The Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica got a head start with the 90 minute pilot. Now series creator and producer Ron Moore is at work developing the weekly series. We caught up with him several times, before the pilot aired, at its Paleyfest premiere and on the grey carpet at the Envelope series panel when he was close to shooting the first season of Caprica.
Crave Online: What’s the status of Caprica?
Ron Moore: We don’t start shooting until mid-July. We’ll have probably half the season written by that point so we’re in pretty good shape.
Crave Online: How much free territory is there within where it has to end up?
Ron Moore: There were hints and suggestions of things throughout Battlestar but in terms of specific history of the colonies and what happened before the first cylon war and how the cylons were invented, we really didn’t deal with any of that in the show so it’s a pretty wide open canvas.
Crave Online: Any chance we could see Tricia Helfer as an early version of Six?
Ron Moore: Well, you never say never but we don’t have any plans for that at the moment.
Crave Online: Is developing Caprica a different animal than BSG?
Ron Moore: It is different. The intentions are different and conceptually, the show is different. We’re not trying to emulate Battlestar really in any way. It really has to stand on its own and have its own sort of rhythm, its own style of storytelling. It’s not going to be quite as heavy and dark as Battlestar was because of its very nature. It’s pre-Apocalyptic as opposed to post-Apocalyptic. This is a vibrant still thriving world that’s headed for disaster but none of them know that, so the whole tenor of the show is very different.
Crave Online: Has it changed a lot from the pilot movie?
Ron Moore: Yeah. The pilot’s a very specific story and then from that story, we’ve really expanded outward and brought some details that are surprising to some of the characters. Some things that we didn’t even hint about in the pilot, you then discover oh my God, that’s who that character really is, or that’s a different part of their character I didn’t suspect existed. Others we double back and you’re like oh, I thought they were going this direction. They’re actually going that direction. There was an effort to sort of change up the game a lot as we went into the series.
Crave Online: Will we see more between the fathers?
Ron Moore: Yeah, right now they’re on very different tracks and going in different directions. Neither of them really thinks that they’re going to go back and revisit anything that happened in the pilot. Very quickly, it’s going to become obvious to both of them that actually none of that is yesterday’s news yet and their paths will cross again. In some situations, violently so.
Crave Online: What’s going on with Zoe?
Ron Moore: Well, she’s trapped in a robot which is a great place to put a 16-year-old girl. She’s going to struggle with what does she do next? A, can she get out of this body? Where would she go? Does she go back to the virtual world? Is that where she wants to be? What are they going to be doing to the robot as they try to develop the rest of the cylons? Can she keep her father from finding out that she’s in there? Does she want her father to find out that she’s in there? I think there’s a lot of questions that Zoe has to tackle in the first couple episodes before she decides what she wants to do.
Crave Online: Will we revisit the virtual world?
Ron Moore: Oh yeah. There’s much more in the virtual world. The virtual world is very large and it exists both in sort of an officially approved Greystone industries copyrighted virtual gaming worlds that people go into. Then there’s the hacked world that we saw in the pilot which is sort of underground where kids made up their own worlds. The virtual world is very broad. It’s almost an infinite world of possibilities and sets and locations and ideas of what happens. We will be taking characters into different aspects of that world over the course of the series?
Crave Online: Where do we pick up Caprica as the season begins?
Ron Moore: Well, the place where we pick up Caprica is that Caprica is just one of 12 colonies, all of which tend to have a relationship with one another but tend to war with each other now and again. It’s not a unified nation state so much as it is 12 colonies that have squabbles but trade among each other. The cylons represent sort of a breakthrough in technology on Caprica but the Vergis company is certainly on the same path on Tauron. There’s probably a couple other places of high technology that exist in 12 colonies, but essentially they’re all on the cusp of this breakthrough.
