Ron Moore on the Virtuality TV movie

Crave Online: Wasn’t this originally supposed to be a pilot for a series?

 

Ron Moore: It is a pilot.  It’s a pilot for a series and Fox is going to broadcast it as a two-hour movie. It was a two-hour pilot, so they’re broadcasting it as a two-hour movie, but in my mind it’s a pilot. It’s always been a pilot. 

 

Crave Online: So it still can become a series?

 

Ron Moore: I think you never say never. They haven’t picked it up to date. Their attitude, I think, is kind of wait and see. I think they want to see what the reaction is going to be. What are the critics going to say? Is it going to get word of mouth? Are fans going to gravitate to it or is the science fiction community really going to turn up for it? Is there going to be a certain buzz and excitement? I think right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to series, but I think if enough people watched and enough people got excited about it anything is possible. 

 

Crave Online: Do you think this is a story that can be told in two hours? 

 

Ron Moore: Well, you’ll see. It certainly does not resolve itself in two hours. I mean it sets up for a show, so it’s got some pretty heavy things that go down in it and kind of leaves you going, “Whoa! Where is that going?” by the end of it. 

Crave Online: What makes Virtuality different from a Star Trek holodeck?

 

Ron Moore: Well, it’s a different concept. The holodeck is a physical space that you would go into and three dimensional forms were actually physically created in front of you that you could feel and touch and interact with, etc. The computer would generate them as long as you were in them. This is truly a virtual space, which is much more akin to putting on contemporary, sort of virtual headsets, but sort of taking it to the next level where you do have an experiential sort of ability to touch and sense and taste and smell things in your mind, so it’s different sort of on the mechanical level. In terms of the story level, we’re not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space you die in the real space. From that sense, it doesn’t have the safety programs like it did in the holodeck where the safety is off and if you get killed in here you get killed. It’s a very different thing. 

 

Crave Online: So in Virtuality if you die inside the virtual headset you don’t die in reality or you do? 

 

Ron Moore: You don’t. No. It’s more like how gaming is now. You go on-line. You play a game and you get killed and you’re kicked out of the program because you’re dead, but you’re not dead in real life. We’re using these much more psychologically as well. Essentially the experience is that the astronauts aboard the Phaeton have, in virtual space, are sort of things that just sort of are psychologically motivated. They go in there and they do things for entertainment and to sort of pass the time of day while they’re on this very, very long-range mission, but you’re learning things about them personally and about where did they want to spend their time and when things go wrong in that space how does it then influence them in the real world. That was the thing I was most interested in. The concept was how the virtual space impacted the real story that was going on aboard the spacecraft and vice-versa. What’s the sort of interaction between the two? 

 

Crave Online: The nature of Battlestar, you had to be very serious dealing with the space ship and everything. Does Virtuality allow you to have a little bit more fun with the concept of people in space?  

 

Ron Moore: Oh, yes. It’s a much less serious situation than Battlestar was dealing with. Battlestar was literally a post-apocalyptic show where the future of humanity rode on their every decision and death was stalking them continuously. So it’s not set up in the same way. The crew aboard Phaeton signed up for what just seemed like a very straight-ahead mission of exploration and they were chosen with that in mind. They were also chosen to participate in this sort of reality show that’s being broadcast back to Earth. So there was a conscious attempt on the part of the people who put the crew together to sort of have an interesting mix of people. There are debates within the crew themselves who was chosen just for sort of their demographic content and who was legitimately supposed to be there. Now you’ve got a groups of 12 people stuck in a metal tube going in a straight line for a decade or so and that’s going to just sort of produce a lot of tensions and frictions and manipulations and sort of cross problems between the characters. It has a stronger element of fun and suspense and sort of interesting plot terms in terms of what characters will do with one another than did Battlestar. Battlestar was very driven by the internal pressures of the huge weight that was on all of their shoulders from the beginning of the miniseries. 

 

Crave Online: So a little more opportunity for humor maybe?

 

Ron Moore: Oh, yes. There’s definitely more humor. There’s more humor probably in the first ten minutes of Virtuality than there was in the run of Battlestar, let’s put it that way.

 

Crave Online: When did you come up with the idea of blending a sci-fi thriller with a reality show element to it?

 

Ron Moore: It was sort of in stages. When we first started talking about the concept is was about a long-range space mission, which I was intrigued with. Like I said before, I was interested in the idea of what do you do with 12 people in a metal tube for that long. I thought there were interesting dramatic possibilities right there and, okay, what would they realistically need to do. What would NASA or the space confederation do at that point to keep them from going crazy? They’d probably have a really advanced virtual reality program to help them while away the hours and there’s interaction between those two worlds. Somewhere in those discussions we started talking about when they would be broadcasting pieces back to earth, obviously, like astronauts do today, and hey, what if they made a reality show out of that? Then it all kind of started to come together. You had these three layers of storytelling going on in the show where you had what was happening in the real world on the ship, what was happening in the virtual space and then what was the reality show that was seen back on earth. Were the needs of the reality show starting to impact what was happening on the spacecraft? Were people being manipulated in order to make better drama for the reality show? The astronauts themselves would start to wonder about are they telling us the truth about what’s happening back on earth or is that something to just get us to be upset for the cameras. It did sort of become this really interesting sort of psychological crucible that they would all be put in.

