Podcast:Torn

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Teaser

RDM: Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode five of season three. This is "Torn", and I'm Ronald D. Moore, the executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and we're doing something a little bit different this week. I am at my alma mater, Cornell University, here in- I can't remember the name of the class, and I just asked this question just five minutes ago, what was the name of the class?

Student: "The History and Theory of Commercial Narrative film."

RDM: "The History of The-" "The History and Theory of Commercial Narrative film." And I'm here with the entire class. Say hello, class.

Class: (Various greetings.)

RDM: And they've just- yes. They've just watched this episode with me and now they're going to help me go through the podcast here on "Torn" and we'll- we will force them to say things. My wife, Mrs. Ron, as some of you know her, is here as well. Kibitzing from the sidelines. There are no cats and no children, no Scotch, and no cigarettes, much to my chagrin.

Terry: And no garbage collectors.

RDM: And no garbage collectors.

Ok. Let's talk a little bit about the setup for this episode. "Torn" is actually in an interesting experience for me, because when this episode came in on the director's cut in post-production, the word out of post was, "Oh my God." I got this word that this was a very troubled episode and that there certain people in post-production said that they hated it. And so I had to scramble and figure out what we were gonna do. There some- there some problems in the narrative and how the story layed out that were difficult to deal with and as we go through the show I'll point out the places where we had to put some bandaids on some problems.

This episode was structured into the third season to be another bridge episode. It sets up a lot of things that happen in the next episode. You see at the end of the story that there's a big fat "To Be Continued". Now, right here in the beginning. This scene with Baltar and Number Six out by the beach was actually not meant to open the show. The show was actually supposed to open much more linearly on the Galactica picking up the pilot exercise that now opens act one, watching their flight training. Seeing the fuel pro- the collision and the fuel problem with Kara and see how screwed up things were back on the ship. And then you were gonna get to Baltar wandering around the baseship and trying to figure out how things operated. And the truth was as you looked at the cut it just didn't work. It just- it was very plodding and the storyline didn't layout very well. And essentially it was a script problem. We find this often in the show where we're dealing with things in post where you can trace them all almost invariably back to the script. They're almost never something that your covering up that was a problem on the set or with performance. Because you can usually get or cut around that stuff in one way or another. But when story doesn't work it's always the fault of the script. So what I did, this scene, you'll not that we're doing a lot of trickiness here. In the cut that the students just saw there's a lot of bad ADR lines with the voices of the editors actually standing in for James Callis and Tricia Helfer. We'll have- right there you can see that we're fuzzing out his mouth. 'Cause he's actually saying very different words. This was a sequence from much later in the show, on a very different topic, and what I- as I was watching the cut I thought, "Well, let's start- let's start the episode off at least with the most provocative image. Let's start with Tricia Helfer in a red bikini out on the the beach."

Student: Wooo!

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: At least that's gonna get- that's gonna get somebody's attention, right?

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: Ok. And from that point, I said, "Let's-" Now this is all stolen footage. All this stuff of Baltar waking up in bed and looking around is actually footage that was shot for the previous episode, for "Collaborators". So this is not even from, this is all a created montage of scenes that's supposed to give you the feeling that Baltar's having this conversation with Six, and that later he's gonna talk about projection and what projection means to the Cylon. But as scripted and shot that was also all much deeper into the episode. And I just thought, "Let's start this episode with something more intriguing."

Now the sets here in the Cylon baseship are atypical for Galactica in that they are more overtly science fiction than our usual stuff. Galactica is much more realistic. It feels much more like an aircraft carrier or warship or a real spaceship. In the Cylon baseship we felt intuitively that it was important that, ok, whatever you're going to see over there, you're going to be disappointed with. Whatever your imagination has concocted for you for the interior of the baseship, whatever I show you, you're gonna go, "Oh, I thought it was gonna be cooler than that."

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: So we went for the stripped down, austere, scifi kind of look, with some surrealistic elements. Like the couch that you saw Baltar reclining on. And there's ornate chairs and upholstered- like the table and the chaise lounge there, feel more like 2001 something odd and offputing. Now, as I was dealing with the cutting of this episode, I started to feel like the sets weren't working. I was starting to lose faith in our ability to hold these sets on camera and really play the story. I thought, "Maybe the audience is getting a little bored here and a little disappointed and maybe the sets don't look that interesting." And it wasn't- I started to feel like maybe there's not that much going on over there. And I started to play with the idea of dissolves. There's a lot of dis- whenever we go to the Cylon baseship and Baltar's story there's a lot of dissolving images of him over him and playing with time slightly, multiple takes, and it conveys this feeling of being out of body and like something weird- You're in an alienated world. You're with him. It's his point of view, suddenly. It wasn't scripted, but it's his point of view and you're with Baltar, and what the hell's happening to Baltar?

