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Rockne O'Bannon Interview Part 1
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transcript from scapecast episode 50
Lindy rae
Hey, everybody, this is Lindy
Rae, and I'm here today with
Mr. Rockne O'Bannon in his virtual comfy chair. So thanks for
being with
us today, Rockne.
Rockne
Thank you, and actually I
didn't know it was a virtual chair,
and I just fell on the floor, because it fell out from under me, so....
thank
you for letting me know. I was perfectly comfortable until
you said that.
LINDY RAE
Okay. So...are you
comfortable now?
ROCKNE
No, I'm [unintelligable],
thank you.
LINDY RAE
Okay.
[pause] Rockne, we have a lot of new
'scapers out there who listen to the scapecast, thanks to the
syndication of
Farscape, and also word of mouth. So the first thing I want
to ask is for
you to tell us a little bit about your relationship with
Farscape. Like,
you're the Birth Father, right?
ROCKNE
It..uh...yes, I am, as a
matter of fact. Yeah. Farscape
started back in the early 90's. I think it was like '92 or
'93, and, uh,
got a call, and went in and met with, uh, Brian Henson of the Henson
Company. And Brian had just taken over the company from his
father, who
had just passed away, I think a year or two earlier. And
Brian was
interested in creating a show that uh..an hour drama for television
that could
essentially show everything that the Henson Company was capable
of. So
not just the muppetry, or the puppetry, but also, uh, they were getting
into,
you know, the early days of CGI, and uh..you know... all the kinds of
things of
the expansive nature and imagination on film that they were very much
involved
with. So. Um...talked with Brian. He had
a concept for
something called "Space Chase". I think they had a couple of
pages that
they had developed in-house. It involved a cargo ship and the
characters
were going from one place to the other. And there wasn't much
there. And I went away and kind of thought about
it. Brian knew
there wasn't much there. It was their start at trying to come
up or think
of a way to come up with a "ship show" of their own. And
essentially what
Brian was talking to me about was, he said that he'd like to do..the
easy
short-hand was the cantina scene from Star Wars, because we're the
Henson
Company and because we can do animatronic characters, and etc. that
aren't
normally seen on television, and we'd love to bring that to a
network.
And the cantina scene from Star Wars would be daunting to any other
studio and
was something that The Henson Company was anxious to try to
effect.
And so I went away, and just
kind of noodled the idea and
came back with the idea that essentially became Farscape, which was the
idea of
a man from earth rocketed across the galaxy, if not the universe, and
um,
essentially him being for the most part the only human being in
it. I
figured, you know, if Brian wanted to do a show with a lot of creatures
in it,
I figured I would take him at his word and, uh, do a lot of
creatures.
So, um, that became kind of the centerpiece of it. So when I
told this
idea to Brian, he kind of swallowed a bit at first, but then
immediately
embraced it because Brian's very cool that way. It was sort
of like, it
sounds tough, but we'll figure out a way to do it. And that
kind of
became the beginning of it, and then we sold the idea to the Fox
network.
So I wrote the pilot script for the Fox
network. They
liked the script. The Henson Creature Shop did some
maquettes, which are
like clay, well not clay, but clay-like models of some of the
characters so
that we'd have something to show to the networks. Examples of
what the
creatures would look like. And we took the pilot script and
those into
the network and they really, really liked them, and wanted to order a
pilot,
but obviously, unlike a police drama, or a lawyer show, or a kind of
more
conventional television show, to do just a pilot of a science fiction
show, and
in particular, a show like Farscape, was prohibitively expensive,
because, you
have to build everything. You have to build the
space ship, you
gotta build the interior of the ship, you have to build the exterior of
the
ship in CG, you have to, obviously, do all the creature prosthetics and
all of
that. And to do that for an hour pilot that may not become a
series is
prohibitively expensive. So, we crunched the numbers and we told the
networks
that we thought we'd need essentially 11 episodes; an order of 11
episodes
without a pilot in order to amortize the costs of creating all the
elements of
the show that were needed. And that was kind of a big -- this
is the Fox
in kind of the early days of the network -- and the idea of ordering 11
episodes without a pilot was kind of daunting to them. So they kept
kind of
edging us along, obviously wanting to make that decision to trigger the
11
episodes.
We, um, did three additional
backup scripts, behind the
pilot. So we had four scripts altogether. And I brought in
David Kemper,
who ended up, obviously...er...I brought onto the show -- my first hire
on the
show -- to write two episodes, and I wrote the other two
episodes. So we
had four scripts altogether and brought those to Fox. And
they still
couldn't bring themselves to trigger the 11 episodes. So we
ultimately
kind of parted company with Fox. And Brian vowed that he
would not let it
die.
