Early on I also had a problem with Tigh going down to the planet. I totally disagreed. I happened to be reading a book called Seize the Fire, because I’m a research junkie. It was about the Battle of Trafalgar, and I was amazed at reading how similar the British navy was to the battlestar Galactica and our whole fleet, because they would leave port and go for years at a time making sure everybody was safe in their dominion and fighting off and discovering new lands, etc. And they would come back to port, disembark, go home to the farm or whatever, see the family, give them the money, have more kids if they can, get back on the ship, and go again for years. Tigh, of course, was one of those career soldiers who would go off, get loaded, and then get back on the next night or whatever. He would go and get back on because that’s his life. He has nothing. So I’m in the middle of this book when I read the script where I’m down on the planet. I said to Ron, the guy wouldn’t do it. He’s glad Ellen’s down there. He certainly does not want to go and be with her. Period. He wants to die. He doesn’t want any more responsibility, and now he just can’t die because these responsibilities keep coming. And you will find a lot of military people, or human beings, going, “I wish I could just walk away.” But he’s got responsibilities, and responsibilities to humanity. They rely on you. But having a chat with Ron, I realized I needed to see what happens, because this was not going to just be a blind leap of faith.
JAMES CALLIS
(actor, “Gaius Baltar”)
The thing about the occupation is that it was bending to their will, and breaking to it. For Baltar, there’s the moment where I have to sign the death warrants. The whole thing is very involved in the sense of he needed a lot of prompting to sign that letter. There was this excellent thing that was written where a Caprica Six comes up to him and pleads with him, but it’s still not enough. Then Doral just shoots her through the head and says, “Listen, the thing is, she’s going to come back, but when I stick this through your brain, you won’t.” Well, there were lots of conversations; I was very nervous about it. I wrote to them initially about him needing to be brutalized into signing the thing. It’s got to be a big, big deal. It’s got to be very, very difficult. And we went that way, and filmed it in a very menacing way that worked for everyone. I mean, we’re creating something and we’re all acting, but having somebody thumping a gun against somebody’s face and screaming and seeing their blood everywhere … we were all like, “This is getting very fraught.”
Then when I saw the edit, all of the stuff with Tricia, Number Six, Caprica Six coming up to Gaius and appealing to him, and being shot through the head, had been cut, so that the episode ran as kind of like, “Sign it, sign it,” and there was a bit of blubbering and then he did. I was just taken very aback and found it worrying, because he really has just rolled over. I actually was devastated on his behalf and I wrote to Ron and David and said, “You know, the whole thing about Caprica Six being killed first is so important, because it’s a message of she can download, but you won’t. It’s more like psychological torture to sign the death warrants, otherwise I don’t care about him anymore, because then it’s too easy for him to just sign those things, and who cares about anybody like that anymore?” And they were like, “We totally understand where you’re coming from, but we sent the cut out to everybody, even to the journalists. Not only that, we’ve got certain amounts of time for people to work on it. The edit suites are hired at certain times with certain people and we’d have to scramble, we’ve also signed off with it with the network,” etc.
RONALD D. MOORE
I do recall this. James did fight for the coercion and then again after he saw the cut. I think I did put more of it back, but I can’t recall why it was cut differently to begin with. It was probably either a director’s cut he saw initially or maybe I had cut it down for time in the producer’s cut. Either way, he was right.
JAMES CALLIS
I kind of got over it, but over the weekend they changed it back. I’m not sure why they changed it, and while there are so many things about that show that I’m grateful for, to Ron and David I was very grateful for that, because I thought that that was a really amazing thing for them to do for me and the character.
ALESSANDRO JULIANI
(actor, “Felix Gaeta”)
It had been clear from the beginning of the series that we were doing something a little bit different. We were trying to make a drama that just happened to be in outer space. But I think those storylines on New Caprica is where that went to the next level. In terms of my involvement in it, it was great. It was sort of a darkening and a deepening of the relationship between Gaeta and Baltar. It added another level of toxicity to things, which is always fun for an actor. Then to just get to be able to be the person who, again, is just trying to do the right thing in all of it. Even being on the ship the whole time in the first season, and then getting to be outside, getting to be in a new environment, it changed everything for all of us, too. For those of us who were down in New Caprica in the tent city, being in a new environment was a sea change for all of us.
RONALD D. MOORE
New Caprica was so important for the Gaeta character. He befriended and looked up to Gaius Baltar early on in the run, so we had that relationship early, and then when you go to New Caprica and you do the jump ahead a year and Gaeta is one of his key advisors, he’s still with Baltar, and he’s trying to do the right thing, but now he’s part of the occupation government. But at the same time he’s also trying to help the resistance, but doesn’t want to give himself away. So he’s a man trying to dance on both sides there, and then after they’re all rescued, then he’s nearly killed for his collaboration.
