Sarah Connor Chronicles: Interview Articles

EVENT (source) & DATE

CONTENT

I think what we did is pretty much what’s standard on all shows. It’s an opportunity for the studio and the network and the production team to sit down and sort of talk about the show and kind of look at what we did right, what we did wrong, and kind of how we would keep doing the right things and stop doing the wrong things. We went in and we made a presentation to Kevin Reilly and his team. We kind of have a conversation about the direction we want to go. And in this case we actually, about six weeks ago, the writing team was all brought back on to start working on episodes. So even though we didn’t have the official pickup, we were being paid to start working and generate stuff so that when the pickup came we would be basically, on schedule for a fall debut.

No, I don’t think [the budget made] Fox pause at all. Despite what a lot of people thought … I guess in a weird way I’ll take it as a compliment. I think people thought that we were spending more money than we were. I think that the show was incredibly responsible and stayed within the parameters that Warner Brothers and Fox and we had agreed to from the beginning. So if the show looked big, then it was just because we’ve done our jobs well, I think. But no, I think it was everyone just, it’s a pretty standard kind of process, I think, by which I don’t, I think everyone gets all anxious when are we getting the pickup?

When are we not getting the pickup? But the renewal, it’s I mean Fox hasn’t, it’s not like they’ve announced their other shows. I mean I think they like to sort of see what they have coming in and I think they felt pretty good about the show. And so no, it wasn’t, money definitely wasn’t a factor at all, I think it’s just a process, it’s just there’s corporations involved and… They like to torture us.

As everyone’s, wondering, we are getting rid of Summer Glau, no I’m kidding. You know better than that. Anyone who’s worried we blew her up in the end and she’s not coming back, I will reassure you, she is coming back and eventually in full force. She’ll still be pretty. [Physically she’ll most likely be the same] eventually. That’s one of the hard things with her, it’s like to beat her up but you can’t mangle her too much. But I think that car bomb, it definitely will mess her up. I will say, I brought the entire writing staff back, every single person from last year … brought back. I was really happy with what people did last year I think we were …, in a weird way it’s sort of like any other sports team kind of thing, you’re just getting–consistency and kind of continuity is a big part of it, so I think we’re looking to make as few changes as we can. And I think we feel pretty good where we ended up and I think there’s wherever we’ve little dropouts of people, some people go get other jobs some of the crew because we’re not schedules are different, but on the whole I think it’s pretty much going to be the same group from last year. People in terms of Brian, I think that character and Brian’s portrayal of it was, I think, people really responded to him last year and we have some stuff we’re interested in doing with him this year. [Sarah's ex, Charley and Agent Ellison will be back as well.] Agent Ellison [will definitely be] more amenable [to their cause]. I think he’s certainly seen some things that make him reconsider all of his, everything that he’s done before.

I think that he’s certainly much less of a doubting Thomas than he was. And you’ve pretty much almost got him up to speed on what’s going on. [As for Michael Biehn returning,] I’m not a big fan of the cameo. I feel like it’s really distracting. And I know that fans like it, but I feel, and I think most of it just goes to the fact that we have a different Sarah Connor and I think we’ve worked very hard to have Lena be Lena and not be Linda Hamilton. And I think that when you start bringing in characters from the show, either from the movies, I just think it becomes sort of this weird kind of … where’s Waldo thing, that makes people, it distracts people. I think it’s like you want to have a world, you want that world to be sort of self contained and real, and I think when you start doing that it just I don’t know, I find it distracting. But I love Michael Biehn and I think he’s cool as hell. I don’t know what I would do with him that wouldn’t feel like I was just saying, hey look, it’s Michael Biehn.

I think one of the kind of ironies is you put someone on your show and they do a really good job then all of a sudden everybody else wants to hire them, so you sort of have to lock them up. And Brian was becoming a little popular, I think, based on the show. So we moved as quickly as possible to make sure he was going to stay in Terminator land as long as we needed him. It’s sort of an evolution. I think, with characters that are new, you just don’t know, you never know. I mean I certainly don’t. I’m not experienced enough to really be able to know right away. And I don’t know that you can, so I think I had hopes that that character would really work, but I also knew that just in terms of expanding the sort of mythology a little, it was a pretty, it was a somewhat risky step and I think– and Brian wasn’t like a—probably, I mean he was a surprising choice I think for a lot of people. So I was really hoping that would work.

