When Ron Moore was a young writer in the 1990s cranking out the familiar rhythms of Star Trek shows—from Next Generation to Deep Space Nine and Voyager — he chafed at the strictures of TV sci-fi. (The pseudoscience was "awful to write and soul-sapping," Moore says.) So when he got the chance to remake the 1970s cheesefest Battlestar Galactica for the Sci-Fi
Channel in 2003, he tossed those clichés out the airlock. Now Moore's version, a tightly constructed drama with cliff-hangers and the occasional exciting space dogfight, is in its final season. In his Universal Studios office, Moore spoke to Wired about making dark, naturalistic science fiction.
Wired: What was your concept for remaking Battlestar Galactica?
Moore: I wanted something that was neither Star Wars-Star Trek, which I saw as the romantic side, nor Blade Runner-Matrix, the cyberpunk side. I thought there had to be a third category. To a large extent, I'd say, yeah, we accomplished that.
Wired: Then you tucked in all that moral ambiguity.
Moore: One of the things I like about our version is that the Galactica isn't one of the best ships in the fleet. If you tell stories about the elite, they have to be paragons. We said the ship was going into retirement and the crew were all castoffs and knuckleheads. To me that's an interesting show.
Wired: And Adama is a very different patriarch than Captain Picard.
Moore: They respect him and they all have affection for him, but not everybody thinks he walks on water. And as you get further into the show, you can see that he's a deeply flawed man — as all fathers are. As we all are.
Wired: Did you feel any responsibility to fans to not change too much?
Moore: I felt a responsibility to make it Battlestar Galactica, but by my lights. I tried to maintain a lot of the superstructure. But the original writers had a great premise for a series that just couldn't be executed on ABC in 1978. They had to make it cheesy fun. I showed it to my 9-year-old son, and he loves it. As a kid's show, it works.
But look, the story opens with a genocide, an apocalyptic destruction of 12 planets. Billions of human lives are lost. The survivors run away, fleeing an implacable enemy, the Cylons, who are determined to destroy them, and they're looking for a mythical place called Earth.
And the first place they go is the casino planet.
Wired: A lot of those '70s and '80s shows had grim backstories. Even Knight Rider.
Moore: Yeah, you can strip something down to these dark premises and wonder if audiences are going to follow you there. The network did a test of our miniseries just before it went on the air, and it was one of the worst-rated ever. The company that did it sent back this report that just said, "Nobody likes these characters, we see no reason this should ever become a series, it's too dark, it's too scary." Fortunately, it was also too late. The show was done — locked, in the can. It went to air with this sense of fatalism on the part of the network. Then they were shocked when the numbers were so good.
Wired: Since then, have you written yourselves into any corners?
Moore: Some of that is happening right now as we wrap up the show. It's like, OK, what did that mean, exactly? How do we get out of this?
Wired: Were you a geek as a kid?
Moore: I grew up in Chowchilla, California, which was about 4,500 people — small enough where I could be in the marching band and be the quarterback of the football team. I could love Star Trek and still be accepted as one of the jocks. So it was sort of surprising to me when I left and people were like, "You're a Star Trek fan? Oh my god, you're such a nerd." I'm like, "But I was the quarterback!"
Wired: The lesson is, always lead with the football thing.
Moore: Yeah, but I just didn't grow up with the inferiority complex that seems to go with everyone else's experiences of loving this material.
Wired: There's a lot of religion on the show. Are you religious?
Moore: I'm a recovering Catholic. At one point I looked into various Eastern religions, and now I've settled into a sort of agnosticism. But I always felt it was something noticeably missing from the Star Trek universe.
You can deal with religion more aggressively in science fiction than you can in a contemporary show. You get a pass because everyone agrees it's not Christianity or Islam or any of those things we're so freaked out about. Even though it is.
Wired: What's going on with Caprica, the Galactica spinoff-prequel?
Moore: It's busy. We're in prep, and we have a director. The script has been written for two years, so there's not a lot of heavy lifting on the page.
Wired: Then what?
Moore: I have another pilot called Virtuality that [BSG co-executive producer] Mike Taylor and I wrote, which has been ordered by Fox. We don't know where it's going to be made, but it'll probably start shooting in July. That's a two-hour movie, and we'll see when and if they make it a series.
Wired: You just directed an episode. What was that like?
Moore: Tremendous. Usually when you're working on a script, you play the movie in your head as you write it. And one of the first things you have to lose in this business is that movie, because it's never going to be that way. You're handing your words over to other people, and they interpret them in their own ways. But when you're directing, you can actually make that movie. My son sat next to me for four days on the set and just lived in it, loved it. I could see the show through his eyes, and it was precious.
Wired,19/5/2008,written by Adam Rogers
Extended version
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-06/ff_moore_transcript
Friday, May 23, 2008
Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore Talks Football, Religion, and What He's Up to Next (Wired)
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