Wood: Continuum Is Big

Today GateWorld’s editors kicked off our annual visit to Vancouver, British Columbia with a stop at Stage 3 Media, where filming for the upcoming SCI FI Channel series Sanctuary is about to get underway. We spoke at length with director and executive producer Martin Wood, who told us about his experience directing the next Stargate DVD movie, Stargate: Continuum.

From his description, the movie is going to be BIG.

Wood joked about sitting in Continuum writer Brad Wright’s office with his jaw dropped and eyes wide open as he listened to the pitch for the film. “My eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and my jaw kept dropping down and down and down,” he said. “I actually said to him at one point, ‘You’re just pulling my leg, aren’t ya? You can’t do all of that in one movie.’ And he said, ‘I’m doing it.’

“And then he started showing me in acts what he was doing. It was so amazing to be able to see all the big, cool stuff that you do squished into a movie. It was interesting.”

The film brought new challenges to the seasoned SG-1 and Atlantis director, including a 7-day trip to a film on a glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean. Wood knew as he turned each page of the script that he would be doing a lot of big shots.

“When I read scripts, I start looking at them visually right away,” he said. “I open a page and start seeing how I’m going to shoot the scene as I’m reading it. And in this one, I was doing the same thing I was doing in Brad’s office — except alone in my office, going ‘Holy cow! Ooh, holy cow! I’ve got to direct this now!”

Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder) and Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) in the frozen Arctic. From Stargate: Continuum.

Continuum brought a lot of ambitious shots and a higher budget, but also a tight schedule for filming.

“We were under such an amazing constraint of time — it was 19 days,” Wood told GateWorld. “It was less than we shot ‘Rising’ in. There was no time to slow down. There was no time for extra shots. There was no time for extra things that were not going to make it into the movie.”

When all was said and done in the editing room, Wood said that the movie blew him away.

“Brad and I sat together in the edit suite and did the director’s cut,” he said. “The two of us together sat down with [editor] Brad Rines, and over the course of a week were able to do a director’s cut of the movie. 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 hand it over and [say], ‘Man, that’s not what’s going to be on TV.’ Because it’s 11 minutes longer than it is supposed to be, or it’s seven minutes longer than it is supposed to be.

“And in this case it was: ‘That’s essentially our movie.’ And that is essentially what made it to the screen.”

Stargate: Continuum is on DVD in North America this July. Stick with GateWorld for more from Vancouver this week, and for the latest on the new movie in the months ahead!