One thing that I was really happy with, well, this is going to sound kind of generic, but I love our cast. I really–you never know what you’re going to get with people. You audition them and you hope you’ve done the right thing and I really was happy with the cast. I really think that they really did what I needed them to do, and they, and even took it to a different level. And I love the people that we brought on, I love what Dean [Winters, Charley Dixon] did and even Sonya [Wagner, Michelle Dixon] in her little parts, I’ve spoken about Brian, Garrett Dillahunt [Cromartie] is very close to my heart. In terms of things we didn’t do well, I don’t know, I think sometimes we might have like gotten a little confusing a little more. I think I want to write a show that’s complicated and sophisticated and subtle. That’s at least, everyone does I guess, but I tried to write something that was–it’s very serialized, it’s not–there’s definitely you have to do some thinking. And I definitely that there were points where the story telling was a little muddy, where I think we could probably do a better job at least of not trying to keep 800 balls in the air, maybe we can keep 500 balls in the air. But I used to have this saying that I was like I instituted a program last year called no plot point left behind, where every single thing that I introduced I kept trying to bring forward and pay off, and I didn’t want to let anything drop. And I think we started accumulating a lot of stuff, which most of it paid off and some of it didn’t. And so I’m going to try to make sure that everything that I need communicated is communicated this year.

Well, [it didn't really have too much of an affect]. In a weird way, we worked up until the day of the strike, so there was no–I didn’t know for sure there was going to be a strike. We worked as if we had a full season. We didn’t change anything around. Then the strike happened and at that point, there’s nothing I can do. So it sort of is what it is. I mean, I think to the degree that things didn’t–there’s two parts of it. I think that part of it is there are things that we shot for storylines that were there that just got cut out that we had. So there’s things that seemed like they were just dropped, but they were ultimately they were dropped for time or whatever, clarity, but there was other material that we shot and there was decisions made to take them out. And then yes, there’s part of it is, we had a plan for a whole season and I had certain incidents paced out for the whole season and we lost them. And I think coming back to season two, I think it’s–part of the process coming back to season two is deciding how many of those things are you going carry over, how many of them aren’t that important. You have all the fans and you’re also bringing in, hopefully, new people. And you have to kind of pick and choose; you have to sort of prioritize what’s important, because you also want to move forward. And that’s kind of been a lot of the discussions in the last month and a half, sort of what–how many of those plot point are, what do we carry over, what do we don’t carry over or how much, how different are things going to be?

The high school storyline is the one storyline that sort of–we shot more of that stuff than we showed and it ended up every time we had an episode that was running a little long, it was like the high school stuff always ended up on the cutting room floor. And it’s unfortunate because I actually had a big plan for it, and I think that it’s probably at least in the short-term, yes, stuff that we’ll, we’re not going to emphasize as much. It’s just, and I liked it, but I think that it just every time we ended up long, that what was ended up getting cut. [We may find out how that resolves itself, or we may never find out.] But I’m not going to say right now just to, I’m not going to box myself in. [As to what open storylines will be tackled first,] I’m not going to give you any spoilers, just because I never do.

But I think, the show was about this family and I think that kind of everything that concerns the family is something that still concerns us. And it’s, I think we were sort of lucky to end where we ended in the sense that there was at least a cliff hanger and it was sort of, it was dramatic and I’m not going to ignore that cliff hanger and just pretend it didn’t happen. So I think the ramifications of the end of the season are something that I’m really determined to explore, kind of the ramifications of it. So I think the big ones are all stuff that’s definitely fair game. I can’t promise that every single plot line from last year will be resolved to people’s satisfaction because there’s so many, and I think at some point you just have to move forward.

Not likely. And someday I’ll share what it was. I want to try to see if I can integrate it in the slightest way. But no, it’s really, it’s like the lost episode, it’s just, not the show Lost, but it’s like the episode that just had to go away, which is unfortunate because I had a very cool idea, but, no.

