How daunting was the prospect of finishing Battlestar Galactica, giving that it’s being called one of the greatest TV shows of all-time? The awards that you’ve won for Battlestar Galactica and so forth, do they spur you on or do they make you sit back and relax? Uh, I don’t know. They look pretty on my mantle. [laughs] I think the awards and the acclaim are surprising and gratifying and you’re always amazed that people like what you do, and it’s even more surprising when you find the critics, the publications, and organisations like that, give the show awards, it’s great. It’s incidental to the process. You try to make the best story you can and you don’t really make them in order to earn the awards, but it’s certainly nice when they come. Well, it came up a couple of years ago. David Eick and I had spent some time causally talking about the possibility of doing a spin-off series of Battlestar Galactica while we were still producing the show, and we said if we did do it, it would probably be about the creation of the Cylons, but we didn’t really take those discussions any further. It wasn’t until another writer, Remi Aubuchon, completely separately went to Universal Studios and pitched them an idea for a show about artificial intelligence that things started to happen. Universal then said that maybe Remi, David and I should sit down together and talk, and we did. It was really out of those discussions that we decided to do Caprica. I think I would. I enjoyed directing and I really found that it was a great new field to try my hand in. So, yes, I would definitely like to direct again in the future. I wanna get a bit geeky here. Is there a connection between the Daniel mentioned toward the end of Galactica and Daniel Graystone? No, that was a complete coincidence of name. I didn’t realise how much people would glom onto that coincidence and start to read all kinds of things into it. There’s really nothing there. Does your work on the Star Trek series influence the way you approached Battlestar? Yeah, working at Star Trek all those years really was the place that I learned the craft of television writing, in story, in plot, structure, and character. It taught me how to write and produce TV. When I came to Battlestar, I also decided I wanted to break all the rules that Star Trek had about how it did stories. From the beginning, we decided that if Star Trek did something, Battlestar was not going to do it and we would try to, in every way we could, make a different show than what Star Trek did. It was slightly different. The field was wide open when we approached Battlestar. There was literally nothing that we couldn’t do and we had tons that we could make up and invent, an entire history. Caprica is a little different, some of these things have now been set in place and we know generally what the outline of colonial history is, so we have sort of a general guideline, but still there’s really no preconceived plan about how long the show will run, how far into the future the show will go, or what the last episode is or anything like that. I’m developing a couple of feature films and some other television programmes, but there’s nothing definitive yet. So, can you tell us a little about your involvement in I, Robot 2? I did a draft of a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, and they’ve hired a director and brought in another writer as well. They are in pre-production on that film and are to begin shooting up in Canada in the next couple of months. Looking forward to that! Can you tell us a little more about the Virtuality pilot that you made? Do you plan to pursue it further? What are the chances of seeing more Battlestar Galactica content? I don’t think so. You never say never but there’s really no plans for more Battlestar. The sets are gone, [but] we did digitally archive all the sets and props and costumes in case we wanted to do something, but at the moment there are no talks of any more Battlestar projects. I don’t think so. We do talk every once in a while about seeing someone else’s ancestor because no-one else from Battlestar are really old enough to be present at the time of Caprica. If we do that, it may just be once or twice, but probably not any time soon. Is the re-using of actors from Battlestar in Caprica, is it a direct reference to ancestry? What initially got you interested in sci-fi? What were your influences? What got my interested in science fiction was actually the American space program. When I grew up, I saw the moon landing and I was fascinated watching them as a child and that’s what really turned me onto space and science fiction and I started watching things like Lost In Space and that led me to Star Trek, which was a major influence on my life. I wasn’t a big fan of it, but I saw it in its original run. I certainly watched it every week. Since it went off the air in 78, I didn’t really see it again until I was offered the opportunity to re-do it, so I didn’t watch it for twenty years or so. Were Caprica and Virtuality being pitched at the same time? And which one were you secretly hoping would win out? When you were picking actors for Caprica, what made you go with people like James Marsters? And will we be seeing his character a lot more in the future? A lot of that came from within. Jane Espenson had worked on Buffy and was a huge fan of James Marsters and she suggested him for the role, and the network was very excited to have him. We definitely will [see him more]. His character has a multi-episode arc in the show. It’s really hard to say. I think there are other periods in the Galactica universe that might be worth exploring, including events that happened. It really depends on how far we take Caprica. How important was it to capture a real sense of reality within the Tauron back-story and culture? The style of the show is very early 20th century, what made you go with that as opposed to any other period, more up to date? Well, we wanted the show to mostly look like today. A show that looks contemporary in its city and landscapes and so on, which had elements of futuristic technology. But, because the show takes place 50 years before Battlestar Galactica, I thought it was also important that it has a period feel, that you’re reminded that this was something that took place before Battlestar, so we went with the idea of giving it a slightly retro feel, and giving it a 1940s and 1950s fashion and touchstones of the culture and having vintage automobiles and things like that, just to remind you that it’s something of a period piece. We’ll do both. We’ll go back into the virtual world with more Tamara and Zoe stories, but their stories will also cross into the real world as well. It’s kind of hard to answer, but there will be answers to those questions in this season. If someone offered you a Star Trek series of your own, would you take it? What does the rest of the season have in store for us? There are a lot of twists and turns. There are more revelations about characters that you don’t expect. I think you’re going to be surprised at some of the directions that Graystone Industries takes and the relationship between Daniel and Joseph will shift and change as the season goes on, and certainly the life of Sister Clarice will change quite a bit as well. Caprica is on DVD now.
