 
GW: There was a good deal of softening of Vala's character, especially since her introduction in Season Eight ("Prometheus Unbound"), through those familiar relationships with Adria and Tomin. Her marriage with Tomin has been, from everything that I can see, very positive for both of them. And they still seem to have feelings for each other.
RCC: Yes. And that came out of my wanting to humanize, in some way, the people who believe differently than we did. I didn't want them to be just cartoon bad guys who didn't believe the right thing. I wanted them to be human beings, and I wanted you to understand and see why they were doing the things they did. And that was, again, more interesting to me.
GW: Tomin's character was fantastic for that.
Tomin (Tim Guinee) confronts the Prior of the Ori, changing his life forever. From Stargate: The Ark of Truth | |
RCC: Tim Guinee is just a fabulous actor who instantly creates that humanity and empathy ... while he's mass-murdering people. I think it's very compelling.
GW: But even just the small arc that he has over the course of the film, from the warm and friendly way that he greets Vala on Dakara through -- just put Tim Guinee in a room on the Odyssey and have him stare, and you've got a scene right there! He's just so good.
RCC: Yeah, he's terrific. I think that when we realized that the series was not going to be renewed toward the end of Season Ten, and we did the episode where Adria ascended, at that point obviously the intention was that Merlin's weapon had worked, the Ori had been destroyed, but that Adria was going to take over as this "über-Ori" -- a single person taking all the power and becoming the figurehead bad guy that we would have to deal with in the movie.
Unfortunately, I wish this wasn't the case, but in many ways sometimes the creative process is steered by real-world circumstances. We had basically our schedule and Morena Baccarin was just only available to us for one day.
GW: Oh, wow.
RCC: And I had scenes that were with her and Julian Sands ("The Doci"), and the whole team. Unfortunately there was just no other way to make it work. And so I knew I could only write a certain number of scenes with her. They could only be in the one set. And there was either a choice of not having her in the film or having her in the film to the capacity that she is in it. And I chose the latter. I thought: I want the character, I want to have the actress in the movie.
But the reason she doesn't play a bigger part is I knew I could only shoot six pages of material with her.
GW: Well, that goes a long way to explaining, I think you said on the DVD commentary, that those scenes with her circling Vala were shot at 3 or 4 in the morning.
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Actress Morena Baccarin ("Adria") shot all her scenes for the movie in just one day. |
RCC: Yeah. It was a Friday night. She was going to another commitment on Saturday -- she had to get on an airplane. She had flown in late Thursday night. Those are issues that are, to a certain extent, out of my control. You make decisions throughout the process that ultimately govern what the movie turns into. And you do the best you can in terms of making those choices.
But they're not always what you want from the get-go. It's not like you're imagining the movie in the best possible scenario, with the most money you could possibly have, that anything your imagination -- and then you're executing that. That's not how it works. You have an amount of production budget, you know how many days you have.
People have commented that they are disappointed that the movie is as short as it is. Well, when you have 18 days to shoot something, it's a mathematical equation. The maximum you can shoot is about six to eight pages a day. A feature film will shoot one page a day. We'll shoot six, seven, eight pages a day in order to get it done.
You can do the math. The most you could shoot would be eight pages, and that's if there is no action involved. That's just dialogue scenes.
GW: How much is on the cutting room floor, then?
RCC: Not much. There's a couple of scenes. It's interesting -- there is a cut-down, TV version that is about four and a half minutes shorter. Because the movie has come out on DVD first, essentially what you are seeing is the director's cut. Then when it goes to TV it will actually be somewhat shorter, and missing certain scenes.
This version pretty much has almost everything in it. There are a couple of scenes that were deleted as we went because they just didn't turn out very well, and they were unnecessary. You write something, and sometimes it's covered in other scenes and so it tends to make the movie drag.
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