Sure, we like to talk to the pretty actors about the awesome characters they play, but we also know they can't tell us anything. They usually don't know. Producers and showrunners still don’t tell us anything but at least they know what they're hiding. Battlestar Galactica producer David Eick helped whet our appetites for the final run of BSG shows.
Crave Online: How do you look back on what you created now that it's done?
David Eick: I think that there's a great sense of accomplishment from the standpoint of having approached the genre in a way that people weren't expecting. That really was what we were trying to do. We were trying to do something different with science fiction. We were trying to do something different with a space opera. We were trying to blow the wheels off the sort of Star Trek aesthetic and I feel that on that front, we feel very accomplished. In terms of what does it all mean and will anyone care in five minutes and does it have any staying power and will history judge us kindly, I think we're several years away and another perspective from being able to determine that. I certainly can't be the judge of that but it definitely is gratifying to feel like we've captured some part of the public's imagination and that the show overcame its title and overcame in some respects its genre to get the kind of attention its gotten.
Crave Online: Did it turn out the way you originally planned or take a life of its own?
David Eick: I think we thought we were going to do an extremely hard hitting politically resonant allegorical science fiction show that would again surprise people who were expecting a certain sort of escapist silliness from the title. I don't think we anticipated that it would be this densely constructed or complicated or uniquely multifaceted in terms of dealing with the cylon culture. That was really, Ron and I got together for our off season drinks meeting to spin the new season right before season three and feeling like we were a little gassed and reaching for what the next angle was going to be, defined season three as sort of the cylon season. I don't think we could've anticipated it would have taken quite that turn, but in so doing, it really broadened the pallet and gave all this different dimension to the series. Now wrapping it up, it is very much a part of the DNA of what the show is. That part I don't think we could've anticipated but the rest of it, yeah. I think that was pretty much what we are trying to do.
Crave Online: Do you see its influence on any new shows that are starting up?
David Eick: I see certain visual influences but on the other hand, you might say that we were also benefiting from shows that were using a verite style. I don't know that I saw it being done in science fiction but there's a lot of that going around now that I have seen. We were looking at stuff like Black Hawk Down. We weren't looking at TV so we were stealing too. I keep saying that because we provided all those first season directors with a care package that included Black Hawk Down and Blade Runner, we should be sending Ridley Scott a check after every episode.
Crave Online: How do you feel about wrapping it up where you're wrapping it up?
David Eick: It's really the result of what's always been our problem which is that our episodes are always about mood and the interior of character and texture and they're always long and we're constantly getting in the editing room with 10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes of material that we can't fit into an episode. So you're doing these page one rewrites in the editing room having to completely respin what the point of the story is, throwing out B stories, throwing out character lines, throwing out whole ideas because you're bound by this 40 minutes and change running time. We've said for several seasons now the scripts shouldn't be longer than 47 pages. That rarely happens because the ideas are too big. Even when it does, we're still really long so what you're seeing now is we're at the tail end of this thing, being able to convince the network to let us air long episodes, take single episodes and make them double episodes, take double episodes and make them quadruple episodes because we don't want to cut that. Now the story has become so critical in order to realize the arc of the series that we can't just cut stuff out and save it for later or push it off until next year, or the kinds of stuff we're used to doing. It's all got to be there, but it's not because we're pushing it. It's the opposite. We're actually trying to pull. Do we need this? Do we need this? The answer is yes, you need everything. That's where we are.
Crave Online: Are there plans to release the seasons on Blu Ray?
David Eick: I sure hope so. I got a multiplayer, and HD/Blu Ray player not for any reason other than the fact that I had the Battlestar HD box set and I wanted a machine I could watch it on. Five minutes after I did that, of course they discontinued HD. So now I'm just waiting for Blu Ray to take over enough that they do that release but they never tell us that stuff. I think Universal might be in denial. No, we weren't wrong to go into Iraq. Well, sorry.
Crave Online: Well, they're doing Heroes, so this should be another flagship of theirs.
David Eick: They're doing it on Blu Ray but it's just one of those things where they were so committed to HD that it's like turning around the Titanic. You've got to get them going, "Okay, we were wrong and now we're going to be doing stuff on Blu Ray."
Crave Online: What can you tell us about the next Battlestar TV film?
David Eick: It will be another like Razor reflection on a story that the fans think they know but they will discover they didn't know the whole story. It gives you a different sort of Rashomon like perspective on a popular part of our arc.
Crave Online: With Caprica coming up, how much Graystone, if any, is locked in stone by what's been mentioned in Battlestar?
David Eick: There's really no relationship. Other than because Caprica is a prequel, we haven't had to worry about infusing Caprica with Battlestar story elements because of course within the context of Caprica, Battlestar hasn't happened yet. Vice versa, it would seem such a red herring. For an audience that won't see Caprica for who knows, to lay in some reference point that won't resonate for a long time doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Crave Online: Are any of the fan speculations close?
David Eick: Well, to the extent that the speculations run the gamut from every category, yes. There is one speculation that's dead on.
