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The cast and crew of Heroes may be coming to a city near you this summer. In August, Tim Kring is sending various Heroes stars on a world tour, cosponsored by Nissan, to present the First Season DVD, available August 28 on DVD and HD-DVD. At least seven cities in seven countries have been booked so far: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Munich, Paris, London and New York. After announcing this endeavor, Kring hung around to answer more questions about season two and the spinoff, Heroes: Origins. 

CraveOnline: In August, could this disrupt your shooting schedule?

Tim Kring: We are going to shut down basically. There are a couple of characters, a couple of actors who will not be going. Some of the newer characters and we're trying to carve out enough production to keep the production trickling along for that week. But the idea was always to build in this week as a week that we shut down production.

CraveOnline: Greg Grunberg was here to help you announce the tour and he said he starts shooting today. So where will Matt Parkman be going?

Tim Kring: Well again, I really am not going to say. It did not look good for Matt at the end of the season. Clearly, he's a very popular character and those kind of things are taken into consideration when you decide what you want to do with a character's fate. As was spilled today, he is filming today, so there is some element of his presence that will show up in the first season.

Tim Kring: Well, as you saw, that character was integrated at the end of the season so it leaves us with a sort of new beginning for that character.

CraveOnline: Does it eliminate her power or redefine it?

Tim Kring: That you'll have to see. It will be redefined.

CraveOnline: Could it make things easier for DL maybe?

Tim Kring: Ando is pining away for his friend to return.

CraveOnline: Will James Kyson Lee get regular status?

Tim Kring: We love Christopher Eccleston. He's a very busy working actor and we absolutely would love to have him back and it's really about finding the time to work him in.

CraveOnline: How are you creating Feudal Japan in LA?

Tim Kring: Well, as you know, LA has doubled for many, many things and on this show, it's doubled for lots of things. So it's a fairly rural view of Feudal Japan which allows us a lot of the outlying areas. Feudal Japan is within 50 miles of here and various locations in Northern [California,] Santa Monica Mountains, some north valley. As I said, we're keeping it a very rural story. We're not trying to depict a city in Feudal Japan.

Tim Kring: That's a very valid question. Obviously not huge. We're doing some stuff with CGI and designing the story so that they're not completely dependent on anything that's going to have to look like a $200 million feature. That's always been our dilemma on a show like this. It circles in the same world as a lot of big giant budget movies but it has to come at things from a different way so that we can actually produce it every week.

CraveOnline: Are you getting bigger budgets at least?

Tim Kring: One would think that that would happen but it's a very large company with a bottom line so there is a natural bump in every budget every year because of contracts and cost of living and all that kind of stuff. So we've been held to the standard that we were. The good news about a second season is that we learned a tremendous amount from mistakes. You learn how to get more efficient, how to move faster. For us, number of days of shooting has always been our big issue and that usually centers around how many pages we can do. That has to do with efficiency.

CraveOnline: Have you thought of any other historical periods you'd like to visit?

CraveOnline: You brought the ensemble together for the finale. Are you splitting them up again?

Tim Kring: Yes. We start with them apart again. That's always been the fun, I felt, of the show and some of the secret of the show is the guessing and the predicting and the discussion about how these disparate characters are going to find their way back to each other's lives. I think that's a big chunk of what the show's success is.

CraveOnline: Will we see any characters like Claire's mom come back?

Tim Kring: Oh yes, absolutely. The smaller characters that were met along the way, some have greater significance in the second season.

CraveOnline: Would you like to do more, bigger swordfights after Hiro's training?

Tim Kring: Oh yeah. All that training and all the sword discussions were part of trying to build a basis of knowledge for him so that he can enter into those kind of scenes. And Masi himself is really quite good with a sword.

CraveOnline: With three volumes potentially, are you working in three finales?

Tim Kring: The idea is actually to do smaller finales so that we don't have to carry the burden of having every single character come together to do this great thing. We'll build to certain mysteries that feel like they need to be solved and things will be solved and other ones will kind of straggle along, as with many volumes of books and comic books.

CraveOnline: Could one volume focus on certain characters while other volumes focus on others?

CraveOnline: Is anyone complaining they don't have any work yet?

Tim Kring: No, no, no. Everybody still gets woven in. It's just that the cliffhanger aspect or the finale aspect may not involve them as much as some of the other people.

CraveOnline: Are you going to do anything this season for fans who didn't watch last season to be able to jump in this season?

Tim Kring: Yes, that is a big part of what we're doing. I mean, one of the things that I sort of learned in the first season was that we called season one Volume One and it was entitled Genesis. It just happened to be twenty three episodes long. Volume II is entitled Generations and it by no means has to be an entire season long. I wouldn't expect it to be an entire season long. In fact we're looking at that volume to end in the middle of the season which allows us to wrap up certain stories and allows us to have new stories begin. So you don't get a sense that if you jump on the train that you're aggressively being pushed off of the train because you don't know what's going on. That's a big concern with us.

CraveOnline: So will there be some kind of recap for people who didn't see last season?

Tim Kring: Only slightly because the actual episode itself, it's an episode entitled "Four Months Later" and so we pick up the stories four months after we left off at the end of the season. There is tremendous mystery in what happened during those four months and that's part of why you're watching these first few episodes. They're revealing what actually happened. So the recap, in a way, is sort of built into the story.

CraveOnline: Is Hiro in Feudal Japan for four months?

Tim Kring: No, Hiro's story is the only one that picks up exactly immediately, so he's existing in a time frame outside of the rest of our story.

Tim Kring: George Takei, yes, he is in the first episode.

