I'll put only part related to LOST, she seems such a nice woman :) let's enjoy what mama Damon thinks of the show !
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Her commentary starts with the recap of previous developments on "Lost" — specifically, the tragic scene in which the beloved Jin and Sun died together on a doomed submarine.
"Oh, don't even show me this again," an anguished Susan Klausner says to the television. "No, no, no, no. Don't show me this again."
As the co-creator of the co-creator of "Lost" — as she's been called — the mother of Damon Lindelof is even more heavily invested in the show than most diehard fans.
"I feel like I'm losing a friend," Klausner says of tonight's "Lost" finale. "It made me think, and when you're over 60, it's a really good thing to be made to think. It's always a good thing."
This past Tuesday, The Record joined Klausner to watch the penultimate episode, "What They Died For," at her Hackensack condo. She also shared memories of her son's Teaneck childhood while everyone noshed on her homemade dark chocolate mousse and toasted the show with champagne.
Watching "Lost" with the dryly witty Klausner is a fun, interactive experience.
When, for example, someone from Oceanic Airlines (Desmond, it turns out) phones Sideways Jack to say they've found his "missing cargo" — the coffin carrying his father's body — she predicts, "He won't be in it."
Back on the island, Kate blames Locke for Sun and Jin's death and says, "We have to kill him, Jack."
"Yes," Klausner says.
When Sawyer comes onscreen, she sighs, "Oh, hot man."
Other comments: "I don't see Locke as a substitute teacher" and "Ben, I don't think I'm liking you."
And what did Mom think of Allison Janney's Mother character in the May 11 episode?
"I think she was protecting her children," Klausner says of the woman who killed the real mother of the two sons she raised as her own, to keep them from being corrupted by the outsiders on the island. "I think her heart was in the right place, but she was a little bit, uh, living out of reality. She was sort of paranoid."
Recently, tv.com argued that there are five types of "Lost" fans. And Lindelof said he'd put his mom in the "Eternally Confused and Faithful" category.
Does she agree?
"Absolutely," Klausner says, but later adds, "I probably know more than he thinks I know. But I'm most interested in the emotional connections."
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She vividly remembers when her son called to say that he had an opportunity to write a treatment — or series outline — with J.J. Abrams. Not long after, her son called again.
"He said, 'Mom, they're giving us $11 million to do a pilot.' I said, 'How many zeroes did you say?' "
In 2005, when "Lost" got the Emmy as outstanding drama and a slew of other nominations, Klausner had a party at her place, complete with red carpet. Her friends had to come wearing high heels and glitz.
The following year, she accompanied her son to the Emmys. When he got up to call his pregnant wife and someone took his seat, Klausner tried to shoo the man away, not realizing he was a seat filler. "I'm not Hollywood-knowledgeable," she says.
Last fall, when Lindelof and fellow executive producer Carlton Cuse received an award at the Hawaii International Film Festival, her son invited her to the ceremony. They flew together from L.A. — where Lindelof lives with his wife, Heidi, and their almost-4-year-old son, Van, Klausner's much-loved grandson.
"It was my very first first-class flight, and it was fun, just being with him," Klausner says of her son.
On that trip to Hawaii, director/executive producer Jack Bender put her into a "Lost" scene in which Sideways Jack's son is auditioning for a music school. Klausner played one of the judges. Although she went by in a flash, her son later sent her a three-minute, 40-second DVD compilation of her outtakes.
Every Sunday morning, Klausner has a coast-to-coast video chat with him and his family.
"He's scary normal, because he's grateful for everything," Klausner says of her son. "He does not believe the media hype. He knows he's smart, but he knows he's also very lucky. He's grateful for being lucky. His first priority is his wife, his kid, his mom."
During the six-season run of "Lost," though, being the co-creator's co-creator did not entitle Klausner to story line secrets. In fact, when she visited the writers room in Burbank to chat with the writers, they confiscated her eyeglasses.
"They took my glasses, because they write on the walls. They have erasable walls," she says. "I couldn't see anything."
