Podcast:Exodus, Part I

From Battlestar Wiki, the free, open content Battlestar Galactica encyclopedia and episode guide
Revision as of 17:31, 23 October 2006 by Steelviper (talk | contribs) (linkified)
This page is a transcript of one of Ronald D. Moore's freely available podcasts.
All contents are believed to be copyright by Ronald D. Mooreand Terry Dresbach. Contents of this article may not be used under the Creative Commons license. This transcript is intended for nonprofit educational purposes. We believe that this falls under the scope of fair use. If the copyright holder objects to this use, please contact transcriber Steelviper or site administrator Joe Beaudoin Jr. To view all the podcasts the have been transcribed, view the podcast project page.

Teaser

RDM: Hello. Welcome to the podcast for "Exodus, Part I", the second or third episode of season three of Battlestar Galactica, depending on how you want to count. I'm Ronald D. Moore the developer and executive producer of Galactica. And welcome you once again to the exciting and always interesting podcast. Tonight Mrs. Ron is here but she is probably going to be silent, since she's exhausted.

Terry: Well, I don't know about silent.

RDM: (Laughs.) Never silent.

Terry: It will be the sound of me turning magazine pages, like the sound of chinking teaspoons on bowls last week with those-

RDM: -Yeah.-

Terry: -Cheerios. And I just have to say hello to all my friends on the "Okay" thread. That's my thread on the Scifi.com bulletin board. So I just wanted to give them all a special nod.

RDM: It's called a shoutout.

Terry: I'm not doing a shoutout.

RDM: She's doing-

Terry: That sounds so-

RDM: She's a shoutout to-

Terry: -fat, white person-

RDM: -to her peeps.

Terry: -trying to do black lingo. It's so pathetic.

RDM: A shoutout to her peeps in the hood.

Terry: I'd like to say hello to my compatriots. (Laughs.)

RDM: And I'm saying hello to nobody.

Ok. So here we go. "Exodus" is, as I alluded to, or actually stated, last time, "Exodus" has been split into two separate episodes because it was such a large piece of material that we quickly realized that it was probably gonna be two different parts.

Terry: Oh, look. The tinkling of ice.

RDM: Ah the tinkling ice.

Terry: Oh and the kittens are joining us.

RDM: Yes the kittens are start-

Terry: They have names.

RDM: Tonight's Scotch is a Longmorn Fifteen-

Terry: Oh, god...

RDM: A highland Scotch. A darn fine one.

"Exodus" is two parts. We kind of knew it going in, even though the script itself was no longer or shorter than any other script. There was just so much material to cover and we knew that to play the action beats correctly, to deal with all of the various threads coming together, it just seemed unrealistic, from the get go, to really do it in an hour. Director for this episode, Felix Alcalá, did a really great job in bringing all this together on time and on budget, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. But nevertheless we still felt the need to split it into two pieces to really play it.

Now here at the beginning, we're of course revisiting the end of "Precipice", last week's episode. And essentially what we wanted to do was play these events over again for the audience and then lead you to a certain point, in the recap section here, and then restart and show you what happened from the other perspectives. This was very tricky. It took a lot of massaging on the page and in the editing room to really make this whole sequence work. but here we're still- here come the Cylons over the hill. Some great work by Gary Hutzel and his visual effect team. That's very tricky stuff. Getting those guys coming over that rise. The rise wasn't really clear on the shoot. They had to artificially play around with the ground and where the Cylons- where their feet actually touch the ground and all that kind of stuff.

So know you can see we're doing the chiron, "One hour earlier". I took a pass at the script after David and Bradley did as well, and this section here at the beginning of the tease was some of the most difficult stuff to make clear. That, ok, we're gonna dial back an hour and show you how the rescue developed from Tyrol's point of view. And this little beat here with Ellen and Tigh, I thought was really important. They really wanted to have one more scene of the two of them together before all hell broke loose in this particular relationship. And I thought it was really important to see them togtether one more time as a husband and wife.

Terry: Hey. Can I interrupt?

RDM: Yeah.

Terry: Can I tell them I've seen all the way through episode eleven?

RDM: Yep.

