Judge on "The Ark of Truth": "It's Quite Phenomenal"

Actor Christopher Judge was interviewed in the March/April issue of the Official Stargate Magazine and described Robert C. Cooper’s Stargate: The Ark of Truth as “Stargate SG-1 on steroids!”

“When I first read the script,” Judge told the magazine, “I was talking to Coop [Robert Cooper] and I said, ‘Are you on drugs? There’s no way that we can shoot this in 16 days!’ It was quite an ambitious undertaking. Two weeks ago I had the chance to do the behind-the-scenes commentary, with Coop and Producer Peter Woeste, and when you see up on the screen what Coop’s vision was — it’s quite phenomenal, and I must say, he pulled it off!”

Judge raved about Teal’c’s role in the movie, the first of two direct-to-DVD movies to be released following the cancellation of the record-breaking Stargate SG-1, and emphasized, “I had to do a lot of stuff that I have never done before, and probably will never do again!”

One of the new things that Judge did in the movie was to traverse a mountain. “It’s not CGI’ed, I’m actually on the peak of a mountain, running across a snowy mountain-top — it really was a real mountain! That’s quite an experience. I’m not saying that I’m in a rush to do it again, but it was a new experience and I think that sums up the entire movie.”

Solutions reporter Michelle attended The Ark of Truth panel at the San Diego Comic Con held in July last year and reported more about the filming of Judge’s mountain-top scenes: “In filming The Ark of Truth, they had to take him up to the side of a mountain, on a very thin ridge. They filmed him with a helicopter that got very close to him at times. There were wind gusts and the helicopter downwash blew him around at times. They asked Chris to walk closer to the edge but he declined. At one point the rudder of the helicopter almost hit him. Chris said in his mind, he was thinking of the guys who’d been to the Arctic. And so he thought, ‘If I don’t stay up here, I’ll never hear the end of it.'”

The resulting helicopter shots of Teal’c’s time on the mountain are included in the movie, illustrating the near-epic quality of filming the movie versus filming the TV show. Portions of these scenes can be seen in the video clip “Movie v. TV Show” recently posted by MGM’s Official Stargate website in their Video Gallery.