Stargate Universe creators Brad Wright and Robert Cooper talked with Matthew Hays of the Canadian Screenwriter magazine, and their interview is published in the article “Across the Universe,” which is to appear in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue.
In the interview, excerpted on the magazine’s website, Wright explains the demise of Stargate Atlantis and the beginnings of Stargate Universe:
Robert and I have been making Stargate for… I co-created Stargate SG-1, and I hired him on that show. So he and I have been working together coming up on 13 years. We’re breaking season 17 of shows called Stargate.
When it seemed like we were done with Stargate, MGM approached us and said, ‘how about another Stargate series?’ And we said we really wanted to do something else. Their response was, ‘okay, let’s do something else–but let’s do it with Stargate.’
Of course, all TV writers want to write feature films and all feature film writers want to write TV shows. We figured we’d parlay what clout we had with MGM and do it as a film–maybe even as a backdoor pilot.
Cooper is quoted:
What I really wanted to do was to shake up the approach to the show. I wanted us to move stylistically in a very different direction. We had made a plot-driven, action adventure show previously.
The characters were fun and interesting, and one of the key reasons people liked the shows was because of the characters, but when people tuned in they knew what to expect: the crew would get into some trouble, go through the gate, have an adventure and then come home after saving the world. I don’t mean it in a derogatory sense, but it was a comic-book adventure, with larger-than-life bad guys, all about bad vs. good– very broad, primary colours. I felt like we had done as much of that as we could possibly do.
I pitched the idea of doing something slightly more real as a character drama. It’s a sci-fi show: you’re still dealing with space ships. But I wanted the characters to feel real. One of the things some people have said is that you can’t make a serious drama that has far-out science in it.
You’ll need to pick up the magazine (Cooper and Wright and Stargate Universe are featured on the cover) to read the rest of the revealing interview.
Additionally, the current issue of the Official Stargate Magazine, issue #32, has an interview with Brad Wright in which he covers a bit more about the beginnings of Stargate Universe as a movie that got turned into a television series. You can read an excerpt of that interview at MGM’s Official Stargate Website.
[Image from our Destiny Gallery.]