 
GW: What about Season Six? Are you just working on Season Five right now? Are you going to finish Season Five and come completely into Sanctuary?
MW: Because Sanctuary is a short pick-up, we should be able to be finished before Atlantis finishes their schedule. That's what I'm hoping. Because I'm running Sanctuary, I can always schedule myself into some time to be able to go and do Atlantis stuff.
Like I said, when they started shooting, Andy Mikita was shooting the first episode of Atlantis this year, it's the first time in twelve years I haven't been there the very beginning of the year. It felt really weird. I went in and told the guys, "This feels really weird not being here when it starts."
They have been amazing. Paul and Joe and Brad and Robert and everybody over there, the producers, have been incredible to me and Amanda about understanding where we're at and what we're trying to do. And they've been very supportive.
GW: Stargate Continuum is coming to DVD this July. We don't want to blow anything. How early did you know you would be directing this project? How early on were you brought in?
MW: Before Atlantis was made Brad and Rob came up to me and started talking about the Stargate feature. I really wish that Brad would release the script that they put together for it, because I read the script that was going to be put together for the Stargate feature, and thought "This is incredible."
But what it morphed into was it essentially morphed into "Lost City" and "Rising." Those four shows were essentially the movie that they were pitching to me. I was going to do that if it came about. Then Atlantis came up and they asked me if I would do the opening two-parter, do "Rising."
"It's the first time in twelve years I haven't been [at Bridge Studios] the very beginning of the year. It felt really weird."
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So that was the biggest project I'd done to that point. And then when it came time for the movies and Robert said he was going to do one, and Brad asked me if I would do the other one. I said "Great, what's it about?" He sat down that day and essentially said, "Here's what the movie is." And spun the whole thing out.
Now, if you don't want me to give you away a huge amount of spoilers, what I can do is I can do this [mouth opens wide] ... and just sit here for five minutes and go "This is essentially what Brad said for an hour and a half in his office." [Mouth opens wide] Now the problem going there is you cant' get your eyes any bigger than that and my kept dropping down, down, down.
I actually said to him at one point, "You're just pulling my leg, aren't you? You can't do all of that in one movie." And he goes, "I'm doing it." And then he started writing. he started showing me in acts what he was doing. It was so amazing to see all the big stuff that you really like doing, the big, cool stuff that you do, squished into a movie.
When I read scripts I start looking at them visually right away. I open a page and start thinking how I'm going to shoot the scene as I'm reading it. In this one if was one of those things where I was doing the same thing I was doing in Brad's office, except alone in my office going "Holy cow, oh holy cow. I've got to direct this now!"
GW: You've got to make it your own.
MW: You know what? I've got to tell you something. I never did make it my own.
GW: Really?
MW: Yeah. This is a very collaborative effort between Brad Wright and me. I've said it a couple of times -- I said this the other day on the DVD commentary. I didn't direct this thing on my own. This was a tag team directing thing.
He's really good to work with. Anybody who wants to be a director, if you dream about it and trying to put it out into the universe, try putting it out there where you want a producer like Brad Wright sitting behind you. He's so unobtrusive when it comes to things. He almost never says "Maybe you should try this," or "You should do that."
The best thing about having him there, what I would normally do, in a television show is I try to second-guess what he's going to want, and with him there I'm not doing that. I interpret the script one way. All directors do. And there's times when you get to a point where you go "I don't think the way I'm going with this is the way he wants it to go," or whoever is producing it wants it to go. So you end up covering it a little bit differently so you can give them the option of doing it in the edit suite.
In this case, because we were under such an amazing constraint of time -- 19 days. It was less than we shot "Rising" -- there was no time to slow down. There was no time for extra shots. There's no time for anything that wasn't going to actually make it into the movie. Brad was there. There was one time we did a single shot all the way around. I designed the shot to work as a single shot. Half the time I do that I go "OK, I have to give him an option if it doesn't work." In this case we did it in a single shot and Brad goes, "No, don't touch it! Go. Move on."
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Richard Dean Anderson returns for more fun with the SG-1 team in Stargate: Continuum. |
So it was great to have him there. From the very beginning, when I was designing shots, I would sit with him. We sat down and this is going to seem like weird heresy to some directors, Brad and I sat in the edit suite and did the director's cut. So we did a cut together. And that doesn't normally happen. For me I'm so comfortable with the way he cuts, and he's comfortable enough with me for the way I can put something together, the two of us together with Brad Rines sat down and over the course of the week were able to do a director's cut of the movie.
GW: Is that what's going to be on the DVD?
MW: You'll see some of the scenes that were cut down, and they were cut down for a very simple reason to try to keep it to a certain time. When we finished it Brad looked at me and said, "Essentially, that's our movie." Which is interesting, because you finish up a TV show as a director's cut and you hand it over and go "Man, that's not what's going to end up on TV." It's eleven minutes longer than it's supposed to be. It's seven minutes longer than it's supposed to be. In this case it's "That's essentially our movie." And that's essentially what made it to the screen, or what will make it to the screen by July..
GW: The entire thing was done in nineteen days?
MW: Nineteen days.
GW: Is that including the Arctic shoot?
MW: No, the Arctic, we were up there for seven, we shot for five.
GW: One before, one after?
MW: Yeah, it was traveling time. It was essentially getting up there. We landed in the arctic, we off-loaded the plane. Peter Woeste and I looked at the sun and went "Let's start shooting." It was essentially that. It was minus 56 that day. We shot in minus 56 degrees.
Amanda Tapping and Ben Browder put their costumes on, walked out there and started walking. I've got two big stars standing out there in the middle of the arctic ocean and I've got a little crew of seven people around me. In a couple of days Richard Dean Anderson was going to be there with John Smith and his wife. They were going to be up there. "This is the coolest thing I've ever done."
GW: "We're doing a movie!"
MW: That's exactly it!
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