “commander Adama” and in our minds think of Edward James Olmos type. So it was very unusual to find ourselves in the uncanny situation of having Edward James Olmos actually play this role.
Edward James Olmos: I never saw the original. And, you know, different people enjoyed it. Obviously it had tremendous impact, because it only had one season and it ended up having the fanbase that was quite extraordinary. So I went off of the sсript that I read. And the sсript that I read developed someone interesting and built believable characters. So, I joined.
I like the fact that he is able to understand the situation and move forward into it.
Jamie Bamber: The way I play the character, you know, in the back of my mind is the sentiment that Lee has decided to quit the military. And he was turning up in the miniseries to fly his last, you know, viper thing and to honour this ship, and to honour his dad retiring. And then he was going to jack it in, settle down on some ranch on Caprica and open up a small bar, you know. That’s my idea. He’s fascinating character to portray. I mean, you know, more than anybody else on the Galactica he is interesting, because he doesn’t belong aboard that ship. He decided himself, that he wasn’t going to be his father’s son. And he won’t. And yet here he is, being his father’s not only son, but his lead pilot and the figure of authority on this ship he never intended to see again.
That’s the pivotal relationship to Apollo. That’s all really the first episode is about. For him. Is this man that he has disowned and turned his back on.
We have to sort of stamp homage on what we are doing. An Apollo, Richard and Lorne Green in the original was such a team. And who know, Eddie and I, I think we are becoming that slowly, but we start from a very difficult place. Eddie is very disciplined, about what he does. Nothing is played for the sympathy, for the audience. Nothing is played for the cozy feeling, or result, or to make himself likeable, and that’s permeated my approach.
We had some episodes where they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the president for an adversary, and sometimes he agrees with the president against his dad. You know, by throwing this characters into such small confined space, they can’t escape each other and their can’t escape their fate. They have to deal with every second. So it’s fascinating.
I watched the original as the kid, with wide eyes and I wanted to be Starbuck and Apollo, and I wanted to fly a viper, and I wanted to shoot down cylons. So here I am. That’s what dreams are made of, right?
Edward James Olmos: I’m grateful, that I was able to partake in it, you know. I like sci-fi. I’ve been very fortunate. Almost every program that I’ve ever been involved with has been used in a entertainment factor, but also sociological factor. So this is very strong. But I think the genre deserves it. It’s a great venue for storytelling.