Podcast:Final Cut
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Hello. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and this is the podcast for episode eight of the second season, "Final Cut". This episode is the first of a few stand-alone episodes that we've- we're doing here in season two. This is all following, this is the first episode after episode seven, "Home, Part II", where we wrapped up many different plotlines and essentially began season two. So, instead of launching into a brand new giant arc of long-term storytelling we decided to tell some standalone episodes, some things that weren't so buried in the mythos. Do a different flavor of episodes now that we were into this part of the season.
Right here you can see we are starting to pick up on the Gideon incident, as it were, from "Resistance" and that is the jumping off point for the events of "Final Cut". But by and large, this is exactly the kind of episode that a new audience member should feel comfortable sitting down and watching for the first- watching the show for the first time, or even if they have missed several episodes.
This footage of the Gideon massacre seen through the documentary lens was not shot at the time that we did "Resistance", although we really wanted to. We were, I think I've expressed before, my- I was dissatisfied with a lot of the riot, per se in "Resistance" in how it was finally realized and we did have a handheld camera on the set during that shoot, shooting footage that we intended to use in this episode 'cause all this was being planned in advance. Unfortunately the handheld footage didn't really convey the emotion that we wanted it to. It was understandable because essentially the director of episode four was concentrating on episode four and subsequently, or as a result of that, the foota- the handheld footage that we had from "Resistance" didn't work so we ended up having to go back and reshoot that whole little opening segment. Which I think is works, which I think is ok. I'm on the fence about the little boy. I go back and forth about whether we should've go'd the little boy or not, is it treakly, is it a step to far? We kinda split it down the middle 'cause it went on a bit after that with him crying and so on and I felt that was too much and then we took it out and didn't feel like enough and in any case it was one of the least satisfying pieces that we did.
This is of course Lucy Lawless's first episode for us. Lucy was David Eick's idea, my producing partner on the show. David had worked with Lucy on Xena: Warrior Princess, which of course is what she's most famously known for. Back when he was working for Renaissance, which produced that show. And so he suggested her. And he knows Lucy and her husband and we had talked about having her on the show before this and it didn't work out for whatever reason and then, as this role came up, David mentioned her for it and it seemed like the right fit. And he checked with her, and she was into it and decided to do it. I think she had passed on an opportunity to do the show the first season because of some other commitments that she had and couldn't break and did this role for us and I wasn't quite sure what to expect to be completely honest. I wasn't a big, I didn't really watch Xena. I had seen the show and my impression of her is very, very different from that show than it is on our show and I think it's- then I met Lucy and talked with her for an evening, when Dave and I took her out to dinner, and found her a really interesting, really engaging woman and a really fascinating person and what's interesting is how much of a chameleon she is. There's really no trace of anything remotely Xena-esque in her performance in this episode. Everything from her look, to the accent, to the way she holds herself and handles herself feels very, very different from my impression of that character. The model for this character was we kept saying a Christiane Amanpour-type character. By that we meant a very no-nonsense kind of going after the story type of reporter, not a muck-raker, not a tabloid reporter, not somebody out for their own glory, but somebody who's goin- who has a story and is going to bite into it, is going to keep it going no matter what.
The genesis of this story began, I believe, when we were talking in the first couple of episodes, I think, I had this idea that I wanted to an episode from a reporters viewpoint on the Galactica. The idea was that the reporter would have been on the ship, you'll recall maybe the first couple episodes that there's references to a press corps that was being held on the Galactica in the first couple episodes after the initial coups against Laura and then Adama got shot and there was all- there was a lot of crises right in that time and there was a press corps trapped down somewhere in Galactica being held in a wardroom. And we started to talk about and somewhat developed a story about essentially doing an episode that- where we would cut down into that sort of room where all the press was gathered and trapped and follow one reporter as he or she figured out a way to get a story and what the impression and tell the whole episode from that person's point of view. To track what they would think of Galactica and what they would think of the people and their perceptions and misperceptions as an outsider and watching an episode from the inside out. Which I thought was a really interesting idea. We- but unfortunately I think the reason that we all opted not to do it, and I'll talk more about this at the top of one.
Act 1[edit]
The reason we opted not to do that was that we needed that epis- those early episodes to tell a great deal of other story. We had the story on Kobol, we had the story on Caprica, we had important plot story to deal with Laura, etc., on Galactica and it just became too cumbersome to try to use that device of sticking with a reporter for the whole episode, to make it work. But, in any case, the idea of the reporter being on the ship or doing an episode from the reporter's point of view was something that we never let go of, that we just kept playing with all season long, and eventually it was like, "Well, let's do that episode. Let's do the documentary episode. Where they- we really shoot a documentary on the ship, the show is shot documentary style, the show is always trying to emulate that aesthetic and so we decided, "Let's do a real documentary." So actually, for this episode, Robert Young, who directed this episode and also directed last year's "Six Degrees of Separation" is a noted documentarian. Has done many feature films and many actual documentaries in his day and will tell you fascinating stories about being with the Eskimos and learning their- living with them and being injured with them and doing all sorts of wild, crazy things and it felt like a natural fit to have Robert do this 'cause he understood what a documentarian was looking for and what- how the scene would be staged. What things you could possibly draw from it.
