So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  For forty years there was no contact between the Colonials and the Cylons. Then all hell broke loose in the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.…

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The big thing that came up between David, Breck Eisner, and me in the development of the miniseries was, “What do you do about the Cylons?” We were struggling with it. There was a restaurant that’s no longer there called Chinois Hollywood, that we were having lunch in. Long working lunch trying to figure out the Cylons. The assumption at the beginning was that they should be like the original Cylons, guys in suits. Then we started talking in practical terms, because in today’s environment the audience expectation of a guy in a suit was different than what it was in 1978. It couldn’t just be silver suits. They were going to have to be more elaborate. They were going to have to be really cool and specialized to have all this stuff, and we kind of quickly came to the conclusion that, “Shit, how many of those things are we going to really be able to afford to make? Maybe one or two, and how’s that going to work? We can’t have just one or two Cylon suits that we’re going to have to do, like, an entire series of. That’s not going to be practical. Okay, what are the CGI possibilities?”

  The Cylons and their technology proved to be the greatest challenge for the design team. In a significant departure from the original, it was decided early on that the Cylon hardware should reflect an organic aesthetic. Eric Chu’s design for the basestar, for example, was inspired initially by images of seedpods and insects as viewed under an electron microscope. And then there was the Cylon Raider, which, more than any other vessel, was a combination of numerous elements that the director, producers, and network executives all wanted to see. Overall, producers wanted to maintain the signature oval shape of the original, but updated with the organic quality utilized in the basestar.

  ERIC CHU

  (art director, Enigma Studios)

  What I intended was to come up with something that looked somewhat organic from a distance, but as soon as you started to come in closer, you could see it was made up of mechanical struts and circuits and that sort of thing. In fact, that was the first design that was unanimously liked and subsequently the first design that was approved. This approach created an innovative visual dichotomy between the series’ two protagonists—making Colonial technology and vehicles more mechanical in design than their cybernetic adversaries’.

  GARY HUTZEL

  (visual effects supervisor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  One of the underlying elements of our story is the Cylons are searching. They are, in a sense, searching for God and what God wants them to do. The Colonials, on the other hand, have a long history of fighting with each other and generally not being very nice. So, to me, giving the Colonials this mechanistic design, while the Cylons are very artistic in nature and seek to understand those elements, is a good note for the story.

  And with the Cylon Raider, in the original script it was described as a “squashed Cylon in space.” David Eick very much wanted to stay with that idea, but to be honest, I did not understand what the hell he was talking about. None of us understood what he was talking about, but he kept after it and kept saying this is not a squashed Cylon. So we kept at it and it eventually grew into this organic ship. Charles Ratteray, a Zoic designer/illustrator, created the approved design, which later received some minor revisions from Eric Chu to make the vessel appear slightly more organic. Literally, it has swept-forward wings that are menacing. It is more of an artistic choice than it is a mechanical, practical choice, but what comes out of that is the fact that in some shots it does look like a squashed Cylon. It has this strength, almost as if it has this kind of Superman pose to it. It’s a very strong visual design that I think worked very well in the show.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  When I approached the Cylon Raiders from a production design standpoint, I thought about the fact that the Cylons are mechanical beings, but they’re alive. So how do you show that? If you remember, it was Kara who came out of the Cylon fighting ship, and she dropped through what was like a birth canal kind of thing, because they were evolving. In my mind, they’re trying to be human and practically are human, and what happens when humans give birth? I had to have some sort of parallel. It doesn’t have to be exact, but there should be a parallel process.

  Moore wrestled with the concept of the Cylons, ultimately envisioning two distinct types—a humanoid agent that would be able to infiltrate Colonial society, and a second, more deadly, mechanical Centurion. Several considerations weighed heavily on the latter design. Specifically, producers wanted their new adversary to be more menacing than the original. It was agreed upon early on that the iconic red eye would be retained and, in a nod to the hard-core, its parallel movement timed frame by frame to match the 1978 version. Although the Centurions are featured only briefly in the miniseries, producers were also always aware of the strong possibility that Galactica could go to series. Not wanting to limit their possibilities, they realized that they needed the movement and articulation that only a completely virtual character could perform.

  GARY HUTZEL

  There is always an issue if you put guys in suits. How are we going to create the right tone? How are we going to execute it? Is it RoboCop? We can’t have the guys in the chrome outfits that were obviously grips storming around, not being able to see. CGI eliminated all of those problems.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Yes, we could do some CGI Cylons, but at that point in the game they were still very expensive and very limited. Even in the miniseries we only used the CGI Cylons for a couple of scenes in the very beginning. You didn’t see a lot of them. We kind of said, “Yeah, but if they’re the antagonist every week, you’re going to want to do scenes with them. You’re going to want to have more than just walking in and shooting. They’re going to have to be characters.” That wasn’t practical on a TV budget at that point in time. But what else could we do? We were just throwing out ideas. Somebody threw out the idea, “Well, what if they were to look like human beings?” I dismissed that at the beginning. I was like, “Eh, that’s Blade Runner, you know? That territory’s been mined. Forget about that.”

