So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  So at Battlestar, from the outset I said that I didn’t want to do that. “You guys know the characters, you’re going to know the characters, and you need to say the lines so that they fit in your mouth, so that you feel comfortable with it. I’m totally open if you want to improvise, if you want to play around, you want to try different things, go for it. But there always has to be one take where you do it as written so that if I get in the editing room and it doesn’t work, I’ve always got that one to go back to.” That was our rule.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  (director, “Pegasus”)

  Ad-libbing by the actors became part of the show in that loose way that I think was also very well done by Friday Night Lights, where you would have a very loose shooting style, where basically the camera guys are shooting the rehearsals. And you’re shooting it like a documentary. All the time we were putting the camera guys in stress positions to try and find their shots as if they were really in the room, and it was also encouraged in the acting. There would be overlapping dialogue, people wouldn’t finish sentences, there would be a looseness at times, as well as something that at the time was forbidden on television, which was silence.

  I kept saying to the cast, “Slow it down. You don’t have to steal every available space; we can take it out later if we need to.”

  TV acting at the time was quite different from film acting. You had to keep moving and you had to keep it snappy. And don’t get too heavy. I remember the first day I worked with Michael Trucco was the day that Starbuck goes to rescue Anders. He has this line where he sees her in the forest after a year or whatever and says, “What took you so long?” There’s a jokey, Bruce Willis–y way to deliver that line, and he did that. And I go, “Great. Now do it like you mean it. Do it like you haven’t seen her for a year. Play the circumstance,” and it was much better. The irony is that underneath it you could still get a glimpse of it and it was great.

  Many times during the filming of the show, we were constantly just trying to find the tone from season to season; trying to push the boundary of what we were doing in terms of performance, naturalism. We were not opposed to nice chunky, juicy acting. Often, like a lot of James Callis’s stuff, he would do very broad takes and then I’d let him go for a while and say, “Okay, give me one where you do that. Give me one where you do nothing,” and that was always the take that was in the show. But all that other stuff was preparation for that take where he threw it away.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Some actors like to improvise more than others. James Callis loved it, and he would do all kinds of stuff. It was like he was doing another show; he was riffing all kinds of things. Some of it was fantastic, some if it was insane. But it was always sort of interesting to watch what he was going to do with it. Eddie just read the line.

  MICHAEL NANKIN

  (director, “Faith”)

  I was mostly a gushing fan of Mary McDonnell and totally intimidated by her résumé, so it was very important to me that when I did my first scene with her, that she like me and think I was a good director. So we did this scene with Doc Cottle. She’s had her tests done for her breast cancer, and she’s coming to the sickbay to get the results. And it’s, like, a two-and-a-half-page scene, all medical jargon. We start rehearsing and it’s playing like a soap opera scene. There was nothing going on; he’s just rattling off all this shit about the cancer cells. It’s not an emotional scene; it’s not what the scene is really about. So I said to Mary, “You’re the president. He’s got this clipboard with all the answers on it, so why don’t you just take the clipboard out of his hands and read it? Why does he have to? Then the bad news comes in. There’s this bed here, so why don’t you back off and put the bed between you two? Like you’re protecting yourself.” She liked that idea. And then they had these semitranslucent privacy curtains around each bed, and I said, “You know what? If I put a light behind the curtain, then you go behind the curtain to collect yourself. You don’t want to lose it in front of this doc. I’ll see it in silhouette if you go behind the curtain.” And she liked that idea.

  So she takes a minute behind the curtain and we see her, and she takes a deep breath and becomes presidential, comes out and asks the big question: “How long?” So I’m watching this and it’s looking good, but it still sounds dull and everyone on the crew’s standing around, staring at me, saying, “When are we gonna get to work?” And I’m trying to solve the sort of stodginess of the scene. I thought, “Okay, let’s do an experiment. Just play the scene, but no one say anything.” And Doc Cottle, who had the most dialogue, said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Don’t say anything. No dialogue.” So we try it, and a chill goes through the room. She walks in, we know why she’s there. She takes the clipboard, she reads it, she steps back. She collects herself, she comes out. She hands the clipboard back, she walks out. And it’s beautiful. But this is my first episode on Battlestar Galactica. I know that if I eliminate all the dialogue, they’re going to fire me tomorrow. So we shoot it two ways, one with dialogue, one without. In editing, I just cut out all the dialogue except for the last lines. So she comes in, does all the pantomime, everything works without dialogue. She comes out from behind the curtain and says, “How long have I got?” And he says, “Four weeks.” That’s the end of the scene. And the producers loved it. And Mary McDonnell thought I was a good director. So mission accomplished.

  The difficulties on the show usually came down to how do we elevate this beyond the traditional approach to a scene. That was the challenge all the way through Battlestar.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  There’s not terribly many circumstances I think of since—maybe Hannibal—where you really have the time to noodle with a cast of professionals who have their characters down and are now going, “Oh, okay, we’re stuck on this ship.” That was always a constant challenge when I did the show: How do you shoot these things to keep them looking different, looking fresh for yourself? We were pulling walls and going with long lenses. We were going extremely wide one season, developing shots, and just really trying to mix it up as much as we could at a time where the technology was not up to scratch. Even that is part of the texture now, the fact that to make it look like a film, we actually just pushed the gain. You would never do that now. You would find other ways to create the texture.

