Saturday, June 9

Talking With "Battlestar Galactica" Creator Ron Moore


Source Blog.Meevee.com

Ron_moore Marjorie Kase hit the "Battlestar Galactica" fan even in Los Angeles this week and chatted with the stars. First up - a talk with creator Ron Moore.

You've already started shooting the fourth season. Is there a definitive ending yet?

We have mapped out in detail half the season. In general terms, we've talked about what the ending of the show is. We all kind of know what the shape of that's going to be. We have a general sense of these events will happen, and this where we're going to end up, but we haven't specifically lined up where say, each individual character is going. We just know the general parameters.

Have you thought about which Earth they're going to reach?
Oh yes, I'm pretty sure what Earth they're going to. I was just on the set yesterday, talking to a couple of writers and we had a new idea that it could be this other time too. That would change a lot of our assumptions about what we're doing, but we're still in a place where we're trying to be free and open to ideas.

Tell us about the new movie coming out midseason.

It's called "Razor." It's a storyline that delves into the Battlestar Pegasus quite a bit - back to the beginning, seeing the Cylon attack, what happens to Pegasus during the Cylon attack, and events that were talked about in backstories when those episodes were originally broadcast. It moves through time actually, sequentially. You get up to the point where Lee is in command of Pegasus and then you start dealing with his first mission as commander of the Pegasus. Eventually things that are said and done in "Razor" set up certain things that happen in the fourth season.

What were some of your influences when you first started the show?
When I was first contacted about doing "Galactica," it was February 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks. I watched the original pilot [of the first show] in that context, I realized that if you're going to do a show about this apocalyptic moment, [a] genocide that happens in a heartbeat, suddenly it's just about this core group of survivors that run away from their implacable enemies, the audience is going to bring all their emotions of that event of the world they live in. If you were honest with that and you tried to really be truthful about what it means to live in those kind of times, you had this unique opportunity. That was really the biggest influence.

And then I would say there were films like "Black Hawk Down" that were very influential. "Blade Runner" is hugely influential - to everyone in the genre, "Das Boot." There was a naturalistic style as to how they portrayed men at war and sort of what warfare was all about, not being over-stylized and glamorous but really giving you this down-to-earth realism.

You must have received a ton of feedback in the beginning from hardcore original fans. Did you find it mostly positive or negative?
There was a fairly large reaction that we were redoing the show at all and it was very negative. I had an incident once, I got invited to something called Galacticon, which is a convention for original "Galactica "fans. They booed and hissed when I got up on stage and showed them clips of the new show before they aired.

Did you tell them to "Get a Life?"
No [laughter], they asked me if I would change the show though.

Did you?
They said, "Would you heed what we're saying and make the show more in our keeping?" and I said no, I won't. [laughter] This is the show. You don't have to watch the show, but it's the show. I've interacted with fans for a long time because I was at "Trek" for a long time. It's always interesting to hear what they're saying, what they're arguing about, what their bitches are and what they love. It's fascinating, but I always try to keep a firewall up to say it's not a democracy. It's interesting stuff and I like hearing feedback from the audience. This is what we're going to try to do and just hope that you like it.

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