 
GW: Richard Dean Anderson's back in the movie. Is Jack O'Neill back, too?
BW: Jack O'Neill's back. General Jack O'Neill is back, and so is Colonel Jack O'Neill. I'll let you figure that out when you see the movie. It is funny, because he plays the characters, if you will, a little bit differently. There's the O'Neill who's gone through the process and is the evolved funny guy who doesn't take very much seriously anymore because he's seen so much. And then there's another side, not an older side, but a side of O'Neill from a few series back.
There's one thing about Rick and his performances. They seem like he's just so fresh. He seems like it's just coming off the top of his head. I promise you, he's put so much thought into how he's going to play it into the arc of how it plays out in the whole movie, and I know that from the editing room.
" We had this opportunity and I literally framed the story around that opportunity. 'OK, now how do I get them to the arctic?'"
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I go, "Oh my God." He doesn't act like he's done a whole pile of homework. Maybe it's just he's got actor instincts, but he's always spot-on. It was so much fun to have him back. I was saying in another interview recently that the fun of having Rick back -- you watch dailies and you go, "That's what we've been missing. That quality, that Richard Dean Anderson spark."
GW: It's his seal.
BW: Yeah. Yeah, kind of. He's not wall-to-wall in the movie. It's really about our team, and of course, the altered timeline.
GW: So you would say the movie has lived up to your goals and expectations?
BW: Yeah. Like I said off the top, this is my best work. And I think it's some of Martin Wood's best work. You always say when you're making a show, considering what we had -- considering the budget we had and considering the schedule -- the audiences don't know the constraints you're under. We shot this movie in 18 and a half days, plus a couple days in the arctic, that were hardly full shooting days. They were "Catch as catch can," so the windshield didn't go above 60 below. But cold!
We did, on my estimation, a movie that looks bigger than the resources that we actually had, because we literally pulled every trick we knew out of the book. And I was there, which was very helpful for Martin, not that these guys don't completely know what they're doing, but quite often they will cover something thinking I might want it. "OK, I better do a close-up here in case Brad's going to say ..." I'll be shouting in the editing room, "Dammit, where's my close up??"
I was able to say "We're done, we got it. That's how we want to do it. That's how we want to leave it." For that reason it has quite a filmic look. It looks like a feature as opposed to a big episode. It has a film structure. It has a film's size. It's got scope like you saw in the trailer and there's, believe me, a lot more you haven't seen that's just enormous.
We built a ship. We built the 1939 ship. James Robbins [art director] and I were chatting at the beginning of prep, and I said to John Smith, our line producer. "We can get a ship in the harbor," and he said "Yeah, but 1939, I don't know ..." And then James realized that to retrofit any real bridge that is in the modern, we'd have to cover up all this equipment and add all this stuff. We'd end up spending as much money as if we built the thing from scratch.
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Teal'c -- first prime of Baal |
Plus, what we were able to do -- we were going to have to build the hold separately -- that's the hold that the Stargate is inside that we find ourselves in. And that hold that we built, whereas in the television show we built a nice room with a Stargate in it, we built a nice gimbaled room, so when the ship begins to sink in the arctic after we blast our way out of the side of the ship with C4, it actually is tilting. It actually is sinking, if you will.
And of course, it's the arctic, and the arctic is cold, so we refrigerated the stage. And these are things we had done on the television series but never quite to this scale.
GW: How do you think it compares to Ark of Truth in terms of how the budget looks on screen?
BW: Well actually we spent a little more on Continuum. You know, you saw Ark of Truth. It's got an epic feel, too. It's huge. Flying helicopters over mountains. So it's similar in scope in the sense that they're both big movies. I think the difference between the two movies is exactly the difference we set out to make between them, and that is the fans deserved a big completion of the Ori story, and that's what Robert made.
But Continuum is, in a sense, I've been calling it "a good, old-fashioned Stargate," and in that sense a big movie I always wanted to make. It's the movie I wanted to make, and it's not a hell of a lot smaller in scope than the one I would have put as a theatrical release. It feels like it could've been a theatrical release in many ways. Of course we had nowhere near that much money to make it.
But we had enough that we could put quite a lot on the screen and that's the difference. One is what we set out to do, which was to complete the Ori storyline, and the other is a stand-alone, good old fashioned Stargate movie that we hope is one of many going forward. And maybe even, I keep saying this, an audition to MGM and to the world that we know how to do this. Maybe we could do a theatrical release.
GW: We were talking with Cliff Simon and he said that the ending leaves a big question mark. Have you considered, perhaps, revisiting the stories that this movie tells in a future movie?
BW: I think the funny part of this movie is people go "That was fun," and then they start asking questions. "Wait a minute, then what happened to Mitchell, and what does this mean to this guy, and what especially for Cliff's character?" There's even a whole new potential for his character going forward. But that's what a good movie is supposed to do. Especially a good Stargate movie. It should make you think of other possibilities.
O'Neill and Carter endure Baal's last words. | |
We have enough other Stargate stories that we might want to tell on the big screen before we mine from the mythology of Continuum. If this were a television series and Continuum was one of the episodes, oh yeah, there's a whole bunch of stories that I'd like to tell. There's an interesting period of time for Mitchell that could be a story all by itself.
GW: So fans have expressed that the short description of Continuum that we've seen so far sounds a lot like "Moebius." Do you think the two are similar or dissimilar?
BW: You know, "Moebius" was my story idea, and I said, when we were developing it, "You know, this kind of steps on a movie idea. This could be a movie."
The big difference between this and with "Moebius," my idea for "Moebius" was seeing ourselves had the Stargate program never impacted them, and how very different -- the idea that Daniel's teaching English as a second language, and that Carter is a junior bureaucrat somewhere. They're essentially the nerds that they are not in SG-1, and O'Neill is an old fisherman with a funny accent. Actually he's hilarious in that scene. I just split.
The huge difference between [Continuum] and "Moebius" is because we're trying to escape the change in the timeline as it's taking place it's a major conceit, if you will, of the way this timeline is altered, that people start disappearing individually. A wave is going through time from the origin of what had happened so that people are disappearing. And then eventually places start to disappear.
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