So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Drawing analogies to 9/11 was certainly fraught ground, but I kind of felt like that was my job; what I wanted to do. And I wanted to delve into the emotions the audience was feeling, and their personal experiences, and put them into a piece of entertainment. The thing is, I never had serious conversations with the studio or the network about any of the political/socio stuff that we were doing in the show. They kind of gave us a pass on all of it, because everything that I’d always heard about the original Star Trek series—it’s not real, you can talk about Vietnam and racism and all that crap because it’s all Vulcans and Klingons and Romulans and no one took it seriously—was true. I got a similar pass. It was all Cylons and the colonists and I could do all kinds of things that gave the audience permission not to get upset about it.

  The feeling was similar to Deep Space Nine. We felt like we were the redheaded stepchild that nobody gave a shit about. We were always struggling to get our pickup and our renewal. But at the miniseries stage, we just felt we were doing something different and something unusual. People say we’re crazy, but we really think it’s going to be amazing. And when I looked back at it and watched it, I was just really surprised and impressed by what we were able to pull off. We really didn’t compromise, we really didn’t bow to pressures and make it silly or tongue-in-cheek. I remember specifically there was a point after I turned in the draft for the miniseries to Ian Valentine, who was running Sci-Fi Channel at that point. He said, “We are never going to end an act with a child and the teddy bear with a nuclear weapon going off and destroying her and all these ships. That’s never going to happen.” I was like, “Fuck you. This is what we’re going to have. We are going to do this.” And sure as shit, we did. We just held to our guns. And then Ian got slowly wedged out and then Mark Stern came in, and somehow Mark didn’t pay attention to it and it ended up in the show.

  Complicating the situation on the miniseries was the fact that at the same time it was green-lit, Moore, who had started writing the project, received a phone call from HBO asking if he would be interested in running their series Carnivàle.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Carnivàle at that point was just a pilot and they were looking for a showrunner. So I went in and interviewed with HBO’s Chris Albrecht as a potential showrunner and talked about what I would do for the series, and this and that. At the end of the day, they decided not to make me the showrunner. They went with Henry Bromell, but they really liked me and they asked if I’d be interested in coming aboard as a consultant, so I said, “Sure.”

  So I joined the staff as a consultant, which meant I would probably contribute a couple of episodes, but I wouldn’t be there every single day. In the meantime, I was writing the Galactica miniseries. So there was a period of time where I rented an office for myself in Glendale, and I was writing the Galactica miniseries, like, two to three days out of five. Then on the other days I would drive to Santa Monica and go to the Carnivàle writers room and participate in their story break and start writing my own episodes.

  DAVID EICK

  We pitched Battlestar Galactica and sold it, and then—I want to be clear—Ron got a fucking office and took the stacks of notes written on cocktail napkins and shit, and went in and broke a story. Broke a fucking outline. And we obviously discussed it several times before he presented it, but when it came time to go in a room and figure out how these great ideas became a story, that was Ron by himself. It’s interesting how the nucleus sort of got narrower and narrower—shrunk and shrunk and shrunk as we kind of pursued it and narrowed it down. It was a really healthy process. We had gone through the Battlestar script development together and the notes from the network and that kind of stuff, but then it just sat there while they mulled it over and debated it. It was there for months, believe me.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  What happened is that just at about the same point that I finished the Galactica miniseries draft, and it had been approved and they were going to do it, and the show was getting green-lit to at least a miniseries, HBO, on the other side of the fence, decided to make a change in showrunners. They let Henry go and they asked if I would take over the show. It was an enormous opportunity to suddenly run a show for HBO. And the Galactica thing was only sort of a pickup for the miniseries. It wasn’t a commitment to a series yet. So at that point in time I said I would run Carnivàle. I had to step back from Galactica and hand off production of the Galactica miniseries to David.

  DAVID EICK

  I don’t remember what the exact specifics of the situation were, but eventually, after we had been waiting, Ron was like, “Look, I’ve got to take this other gig.” The upshot was that, by the time we started shooting, he was gone. I was sending him dailies. We would talk on weekends, and on the occasion when we’d hit snags in production, I would do a rewrite and shoot it over to him and hope that at night he would get to it. He didn’t vanish completely, but he wasn’t able to be there for the production. He wasn’t able to be full-time on it.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  At that point I was still involved, but he was really the guy. He really produced the Galactica miniseries. You know, I chimed in from Valencia periodically and we had various meetings with production designers. I did all the script rewrites along the way, but they were sort of in my spare time while I was doing the showrunner duties on Carnivàle. But we had gotten a “go” on Galactica.