Terry: I have seen all the way through episode eleven as of last night, and this show, this season is so good. You really- tell your friends and relatives. It's really- he's done a really good job. He really has. They all have.

RDM: If Mrs. Ron says it's so, it must be so.

Terry: You guys know that I'm critical when I need be.

RDM: Now you'll notice here that Tyrol has mysteriously lost his beard. This has to do with a lot of complicated scheduling problems that we were dealing with, because while we were shooting these episodes and shooting pickup scenes we were also having to shoot scenes for the flashback episode that's coming. It's kinda hard to unwind all of this and explain it now, but in essence, this scene, this little sequence of Tyrol and Tigh and Ellen in the tent was a pickup that we added later. Once we were stretching this into two episodes we needed a little- we were slightly short on the first episode, maybe about nine- seven minutes short, I believe, on the first hour. And on the second hour we were only three or four minutes short. So we still had to go back and pickup some material to round out the two hours. This scene is one of them. Well, we were also shooting it after the fact. That is, we had already shot these episodes and we were going back and shooting them in tents. You could tell that was an interior set that we were doing, much later in the schedule. Well, by then, he had shaved Tyrol's beard. 'Cause he had come back to Galactica. I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying, "Yes, they do eventually get back to Galactica".

Terry: No spoilers.

RDM: Watch the spoilers. I already made some errors last week, I was reminded of.

Terry: By me.

RDM: Yes.

And Tyrol's beard had already been shaved off. Well, we had the option at that point of either, see there's his beard in the main title section. We had the option of either just shaving it off and saying, "Ok. Tyrol decided to shave it himself because the Galactica was coming."

Terry: Which is what I thought when I saw it.

RDM: Or we could go for the fake beard.

Act 1

RDM: And the fake beards just suck.

Terry: They always suck.

RDM: I mean, anyone who's ever seen the movie Gettysburg will tell you just how quickly bad beards can s-

Terry: Who's in that?

RDM: Gettysburg was a Ted Turner flick that-

Terry: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RDM: With big cast and was almost single handedly destroyed by the-

Terry: By the beard?

RDM: (laughs) -by the beards, which were some of the worst ever seen.

Terry: Well, it's also really important that everybody can understand, these decisions aren't just bad planning.

RDM: No.

Terry: They just- sometimes these things happen when you make movies and tv.

RDM: See, all of this. All of this whole sequence was shot weeks later, after we had shot the rest of the episode. And there was just no way. I mean if-

Terry: And you have to decide. Do you want the story to better or do you wanna-

RDM: Yeah.

Terry: -stick to just the absolute continuity? And story should win. 'Cause your audience is sophisticated enough to-

RDM: Yeah, they'll track with you. And you know what? There's a couple of people out there that probably notice that Tyr- "Hey! Tyrol shaved his beard." And then moved on rather quickly. But it eats up a lot of discussion time.

Here's a section where Tyrol's is- has been shaved, but this has a different reason for it being shaved because this was shot after we had done the flashback sequences which also had to be shot on the New Caprica sets. So there was a point where we just committed to the fact that we was gonna be without his beard in this entire episode. So- it's- like I said, there's several factors at work. There were the- oh, who cares? It's Tyrol's beard, and it's gone.

Terry: Enough.

RDM: And we love it.

Terry: You're done.

RDM: This was all complicated because we had to figure out how to establish these two different locations. There's the location where the trucks are with Laura and Tom Zarek and there's this ambush out by the river. And again, we're showing you the scenes that we didn't show you last week, so- in order to explain how they get out of these situations. Here's the chiron, "Breeders Canyon, blah blah, rendezvous point," which was added after the fact. I hate- I generally hate adding chirons and ADR later 'cause I kinda would prefer the audience just figuring these things out or wonder or it be mysterious, but there's always this battle and balance that you're trying to achieve where clarity, "Oh, don't let the audience be confused. Confusion's bad." So you get into all these sorts of back and forth decisions of adding chirons and ADR to explain things much later.