  GARY HUTZEL

  Eric Chu was asked to incorporate an unfeasible anatomy to the Cylons, specifically an extremely small waist to illustrate that this was a machine and not an actor in a suit. One of his earlier concepts featured an elegant “sci-fi retro” humanoid form with articulated sections. It was very feminine, and I rather liked that idea. It was a completely different take on them, very stylish. It was a great design, but nobody wanted it. So we turned about and went back to Eric again. I gave him a horrible little drawing that I had done. I said, “This is the idea.” It’s kind of like a death shroud—the Cylon design with a spiderlike face—and he created the Centurion the first time out. He sent it over and we said, “This is it. This is a Cylon.”

  EMILE SMITH

  (digital effects supervisor, Zoic Studios)

  We decided not to use motion capture to animate the Centurion, preferring instead to keyframe a unique walk cycle that would incorporate both humanistic and robotic traits. We were trying to give it a unique look. We felt motion capture would be too human. We referenced a lot of movies—from RoboCop to The Terminator to Nightmare on Elm Street—to get a heavy but evil movement devised for them. We have one shot of it unfolding its hands, which I reference Freddy Krueger unfurling his bladed hands for.

  GARY HUTZEL

  People should know that we spent a lot of time trying to reintegrate the original Cylons into the show. But ultimately it was decided we needed something more deadly-looking and something that would be more articulate. So by rethinking and redesigning it, we have a creature that has a lot of articulation and can move in lots of impressive ways.

  MIKE GIBSON

  (visual effects producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Gary’s feeling was that they had to be menacing, right? And they had to look deadly. He said, “Le
t’s make them taller. Let’s make them tower over you,” which is how they ended up being about seven feet tall so that they would be quite impressive standing there next to a human form. You have to remember, when we started, you made ten CG shots a show. It was a very different world back then compared to the savvy viewer that, today, expects, like, one hundred or one hundred and fifty effects on a show.

  The other thing Gary said was we should consider moving them in the direction of insects in terms of look. Working with the face, we began to look at mantises. In some of the early designs, you began to see the arms had that kind of upright position with longer talons and were almost mantis-like. We began to pare that down and that’s where you got these very large hands with very sharp fingers, the idea being that it doesn’t even need a weapon. It just needs to get near you and touch you, and it can rip you apart. It’s that big.

  The other thing we wanted, coming out of Glen Larson, is the oscillating eye, which needed to be worked in. We didn’t want something that just felt like it was moving across, so the way that we then designed it is it almost came down as a “V” on one side, and came to a point in the center of the forehead, where the eye would be on a human, and then up the end. So we kind of angled that a little bit. It needed to have a human form, because you had to identify that in the evolution of that Cylon that it was imitating arms and legs, but still had this real deadly presence. In the next evolution we kind of shrunk the hands and made them clawlike. We wanted something that looked mean, with heavy weight, which is always very difficult to do with CGI characters, and putting them into real-life environments.

  DAVID EICK

  We knew we couldn’t sustain CGI Cylons, and realized we would need to go with humanoid Cylons. I remember that coming up while Breck was still involved, and I remember pitching them the Manson Family as sort of an analogue for how the Cylons view their ancestors. Remember how the Manson Family believed that they were releasing you to heaven by killing you, because they were the rightful next stage in evolution? The Cylons therefore really didn’t have to have any malice, you know? They didn’t have to hate us, they just need to be done with us. Finished with us. Almost ambivalent. That came up during those early days.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  So maybe they look like human beings. How is it not Blade Runner? As we were sitting there, I started to come up with this sort of, “Well, what does that say? Why would they look like humans if they’re robots? Why would an alien robot species look like human beings? Well, maybe if they were created by humans, it’s sort of a Frankenstein thing?” Well, that starts to get interesting. Maybe they didn’t always look that way. Maybe they used to look like traditional mechanical robots. Then they went away and on their own evolved into looking like human beings. But why would they do that? Could it be an existential thing? Could they believe that it’s a religious thing? That they’re making themselves more like human beings because that’s what they think God is like or something? We were starting to feel all this depth and that there was something interesting about this. It became a way to solve a production problem.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Early in the first season, we felt that we didn’t want to explain them, we didn’t want to be in their world. We thought it would demystify them and take away their power. That it would be better if they were more enigmatic. Of course that changed, but I don’t know that we planned on them becoming so complex as they eventually did. None of that was envisioned.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  If you go back and look at the original writers’-guide bible that I wrote, there’s very little about the Cylons. In fact, Number Six’s bio consists of one line. It just says, “The woman as machine.” I just embraced the idea that it was going to be an organic process to figure out the Cylons and what kind of society they had and how they operated, what their rules were, and all that just came out of the writers’ room. It was really a completely improvisational process. You know the Hybrid that controls the basestars and talks in that sort of crazy word-salad? That was inspired by a drawing that [production designer] Richard Hudolin did of a hybrid Cylon and a tank. He was like, “I think we could build something like that, and doesn’t this look cool?” I said, “Yeah, it does look cool. What is it?” “I don’t know what it is. What do you think it is?” “Well, let me think about that. It looks like a hybrid.… Hmm, I wonder if we could make this into something that is half Cylon/half machine, and maybe it controls the basestar?” It was literally inspired by that drawing.

