peter noble
December 5th, 2003, 04:12 PM
http://battlestar.ugo.com/series/news.php?id=104
As Fred Melrose would say in the 1987 opus The Secret of My Succe$s, “Not the suits, man! You never consort with the suits.” Since David Eick was once head of the USA Network and is now the executive in charge of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, he is what Fred would call “A suit made good.”
But Eick is no stranger to genre television, having worked with Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi on the Hercules television series. While at USA, he helped bring forth the Pate brothers’ one-hour series, G vs. E. He also has a great sense of humor as demonstrated at the Battlestar Galactica press conference, when the star of the show, Edward James Olmos said "If you're a die-hard fan of the original Battlestar Galactica, please don't watch.” Eick handled the situation like a true professional and laughed all the way through it.
UGO: Katee Sackhoff said that you were probably the most excited person on the Battlestar Galactica set; that you were bouncing off the walls
David Eick: Yes, I was saying to a friend earlier that it’s so rare that you are involved with anything that ends up getting realized the way you imagined it would, and that you have a good time doing it. This is one of those rare occasions where the experience was singular and wonderful. It ultimately came out exactly like we wanted it to.
UGO: Are you the one that put this together from the beginning?
DE: I guess so. Although the anti-Galacticans should not get my home address.
UGO: Ron Moore told me that it was his idea to dump the robot dog and do a remake instead of a sequel.
DE: It’s a funny thing, remake versus sequel. Initially, it was Ron, but in a strange way, I feel he was still able to acknowledge the existence of the original show by having this take place further down the timeline. They talk about the old vipers, then you see them, and they are the very ships from the original show. It has the ring of nostalgia despite the fact that it is not a literal translation.
UGO: But why a remake rather than a sequel?
DE: The value in Ron’s approach to this is that we could accomplish what we had initially not only told ourselves what we wanted to accomplish, but what we had been asked by the network to accomplish. That was the deconstruction of the tonal aesthetic of the so-called space opera, which are all descendants of the original Star Trek and the original Battlestar Galactica. That’s a long lineage, and quite a dense history to try to deconstruct. I really felt that Ron’s approach really gave us the best chance to do that.
UGO: What made you choose Ron for this project?
DE: Ron was a consultant on some episodes of a show I produced called G vs. E. I remember some really lengthy phone conversations with Ron. What was telling about Ron is that he came from Star Trek. In my own ignorance, I assumed that the people who wrote those shows were a bit humorless or stoic. G vs. E was this clever sort of Simpsons comic horror show. Ron really got it and wrote an episode, I think, about shoe fetishes. He was just great. It said to me that this is a guy with an eclectic set of talents not limited to the earnestness of something like Star Trek.
UGO: Even though Ron is a talented writer, did you ever have to say to him “Not like Star Trek”?
DE: Well, only once. It was when I made the decision to hire him, because I felt that, while I understood theoretically what it meant to go against the Star Trek grain, I am not a Trekkie. So I knew going in it was very possible I would arrive at creative ideas or have inspiration that I thought was genius only to learn that Star Trek had been doing it for 20 years. I needed somebody who was very intimate with that world to go left every time Star Trek went right. In that respect, it was a stroke of great fortune to have Ron, because he not only understood what it meant to be a Star Trek type of show, but he shared with a desire to deconstruct it.
UGO: Michael Rymer had only done one big budget movie [Queen of the Damned] before directing this. What did he do that made him the director?
DE: Rymer was also someone I had brief exposure to when I was at the USA Network. We had talked with him about directing a pilot. I found him to be really intelligent, really driven by idiosyncratic character, irony and moral ambiguity. These are the themes in his work and I felt those strengths would be more beneficial to us in what we were attempting to do with this project than someone who had done a thousand outer space shows. I was confident we would have great technical and effects people so I really wanted a director who would find the nuance in the characters and subtexts. That’s what Michael did.