MICHAEL TRUCCO
(actor, “Samuel Anders”)
I remember my first reaction to the one-year leap was, “What the hell? You’re just going to arbitrarily throw us ahead a year?” It was just that knee-jerk, selfish actor reaction of feeling like you were being gypped, denied the drama that had played out. Then it was, like, trust. Let the powers that be do what they do. As it turned out, Anders got deeper. Suddenly he’s more embedded with the crew and the gang, and the people. It was the first time that I felt that I had been a part of the family, of the Battlestar lore. It was easy to feel like an outsider and thank you for bringing me back for another episode, but I always felt like it was their show and I’m just playing here. When that jump happened, I was like, “Oh, okay. They’ve mixed me into the bowl.”
Physically, I loved getting in the dirt in that location. I loved that I had welts all over my back that I thought were fire ants, but because I’m a lefty, when you shoot a semiautomatic gun—they’re quarter rounds that are blanks, but still bullets—the empty shell casings would eject out across the front of me. If you’re right-handed, they go to the outside of you, but if you’re left-handed they go right across your face. I was up against the dirt and we’re shooting the guns and these hot shell cases were hitting the dirt, rolling back down the embankment, and sticking to my bare arms [laughs]. They were stinging me, making little welts, and I thought I was being eaten by fire ants.
RONALD D. MOORE
The experience of New Caprica really scarred a lot of the characters in pretty deep ways. It’s interesting, because the show starts out with an incredible attack and the people are all scarred from the initial moments of the Cylon genocide of the human race. But somehow what happened to them all on New Caprica felt like it ran deeper in some ways in terms of the characters. Maybe because you’d gotten to know the characters over two years and had deepened their relationships and the cast knew each other better, and we knew the characters better. So we had a firmer grasp on who they were two years in than we did at the very beginning. When suddenly a big traumatic event like this happened midway, it just felt like the characters were more deeply wounded. They carried the scars a little more visibly. Everyone was a little angrier, a little more bitter. You’d sensed that they had really gone through an additional trauma beyond the one that
had sent them on this journey to begin with.
MICHAEL HOGAN
When Tigh finally comes back up after the planet, Adama meets me as I’m coming off and says, “Good work. You brought them back.” And I said, “Not all of them.” And that’s all. Nothing is ever said about that, but that still brings chills to me, because that is dead on. This is life. They’re working soldiers.
RONALD D. MOORE
After the resistance was over and they were back on the ship after the New Caprica story, it made perfect sense that Starbuck would be leading the charge to track down and take vengeance on all the collaborators. I thought that was fantastic.
MICHAEL TRUCCO
There was a great movie called The Star Chamber starring Michael Douglas, and the idea was the same: Judges got together and the cases that got thrown out on a technicality, they would retry and send a hit man to knock these guys out—rapists and murderers that got off—and that’s kind of what we were doing. It was our own little Star Chamber and our own vigilante circle and picking people that sided with the Cylons. They wrote Anders with a conscience and he recuses himself eventually. That it had gone far enough. I struggled with that a bit; on whether or not it was perceived as weakness. And then I’ve got Starbuck calling me a pussy, so I had to work to strike the right tone and balance. I guess kind of being pushed back on your heels like that as an actor is probably the best.
RONALD D. MOORE
The execution-squad idea came out of our discussions of, “Okay, historically what would happen after these things?” There was a lot of discussion about what had happened in post–World War II France after the Allies had liberated the villages and the way they paraded people through the streets or shaved the heads of the women that slept with the Nazis and shot some of them and killed them, and how people in this situation, who had been under occupation for all this time, there were some who had fought and some who had collaborated and people remembered. Once they were all free, there would come a reckoning and was there going to be a council of reconciliation, like they did in South Africa? Probably not. How were they going to go through this? Some people would take the law into their own hands, and that was a great story. It should be brutal, it shouldn’t be pretty, and who would be on it?
MARK VERHEIDEN
What was so liberating about Battlestar in so many ways is that we were able to approach situations that would be incredibly hot-button to do if you did them on a regular set in America or in the Middle East. This was a science fiction background and they were essentially robots versus us, so we were able to do a lot of things because of being that one step removed. That’s what the best science fiction always lets you do is take that one step removed and look with a different eye at situations that feel real to us as human beings, and as citizens of the world, but you take that one step back and you’re able to look at it in a slightly different way. It becomes less charged, less immediately going, “I don’t like this, because it took this political stance.” Taking that one step, you don’t feel as invested in being angry about it, because you’re not actually saying it’s Republican or Democrat or something like that.
DAVID WEDDLE
Of course, by that time we had the Iraq War going and were witnessing all the stuff in the Middle East. We wanted to mix it up. Ron’s whole thing is never make it a one-on-one; that even if we were inspired by current events, we didn’t want it to be a transparent commentary on current events or take a political side of anything. The thing about New Caprica and the drama there is it really fit for an occupying army anywhere. Germany occupying Russia and all of Europe. Or the Romans occupying the Middle East themselves. We wanted to write about an occupying force and to look at that dynamic from an angle that the public doesn’t normally look at it. You don’t have your heroes being suicide bombers or blowing up cafés or doing anything they can to push these occupiers out. Then people are forced to look at the ramifications of their actions, and then the Cylons start thinking, “Hey, what’s wrong with these people? We’ve been decent with them, we didn’t annihilate them, why are they sabotaging us at every turn?”