 

 

Crave Online: We compared it to the holodeck, but is this virtual world similar to the one in Caprica?

 

Ron Moore: I was sort of aware of the similarities between the two. They do have different purposes and different sorts of constructs to them. They both involve putting a set of goggles on your face, so they’re similar in sort of that perspective. In Caprica it’s really much more akin to the Internet where you go out and the virtual spaces are practically infinite and they intersect with one another. On Caprica you can go from the V-Club where we establish in the pilot is sort of a hacked world and then, presumably, there are worlds of war craft type of worlds, etc., etc. It’s all sort of interconnected into their version of the Internet. In Virtuality we’re looking at something much more discrete, much smaller, much more of a gaming type of environment where an astronaut has a specific virtual reality module that they go into and play whatever game or have whatever experience they want, but there is no expectation that you can cross from one module to another. 

 

Crave Online: What was the process of writing a new cast of characters?

 

Ron Moore: Well, we set out to create sort of a diverse group of astronauts and we sort of then embraced the idea that given our premise that these astronauts were put together not just for the scientific mission, but also for its own demographic purposes, we kind of embraced the idea that they would be a very diverse group and then that would be part of the story, the show. Was this group assembled for its TVQ sort of attractability, as it were, or were they really all of the best in their selective fields and to use that as sort of tension between them. We just wanted sort of characters that would be interesting to sort of collide against one another, characters that would have problems with one another, all of the sort of standard things that you look for in a dramatic series. 

 

Crave Online: Then how did you cast those characters?

 

Ron Moore: It was a lot of long sessions of casting. Peter Berg was very instrumental in reading the actors and working with them during the reading process. Fox has got a great history in terms of their ability to go out and find interesting new actors. Some of the actors have been on Fox series before, some have not. It was a pretty sort of wide ranging process that ultimately ended up with the core cast that we have.

 

Crave Online: How much has this version changed since the original one that you shot?

 

Ron Moore: With this material, like I said before, this is a very complex material. I think the initial reaction when they saw the two-hour version was, “Wow! If this was just a movie I would say ship it right now. It’s fantastic. But it’s a pilot and it’s a pilot for Fox. I’m not sure. Let’s talk about different ways to go at this.” So we went back in and we worked with Kevin [Reilly] and the network. Any of these sorts of processes when you’re dealing with pilots, it’s a conversation between you and the network to try to figure out how to maintain and sort of show the piece of material that you’ve worked on, that you believe in. You’re also trying to get something that will fit onto their air schedule. It becomes a question of how can each of us accommodate each other into this process. As part of that process, Kevin asked us at one point, “Can you do a one-hour version of it? Can you cut the existing two-hour to a one-hour version? How would that be?” So we went back in and we took a crack at carving a one-hour. Peter Berg really led that charge and tried a whole different kind of style and structure to do what a one-hour piece would have looked like. Ultimately, I don’t think any of us really felt that that was the best version of the show. We didn’t feel that way and neither did the network, so ultimately that didn’t really go anywhere. I think they then judged the show on its own merits as the two-hour version and just decided they weren’t willing to pick it up right then, but they weren’t going to foreclose the possibility if it sparked interest later and that’s kind of where we are. 

 

Crave Online: If it only lives as a two-hour movie and doesn’t get picked up is there any thought of maybe trying to push to do another two-hour movie where you could tie up some of the thoughts that you wanted to or, as a lot of creators are doing now, maybe taking it into a different media, like a comic book so you could continue to expand on the theme?

 

Ron Moore: I think all of those are possibilities. We’ve talked about all of those possibilities. It’s just kind of one step at a time. I think it’s really hard to say. It depends on where we go after the broadcast and, A, after the ratings, after they start looking at demographics, after they start looking at word of mouth. Sometimes these things have a bigger life that sort of blossoms a few weeks after the broadcast. There’s a buzz going. People talk and then they start wondering when it’s on DVD .and decisions about where we would go with the underlying properties is just really hard to say where we are right now. 

 

Crave Online: What type of virtual worlds could we see in the movie and maybe in the series if that progresses?

 

Ron Moore: You’ll see kind of a range of virtual worlds. It opens in the Civil War in an action sort of piece and then there are more pastoral settings. There is a home. There are actually doctor’s offices. There are rock concerts. There is quite a range of areas that we went into, which was a deliberate choice. We wanted to sort of show that we were going to use these worlds in sort of disparate ways and that they would all be sort of tailored to specific characters and what they were interested in going to do, so you’ll see quite a range of virtual worlds when you get in there. 

 

Crave Online: Was it intentional that you never specify the year this takes place?

 

Ron Moore: Actually, that changed over time. Initially we didn’t really specify those things. We wanted to keep it looser and kind of vague because I just thought it was more interesting than nailing down the specifics on all of that, but as we went through the process we started to nail those things down. We just started to feel like we had to answer certain questions. I think we did. I know you’re going to ask me what year it is and I’m not going to know off the top of my head, so don’t ask, but I think we do refer to the year and we definitely talked more about the nature of the emergency. It’s kind of explicit. I mean there is a commercial for the reality show within the show. Within that commercial it kind of lays out some of the broader parameters of the mission, about what’s happening on earth and why the mission has taken on a new urgency. The mission started out as just one of exploration and then something going terribly wrong back home in terms of climate change, in terms of the environment, or so the astronauts are told. That’s kind of where we are.