Yes. I think so. I think we will be incorporating more action this year. I think the show, that’s one of the things that the network and the studio and I have been talking about, as we were talking about the pickup is sort of how much action versus drama versus … facts. And I think that everyone is excited to try to do a bit more of everything. But it’s money, and I think that’s always the issue, you have to stay within the confines of what works economically for everybody. But I think that we’re def—and I think we did some nice stuff last year. I also think you can’t, in a weird way if you do too much I think people kind of get bored of it, I think people like a balance. But I think this year we will try to do a little bit more.

I’m hoping to revisit the Future War, I love the Future War. I had plans last year to do a number of Future War episodes. They’re expensive. They’re the most expensive episodes we do and they’re the most time consuming. And certainly the CGI–the hard part is the CGI, not does it cost a lot of money, but it takes time. And it just it takes … production time. And it’s hard to kind of turn those things around on the schedule. I mean the Future episode that Reese did last year was, it was shot as a last episode even though there were three episodes after it. But we pushed it until the end. And it was actually the episode that we pushed and pushed until I had left for the strike. I wasn’t on the set for a single frame of the Future episode. I was gone. So it was shot without me. But well we had to push it because it just, we kept moving it because of the amount of prep for it, and it’s a lot of post too.

Yes. I guess, I’d like to think that we–I think yes, I guess the short answer to that is yes. I think that that character does have to grow and move. You sort of try to pace that out. I think last year he was still sort of almost in denial and didn’t really want to–there was problems of being a hero that we was sort of like facing. But I think that this year is sort of more, I would say it’s kind of maybe his coming of age year, maybe kind of becoming a man. I’m saying that having not finished writing a single episode yet. But yes, I think moving forward, and I think hopefully, you move everybody forward, it’s not just him. And as it relates to it kind of being a mother/son story I think that you want to see growth in the characters and maybe conflicts in their relationships and certainly the more a boy grows into a man, the less he needs his mother. So I think it’s certainly stuff that we’re going to work on.

There [were] a few things that I felt like that were important to me. I think maybe Cameron’s, part of Cameron’s reversion to a more, I don’t want to call it awkward way of dealing with life, but a little less affected because maybe she had a way, she knew how to deal with 1997. She’d been there for three months, she’d been told by John when John sent her back kind of what the world was like when he was back there. They go forward I think she’s sort of out of step with whatever 2007 is. So she’s sort of taking a step back and started re-learning what the new world is. I think John had to do a little bit … computers, but at the end of the day you don’t want it to be too much a fish out of water technologically. And then I think the one big thing that we dealt with in the second episode was 9/11. We had a lot of discussion about whether to even have a conversation about that, whether we should ignore it.

For me it was important to kind of brig it up and realize that this is something that they have to experience, and there is a voice over Sarah kind of trying to process what that meant. To me that seemed like the big thing that when you jump over, you jump over 9/11 that’s, the world has changed and that’s something that’s worthy of at least spending a scene on. So I think they’re very adaptable people. They’ve moved around a lot through different time and space and I can’t, I didn’t want to spend too much time on it but I think that still we’ve spent some, I certainly wanted to hit it, it’s not something I wanted to ignore.

The first well, I can try to, I could track it through, but it’s they mug some frat guys in the beginning. I always felt like when they mugged the frat guys, I always felt like they got a couple thousand bucks, they maxed out their credit cards, they got some cash, and they got this cheap crappy little squatter’s house with no furniture. And then they found diamonds in the safe. And my theory has always been they’ve just been cashing in those, hawking those diamonds and buying stuff when they need to. It’s one of those things that I’m–you either have a show that’s all about process or you have a show that’s takes certain things for granted. And I kind of felt like we spent a couple episodes on process and then I wanted to sort of move into a place of, you know what, they can have some stuff. Now, if you look they’ve got a pretty crappy TV with a pretty crappy VHS player. They have a second hand sofa most of their clothes are surplus army surplus clothes or hand sewn.

I do have a theory that Cameron stays up all night making her own clothes, but I‘ve never really gotten into that. So I think, and then they went out and bought a car but look what that did. But I figure they got about $300,000 in diamonds sitting around. So they can buy a little stuff. And I also think and I’ve never had to show it but we’ve talked about it a lot, which is there’s certainly, we’ve seen John previously rip off ATMs and things like that. And I think they kind of, they can get it when they need it. So they’re not going to be knocking over any banks, but I think they can get what they need when they need it. I think it’s, they’re not living in the lap of luxury I think that would be sort of abusing the setup.