And on top of that, I was looking for some- what's the sound? What's going on in the background. And I glommed onto this idea of piano, of classical piano. It was something that James Callis had actually suggested for an earlier episode of scoring a Cylon scene with classic piano and I had a bunch of Beethoven sonatas at home and I brought 'em into the editing bay and gave them to the editor and I said, "Let's score- just take from this and score all the scenes in the temp track to Beethoven." And so all the Cylon scenes were originally, I mean, Bear McCreary our composer has actually written specific pieces for these so they won't be Beethoven on air. But when you were watching the Cylon baseship scenes and they were dissolving and montage-y and out of body and you had this free-flowing, free-wheeling feeling and then it was underscored with this piano. And the piano didn't like become more dramatic as the scene got more dramatic, and it didn't become scary, and it didn't become comedic. It just played a piece all the way through. It gave this out of body quality to all those scenes and that's what I decide, "Well, that's gonna save the episode." (Chuckles.) That's the trick.

Now did that work? Does anybody... what's the consensus on the Cylon baseship scenes?

Student: It's very surreal.

RDM: Is it surreal?

Student: Yeah. It's very humanistic music, but with a very surreal setting and it's almost confusing.

Act 1

Student: Is the light practical in that shot, or did you like have to bump them up some in post-production to get that glow that kinda-

RDM: They were practical. They were practical lights and our DP Steve McNutt played a lot with the look, 'cause you know because we shoot the show in HD, on High-definition digital videotape, he actually can play with the exposure live on the set as it's happening so he was- and we get, there are monitors on the set where we can see what the actual picture's gonna look like. In the old days you- there was a video relay to a bad black and white tv screen. You got a sense of what the composition of the shot was but you never really saw what the real shot was gonna be. And so Steve, on the set, live, we tweaked around with what the actual exposure was gonna be and how it worked.

This is actually all made up too. The original scripted and shot sequence explains why this whole thing with the fuel is going on here. What really happened, and what was shot, was that Kara was in the mock dogfight with Kat and there was just- a coupling blew on her wing and she started spewing fuel out the side of her Viper and Lee told her, "Go home! Go home! Break- head home Starbuck." And she refused to do it. And she kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing to the point where she finally tagged Kat with the laser and then her ship ran out of gas and she had to coast all the way home. So that's why there's these references to her coasting home and there's no fuel left. But when I watched it in a cut, and this is like the difference between reading something on the page and watching it onscreen. When I watched in the cut, it was just boring. It was like- so she ran out of gas.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: That's the big scary thing that happens in act one was Starbuck ran out of gas? And yet Lee is yelling at her at the top of his lungs, and it's supposed to be a big thing, and it just didn't work. So we concocted this- a different visual effect in post-production and had a collision and they ran into each other and that's really what caused the Viper to spin out of control and seems much more dangerous than it was.

Student: Can you say something about the backstory of Ellen and her relationship to him?

RDM: Yeah and- in epis- in "Exodus, Part I" when they were on New Caprica during the occupation, Colonel Tigh was a member of the resistance, the insurgency against the Cylons. And he had a wife named Ellen. And Ellen was a blonde woman and he and Ellen had had this tempestuous, crazed relationship and she slept around and they were both drunks and there was shades of Virginia Wolfe, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. But, there was a storyline where essentially she was sleeping with a Cylon in order to get him out of detention, where he lost his eye, but then the Cylon- she used the Cylon to get her husband out of detention and the Cylon used her. Said, "I wanna know where the resistance is meeting and if you don't tell me I'm gonna kill your husband." And so she was trapped. She was in this no-win situation. And she gave up information and told the Cylons about a key resistance meeting and there was an ambush and several people were killed. And Colonel Tigh ultimately found out about it, and he had a rule in his resistance that if you collaborated or betrayed the group you had to die. And so in "Exodus, Part II" Colonel Tigh had to- Colonel Tigh poisoned his own wife and killed her and she died in his arms, and it was really a devastating thing for the character. Now he's back on Galactica and he's try- he's still not over it. He's trying to get on with his life but he can't and he keeps her clothes in the closet and so on.

Tell me what you think. Let's talk about it. Questions, feelings, stuff you like, didn't like, either in this scene or throughout, just-

Student: Yeah, I have a question. Do you think it's- Apollo's rapid weight loss is believable, I guess?

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: Do I believe (unintellible).

Student: Uh, no.