Here you can tell that we're back in the sequence as you remember it from "Precipice", essentially we're telling you the same story, we're leading you to the same point, but now you're gonna understand a different context for how these events are taking place. Now you know that Sharon has- her Marines are spread out there in the trees someplace and they're on guard, more than we led you to believe in part one. Same thing in the sequences coming up with the trucks. You now know that Tyrol is on the way. Here. In Pergamus Flats. (chuckle) Which I think I was thinking about buying a house in Pergamus Flats.

Terry: Where's Pergamus Flats?

RDM: I have no idea. It's some name we made up. (chuckles)

Terry: You would think that maybe it's too much information.

RDM: What, for the podcast?

Terry: Uh huh.

RDM: Well ya know, hon, we gotta talk about sumpin'.

Terry: (Chuckles.) No I- it's just funny, 'cause I- I don't know.

RDM: Yeah, the tendency to overexplain some of these things?

Terry: Well- no, no, no. Not you. Just meaning in general. Remember how when you were a kid and you just watched a movie and you just watched-

RDM: Oh, well yeah. But, if you're gonna- I figure if you're gonna listen to the podcast at all, it's because you wanna hear how the sausage is made, so...

Terry: No, I agree. I don't know.

RDM: One note on Felix Alcalá. Felix is the director of the infamous Pern, Dragonriders of Pern pilot that I almost did that failed to get off the ground years ago, for the now defunct WB network. (laughs) The WB. I love the fact that I lived longer than the WB. The WB killed my pilot for the Dragonriders of Pern several years ago. Felix was going to be the director and I had not spoken or seen Felix since and when he arrived for prep for this episode I went over and shook his hand and we were just happy to see each other 'cause that had been a really bad experience for both of us and now we were doing something that was actually going to be shot. And it was kinda fun and it was great having Felix. He real- this is a big, complicated piece of business. This one is truly like moving an army around. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of logistics involved in setting all the stuff up and Felix just marshalled his way through the process. I mean, he stepped on a few toes along the way, but that's Felix. Felix is great. And they love- and he's good at what he does.

Here we have the ambush. All these shots of the Cylons were much agonized over. And when do you cut to the Cylon and how do you play it in the action sequences? Endlessly storyboarded back and forth. This idea was something I came up with of Cally's in the way, she's doing the countdown, Tyrol's gonna knock her down, and the second he knocks her down they're gonna open fire. And this took a great deal of discussion. How is it gonna work? Lining up the eyelines. It was complicated even further by the fact that "Precipice", the opener of this, is shot by Sergio. So Sergio shot chunks of this and Felix shot other chunks of this and then we had visual effects guys bridging the two with scopes and with silent Centurions and what have you. And needless to say this was, like, an editing nightmare but our crack team of editors pull it off one more time.

There goes Jammer. Jammer, interestingly enough, in early drafts Jammer was killed in that sequence. He died in the firefight and then there was even a draft where Jammer died a little bit later on. And I ultimately decided not to do that. And- for reasons that will become clear in future episodes.

This is also a pickup. This little pickup here of Connor finding the map was another little piece that we didn't have that we had to go back and recreate later for this key thing of- when he walks up and says that he's found the map and it was on a skinjob, we didn't really have the shot of when that occured. Sergeant Mathias is named aft- Gunnery Sergeant Mathias. Again, I wanted it to be a woman, for whatever reason, and someone in her forties that looked like she'd been around the block a few times. And she's actually named after the high school superintendent that preceded my father at Chowchilla Union High. His name was Jim Mathias and I just decided to name it after him.

Terry: Does your father know that?

RDM: I don't think so. I didn't ever mention it to him.

This is a piece of business that I really dig. 'Cause it's really dark. Dean Sto- Cavil reaching for the gun, her kicking the gun away and knowing that he's got a bullet in his gut and that it hurts and she's just gonna lie there and suffer. And for a logical reason, she doesn't want him to download and tell everyone what he's seen.

Terry: They're asleep.

RDM: The kitty cats are asleep. We wore them out.

This was a very unusual way to end a teaser, which is a hopeful note. The previous two hours have been so dark and so grim, that I felt that we were not only justified but required to have an uplifting tease-out. That hey, we're gonna make it. Stick with us, folks, 'cause we are actually gonna make it out of this situation for once.

Act 2

Ok.