Her favorite "Lost" characters include Sawyer, of course, and Kate, Hurley and Jack.
"I love them for different reasons," she says. "But I think if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the intellectual. John Locke. Not the evil Locke, but the one who's struggling with redeeming himself.
"I can't imagine what this finale's going to be," she says, before speculating that "Welcome to LAX" will be the final image. "Not that this was an imaginary thing, but that they do land somehow at LAX and that the other things were the possibilities of redemption."
Before the episode began Tuesday night, Klausner made another prediction, part of which seemingly is turning out to be true.
"I think Jack is going to be the last man standing," she says. "I think Jack is supposed to stay on the island. He's going to be the keeper of the light, because what's waiting for him? Kate's going to marry Sawyer, if my son has a heart."
Given all the time Lost has spent lately on Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and the Man in Black (Terry O'Quinn), you might think they're the key to the show or something. They're not.
"It would be mis-categorizing to think this is the epitome of what Lost is," executive producer Damon Lindelof tells TVGuide.com. "Obviously the island was there before these babies were born, and lots of things were going on before they came there. What those stories are isn't relevant to the story we told, which is the crash of Oceanic 815 and what the ultimate fates of the survivors are."
Lindelof's explanation of what to expect echoes a line Jacob delivered to the Man in Black in the Season 5 finale: "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress."
"I wish that we could say that the finale is going to be enormously definitive," Lindelof says. "We found that when we told people that we've got definitive answers coming, it's not as definitive as the fans want it to be, therefore there's this ongoing and vociferous debate about what things mean.
"All we can say is: Lost is only ending once," he adds. "There's only one finale. There's not a question mark at the end of the end. There's not a dot, dot, dot. This is our story and it's over. Hopefully there's going to be a lot of interpretation in its wake."
"This was a pilot where the question asked secondary to 'What is the monster?' was 'How will you sustain this as a TV series?'" he says. "If I had said, 'We'll be fine for 120 episodes, and then we'll end it,' nobody ever would've believed it, including me. I think the show is a blessing and we're really grateful to be here."
I started to watch LOST with "The Moth", I finished Smallville and i was let's try this new show my friend talk me about and i just FALL for Sawyer as fast i saw him, the bad boy, the asshole, with the Moth I was wow I like him lol then we got Confidence Man and i was I fall for him simply. I was touched by his storyline, My fav scene of this episode is when he tells Kate about the real Sawyer, i knew i couldn't stop to watch this show just 'cause i wanted to learn more about this man then I fall for Locke very fast too but today it was when LOST caught me and i wanted to share this story with you. Now let's remember this amazing episode with the LOST location and what Damon have to say about the character who will become one of the most popular on this show !
-New sets built for the finale, sets that have never been seen -The sideways and island timeline will definitely be revealed -Characters in the sideways will realise there is another timeline with them on an island -The fact that Desmond isnt on the finale cast photo is "beyond their involvement" and could be significant either way, meaning dead, or alive but not shown for a specific reason -A large part of the finale is still as planned as it was 2 or 3 years ago -We wont have a Sopranos series finale, where we are left on a cliffhanger, but not everything can be explained -The total end of lost will not be a waking up from a dream sequence
Damon just tweeted about it, so now it's really done and what it made my cry right now is that our fav actors will not work together again, of course we'll not see more episodes/seasons but the worst part is the cast, it will be pretty hard on May but right now is it to think it's really over.
DamonLindelof We wrapped the Pilot on my birthday. Bender called at 6 AM to say the finale is completed exactly six years later. The circle closes.
wow Double anniversary today ! Rebecca Mader and our Dear Damon ! It feel weird 'cause a year ago, i met Damon the next day, a year ago, it feel so weird...I hope i'll have chance to see him and Carlton once again :) so for now HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO DAMON AND REBECCA and HAVE A WONDERFULL DAY:)
Hours after a massive 8.8 earthquake hit Chile, the residents of Oahu, Hawaii, have been bracing for a predicted tsunami, and the stars of Lost, who live and work on the island, are among them.