  MICHAEL NANKIN

  The other thing to keep in mind is that Battlestar Galactica’s essentially a submarine picture. It all takes place on the ship, except every once in a while we go somewhere else. But the advantage of being on the same sets all the time and not having to light them from scratch afforded us an enormous amount of time to play with the scenes. In a lot of ways it became like a repertory theater. It’s the only show I’ve ever worked on that you could get forty-five minutes or an hour into a scene and stop and say, “You know, this is not working. What’s your thinking?” And there would be enough time in the day to extract yourself from the wrong path and rethink and start over. So it became about the scene work. The average length of the editor’s first cut was usually about twenty minutes too long. So an episode that needed to be limited to forty-three minutes was sixty-five minutes. That was the average.

  The reason that that happened was because the writing on Battlestar Galactica encouraged the actors and directors to capture moments. The show lived in the space between the lines, so things would expand and you’d find moments and chase them down until you pulled them to the ground. Ron, God bless him, would not cut all those moments out and just stick with the dialogue. He would just throw out stories and preserve the work that the actors and the directors had done.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We started the year with “Scattered,” and we were essentially picking up with Adama in the hospital and Tigh’s in command. Stepping into the season, I knew I didn’t want to do a quick reset to the events that had happened at the end of the season. I didn’t want to get Adama out of the hospital quickly, get him back in command and sort of set everything back to
the way it was. I wanted it to feel that we were definitely moving forward, and that when big events like that happened, they had consequences for all the people involved. So we kept Adama in that hospital bed for quite a while. He didn’t even speak. It’s like the original Godfather, you know? Vito Corleone gets shot, he’s kind of out of the story for a good chunk of time. I wanted to play it like that. Eddie was totally down for it. He was great. Didn’t want to play how easy it would be to recover from a gunshot wound like that either. So we were very much on the same page.

  And I liked the idea of Colonel Tigh being the commander, declaring martial law, starting to squeeze too tight. So you could start to see the difference between him and Adama and realize why he wasn’t the right guy to command a battlestar on his own. It was sort of the reverse of the way we always played this dynamic in Star Trek. And in Star Trek, the captain goes down, the first officer takes over, and it’s never a big deal. Whether it’s Riker or Spock, or whoever, the first officer always steps in. There’s always a little thing about, “Well, we miss Picard, but Riker’s great.” I didn’t want to play that at all. I wanted to really go the other direction. Like, oh shit, Tigh’s in command, this is a real big problem. And that Tigh, absent the sort of cooling and calming presence of Adama, would realize he’d have to back off. I really enjoyed playing that, because I think that it was an expectation at that point to the audience that we’re just going to reset the show. That it would kind of magically just go away. And we opted not to do that.

  MICHAEL HOGAN

  (actor, “Colonel Saul Tigh”)

  I loved that stuff where Adama was almost killed and Tigh is in command. Well, he doesn’t even want to wake up in the morning. He’s seriously hoping he has drunk himself to death, because he does not want to be responsible for anything. He never wanted a command. Adama brought him back into the service. And when Adama is on his deathbed, they gave me that wonderful speech where I say to him, “Don’t you die on me. I never wanted to command,” etc., etc.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  With “The Farm,” that was another one that David Eick really pushed the writers’ room to do. We wanted to do something that was a little odd, a little more horror-oriented. Something that sort of changed up the format from the combat war movie to more of a genre piece. A little bit more horror. Strange things are happing on this farm. Kara is taken there and not quite knowing who to trust. Just giving a creepier, stranger vibe.

  We also wanted to do a love story for Kara. That’s where Michael Trucco as Samuel Anders, who was introduced in “Resistance,” came in. He was introduced as this sort of on-the-ground resistance fighter, one of the last ones left. And that she would be a good match for him. The idea was to set him up in a lot of ways like a better match for her than Lee was.

  Even though there’d always been this kind of budding sexual tension between her and Lee, let’s introduce one that’s a little more like her, a badass fighter, resistance leader. More of a grunt, and that they would have a little bit more in common, and see how that all plays. We knew that she was going to leave him behind, but we definitely wanted to leave the door open to revisit that character later. So we didn’t see him get killed. We had no idea how we were going to get him back to Galactica later on, but we wanted to set it up so that we could pay it off some future day.

  MICHAEL TRUCCO

  (actor, “Samuel Anders”)

  I had auditioned for the role of Apollo in the miniseries, which I didn’t get, but then this came up as a guest star with recurring appearances to come. Anders was this athlete who meets Starbuck and Helo on Cylon-occupied Caprica. A lot of the description didn’t really have much meaning for me; I didn’t know the lore of the show. Before I went to Vancouver, I watched a couple of episodes and was like, “Holy crap.” So I get really excited, I go to Vancouver, I meet Katee Sackhoff and Tahmoh and Grace Park, who are the first two people I worked with. Katee, on my first rehearsal, our first meeting, was on an empty soundstage with a stunt coordinator. It was the three of us and we had to come up with the choreography for this game called pyramid, which doesn’t actually exist.

