One of the longest running members of the Stargate production team from the entire franchise John G Lenic has taken time to answer a series of questions with the popular online media outfit Fused Film.
You can read an excerpt of the interview below
So Stargate Universe, I am such a fan of the series, how long have you been apart of the Stargate franchise since its inception?
“December of 1996. I was an assistant on another production, a TV movie and I had an offer to come and do Stargate and that really appealed to me because I had an opportunity to move up by working on a series but also in terms of moving up in career and position. Also find something that was going to give me a breadth of experience. No offense to shows with talking heads like Law and Order and NCIS but this was an opportunity to work on a show with visual affects, special effects, all those visual elements, huge costumes every single week will give you that great experience than just working in office buildings all day long.â€
Were you a big Science-Fiction Fan going into this series?
“Not really. I had grown-up watching Star Wars and I had seen the Star Trek movies but never watched the series. I did see the movie Stargate and loved It so when I heard about the series I knew it was going to be a great show because of the scale and sure enough it has been.â€
Oh yeah it has been! I always refer to it (SG-1) as the A-Team in Space.
“Yeah you are right! I never thought of that! Thats exactly what it was!â€
So We Want to Dive Deeper into SGU With You, when you guys came up with Stargate Universe, what were you trying to accomplish? I mean we have already seen it but what was going through the minds of you and the rest of the production team?
“Basically we all talked about wanting to do something different. Something different from what we had been doing and go a another way that people would respond too and make it more “charactery†and slightly darker especially if we got the right cast (which we did.) People had been saving the day every episode and that was fun and there was that feel good response of being able to walk away from every episode. But also it was just wanting to go into a different look and a different feel, bring it into what was being done now in the era we are in. It was something that was talked about back when Atlantis came along but it wasn’t the right time and people thought it was squirrely to do that kind of thing. The rest of the shows on TV hadn’t done that type of thing yet and there was hesitancy based on that. I mean we went so far as to say let’s shoot it or air it as a Letterbox show and in the same aspect ratio as a feature film to make us stand out more but the network and the studio resisted that and they thought it would be too different. But now we have been able to do that and go a different way and people have been making those comparisons to Battlestar and the way it was shot and I have to say that everything has to start somewhere. They started with a look and its not that we are copying them we are actually trying to do something differently but also its a look that goes across many different shows.â€
Yeah! that look in my opinion started with Firefly before BSG!
“Oh yeah, Firefly and even Friday Night Lights. Robert Cooper, co-creator and executive producer, even said that his favorite shows on TV were the Shield and Friday Night Lights and if we can get one of those guys to DP the show. So with that the onset of the show was handled with a different perspective.â€
You can read the full interview here courtesy of FusedFilm »