I’ve just had the pleasure of talking to Brad Wright and he tells me that Stargate Universe was all your fault! That you were looking for a break, looking to do something different. And then the pair of you realised you could do it with Stargate? Yeah. Neither one of us really wanted to do the same thing again. We had felt like we had done Stargate, as it was, almost to death. And that 15 seasons of that type of television, we were running out of ways to be fresh and interesting in the writers’ room. And we really looked at – I certainly looked at – I think we felt that, Stargate was, obviously, very successful but also, in many ways, the longevity is due to the fact that it kind of flew under the radar a little bit. It was successful within its own niche. It never really did break out in a major mainstream way. I think that we stepped back and looked at why that was and have taken, probably, a bigger risk in trying to… you know the words “appeal to a broader audience”, in some case, some people interpret that as trying to be more commercial or appeal to a lower common denominator. But I don’t think that’s true. I think we want people to watch our show – and we want a lot of people to watch our show. [laughs] And how are you feeling right now, just as we build up to the show premiering? Well, you never know. I’m not a predictor. The thing about television is you’re really not sure. We’ve always taken the tact of not trying to pander to a particular audience. While I certainly feel we’ve taken a lot of steps to try and appeal to a mainstream audience, it’s not like we’re trying to cater to that – like we’re going for ratings. We’re trying to make a show that we think is good and that we would watch. And I think Stargate Universe is much closer than either of the other two shows to a show that I would want to watch. As a viewer, when I sit down to watch TV, this is much closer to the type of show I really enjoy. I just thought that if I was going to continue to do Stargate, that was something I had to do – to bring it a little closer to something I would be really proud of. Not to say I’m not proud of the other two shows, and the work I did on them, but I feel good about the product we’re putting out there as something I would want to watch and I can only hope that enough people agree with me that I can continue to do my job. Are you happy with how it’s worked out, then? Really? Oh, for sure. The cast is phenomenal. The studio has been unbelievably supportive and responsive to what we’re doing. We had a tremendous amount of creative freedom. And people across the board are just really enjoying themselves – having a great time and some of that comes from Robert Carlyle and his enthusiasm and that trickles down on the cast. And the crew is just a crew that has been around, in many cases, for a long time with us in the franchise and they’ve become reenergised and reinvigorated. So, yeah, so far I don’t have any regrets whatsoever for having pursued this. It’s been a fantastic experience. And you’ve gone through quite a reflective documentary feel with the show? That was one of the things I was going to ask. I know it sounds horribly pretentious, but in some documentary material, and on reality TV, it’s almost like the camera is a character within itself. Is that the kind of thing you were going for? Yeah. We wanted people to feel like they were voyeurs. One of my favourite shows of all time is The Shield. Yeah. We ended up hiring the DP from The Shield, Ronn Schmidt, who shot our pilot for us and he helped to bring that tone to the show. And he talked about the fact that when they were first putting The Shield together they wanted…they looked at a lot of Vietnam War footage.. and the whole idea was: what would happen if we dropped a documentary crew into south east L.A. to cover the gang wars and the cops trying to deal with that. There’s just something kind of intriguing about feeling like you’re a voyeur, like you’re on the ship watching what’s really happening there, as opposed to something that’s staged and going on. I think when you try and set things up in a traditional Hollywood style, on a television budget, on a television schedule, it’s really hard to get the kind of magic you might get if you had the time a feature does. On a television show, when you create a formula where almost anything can happen you do end up capturing these magic moments that are, sort of, accidentally on purpose. I’m finding we’re getting a lot more of those accidentally on purpose great moments. How did it affect you when you came to direct an episode yourself? That must be quite a different approach. Yeah. It was something that I’ve studied and been really interested in. I started to bring it into my own directing style a little bit prior to this, sort of experimenting with a little bit. But I just loved it and it was just so liberating. And what it does is it energises you and gets everybody involved – the DPs, the camera guys – and you end up with this collaboration that really helps in the end. It was definitely an exercise in different styles! What’s the highlight of the process for you? Because I can’t imagine anything more daunting – and yet, conversely, brilliant – than sitting there with a blank piece of paper at the start. But your hands are in the editing room, writing, directing… Is there a particular favourite segment of that to you? For me, I love editing too. That’s where you kind of rewrite and see it all come together. You’re dealing with what you got. It’s all good. Has the casting process got any easier or harder in the last 10-15 years as the genre itself has become more popular? Robert Carlyle, is some capture, for instance, and I couldn’t … We just really wanted to have the opportunity to work with him. When Battlestar Galactica was first announced and people were like, ‘Whew, why are they making a series out of that cheesy old show?’ And when they then turned around and said, ‘We got Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos’ suddenly they went ‘Oh! That’s different than what we expected’ and ‘Maybe it’s gonna be good’. That simply came from the ilk of actor that they had on that. No, those sort of crossover things don’t really speak to what we’re doing. We are doing, certainly, big recurring cameos from the other SG folks, so… We have Richard Dean Anderson in six episodes this year. Michael Shanks has been around and Amanda Tapping. We’re happy to mine our own universe. You’ve been very clear as well, from what it seems, that the characters [that] are coming back won’t be permanent characters, they’re just there for a short period. Is that crucial for you in terms of making the break? There’s certainly going to be a lot for fans of the franchise to enjoy and they’ll see things that will reward them for being long-time fans. But you don’t have to be to enjoy it. I think it was really important to us to make a clean break and start new with this. Is the stargate itself set to take a back seat in comparison? You talk about a central icon to the . The other one, from where I’m sitting appears to be the Destiny. What were you looking for with the Destiny? What were you looking for with the design of the ship itself? The Destiny is a character in the show too. It plays both protagonist and antagonist in a show in which it is more about the complexity of human characters than it is about heroes and villains, and good guys and bad guys. Those aspects to it were very integral to the design of the series. That the place we were trapped in was going to help to motivate the behaviour of these people. That’s essential and James Robbins, our production designer, did a phenomenal job. Would it be fair to say, then, that one of the underlying themes of Stargate Universe is this feeling of just being out of control? You talk about the ship as a villain, which is a fascinating concept. Whenever I’ve ever flown over the mountains in North America, I’m always amazed that people used to cross that in a horse and carriage. They would just set out for the west coast with what they had. And that aspect of completely being abandoned is an interesting position to put people in, given our contemporary lifestyles. Also, the themes of what we are going through as a people here on Earth, where we’ve kind of returned, in some ways, to pay more attention to the very essence and elements of life. We’re starting to become concerned about air, water, space, all those things. Does all this allow you to, basically, make every character vulnerable? I’m a great fan of 24, but I know, watching an episode of 24, Jack Bauer’s going to walk away no matter what they to it. You seem to be very much heading for a different dynamic here. We always felt that one of the other positives that Stargate had going for it was that it was contemporary. It was placed in the here and now. So when we set out to create characters, we said, look, we have the opportunity to create characters that a really broad spectrum of audience can potentially identify with. Make these real, flawed, three-dimensional human beings that are being put in a somewhat supernatural situation, but that maybe we can identify with their behaviour. That is what we were going for on the show. Make it more real. It’s never going to be real, or reality; it’s a sci-fi show and crazy things happen. But I think we tried to, from a dramatic point of view, make the show more contemporary. It always had that going for it and I’m hoping audiences that might not normally embrace a science fiction show, who might tend towards drama, may cross over and say, ‘This is a show I can watch.’ I think if you want to draw the JJ Abrams comparison, then it’s more Damon Lindelof, it’s a little closer to Lost. Where Lost is, essentially, a genre show that crossed over and appealed to drama audiences. That people who might not normally tune in to a hardcore sci-fi show, like a Star Trek or a Stargate, will watch Lost and… It’s as much sci-fi as anything else. It doesn’t have the same skin on it. It’s not all about techno babble. It’s more about the people in that situation. So, I think, if anything, that is probably a better analogy for what we’re trying to do. Lost is interesting in the way that science fiction is perceived on television now, I think, in that Lost as a show almost hid the fact – it pretended not to be science fiction for a period of time. How far are you into planning the future of Stargate Universe now? We’re almost done the season. We’ve shot 17 episodes and we’ve written everything for this year. We’re starting to talk about the beginning of next year. The last two episodes of this year kind of dovetail into the beginning of next season. So we’ve already started to spin that. Robert C Cooper, thank you very much! Stargate Universe is on Sky1 and Sky1 HD, every Tuesday evening.