  MARK STERN

  (former president of original content, Syfy)

  It’s become part of the lore now, but when Bonnie Hammer heard that Ron and David were going to turn Starbuck into a woman, apparently she raised her hands in joy. But all of that happened prior to my arrival. Now, the reason they had hired me, and the reason that I wanted to go there, was I was excited about reinventing what science fiction was on television. I know it’s grandiose to say that, but I wanted to do things that were different in terms of science fiction and not what had been done before. They were all on board with that and I was very excited to do it. At the time they had some fairly traditional science fiction on their air. They had Farscape and Lexx and Tremors. So, for me, it was really exciting to go in there and figure out what the next iteration of science fiction was going to look like, but the first thing they did was say, “Oh, we just green-lit this miniseries around Battlestar Galactica.” My first reaction was, “Oh, shit.”

  I grew up on Battlestar Galactica and I love it in all its kitschiness. But the last thing I wanted to do was preside over this kind of old-fashioned space opera. It was like the antithesis of what we were talking about doing, so I was like, “Okay, great. So this’ll be the last thing before we kind of get on to the new agenda?” Then I read the script, and I was like, “Oh, this is awesome.” The script changed my mind. Plus the manifesto, their statement, of what they wanted to accomplish and how they didn’t want it to be a traditional space opera. When I read both of those things, I was like, “Okay, we’re on track. This is great.” I got very excited about it and was on board.

  The next challenge was getting a director and crew on board. The answer was found in the form of Michael Rymer, who had come off of directing the films Angel Baby (1995), Allie & Me (1997), In Too Deep (1999), Perfume (2001), and Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned (2002).

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We started with Breck Eisner at the beginning, but he left because, I believe, there was a feature in development that got the green light.

  DAVID EICK

  He left to do Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, so we can make fun of him for that. But when Breck left, we were without that third partner, and that’s where I think Ron and I really began to connect, because it felt less like a forum or a committee and more like a partnership. So in a way it was good to kind of force us to focus.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  But when it came time to do the miniseries, we were back to square one in terms of finding a director.

  DAVID EICK

  Remember, at the time the
name Battlestar Galactica suggested a cheesy seventies show. I know its fans and disciples adore it, but if you mention the title to a lot of people in show business, they would roll their eyes. It wasn’t exactly a great calling card to say, “We’re looking for a director for Battlestar Galactica.” On the other hand, we were a basic cable network. This is 2003 when we started sending up the flares. You’re still many years before the cable world was viewed or the off-network world was viewed as the land where all your dreams come true. It was viewed as, “Oh, you mean it’s cheaper than if we did it for NBC? Okay, got it.” That was about all it meant. Cheesy title, cheap network, right? We were getting action directors. We were getting Star Trek guys and guys who had done Stargate and anything with the word “star” in the title, but nobody who I had any certainty or promise was going to understand what we were trying to do, which is that we were taking this title and turning it inside out. Then, Michael Rymer came around.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  I had just finished Queen of the Damned and was in Los Angeles. From there I went into a TV pilot called Haunted, and I found the medium to be a very interesting experience. The rhythm of it was quite different and gratifying, and even though there was a lot of green screen in Haunted, there were certainly a lot of set pieces. Because I come from the indie world, I said to my agent, “No more special effects, no more action. I just want to do character stories. People talking in rooms. Relationships. Things like that, because those are my favorite films.” And the first thing he sends me is Battlestar Galactica [laughs]. He just said, “Read it,” which I did. I sat down one afternoon to read it and didn’t put it down. It was a really good read. Ron Moore hooked me in completely, and that’s sort of tricky when you read a lot of scripts. When I did put it down, I said to my wife and my friends that it was a strong character piece, the emotions are all there, that it really was what I was looking for. I was quite surprised by it. This is not your standard space opera. So that was pretty much it, but then I was not offered the show originally. I went back to Australia and got on with my life, working on my independent stuff. Then I got another call saying they wanted me to do it, so I was back on a plane for Los Angeles.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  David had seen Angel Baby, which Michael Rymer had written and directed. Then we had a great meeting with Michael and all got along really well. It felt like a really good fit.

  DAVID EICK

  On a project like this, you need a sounding board. It would have been a lot more catastrophic losing Ron if we didn’t have someone like Michael Rymer there to continue working with me and working with the cast and crew. Just someone who was so like-minded, I think is my point. Could have been Ron left and I was stuck with some yo-yo. That would have been a lot more difficult.

  TODD SHARP

  Michael was a visionary, and in concert with Ron and David, they really crafted a beautiful vision for the show.

  DAVID EICK

  Rymer was a guy who had this interesting combination of a very high-profile sci-fi feature film. I know features always got the brass of the network excited if you could bring them a director who had done big movies. It was Queen of the Damned. It was the right genre and it was large in scope. The only problem was, it was a piece of shit, which Michael hated, because the Weinsteins recut it. On the other hand, Michael had this award-winning celebrated little indie film that had gotten him legit.