UGO: I couldn’t see him as your first choice, though.
DE: He was on the very short list of potential directors that I started making right after I read Ron’s script.
UGO: You’ve done a lot of work with Sam Raimi on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, American Gothic…
DE: Yes, also with Shaun Cassidy on American Gothic. Shaun is a good friend of mine.
UGO: Also, Mantis with Sam Raimi.
DE: Yeah, well. We all have to start somewhere.
UGO: What did you pull away from working with Sam that’s stuck with you?
DE: Yeah, a piece of advice which sounds really corny. But it was, “Uplift them”. Whatever genre you’re in, whatever ground you think you are breaking, “Uplift them”. That is the central component to good storytelling and to commercial success. I think that one of the great elements of Ron’s script is that, unlike so much contemporary drama, which seems obligated to assure the audience that we’re not alienating them, Ron’s script gets really dark. It gets seemingly hopeless, borderline nihilistic, then delivers the barest glimpse of hope, which you find yourself so grateful for. Maybe it’s a callback to ‘70s movies, but I felt Ron achieved that and I was grateful to Sam that I am able to recognize it.
UGO: What do you do when your lead actor tells about 200,000 people that they shouldn’t watch the show?
DE: I laughed my ass off. I thought it was hysterical. He’s being very honest. I think he feels that anyone who watches the miniseries who is expecting a literal rebroadcast of a 1978 show, they are going to be very disappointed and shouldn’t watch. I understood exactly what he meant. I think it was more fun to interpret than as an actor dissing the project he was in. I was sitting right next to him when he did it and I was almost in tears from laughing. Maybe I’m just an idiot, and it should have bothered me than it did.
UGO: What superpower would you like to have?
DE: I would like to be able to see through walls. Of course, I would go to the movie theatre and watch all the movies for free.
UGO: What is your favorite movie franchise out of Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars?
DE: Star Wars.
UGO: All of them?
DE: No, but I have to say that, for our marketing, I was inspired by the teaser campaign for Phantom Menace. I thought that was genius.
As Fred Melrose would say in the 1987 opus The Secret of My Succe$s, “Not the suits, man! You never consort with the suits.” Since David Eick was once head of the USA Network and is now the executive in charge of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, he is what Fred would call “A suit made good.”
But Eick is no stranger to genre television, having worked with Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi on the Hercules television series. While at USA, he helped bring forth the Pate brothers’ one-hour series, G vs. E. He also has a great sense of humor as demonstrated at the Battlestar Galactica press conference, when the star of the show, Edward James Olmos said "If you're a die-hard fan of the original Battlestar Galactica, please don't watch.” Eick handled the situation like a true professional and laughed all the way through it.
UGO: Katee Sackhoff said that you were probably the most excited person on the Battlestar Galactica set; that you were bouncing off the walls
David Eick: Yes, I was saying to a friend earlier that it’s so rare that you are involved with anything that ends up getting realized the way you imagined it would, and that you have a good time doing it. This is one of those rare occasions where the experience was singular and wonderful. It ultimately came out exactly like we wanted it to.
UGO: Are you the one that put this together from the beginning?
DE: I guess so. Although the anti-Galacticans should not get my home address.
UGO: Ron Moore told me that it was his idea to dump the robot dog and do a remake instead of a sequel.
DE: It’s a funny thing, remake versus sequel. Initially, it was Ron, but in a strange way, I feel he was still able to acknowledge the existence of the original show by having this take place further down the timeline. They talk about the old vipers, then you see them, and they are the very ships from the original show. It has the ring of nostalgia despite the fact that it is not a literal translation.
UGO: But why a remake rather than a sequel?
DE: The value in Ron’s approach to this is that we could accomplish what we had initially not only told ourselves what we wanted to accomplish, but what we had been asked by the network to accomplish. That was the deconstruction of the tonal aesthetic of the so-called space opera, which are all descendants of the original Star Trek and the original Battlestar Galactica. That’s a long lineage, and quite a dense history to try to deconstruct. I really felt that Ron’s approach really gave us the best chance to do that.