We've just from star Daniel Dae Kim--whose trip to Los Angeles today for a fan event was derailed because of the tsunami warning--and also Lost boss Damon Lindelof, and here is the good news they shared...
"All our cast and crew is accounted for and safely away from coastal areas," Damon tells me this afternoon. Jorge Garciacontinues to thrash me in Scrabble via iPhone from Ken Leung's house. Our entire team in Hawaii appreciates all the positive energy being sent their way."
Daniel decided not to fly to Los Angeles this morning for tonight's Paley Festival fan event to stay with his family druing the tsunami warning. "My family and I are doing fine," Daniel told me less than an hour ago. "We've moved to high ground and are staying with friends who generously opened their home to us. All that's left to do is wait. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who sends their thoughts and good wishes."
According to the show's ABC rep, the other cast members expected at tonight's Paley event—Michael Emerson, Terry O'quinnNestor Carbonell and Zulheika Robinson—are already in Los Angeles, so Daniel is the only cast member whose plans have changed because of the tsunami warning. The rest of the cast is still in Hawaii and were unable to attend tonight's event because they were working on Lost, according to a rep for the show.
Here what fews actors and Damon have to say about the FS (Flash-Sideways)
Jorge Garcia : "I feel at some point, it's going to come to a head," "I just don't know what it's going to be."
Damon Lindelof : "There's a reason. You're supposed to be asking yourself the question of why are they showing me both shows. The fundamental mystery is what is the relationship between these two things." "There are going to be a lot of good theories about it, we hope. That's the fun of Lost," "If you can make it another 16 episodes, your patience will be rewarded."
Evangeline Lilly : "I really love it. I love the fact that once again I get to try on a new version of Kate,"
Emilie de Ravin : "That was a big shock to me to read that side of the characters and how they're slightly different,"
Matthew Fox : "The notion that Jack both succeeded and failed at the same time was really interesting. It has great potential to be very powerful, what this other reality, 815 not crashing and landing in Los Angeles, would have meant to people we have come to know in juxtaposition to who they are on the island,"
Terry O'Quinn : the flash sideways is confusing, but he says it doesn't matter. He just wants a satisfying outcome to the series.
Now, we know that Locke ain't Locke. Our Locke is dead and the Locke imposter running things is still smokey cool, but who is he and what does he want? Do we trust that Smocke just wants "to go home?" Even O'Quinn believed that Locke had been resurrected last season, so now what?
We've done our own time traveling back to 2007 when we interviewed executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and O'Quinn about the significance of John Locke as it relates to the island's mysteries.
For example, we asked: when Locke "looked into the eye of the island" and what he saw was "beautiful," what did he mean?
Lindelof: "That he’s been secretly sleeping with the monster all this time and that they have little smoke babies."
Knowing what we know now, should we take that literally? Should we scream, "A-ha!"
On that note, do you remember when the smoke monster wasn't Locke and it killed Eko? O'Quinn admitted then that the "polar bear business and the special effects" were not his thing. "I'm not a big fan of fighting special effects with hair spray and a lighter," he said at the time.
Fast forward to 2010, or whatever the date is on The Island, and the man who plays Smocke has changed his tune.
"I notice that the effects are much better now that it's me," he half-joked on set last week in Oahu. "... It's a little tougher this year because now I know that I'm some sort of other worldly inhuman thing where as last year I didn't know it, so it was easier to play."
Will Smocke alter Locke's status as a fan favorite?
"I don't know if you'll have a great deal of affection for him," O'Quinn said. "I think the character is as interesting as ever, but he's different. I'm playing somebody different. Although this different person has occupied the persona of John Locke, I think the character -- if I do it justice -- should be riveting."
As long as Smocke says things like, "I'm sorry you had to see me that way," we're in.