CraveOnline: Will Tim Sale still be involved even though Isaac's not around to paint anymore?

Tim Kring: Yes, Tim is going to stay involved so the idea of the paintings is going to have a clever sort of re-entry into the show.

CraveOnline: Are we going to get more backstory on him and the Petrelli's mom?

Tim Kring: The idea of Generations, last year we set up this sort of sense that there was this other generation represented by the Linderman character and the Petrellis' mom and George Takei and Richard Roundtree's character. All of these characters set up an idea that there was another generation that had secrets of their own. This season, one of those themes that we're going to talk about is the sins of the parents being visited upon the children. That's one of the themes, this idea of how generationally we are left with problems that we have to fix.

CraveOnline: What other big themes are you addressing?

Tim Kring: Yeah, one of the things that we wanted to do, and this is in getting back to the idea of how do you come back to a second season and get people to start over again, is a kind of how do you stay back on the farm after you've gone out and had these amazing adventures. So a lot of these stories are resetting at the beginning and we're getting to come back to the touchstone of what it's like to try and live a normal life while having these issues going on, as opposed to the first season where it got so cranked up with a plot that that idea sort of fell by the wayside.

CraveOnline: Can you tell us about any of the new characters we might meet?

Tim Kring: I don’t know if that’s something I’m supposed to be talking about or not. There are a couple of new characters that will fold in and a couple of them have already been announced in the press. Dania Ramirez is one.

CraveOnline: With eight new characters, how hard is it to integrate them?

Tim Kring: A lot of it was planned for and felt fairly natural. It's a big cast. One of the things we are doing this year, because we're not asking the audience to start absolutely from scratch, we're not so concerned now about every episode having every single character in it. So we're able to sort of pull back and ebb and flow and let certain characters come to the surface for an episode and sit out an episode. The idea of being able to focus on a couple characters is something we really learned last year was a really valuable thing to do, but you had to have earned enough interest in those characters to then focus on them.

CraveOnline: You have a blond hair, blue eyed guy playing a Samurai war lord. Can you address that?

Tim Kring: Like with everything on Heroes, nothing is quite what it seems to be. That becomes a huge part of the story.

CraveOnline: Can you talk about how long Hiro will remain in the past?

Tim Kring: For a hand full of episodes. That’s it.

CraveOnline: How do you feel about the mixed fan reaction to the finale?

Tim Kring: I didn't really experience the mixed fan reaction. I heard anecdotally that people loved it and clearly on a show like this, again this is one of the problems with a big serialized show which is that by the time you get to twenty three episodes in you're dragging a tremendous amount of story behind you. So when people wait that long for answers it gets very hard to satisfy people. This is another reason why I think these volumes are really the way to go because it allows us to not have people build up expectations for so long as to how things are going to be resolved. When you build up for a whole year with a show like this it has an addictive quality to it and so it has to really pay off. Sometimes those expectations are too high for a mere television show.

CraveOnline: How did you decide to reveal HRG's name in the first season? Was it the same name you originally had in the pilot script?

Tim Kring: We actually talked about what the name was all year long so I would be lying if I said I knew what his name was. And we just felt like in the spirit of answering questions, one of the things that I talked about is this feeling that this show is a show that will- - we committed ourselves to the idea of answering questions along the way so that we didn't build up a frustration level of "Why aren't they telling us what's really going on" and "why aren't they telling us these answers. So we decided that that was one of the questions that was nagging on people's minds.

Tim Kring: Yeah. That was another thing I said. I really felt like we wanted to, again, this is all part of jumping on board in the second season, knowing that there were new villains and new bad guys. I looked at Linderman as almost like a Bond villain. The Bond movies always have somebody new and interesting, so Linderman was our first. He was our Goldfinger, our Dr. No.

CraveOnline: Any chance of getting a big star to play one of the Heroes: Origins?

Tim Kring: That's one of the interesting things about the idea of it being an anthology where people don't have to commit to an entire series. Some of the hopes of that is to entice certain actors, certain writers, certain directors that may not normally be attracted to the workload of a series.

CraveOnline: Have you put out the word or been contacted by stars?

Tim Kring: Word is going out right now. We're literally in the beginning stages of that and we hear often from people that they're a big fan of the show.

CraveOnline: What about the audience voting for a character to enter the main Heroes story?

Tim Kring: Well, we're seeing how that would work. It would not be able to be for the entire season. It would probably be within a couple of contained episodes to allow for just this. To allow for the idea, it's very difficult to let the fans have that much control over something. Internally, you may not be able to make a deal with somebody or they may not be available or they may be terrible to work with and we don't want to work with them. There's a million reason why you don't want somebody imposing that on you.

CraveOnline: Have you started scripting Origins yet?

Tim Kring: No, not yet. We are now in the process of talking about who is going to be writing and directing them.

CraveOnline: Would it be fair to describe the show as an anthology series?

Tim Kring: Yes. Right now that’s the idea. It will not be a continuing cast or storyline.

CraveOnline: Do you see a lot of the current cast members being in it?

Tim Kring: Right now, no. This cast has 24 episodes which is a giant mountain of work to do already. The idea is that these are the stories of other people. The show has posited this idea that this is happening all over the world and so this is an opportunity for us to tell some stories about some of these other people out there.

CraveOnline: Do you think all six episodes will run in one six week block between a break in the regular series?

Tim Kring: Right now that’s the idea, yes. Let me just clarify one thing. The idea of when we’re going to air, as of now, the idea with Origins is that Heroes will run continuously as much as we can throughout the season. Obviously there are a couple of tiny breaks along the way. When Heroes ends in April, Origins would begin.