RDM: It's pushing. Actually this is a pickup scene that we shot later to do something for the fact that we were gonna do this rapid weight loss. At the end of season two, Apollo had put on a lot of weight. He was "Fat Apollo", as we called him. And then he was fat in the beginning of the season, and this is one of those ideas that we came up with, I came up with, at the end of last season. And I just frankly didn't know what to do with. It was- I had a lot of things that we were trying to juggle and I co- there was a psychological underpinning for the fact that he had go- he has this elaborate backstory with Starbuck that drove him to gain weight, and he had settled down and gotten married, and then had gotten fat and lazy was essentially his storyline. And then we kept talking about ways this season that he was gonna lose the weight. And he was gonna go to the gym, and he was gonna join the Marines at one point, he was gonna stop being a fighter pilot, and become more of a pure warrior and that was gonna be the method towards getting him back in shape. And those storylines kept either not working on the page or we kept cutting them for time. And we kept getting to these places where, "What are we doing about 'Fat Apollo'?" And the question just- it just kept getting moved off the table and so we finally just said, "You know what? Let's just... Ok. He's not 'Fat Apollo' anymore." He's jumping rope and he's working out and seeing we can prove it, there he is on the scale.

Terry: In outer space he has the magic pills.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: In outer space he has the diet magic pills that we all wish we had.

Student: What language were those scrolls written in?

RDM: That's a good question. It's something that the prop guys made up.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: It's supposed to be some kind of ancient text. You'll note that in the series we use English in all the signage and English in- if we do inserts on pieces of paper it's always English and the audience can always read it. In this case, there was something cool about the fact that their scriptures were written in Ancient Hebrew or some variant. I mean, you can see all this is English. But it was just something that he prop guys came up with and I bet that they've worked out an entire grammar and syntax for everything.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: You laugh, but when I was at Star Trek somebody actually created the Klingon language. I mean, there is an actual Klingon language you can learn, and there are certain colleges and universities in this country, which will remain nameless, where you can take a course in Klingon. And somebody once sent me a bound copy of Hamlet as rendered in Klingon. Which I have at home.

Student: Speaking of props, is there a reason why all the papers are octagons?

RDM: Oh, why do we cut the corners off all the pages? It was just a design idea that came up in the miniseries. It's- because the- it's always this fine line about how close to our contemporary reality is it, and what are the slight differences that remind you that it's not Earth, and somebody came up with this idea of clipping the corners-

Student: Colonel Tigh had eight sided cards.

RDM: Yeah.

Student: And I think those were in the original series.

RDM: Those were probably in the original series. But the corners off of pictures and off of pieces of paper is just- I guess they just hate rectangles.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: This was all- this was supposed to- this whole sequence of walking through the Cylon baseship was supposed to just give you a sense that life is different over there.

Class: (Laughs.)

RDM: And there's another scene, they walk out of this scene, and there was a conversation that got cut where essentially Baltar was, "Well, there's no sense of privacy on this ship." 'Cause there are no doors. There's no doors in the ship at all. And Six said something to the effect that they don't have concerns like that, that that's not how they live, that they are different from human beings and they're- live much more communally and they don't care if- about nakedness. And that seemed in keeping with the sensuality and the sexuality that Number Six has displayed from the very beginning of the project. She was always a very intensely sexual character who used it for her own pleasure and for- as a weapon. And it seemed like that was something that in the cul- in their entire culture they were very free about their sexuality. They didn't have a lot of social conventions to keep it at bay.

This idea of the Cylon projections was- as we were talking about life on the baseship early on, I started thinking about, ok, what are we gonna do? We're gonna be on these sets. I don't know if these sets are gonna work, in terms of what the audience expectation is, and I needed something else. If they're just these walls and these boring lights, isn't the audience just going to be always disappointed about what the Cylon life is like. And thought, "Well maybe... they are machines after all. They can do pretty much whatever they want. And if they choose to envision their surroundings as a forest, maybe they have that ability." Now, see, this is where the original, the beach sequence used to live here in its entirety. He was in the middle of that scene with Number Six, on the baseship, and then in his mind he went to what we call "Head Six", the imaginary Six in his head, and the whole beach scene played out here. And what I did is I took the first half of that scene, cut it, moved it to the top of the teaser, and then looped in different dialogue to have a completely different conversation.

Student: Within the logic of the show, does the place that the chararacter projects to ever affect their movement? Like, were they to walk into a rock or a tree or something? Is that really a problem?

RDM: It's a good question. I fudged it. I went around it completely. You'll see that there's- we- actually, I forgot we- I used to have an extension of that piece where as he walked- followed her down the corridor I dissolved over a piece of them walking in the forest and they turned left down the corridor but in the forest shot they actually kept going straight. And it was a discontinuity, but I- in my mind I justified it by saying that the Cylons are much smarter than we are and yes they choose to look at their environment as a forest, but they also know where they really are and they have a feeling of what the objects are in the room or in the hallway, and they're never going to run into- they're never gonna run into a real object and they know intuitively that all the objects in their projection aren't really there, so they would walk right through a rock.