  One of the earliest things he did was called Angel Baby, which was about these two homeless Australian people who were mentally ill and fall in love and get pregnant. I would struggle to find anything less applicable to Battlestar Galactica than that. Yet the movie was filled with humanity. It so compelled you to relate to this culture that you really didn’t have any natural access to. It’s Australia, it’s homelessness in Australia. Don’t really know what that’s all about. All these different ways in which it could have been distancing, just like science fiction can be.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Michael Rymer brought a lot to the show just visually, but also in terms of thinking through the dynamics of character in each individual script. We had some other great directors, too, and they’re the ones who had to figure out how to shoot an episode in seven days.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  His interactions with the cast, and the pilot, just formed so much of the fundamentals of the characters, and how they behaved and the style in which the show was shot; the way it was lit. The whole aesthetic of the show was something Michael brought to the party, along with Richard Hudolin, obviously, our production designer. But Michael was the man on the scene. He was really captaining all of that, and his relationship with the cast was amazing. They spent a lot of time together and he helped them form those characters, and so many of the actors were so very young and very green and very early in their careers. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the work that Rymer did with them to craft those characters and make those relationships work.

  TRICIA HELFER

  (actress, “Number Six”)

  Michael is a part of Battlestar, because he was one of the people that started it. He directed so many of them and finally came on as a consulting producer. Even if he wasn’t directing it, he had his stamp on it. Not only is he incredibly artistic and knows exactly what he wants, but he’s extremely collaborative as well. He comes in knowing what he wants, but he also, sometimes to the crew’s dismay, would really take time to discuss it with anybody in the scene that wanted to discuss it or had questions or had thoughts or whatever. The crew would be like, “Can we go home?”

  We did extremely long hours on Battlestar, and he was all about making the best product and was one of the directors where his ego was out of it. If somebody had a better idea about something, it was something that ultimately became what we used. He was open to that. He wasn’t somebody who would say, “My way, that’s it.” He was also somebody who would just come right out and say, “Now, that was shit. Do it again.”

  MICHAEL HOGAN

  (actor, “Colonel Saul Tigh”)

  When you’re doing a play, you rehearse for weeks and you do the play every day and you live in each other’s skins every day. And a theater rehearsal space is the safest space in the world. It’s like a cocoon. You make a fool of yourself, you laugh, you cry, you do it again. You try everything and it’s safe, because nothing’s going to go wrong. Rymer was kind of like that with the miniseries and with the work he did with us before. And he did it with “33,” the first episode, and after that. So there’s the dress rehearsal, and there’s the first preview, where you’re letting people come in and see this baby that you’re creating, and by the time of opening, yeah, let’s go. You can fly. You’ve got wings like a bird coming out of the cocoon, and away you go. That’s what Rymer created for us on Battlestar Galactica and we were safe enough to do what we did there.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Michael brought a strong visual sense. He really embraced the docu-aesthetic and a naturalistic sense of shooting it. And he’s really good with actors. He really spent time thinking about each scene, talking with the actors involved in each scene. He’s an actor’s director, and so he really concentrated on that aspect of it. David and I impressed on him at the beginning that this was really a character piece. It was all about character, character, character. We had to believe these people. We’re doing this character internal drama. There’s a lot of backstory, there’s a lot of jagged edges to these characters. It’s a complicated story, but don’t get lost in the sci-fi action aspect of it. It’s all about the people. Michael really embraced that, and so he embraced the cast and worked with them intensively. So his work with the cast, and his visual sense as a cameraman and a cinematographer in his own right, gave it a certain dynamism on the screen. He was a huge part of the show. It was David and Michael and myself, the three of us. It was that chemistry that really sort of delivered the whole product.

  DAVID EIC
K

  We twisted ourselves into a pretzel to make the argument that he was right for it. That he could handle the effects and the scope, because he had worked on that canvas but he could also handle terrific performances and texture and detail and really create a world. Bonnie Hammer, the head of the network, to my surprise, was very supportive. I think she saw in Michael a name she could promote, meaning he’d done a big sci-fi movie and somebody who’s worked on low budgets and so wouldn’t have an appetite to only understand how to make huge and expensive.

  He became critical to the process. He had done other movies about subcultures, too. He’s a Robert Altman type, and very interested in diving nose-first into these subcultures and exploring them. He did the movie about the fragrance industry. He did a movie about modeling. He does movies about worlds. He would struggle over things like how the helmets would have to have a visible oxygen source, but somehow understand even without a big scene about it, would just intuitively understand how the ship moved from the landing bay and into the hangar dock and how the pilot would be removed from the cockpit and how the helmets would work, and how they would get down and how there would probably be three assistants who would gather around that Viper when it came in. Each of them would have their own job.

  These are things that you’d say, “Well, that’s what directors do.” You’d be shocked at how many directors don’t do that. They don’t do their homework, they don’t think it through, they don’t have a sense of building a whole world where every detail is figured out. You get into the editing room and you start panicking. Michael just obsessed over how everything would work. The only thing we gave up on, meaning we obsessed about it for a while and then said, “Fuck it,” was gravity. I think for a while we were pretty caught up in the idea that we would need a rationale, an explanation, some sort of exposition scene—an “Irving the Explainer” scene—where you say, “Here’s why everyone can just walk around flat-footed and not be bouncing around like in the space station.” Then we basically said, “Fuck it, who cares?”