I felt that it was important for this kind of episode especially, to really give the writer of this episode and the director, the writer, by the way, Mark Verheiden our co-executive producer of this season, to give them as much latitude, and the actors, the writer, director, and the actors of this episode as much space to improvise and to really embroider on the characters and on the life of Galactica. My mandate to everyone involved was, I kept saying, "I want to know things about these characters I didn't know before. I want to learn things that I didn't- I didn't know about these people that I created. I wanted- I want you to surprise me with who they are, really, behind the scenes. Tell me some interesting things about them." And so there's lots of little moments. There's lots of little character gestures, moments, asides, looks, and things that were not scripted but were just improvised on the set or discussed with the act- with the director.
It's worth mentioning this little device that we're using. Every time we go to the documentary camera you'll note that we clip the corners off, which is a nod towards the aesthetic that we've established in this world, that they tend to clip corners off things. It's- for whatever reason that's an aesthetic choice they like. They like books with the corners cut off. They like picture frames with the corners cut off. Pieces of paper. Anything. They just- that happens to be an aesthetic style they like in this universe. The idea of clipping the corners on the documentary is actually one of the very last things we did. We were playing with this episode a lot in editing and trying to- I kept struggling to make the documentary footage stand out and feel different from the objective camera footage, which I always called the camera on the set, the handheld, the documentary camera, the subjective, and the other one the objective camera. In any case, I kept struggling for ways to make the two- a distinction between the two pieces of footage, 'cause the style of our objective camera is very handheld and very documentary-like and so the question was- the challenge was how do you distinguish the look between the two. And we kept playing with futzing the video in various ways, putting more RAS scan lines on it, we- I thought at one point even about possibly going black and white, but then I thought that was a little precious, a little bit too much. And it was literally one of the very last things. We were getting ready to lock the picture and I was looking at it in the editing bay and we were futzing around with just a couple little tweaks and it just occured to me. I just said to the editor, "What if we clip the corners off the documentary footage?" They said, "What?" And I described it, "Let's make a matte, and make a documentary mask and let's clip the corners and that'll be like their letterbox. This is essentially their aesthetic like they- we like letterbox, they like letterbox with the corners cut off." And it was really interesting. It was such a very small tweak, but it really works. It really sets those images apart instantly and visually in a really easy to understand way. You're not even thinking about it and you know that you're in the documentary camera. You're not even having to struggle for a minute. It's just one of those nice little touches and it's- God knows why you think of something like that and God knows why, in retrospect, you haven't thought about something like that on day one, but in any case that's how the creative process sometimes work. You just come up with these things at the last minute, and they turn out to be the thing that makes it all click together and make the whole piece work.
This is another one of those great little moments where James, you know, is James, and just gives you the Baltar of your dreams. The man who preten- walks by her three or four times (laughs) trying to- trying to be noticed but not- trying to look like he's trying to be noticed, of course. And then, "Oh. Yes. Who? Yes. What? Oh the reporter. I can't do it right now." It's just- it's just great, you know? Having James on the show for these little bit- these little moments is just gold. You can always count on him. It's always going to be great. When in doubt, cut to Baltar.
It's worth note- I wish I- I'm embarrased to say I don't remember the name of the actor who plays the cameraman in the episode, and that's just one of my flaws, is I forget people's names quite often. In any case, he is a real cameraman. We discussed early on whether the man that's shooting that footage within the show, whether we should use his footage or not, or whether we should have a separate pass that would be dedicated to doing just the documentary shots. And ultimately we decided that it was much smarter to use him. Let's make him a real camera. He'll know how to hold the camera, he'll act like a cameraman acts. We actually, Bob Young did tests- he got a bunch of ca- actors and cameramen and had them audition with the camera. And he put the whole thing on tape. So we sat and we watched audition tapes of cameramen walking around in a room, playing in a scene, and then we would watch the tape that they- the film that they actually shot, and went from there. And quickly, quickly realized that it was much, much better to have an actual cameraman working the camera within the scene (Chuckles) than to rely on an actor, who's essentially trying to act like a camerman, if you had any hope of using the footage.