UGO: What made you choose Ron for this project?
DE: Ron was a consultant on some episodes of a show I produced called G vs. E. I remember some really lengthy phone conversations with Ron. What was telling about Ron is that he came from Star Trek. In my own ignorance, I assumed that the people who wrote those shows were a bit humorless or stoic. G vs. E was this clever sort of Simpsons comic horror show. Ron really got it and wrote an episode, I think, about shoe fetishes. He was just great. It said to me that this is a guy with an eclectic set of talents not limited to the earnestness of something like Star Trek.
UGO: Even though Ron is a talented writer, did you ever have to say to him “Not like Star Trek”?
DE: Well, only once. It was when I made the decision to hire him, because I felt that, while I understood theoretically what it meant to go against the Star Trek grain, I am not a Trekkie. So I knew going in it was very possible I would arrive at creative ideas or have inspiration that I thought was genius only to learn that Star Trek had been doing it for 20 years. I needed somebody who was very intimate with that world to go left every time Star Trek went right. In that respect, it was a stroke of great fortune to have Ron, because he not only understood what it meant to be a Star Trek type of show, but he shared with a desire to deconstruct it.
UGO: Michael Rymer had only done one big budget movie [Queen of the Damned] before directing this. What did he do that made him the director?
DE: Rymer was also someone I had brief exposure to when I was at the USA Network. We had talked with him about directing a pilot. I found him to be really intelligent, really driven by idiosyncratic character, irony and moral ambiguity. These are the themes in his work and I felt those strengths would be more beneficial to us in what we were attempting to do with this project than someone who had done a thousand outer space shows. I was confident we would have great technical and effects people so I really wanted a director who would find the nuance in the characters and subtexts. That’s what Michael did.
UGO: I couldn’t see him as your first choice, though.
DE: He was on the very short list of potential directors that I started making right after I read Ron’s script.
UGO: You’ve done a lot of work with Sam Raimi on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, American Gothic…
DE: Yes, also with Shaun Cassidy on American Gothic. Shaun is a good friend of mine.
UGO: Also, Mantis with Sam Raimi.
DE: Yeah, well. We all have to start somewhere.
UGO: What did you pull away from working with Sam that’s stuck with you?
DE: Yeah, a piece of advice which sounds really corny. But it was, “Uplift them”. Whatever genre you’re in, whatever ground you think you are breaking, “Uplift them”. That is the central component to good storytelling and to commercial success. I think that one of the great elements of Ron’s script is that, unlike so much contemporary drama, which seems obligated to assure the audience that we’re not alienating them, Ron’s script gets really dark. It gets seemingly hopeless, borderline nihilistic, then delivers the barest glimpse of hope, which you find yourself so grateful for. Maybe it’s a callback to ‘70s movies, but I felt Ron achieved that and I was grateful to Sam that I am able to recognize it.
UGO: What do you do when your lead actor tells about 200,000 people that they shouldn’t watch the show?
DE: I laughed my ass off. I thought it was hysterical. He’s being very honest. I think he feels that anyone who watches the miniseries who is expecting a literal rebroadcast of a 1978 show, they are going to be very disappointed and shouldn’t watch. I understood exactly what he meant. I think it was more fun to interpret than as an actor dissing the project he was in. I was sitting right next to him when he did it and I was almost in tears from laughing. Maybe I’m just an idiot, and it should have bothered me than it did.
UGO: What superpower would you like to have?
DE: I would like to be able to see through walls. Of course, I would go to the movie theatre and watch all the movies for free.
UGO: What is your favorite movie franchise out of Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars?
DE: Star Wars.
UGO: All of them?
DE: No, but I have to say that, for our marketing, I was inspired by the teaser campaign for Phantom Menace. I thought that was genius.