True to his word, he hung in
there. And we would every
few months, or a yar or so, there'd be another network that Brian would
get
interested in, we'd dust off the maquettes and we'd take them scripts
and go on
in and pitch it to them. And we'd just...um...you can tell by
the dearth
of science fiction ship shows on the air that networks tend to not want
to buy
into shows that take place in outer space. so we just didn't
find a
market for it.
Then television came up with
exactly what we needed, which
was a network dedicated to science fiction. When we finally
went in to
see them, it was 1968 or 69....I'm sorry, 1998 r 99. SciFi
had been on
the air for just a few years, surviving on reruns of former science
fiction
shows, including several of mine. Sequest would play on that,
and Alien
Nation. So we went in and they read the scripts and liked
them, and were
looking for their first original series, to become kind of the glagship
of The
SciFi Channel. So they bit. They gave us an ofer
for, actually, 22
episodes -- for a full season. So it took like six, seven
years from the
time the pilot script was first written to the time when we were
standing in a
soundstage inside Moya filming the pilot.
LINDY RAE
That's perseverance.
ROCKNE
Yah. It's um...like
I say, that was all Brian.
LINDY RAE
Yeah. So, which were
the four scripts that were written
for the into?
ROCKNE
Well, I'm trying to
remember...okay, uh, obviously one was
the pilot. There was one that ultimately became -- I don't
remember what
it ultimately aired under -- but it was the lawyer show where they have
to go
down to a planet.
LINDY RAE
Oh, yeah.
ROCKNE
And again, that changed quite
a bit from the script that we
had written originally. And then the other two or three were
cannibalized
kind throughout the run of Farscape. There were elements of
them we would
use. There was a terrific script that David Kemper wrote --
the first one
he wrote for the show -- which was based on an idea he'd actually
pitched to
Star Trek next Generation, and they didn't buy it. He'd
pitched it a few
years earlier, and it was an idea for a particular kind of
creature. and
Star Trek didn't buy it. And we went to lunch and he just
happened to
tell me the idea after he'd pitched it. And I thought it was
just a
terrific idea. So when I brought him onto Farscape later to
do these
backup scripts, I said the first story I want you to do is this
particular
one. Unfortunately it was so...such a great idea, but such a
daunting
idea that we could never quite figure out how to pull that
off. We did a
version of it in Farscape with the Budong. The notion of the
creature
where they're kind of mining the inside of a being. So
there's a version
of that. so anyways, the only I believe we adapted and used
many elements
of was the Lithigara one, and the other ones bits and pieces of were
cannibalized.
LINDY RAE
Is there any Farscape
character that you really identify with
personally?
ROCKNE
[chuckle] Well, obviously,
when you write there's a little
piece of you in everybody. because to me that's the juice of
doing the
job is to kind of be able to put yourself into these situations and no
matter
who the character is and say, okay, what would I be thinking if I were
int hat
situation, if I were that person, and have that personality; how would
I react
to things. Obviously John Crichton is very much a stand-in
for all of
us. He's the guy from earth and very much the outsider who's
having ot
adapt and learn and prove himself anew almost every day. So
John,
certainly.
I was really quite taken with
the character of Aeryn and her
growth through the series I thought was quite remarkable. I
could see the
power of that even through the first season. Seeing where she
came from
if you watch her in the premier episode and then you see her in the
last
episode of the first season. One of the most touching moments
in the
series for me is in one of the last episodes of season one when Pilot
informs
them all that Moya is pregnant and he tells Aeryn that Moya would like
her,
Aeryn, to name the baby. It's a combination of the situation
and
Claudia's amazing performance. The expression, and the
emotion she
expresses in that moment, to me is just...I remember when I saw it
first, I saw
the dailies, and I saw the show, and it just chokes me up each
time. Just
really really very effective. So I'm really quite taken with
Aeryn and
the journey that she took. And it wasn't an easy journey for
her, and I
think that made it very interesting, as well.
Crais also had a real
interesting journey. I thought
that his arc, a much longer arc, obviously, through several season,
which was
really quite interesting. And we put him through a lot of
wringers.
D'Argo's plight, I thought, was terrific. D'Argo, in
particular,
considering who he was, and the kind of straight-forward nature of him
in the
pilot, or the Premiere episode, portrayed all that there was deep in
the heart
of D'Argo. All the kind of layers of him. That
really came out from
a couple of things. One was obviously the writers kind of dug
into him
and started to mine those depths. But it was also Anthony's
creativity. Not only in the performance of it, but Anthony's
a really
creative guy. I think he's directing now and he's really
smart. A
film maker's head. He and Ben both were incredibly valuable
contributers,
beyond just acting. Anthony brought a LOT to
D'Argo. It's tough to
do. You're covered in a lot of prosthetic makeup, and a lot
of
performance can be buried, and there can be a tendency in actors to let
the
prosthetic be the character, or carry a lot of the heavy lifting of who
this
character is just by virtue of his look. That wasn't
Anthony.
