Podcast:Torn
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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.