  And from there, we always talked about the idea that the Hybrid could look into a level of existence above our own and just the mere fact of rising through the surface of the water and seeing something greater drove her mad and that she couldn’t really explain it to us in any rational terms. So there was a sense of there being something else that human beings could sort of perceive on certain levels and not understand. And that we in Galactica were going to see sort of small shafts of light that came down from this other plane. We would see them and experience them imperfectly and never be able to truly understand what that was all about. Again, all of that was from a drawing.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  We were reaching into “What could be weird and different about this?” and something halfway between the Cylon and God. I don’t know, something’s got to run the ship that they can interface with. You don’t want to see some guy sitting there flipping switches, because we’ve seen our guys flipping switches. So how would they do it? Do they need to read the dial that says, “There’s this O2 component in the atmosphere in these various sections,” or do we just have something that monitors it the whole time and corrects it, because we’ve mastered the ability to create consciousness and put that in our various models’ heads? Couldn’t we make a ship that basically is a Cylon?

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In the miniseries, there’s a woman with a baby and Six asks if she can see it, and she ends up snapping the baby’s neck. That happened because they needed an act out. They called Ron up and said, “We need an out for the act; it’s too soft the way it is.” He didn’t really know why he had her break the baby’s neck either when he wrote it. He even said, “I don’t know why she did, but let’s find out.”

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  We would ask questions like that. “Why does she seem sad when she broke the baby’s neck?” Ron at that point had said, “Well, I’m not exactly sure.” It just seemed kind of cool. Or, in the opening of the miniseries, why would she kiss that guy in the beginning and ask the question, “Are you alive?” Why would that be an issue? Those are things that with Ron’s instincts were intriguing to him. Let’s say it and then figure it out later was a part of the fun of that. It was also saying, “Okay, we’ve got a war between these essentially killer robots and humanity. What are the weaknesses of the robots? What are the weaknesses of humanity? What do the robots envy about humanity? Do they want to be alive? Is that what they’re testing?”

  DAVID EICK

  Ron was shooting Carnivàle and I called him up saying, “Rymer feels we need something to kick this off or we need to punctuate it.” It was literally like one of the last things he wrote for the miniseries. By that point in time, there was a good-natured acceptance that David and Ron are going to go dark as fuck and the network is constantly going to be fighting them about it. To their credit, the network didn’t make it an ongoing war, which I suppose they could have, although there were some skirmishes. At that point they were just, like, “Guys! Really? Really, guys? Is nothing sacred?” I think the effectiveness of it and the fact that it came to some sort of production rescue that I just can’t remember, was part of the reason they let us get away with it.

  TRICIA HELFER

  (actress, “Number Six”)

  There was a lot of discussion about it, and the network didn’t want it in there. But I liked the fact that it was in there. Michael Rymer and I talked about it, and Ron talked about it, being more of a mercy killing. To me it was important to h
ave that moment, because the bombs were going to go off. This baby was going to die shortly, but it was the first time that she had actually held a baby. For her to take that moment and kind of be fascinated by the baby, and want to pick up the baby, and being kind of taken in by its innocence, and then make the choice to end its life quickly and painlessly as opposed to suffering hours later. To me that was a very integral moment of showing that there is some empathy, even if it’s not something you believe in, and there’s these robots that can have these emotions and feel. That’s the first moment that we really saw a glimpse of it in the show that there’s more depth to her and to their side. Sort of foreshadowing that there’s a lot more to this side, the Cylon side, than you’re expecting in the beginning.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  At the beginning, I really wasn’t planning on seeing a lot of the Cylons as people and finding them in the show too much. I kind of thought that they were going to be more of a shark; they’re off camera, they come in periodically, they catch up every once in a while. You know, you meet up with them one-on-one in discrete situations. There’s some sleeper agents in the fleet out there, we’ll play that for a long time. We’re not going to play multiples of these guys very much. I think I had sort of an instinctive prejudice against it, because in Star Trek that was what we called the “evil twin scenario,” where there was a bad Data, there was a bad Riker, the Mirror Universe and all of that. So I kind of shied away from it and didn’t want to go down that road too deeply. But you just kind of found that you were able to do that. Look at Grace Park. She was playing both Sharon on Cylon-occupied Caprica, and the other Sharon on Galactica. The audience realized that there’s two of them and they were two different people. Suddenly you realized you could do more of that stuff.