  So we’re banging into each other and going head-to-head, and shoulder-banging, and we kind of land on each other and there’s that moment of locked eyes and sexual chemistry that happens. And, man, we just had the same sense of humor. We just clicked, you know? There was something that felt really easy. It was tough coming onto somebody else’s show as a guest actor and you’re kind of an outsider. I remember I had no delusions of grandeur that this was going to be any more than one or two episodes, but these people were so welcoming. And I bring up the chemistry, because Katee told me that the original idea was that the two characters meet, they sleep together, and then she was going to kick me to the curb and that was going to be the end of Anders. It was just another obstacle in the relationship between Apollo and Starbuck, right? Then we get the call saying, “You’re going to be in the next episode.”

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Michael Trucco came in a little later into the show. First of all, as I’ve said with everybody, he brought a real strength as an excellent actor, but, again, that person you felt really could be with Starbuck. The star-crossed romance between Starbuck and Apollo, I think for various reasons, we never really wanted to consummate. Not really for the TV reasons, like if they get together somehow something changes in the show that you can’t bring back. It just didn’t feel like where we wanted to go, but it did feel like we wanted to give both Starbuck and Anders an emotional life. So his character became very connected to Starbuck. They got matching tattoos and all that fun stuff, which must have been really fun to paint on every morning when they went to work.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We dug deeper into the mythology with “Home.” This is where we return to Kobol and they discover the secret with the constellation. We needed to sort of complete the arc that had really begun with the shooting of Adama, where the fleet is split. There’s different warring factions: Laura Roslin has gone renegade, Adama has thrown his coup, Tigh had taken command, Lee had gone against his father … we had all these sort of divisions in the ranks, and so “Home” was designed to bring them all back together. To put the family back together again, and give them the next piece of the puzzle in terms of “Where is Earth?” With the idea of the Arrow of Apollo, we just decided to lean in to the Indiana Jones of it all. It’s, like, okay, we’ve got this ancient artifact, this physical arrow that has been brought all the way back from Caprica … what do you do with it? And we didn’t know what to do with it until this episode. David felt it was Indiana Jones, that we were going to put the arrow into some crevice or into some old broken piece of statuary, and the room’s going to change and we’re going to get a big cookie.

  It was also part of the evolution of figuring out the big mythology of the show. You know, like I’ve said before, I didn’t really have it all worked out in my head when we started. You know, where is Earth? Are they ever going to find Earth? How will they get there? What does it all mean? And I was taking pieces of the original Galactica and sort of combining them in different ways and trying to make it all make sense. In the original Galactica, they did go to Kobol and Adama found a clue that pointed the way toward Earth. So I wanted to say, “All right, we’re going to do a similar kind of gag here. We’re going to go to Kobol again, and Adama’s going to get a clue. What is the clue? Why is there a clue? What could the clue be?”

  I had these long talks with Gary Hutzel and our science advisor. I had this idea about, okay, if the clue here is that Earth is the place where you can look up in the sky and see all twelve constellations, that’s the way to figure it out. Like, okay, so you walk in this room, the room changes. Suddenly you’re looking into this night-sky scene from Earth and there’s little markers—twelve markers all the way around you, and one says Caprica and above that is the constellation of Capricorn. A spacefaring people could triangulate and figure out the mathematics and go, “Well, if
Earth is where you can see these stars in this alignment, that’s a big navigational help. That’s what we’re looking for: a place where you can see all twelve of these constellations at the same time.”

  It was interesting to work in the sci-fi mythos to a show that dealt so much in military themes. There were all these bubbling things that we had been referencing. You know, Gaius has visions and in “33” God came to help the plan work in some way. Our characters have this mythology about Earth and the lost colony. So there’s all this other stuff bubbling around the edges of the combat. It felt like we got to bring that in and integrate it, too, since we’d already done Laura Roslin’s prophecy. We’d already done those kinds of things. So it felt like we needed to kind of integrate this all so it all felt like it was of a piece. And that the characters in the show would have the reaction that we would. Some of them would be fervently religious believers, some of them would be devout atheists and skeptics, some people would be in the middle. I wanted to be able to play all those different colors, so that you could watch a group of people that were representative of us work through these problems and try to grapple with things like, “Really? The Tomb of Athena? The Arrow of Apollo? That nonsense actually has meaning?” It’s not that different from the Shroud of Turin, and people put a tremendous amount of faith in all kinds of things that sound crazy.

  It all felt of a piece to me. That there was a way to do this. I mean, the Tomb of Athena is a direct reference to the original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” because he tells that great story of Athena spreading herself on the wind when they all realized that their godhood was at an end. Athena goes out and spreads herself on the wind until she’s no more. I think I wrote something similar, a similar story in their mythology of how Athena died. I wanted to touch on that same kind of piece in the Star Trek lore as well.