Anthony was right in there digging for the character way beneath the
surface
look.
[chuckle]
Rygel. I'm not just going down the
list. Probably what I was the most proudest of was how
consistent he
was. Even though he, obviously grew to first tolerate,
then...er...or
maybe first be grudgingly dependent upon the others on the ship, and
then to
tolerate, and then to appreciate, and then ultimately to like and maybe
love
them, I guess. What I was very proud of with Rygel was he
always stayed
true to his core nature. I think that's one of the reasons
why when you
first see Rygel on screen in the Premiere, you also have the puppeteers
who are
operating Rygel learning, kind of getting up to speed on all that he
can do and
how best to create his performance, same with directors and all
that. but
you also had, when you first saw Rygel, even for me, you're not used to
seeing
an animatronic like that as a important character on a TV series, so
there's a
little bit of a disconnect. You're kind of "hey, I get it,
but he's a
pupet." Because of the nature of Jonathon Hardy's
performance, and the
way Rygel was written, and the way Rygel was so consistent as a
character, I'd
like to think that very soon it drifted to the back of your mind that
this is
an animatronic that I'm watching and you really feel that you're
watching a
living being.
LINDY RAE
We are all totally able to do
our suspension of disbelief
thing.
ROCKNE
Yeah. And Pilot,
same thing. I always thought
Pilot from the very beginning was incredibly cool, because of his size,
and his
design, and all of that. But again, in the first episode or
two, you're
kind of "okay, here are the human characters. I get
that. And
here's this giant animatronic creation." And then because of
the nature,
and the heart that he had, and the personality he had, you totally
forget
that. At least, I did, and I tend to think that's true of a
lot of us.
LINDY RAE
Now did the actors who
portrayed the characters -- it sounds
like there was a lot of give and take between them and you and the
other
writers to help develop their story. Did that happen from the
beginning? Or did that come later in other seasons?
ROCKNE
There wasn't a lot of hardcore
contribution to the story or
the story arcs of the characters. I tend to find that actors,
at least in
my experience. often like to be surprised about where their character
is
going. Not horribly surprised, though. So they
don't necessarily
get involved on a story level. But in terms of aspects of
their
character, and how they would react in certain circumstances and
situations and
that sort of things, which obviously then color the creation of story,
very
much. That was one of the joys of this show. When
you're casting
you never know what levels of chemistry you're going to find out of the
group
that you're putting together. You're always worried that
around the
corner there might be person that was really perfect for that role that
I just
missed. If you look at our show, it was one of those magical
times -
[which] don't happen that often - where we found a great group. A
really smart
group of actors. The fact that all but Ben were Australians
was, I think,
a huge contributing factor, because I think they weren't steeped at all
in the
American television machine. There's so much in the
Australian arts,
there's so much theater, and there's so much training, so their actors
are all
very classically trained. I think that contributed hugely to
the richness
of their performances, and totally informed the show in a huge, huge,
huge way.
LINDY RAE
And they're so much fun in
person, too.
ROCKNE
[Laughing] Oh, they're just
the wildest. Australians in
general, and our cast, very specifically. They just a kick to
hang
with.
LINDY RAE
When you were thinking about
the show, you talked about how
you developed the show. I've heard you say that, like, bolder
material
gets more attention. And one of the things that was said
about Farscape
was the story telling was pretty risky and that it didn't seem that you
guys
were worried about failing and were willing to push the envelope to
tell
different stories in different ways. Who was really
responsible for that
willingness? I mean, how did that come about?
ROCKNE
It's kind of one built on the
other. At the core of
that, the set of people who could have obviously put the brake on that,
was the
network. And if we were on another network,
certainly a REGULAR
network, not a cable network, and not the SciFi Channel, yeah, there
was a ton
of stuff that we did that would've gotten nowhere near the light of a
television screen. Again, we were in a period when cable was
pushing into
new ground and you could do kind of bolder things, and the next day the
network
executives didn't wake up to fifty phone messages on their desks
complaining. And they appreciated the fact that there was an
opportunity
for them to kind of push those envelopes and things. So at
the center of
it is the network.
