| By Sean Elliot, ifmagazine.com,
on 18-12-2006
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Favoured : 122 |
 Interview: DAVID EICK FILLING THE GAP IN SEASON 3 ON BATTLESTAR GALACTICA - PART 4
Lucy Lawless, a Peabody award, and feminist theory in his new show BIONIC WOMAN
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is now officially in hiatus, but we only have to wait a matter of weeks until we can get our fix again. Shooting is completed on the three part finale for this fourth season, a lot of the people involved with production can breathe easier for a little bit. David Eick is not one of those people. Eick and producer/creator partner are always working, and Eick himself has more projects getting ready to head into production. In this final part of our interview series with Eick we squeeze out a few more details about BSG and find out what’s just over the horizon for the talented producer.
iF MAGAZINE: Is it as fun to collaborate with Lucy Lawless again after so many years?
DAVID EICK: It’s really great and I’m really happy with her. She came to the show to do and she’s such a pro because she understands that means sometimes she’s in a lot of the episodes, some times she’s in a little of the episodes; sometimes she is the focus of a scene and sometimes she is in the background. You’d be surprised, a lot of actors, particularly actors that have had their own shows and been title characters on shows that were big hits; it doesn’t work that way. If you want them you better build a whole story around them and when they show up on set you better have scheduled your day in such a way that they are the centerpiece and focus of what’s being done. She’s got kind of a theatre actor’s soul. She has a consummate professional attitude and she is all about the work; and yet she has all of the intangible qualities of a true star. I think it’s a really amazing and unusual combination.
iF: Judging from everything I’ve ever read, she has to be fun to work with.
EICK: She is a lot of fun. The crew adores her. The directors adore her. She is sort of like how I would imagine people working with in the 1940’s in old Hollywood. There’s a real irreverence to her, she gets the joke, and she doesn’t take it all that seriously at all and yet she is a complete professional. She doesn’t have the failing that accompany people who have had such huge successes early in their careers. She’s been the centerpiece of a hurricane television sensation and yet there were days on BATTLESTAR where I know she spent hours and hours on the set to say one word. You just don’t find that kind of dedication in people. On top of everything else to have the work be so good, and to have it stretching her in ways that people haven’t seen or haven’t seen as much as other things she has done has been a real joy. It’s a shame, and I wish we had known and been able to coerce her into making a longer commitment because it’s one of those situations where it didn’t go as well and I thought it would it actually went better.
iF: How far do you foresee BATTLESTAR going?
EICK: I don’t know is the honest answer. Ron has told stories of other shows he has worked on where they got to seasons where it was a chore for them or it was clear that it was more of struggle than it had been in the past to keep things going. I haven’t had that experience, so I don’t know what that’s like, but if we found ourselves feeling that way … We’re all making a good living doing the show and we have families and mortgages so its nice to have a job, so that’s a factor, but if it were a chore to comet o work everyday, or we felt were bullsh**ing each other with each subsequent story and it was a drag, then maybe we’d say “they all blow up at the end of this one and lets call it a day.” Until I feel that way it’s hard for me to say if it’ll be another one, or two, or even five years. We had always intended for this to be a series and that’s why we ended the mini-series on a cliffhanger. I was standing on set a the end of the min-series with Michael Rhymer and I said to him, “ I can’t imagine doing this as a series, I don’t have a single idea in my head as to where this could possibly go as I stand here on day 37 of this 45 day shoot.” He said, “Are you crazy? This thing could go on for years and years. I don’t even know where you’d draw the line. There are so many directions this thing could go with the depth to this idea.”
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then, and I feel that way too about the show now. Every time we get into the writer’s room and Ron and I have a scotch and story session, the possibilities seem very fluid and long-term and far reaching. I don’t at all feel like we’re contriving or pushing or forcing. Theoretically, that day will come [when we end the series] and I’ll be able to say that we’ve got one more in us, and then we do three more and the last two suck, but I’m not at that place now. I’m not there yet and I don’t feel the walls closing in yet.
iF: How has this season been since you won the Peabody Award?
EICK: It’s been a good news/bad news year. We’re on in October, right in the teeth of network originals and baseball playoffs and stuff that has definitely softened our ratings, but the network seems happy because they knew that was going to happen and we still stayed in there.
When you premiere at a 1.8 and in years past you premiered at a 2.6, there is a part of you that says gee that’s not a sign of growing, but all things are relative. It’s apples and oranges. The only thing that is holding us back is that not enough people know we’re on and not enough people who do know we’re on have given the show a try yet. I don’t think the show has ever really been better than the premiere of season three. At least just internally we’ve been happy with the qualitative outcome of the first four hours of the show, not that they go downhill from there, but comparing it to other seasons we haven’t been better than season three.
iF: You also have BIONIC WOMAN in development?
EICK: Again, that’s just a pilot. It’s like CAPRICA or any other thing. It’s in development, but it’s not a commitment yet. It’s a big piece of business, because it’s a big expensive script that they bought, but it’s definitely still merely speculative at this point. It’s for NBC. BIONIC WOMAN is not as outrageous a concept as BATTLESTAR, so the level of re-imagining required isn’t quite as graphic. Jeanne Kalogridis, my partner on that, isn’t as sick and twisted as Ron Moore, so it’s certainly not going to be as dark a show. We’re really trying to update the social commentary as to what it means to be a contemporary woman. That’s what the BIONIC WOMAN in its Gloria Steinem way was saying, “Women can too.” Nowadays, it’s not really about that, it’s more about how are overachieving women judged differently then overachieving men and how do we view them and how do they view themselves? Jeanne is a great writer and she has written some great set pieces and she is fantastic with humor, so I think this will have a more mainstream approach than we took with BATTLESTAR. Source Link: http://ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=1810 Submitted by Zipper Talk about this article on our forum: http://galacticabbs.com/index.php?showtopic=868
Last update : 18-12-2006
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