RONALD D. MOORE
It was kind of easy to figure out who would be behind it. It was really easy to go, “It’s going to be Saul, it’s going to be Starbuck, and they’re going to be hunting them down and they’re going to be passing sentences.” It was really dark, but it seemed true. It seemed like this was the reality that we wanted to paint, because all through that storyline, we really wanted to play how people really behaved, how they really act in these circumstances, and it just felt like that was where our characters would go.
DAVID EICK
We were doing things to the characters that were extraordinarily risky. Our protagonists were leading an insurgency and hiring suicide bombers. Our antagonists were running for their lives. The visual effects were incredibly challenging, because we were in a broad-daylight scenario versus our usual kind of inky black. There were tons and tons of fights and arguments and redo’s—all kinds of R and D and headaches and nightmares that just exacerbated all of it. It was a much harder season than anything we had done. And I don’t care who you are—you can be Gandhi—you’re going to argue more when you’re doing that kind of thing under those conditions.
Prior to the characters’ return to the Galactica, the New Caprica storyline concluded in spectacular fashion with an epic two-parter called “Exodus” (episodes three and four of the third season), but as originally conceived it was supposed to be a single episode. The shooting style of the show changed that.
FELIX ALCALA
(director, “Exodus”)
“Exodus” was supposed to be a one-hour episode. After we shot it and it was being cut together, the editor called after speaking to Ron and told me we had too much material. I had done all the explosions, I did this war stuff with the arrival of Galactica and all. I made a meal out of everything. We put it together and I said, “Look, cut a movie out of it.” And we ended up with a really long cut which was only short of a two-hour episode by very little. The editor called Ron and then he spoke to me and he said, “We can make this a two-hour. It’d be fantastic.” And then Ron calls me and said, “Look, I’m going to write another scene. We have two more scenes we can pick up and stick in your movie. We’ll have a two-hour special.” And so I ended up, for the price of a one-hour, giving them a two-hour.
RONALD D. MOORE
That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much, actually. It was just a big script, and then Felix shot it really well. The run time was way over the hour mark, and so you got to a point quickly where you saw the first cut where you realized, “What are we going to do with this?”
TODD SHARP
The first cut of the episode came in thirty minutes over, and it was all great. Everybody’s saying, “How are we going to cut this down to size?” The answer was, we don’t have to. Why don’t we add another episode? We had to add about twenty more minutes of material and shot for three more days and we had a whole extra episode out of it.
RONALD D. MOORE
That first cut wasn’t quite enough to get to two hours, and Sci-Fi really didn’t like to do the ninety-minute format, because it gave them scheduling problems and financial issues. So we did say, “Well, we could make this into a two-parter if we just added a couple of scenes here and there.” So we did make that decision on the fly and just went for it, and it probably did save us quite a bit of money in the scheme of things.
DAVID WEDDLE
When Brad and I broke the episode, we knew that it was too much material. We’d done that a couple of times on the show, where we expanded things into two-parters. I remember we were on a plane going to Vancouver—Michael Rymer, our producer/director, was with us—and he read the script for “Exodus.” When he was finished, he looked at us on the plane and said, “There’s no way you can do all this in one episode. This is two episodes.” We smiled and said, “We know.” As it turned out, that’s exactly what happe
ned.
TODD SHARP
With Battlestar in general we shot much more material than we were ever able to use. In episodic television, you really want to shoot only about three, four, or five extra pages or minutes of material to be able to cut a fine-tuned show. You don’t want to shoot an extra ten or fifteen minutes, because that’s a day or two of photography that ends up on the cutting room floor. But we did that. We did shoot episodes that are ten or fifteen minutes over. You see on the DVD there are tons of deleted scenes. But we did that by intent, because David Eick made a very strong case early on. There was a moment that Mark Stern loved in the miniseries between Adama and Tigh, and Adama’s shoving noodles into his mouth. It’s a dim, kind of gross, but very human moment. When the studio was saying, “Look, guys, you’re leaving a lot of money on the floor every episode here. Think of how much more you could put on the screen if we weren’t throwing away a day of photography.” To his credit, David said, “But if I’m not shooting an extra ten or fifteen minutes of material, I’m not going to be able to give Mark Stern those great moments, like Adama shoving noodles into his mouth.” There’s something about all the excess that we shot that allowed us to be able to craft the show.
RONALD D. MOORE
We would usually shoot way more material than we could cram into our forty-minute box. The network did start going, “We’re wasting an awful lot of money.” They would call it wasting. Todd Sharp would try to voice this and say, “It’s a problem and I really think you guys should dial back. It hurts you later, in fairness, when you ask them for extra money for big shows, when you’re doing a bigger show like the New Caprica storylines or the finale or something. You go to them and ask for extra money, and they’re like, “Well, maybe you’d have more money if you hadn’t spent all this other money on footage that didn’t even make it into the show,” which is a fair argument. My argument, and still to this day, is that I still do shows that are too long. My scripts are always too long on any show and the cuts are always long. I just think it helps to cut down. It helps to figure out what works and what doesn’t later.
So Say We All Page 64