It was a perfect time for
David Kemper and me, because we had
both worked in regular television a lot. I think both of our
tastes and
talents were just ripe for the right moment where as we saw an
opportunity and
a premise that would allow for this kind of wilder stuff, we were ready
to jump
into it. It was very telling to us, because when we would try
to bring in
American writers and friends that we knew, or people who had written
for
American television, the tendency very typically was to try to go back
to the
more familiar acceptable American television kind of thing. I
remember in
the early days of the scripts I kept getting scripts in from these
other
writers and they were all trying to make John Crichton the de facto
captain of
the ship, and very much the man in charge. I kept saying, no
it's not,
he's the exact opposite, he knows the least of how things
operate. He's
not the guy who stands at the front, he's not, you know, by virtue of
the fact
that he's human, and our lead character, he's not the guy who, while
everyone
else is cowering on the command, wondering what do we do next, the one
who
steps forward and says this is what we do. He's the exact
opposite.
Everyone else is screaming what to do, and John's the one who knows the
least
of what to do. As I used to tell the writers, the one thing that John
Crichton
can bring to the party, is something that I think is inherently human,
which is
while everybody else is kind of chattering and coming up with different
opinions about what we should do in this horrible situation, John is
the one
who's essentially willing to put the knife in between his teeth and
dive into
the pool of snakes. He's the one who's kind of willing to
leap in, even
though he's not the one who's best suited or has the most knowledge of
what's
going on, or whatever the creatures are or the race that they're facing
or the
technology, and that sort of thing. So the timing was just
right for
David and me to hook into that, and we just fed on each
other. We both
"got" it.
Then, in terms or performance,
Mr. Browder is the bravest
actor. He would do things..and not only would do things if we
asked him
to, but would come up with wild things for Crichton to do. He
so embraced
that. You look at some of the episodes, and the things we had
him do, and
the costumes we put him in, and they weren't...they were all
always...Ben
certainly would never allow us, if we ever went off the beam slightly,
would
never allow us to go outrageous for outrageous sake. It was
always
grounded in the needs of the story. But Ben's boldness
allowed us to take
the stories into these really wildly off beat, or off the beaten path
directions. Ben would just grab it and embrace it.
One of the
things that I wanted in the show from very early on and developed as
one of the
signatures of the series was that notion of all his pop culture
references that
he would make. To me, as funny and cool as that is, it's fun
to listen
to, there's a solid reason for it. I always pictured for John
as his way
to kind of stay in touch with earth. If I make Monty Python
references,
or Spongebob, or Simpsons, or name it references, even if the people
who I'm
talking to don't understand it, it's helping me to keep a little piece
of
earth, a little connection to earth. Believe me, the writers
all had
great fun coming up with those, and Ben would come up with a zillion of
them
himself. Many of the top Crichtonisms are Ben's own
creations.
LINDY RAE
Really. What's your
favorite? Do you have one?
ROCKNE
If I thought about it, I could
probably come of with a real
favorite. The one that turned a corner for me was probably at
the end of
season one, was an episode that Ricky Manning was writing.
Ricky, being
the other American writer who came in very early on, and who just "got"
it
right away, and became a huge contributor to a lot of the mythos of the
show
and the tone of the show and all that. And there was this
episode in the
latter part of the first season where Crichton was being subjected to
the
Aurora Chair. And, when you're working in a writing room on a
series,
there's kind of two levels of conversation that goes on. One
is kind of
what goes into the show, into the stories, and into the
script. But
there's a whole other sub-level where you're kind of mocking the show
at the
same time. So Ricky, for example, would continually refer to
the Aurora
Chair, which was originally intended to kind of save us some money by
putting
Crichton into the chair and torturing him; they'd be probing his memory
for
things that happened in the past, and we'd be able to use clips from
other
episodes and save us some money at the end of the first
season.
Obviously, in the Farscape tradition, it didn't work out that way, and
story
was more important to us than savings. But in the writing
room, as we
were developing this episdoe, Ricky kept referring to it as "the clip
chair". You know: "we get Crichton in the clip chair, and
then we show
some clips there", that sort of thing. A shorthand, in a kind
of snide
way, mocking your own product. I kept referring to it as "the
comfy
chair", from Monty Python. When Ricky wrote the episode, I
thought it was
great, but I told him that somewhere in this episode I want Crichton to
refer
to "okay, go ahead and stick me back in the comfy chair". I
remember
after the episode aired there was a nice flurry of appreciation on the
blogs
about the show for that. Because it was such a wonderful
little throw
away, and to me that's the joy of it. It doesn't have to be
references
that 98% of the audience gets. Let it be something that 30%
of the
audience gets. The other 70% isn't going to tune out because
of this one
line. That 30% is going to really enjoy [it] especially well,
because
it's a more specialized, personalized reference for them. So,
it's
certainly not my favorite, because it's not that great, but it comes
immediately to mind because, again, in the development of the show, it
was one
of those turning points in the first season where Crichton's pop
culture
references were starting to become more pronounced and more
signficant.
END OF PART ONE