Some of the complications that arose from doing that, however, of commiting ourselves to using the documentary camera footage shot as shot by the actor in the scene was quite often we found ourselves in editing realizing we couldn't use a lot of that footage because the scene was blocked in such a way- it was blocked for the objective camera. In other words, here's the camera setup, we're pointing at Kat, and there's the Viper and Tyrol. Ok, when we cut inside his lens here, and you see Tyrol and Kat. What happened just a few seconds after that cut was you saw a member of the crew working with the objective camera. The boom man or the cameraman or an assistant or somebody else moving into frame. And so we were constantly having to juggle this documentary footage in such a way that we weren't picking up members of the actual film crew which- who were filming the scene. And that kept happening over and over again. Now there were times, on the set, where they did a separate pass for the documentary camera because we knew that there were specific moments we knew we had to have on the documentary camera and we definitely block- or they definitely blocked those scenes accordingly so that you could do it. But they didn't do it on every single setup and that was the problem. If you didn't block it that way, quite often you couldn't use the footage and, in retrospect, we all said it would have been best if we had been able to do a separate pass on each scene just for the documentary camera. Problem was, you only have so many hours in a day, television is a very tight, very fast moving operation, and we just simply didn't have enough time to do yet another separate pass on all the- on everybody else. And on just the documentary camera footage. And also if we had done that it would keep you from doing the trick that I like the most. My favorite thing is to be able to go from the objective camera's point of view on a scene into the documentary camera on the very same take so the performances, the emotion, and the whole rhythm of the scene is intact and it feels all connected and organic, as opposed to mixing the takes where the documentary camera's recording one angle on the action, objective, in one take, and objective camera's recording the action in a separate take. And you marry those pieces of footage up and, yeah, it works 'cause it's like traditional editing, is going from one camera to another and shifting take and doing that whole thing. But there's a subliminal part of the documentary which is to convince you it's truly picking it up. When you go jump inside that camera, you want to feel that it's live. You want to be able to feel Tigh's emotions, and his body movements, exactly matching when you cut to the objective side. That's the theory, my theory, anyway and damnit, I'm sticking with it.
Here's a look at interesting little challenge, was how to play this scene. How to play this moment. It's a private moment between Tigh and Adama. The whole point of the scene is that she's evesdropping on private moments. The question was, in editing, at what point do you go in here, which tells you that this part of the show- of the conversation is not being picked up by D'anna and her cameraman, and therefore is not part of the documentary? And at what point do you go back into the documentary style and point out that, "Oh, yes. This part of the conversation very clearly is being picked up by the- by her camera." It's a little unclear. I liked it in theory, and we kept playing with it and there's a part of me doesn't feel like it's clear what the documentary camera picked up and what it does not pick up. So that one's on the fence. But I like the idea of what we were attempting there.
This whole bit of business with Tigh going to Cloud 9 and the explosion and the sabotage and all that, in a couple of drafts I believe he and Ellen were both going. Ellen was on the ship and we played more of the action inside the ship and then at some point we decided to keep Ellen aboard Galactica and not play her, and I don't really honestly remember the reason why we made that choice.
This sequence is ok. I think I'm- I've never quite been happy enough with what this whole plot is, to be completely honest. This whole section of the show, the whole- the guy who's stalking Tigh and then sabotaging Tigh and then ultimately confronts Tigh with the gun. It's part of the plot in that it's connected to the Gideon incident, which is what, really, the springboard into this entire episode. But it's not really part of the show in my estimation. This is- well I'll come back after the- after break.
Act 2[edit]
Like I said, I think this whole section of plot is- it's a part of the ep- it's a part of the plot. It's not really part of the show. And what I mean by that is, to me, this show is a complete character piece. It's all about the characters in Galactica, it's all about coming aboard and learning who they are. And that's why you like this episode, if you like this episode, 'cause you're interested in these characters. This is, to me, television. It's a bit of a television device that we're doing. It's the guy that's stalking her puts- writes on the mirror, scares your wife, blows up your car, and then comes and there's the confrontation in the end, and you talk him down. And it works, I mean you can't argue with the mechanics of it and I even understand why it has to be in the episode, because it is television, and there's a requirement, a sort of unspoken and sometimes spoken requirement that there be a certain amount of jeopardy and a certain amount of sus- tension that happens in these sort of shows, especially something like this which is predicated on an action/adventure aesthetic at least. It's at least that idea, on some level. And so you find yourself going into these places to provide the bare bones of some jeopardy situation to justify you doing everything in the episode that you want to do. And what you want to do in the episode is you want to play this. You want to play the emotion. You want to play Kat, or I'm sorry this is Racetrack, at the memorial wall. You want to get inside her head and you want to understand who she is. That's why you're watching the episode. So, we have this other Tigh plot all going on at the same time.
One other word on the Tigh plot. That whole thing about he wasn't wearing a spacesuit when he was in the Raptor and that's why it would have killed him. That raises a very logical question, of course, "Well, why doesn't everybody in a Raptor wear a fuckin' flight suit?" There's no good answer to that. We were very inconsistent from the get-go, from the miniseries on, about who wears flight suits inside those Raptors and who does not. The sort of internal rule that we have are the pilot and the ECO, the electronic countermeasures officer, always wear flight suits when they're flying on a mission. We then break that randomly for various reasons in various episodes. The shortest answer is that we don't have enough flight suits, generally. We are limited in the number of flight suits that we really have. So sometimes when we have a whole group in there you put- there were episodes last season where we had strike teams in the Raptors and we had ground crew in the Raptors and we simply didn't have the money to outfit all of them in a flight suit. Plus they all look kinda goofy when you put that many flight suits together in a cockpit. They start looking kinda silly.