James Middleton says August. We did do a bunch of extras for the DVD, there’s at least, is it three commentaries out of the nine episodes including a pilot—one on the pilot, one on the finale, one on the Future episode, so we did a bunch of those. We did some mini-docs. We got some good stuff. I think it’s going to be really cool where we had every Summer [Glau, Cameron] and Thomas [Dekker, John] and Lena [Headey, Sarah] and David Nutter [director] and James [Middleton] , John Wirth [writer] and I all did, and then some of the other writers and oh, Brian [Austin Green, Derek] also, we all did commentaries. So there’s some good stuff on it. I like it.

It’s not actually an expensive show to produce. I think we’re below the budget of many action shows that are on TV right now. In fact, our budget is much more in line with your basic drama that you would find on any network. So I don’t think that cost at this point plays much of a factor.

I think that the show has done well for a new show and for a new drama. There are not many that do very well or haven’t been doing very well, certainly in the last strike era. And we do very well in certain demographics. We do very well in DVR. We do very well on downloads. I think for our type of show that is a big chunk. We were one of the top five shows being TiVo’d right now, which is how I watch the show because otherwise no one would know that I’m watching.

The ritual for first year shows is to come back into the network and tell them what season two is. Things are just a little weird this year because of having the strike so we have to readjust what our season two plans are. We’re going to go in and sit down with the network and we’ll do a post-game on season one and talk about season two. They’ll make the decision. FOX, they haven’t made a decision on any shows yet. So I fully expect to get in there with them pretty soon and hopefully have an answer pretty soon because we need to start writing.

I’m a fascist about spoilers. I’m the biggest pain in the ass to the marketing and promotion department, and I think they were very happy that I was on strike for 14 weeks. Since I’ve gotten back I get these little e-mails and they say, “Can we show this?’ And I say, “No.” If I had my way the commercials would be 30 seconds of black with the words “Sarah Connor” on them.

You know, it’s funny, I was online last night going through some of the chats just to see what people were talking about, and this is one of those shows, unfortunately—I mean it’s unfortunate for me in the sense of whenever I do an interview that if you give any little bit of anything, people will talk enough about it that they’ll start to figure out what’s going on. So it’s a very fine line of what you can and can’t talk about. I actually did a talk show one night and the only clip we could get of me on the show, because I hadn’t premiered on it yet, was the teaser from the episode before, so it was like “Next week on the Sarah Connor Chronicles” and it showed my running and fighting, everything that everybody else had seen. We couldn’t get anymore footage than that. I knew at the end of it all that was Josh’s doing.

That is not the house that they’re living in now, I will say that. I will actually give a definitive answer. And it is certainly my goal that we find out what happens down there. I originally planned on doing four episodes—if we had a 22-episode order of the first year, I had pitched doing four episodes that took place in the future out of those 22. Then when we had an order of 13, we were going to do two, and then I was still planning on doing a second future episode out of one of the four episodes that was not filmed because of the strike, was going to be a future episode where we probably would have explored that. But we didn’t get there. Hopefully next year.

I hope so. I don’t know if anybody can tell by the way that we put the show together but I really do try to plant things and pay them off and I really hate television shows that abandon ideas; whether it’s sort of carryover emotionally from episode to episode. That’s one of the reason the show is so serialized is I just feel compelled to constantly track these things through. That story line—that’s it, that story line is part of the story line that was certainly supposed to be resolved and I was going to continue with it and resolve it in the first season. I … don’t know. But I haven’t forgotten about it and there was a plan. There’s always a plan. Executing the plan is a whole different matter.

Well, you know it’s serendipitous. I wasn’t there. I was on strike and so this is the number of episodes that we had reached; we had only written up to this number and produced up to this number when I went out on strike. So it happens that a lot of stuff locks in and comes together during these last two episodes and frankly, that’s just dumb luck. If we would have gone one episode more or one episode less I think it would be probably less satisfying.

I can’t tell you what episode ten is, but episode ten was a fantastic episode ten and an absolutely horrible season premiere for a season two. It is heartbreaking for me. I just wish I’d gotten—I really, really wanted to do episode ten, it was like one of my favorite ideas and I can’t do it. I really can’t do it because it would’ve been a terrible season premiere. So you know— Yes it’s going to take some re-jiggering but I think there are ideas and beats from those episodes that we had planned and hadn’t filmed that will definitely be making their way in. It’s nice to—I’ve got a little perspective on the show and when we were working on episodes 10, 11, 12, 13, we had yet to air episode one. So it’s nice to actually now have seen the show and sort of educate yourself on your own show on what works and what doesn’t work. It’s like you have a second chance with a look at it.

I try not to abuse the time travel too much. I think we think about it all the time. I’ve been in the writer’s room and there will be points, it happens at least once a day where all of a sudden we just go quiet and everyone stares at each other because we completely tilted like a pinball machine because we can’t wrap our brain around what we’re trying to do. I think that I have a pretty specific idea as to what I believe the rules of our universe are and I try not to violate them. I think that chaos theory abounds and that’s always my argument, a specific geek argument, why doesn’t Skynet just send—well they can’t send a nuclear bomb back. I think even Skynet probably at this point understands that the causality is so complicated that it’s unclear as to what any one thing might do. So I think to do something en masse is a very—they might end up destroying themselves, when they need the humans as much as the humans need them to kind of—well, they need the humans more right now, until later, once they’re created, then who knows.

You’ve had the opportunities. We had the conversation too, of the possibility of bringing Kyle Reese onto the show instead of Derek. But then within that was the whole concept of, okay well then at what point are people actually dead and at what point do we have to realize that a character is gone. It’s a weird, confusing line. I don’t know how specific you can really get with any of it because at the end of the day it’s something that’s completely nonexistent at this point. So who knows how one thing can overlap into another and how one decision can affect another? It will probably be an argument we’ll be having until the end of time.

It was the coolest thing ever. The blaster alone, the fact that I was the only one with a green scope on it was pretty cool. But there were a bunch of specific little things all through the costumes that—just little details that you really didn’t pick up, but everybody had Terminator Kills on their sleeve, these little badges. And they were just little Terminator heads but everybody had one for every kill. Some guys had one and I think I had seven, which was pretty cool.

It’s fantastic for this job. Summer is so good at completely staying in those moments and I think that oddity is what sort of creates the tension and excitement in the scenes. You do scenes all day long with people that react and when you have somebody that just sits there and blankly stares at you they almost end up becoming these staring competitions. And Summer and I will sort of laugh by the end of them if we haven’t made it all the way through, just because it’s an interesting relationship between the two of us. They’ve both known each other for a long time and there’s a lot of tension within it.

I really knew very little of the character except for the first script that I had in my hand, which is the first episode that everybody saw of my character. So the big challenge for me as an actor was the next day on set whenever I’d see Josh, just asking him as many things as I could. Just trying to get as many answers to questions as I could, because picking up a script and not knowing what happened before, and it’s like, okay, what the hell is a Turk and what—there’s so much involved in every script. The scripts are so detailed. And I really had no reference. That’s been the hardest thing for me as an actor is trying to make sure that I have enough back-story to really understand what Derek is doing and what his thought process is. Development wise he went from living in the future where he was fighting every day to survive to now being in a world with a blue sky and grass, and fighting for a different reason. It’s at times just a huge rollercoaster for him. He still really has no grasp of it. I mean, he’s just coming out of nearly dying. So he’s got a lot of growing to do I would say.

All I’ll say is that I think Brian is doing an awesome job and I think he’s brought more to the series than I even imagined that he would. So I’m really happy.

That should be episode one of season two, I’m just in the house with an apron on lifting furniture and just cleaning underneath things because I’m strong enough to do it. That would be awesome.

Last year I had 22 planned and we switched it to 13 and we did nine. So I’m always—when I sit down and plan a season out, until someone tells me otherwise, I plan for 22, and if it’s not going to be 22 I make adjustments. But I always plan for 22. I’ve had ideas for probably the first three or four years. I’ve got arcs for them. Sometimes it just a matter of moving things up or moving things back or seeing where it goes.