TVGuide.com: The show raises a lot of questions, but is there anything that fans have focused on that you never intended to be a big deal? Cuse: The polar bears. We sort of felt like we explained the polar bears. We saw polar bear cages. We saw Sawyer locked in a polar bear cage. But people were still like, "What's up with those polar bears?" That seems to be kind of an obsession. Libby has also been an obsession. Lindelof: The new obsession is basically, "How many questions are you guys going to answer?" And people are asking us that like Carlton and I are gonna go, "87. We're just not going to tell you which ones." Or, "What percentage of the mysteries are you going to answer?" But that doesn't take into account the fact that some people consider some things mysteries that other people don't consider mysteries at all or don't care about. So we basically say, every mystery that is relevant to the characters on [Flight] 815, if they don't care about it, then it's probably not going to be answered. So if it's relevant to them or they're asking a question, then it's something that we're going to deal with. But that's the story that we're telling.
TVGuide.com: Is the reset going to be a theme of this season or are you playing with the audience? Cuse: I think it wouldn't be Lost if we weren't playing with the audience a little bit, but by the end of the premiere, you'll have a sense of what we're doing. We're still doing the same thing we've always done on the show, which is island storytelling and off-island storytelling. It just now starts to take on a different form in the final season. Like every season, each season is a distinct entity, so by the end of the premiere, you should have a sense of what Season 6 is shaping up to be like.
Doc Jensen made recently an interview with Damon and Carlton and they spoke about MIB and jacob and also Locke and walt from s1 and the backgammon
I asked Damon Lindelof, who co-wrote the pilot with JJ Abrams, if the backgammon scene was an attempt to plant a flag for the series end game. This is what he said:
“We can’t rewrite history and say that at the time the pilot was being constructed we were using phrases like “The Man In Black” and “Jacob,” but we can say that the overriding theme of The Island and what an endgame might look like — and that Locke was the character that was tapped into this almost instantly — was all sort of calibrated. Looking back on that scene, its intention at the time that it was written and its intention today is exactly the same, which is to basically set the stakes for the entire series. At the time that we wrote it, we didn’t think that there was going to be an episode two. At the time that we wrote it, it was a conversation about the good and evil internal in the people themselves. But obviously, as the show grew and blossomed out, that same conversation grew to encompass the nature of The Island and The Island’s affect on those people.”
In December, I interviewed "Lost" executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof over lunch on the Disney-ABC lot in Burbank, Calif. In a week or so, I'll be using that interview to write a feature for the print version of the Tribune (I'll post that "Lost" feature here too).
But with the anticipation of the "Lost" Season 6 premiere building -- the start of the final season is only two weeks away on Feb. 2 -- I thought I'd start posting the full transcript of the interview. It's looong. Check back here for additional installments (there should be two more installments over the next week or so).
Yes, what follows is only about a third of the interview. I know! But given that Lindelof and Cuse were kind enough to give me an hour of their time, I'm going to share everything they said with my fellow island fanatics. Casual fans might not want to read the whole thing; if that's the case, there are a few choice excepts here. All my other "Lost" coverage is here.
This interview contains no spoilers for Season 6. I didn't (and still don't) want to know any specifics about the season to come.
I was interested in finding out how Cuse and Lindelof approached Season 6 and how they feel about the fans' expectations for the last season. This section of the transcript also contains the first set of 'Star Wars references, and there are several "Battlestar Galactica" and "Sopranos" references too. Also, giraffes.
In the next exciting installment: Time travel!!! Later: Ewoks!!!
Here's Part 1 -- enjoy!
Ryan: Even as a hardcore “Battlestar Galactica” fan, I was taken aback at how impassioned people were about the last set of episodes of that show. And I was really unprepared for how harsh people could get over the smallest things and what they meant, and over what and wasn’t dealt with in those final set of episodes. It was as if everyone had a different checklist in their mind of what had to happen.
In approaching this last season, do you have the sense that it's going to be like that? Or did you just not think about the intensity of the fan reaction?
Lindelof: I’m sure we both have similar yet vastly verbose responses to that because we talk a lot about it and been talking a lot about the ending of the show for a long time. But I think that there is a disproportionate focus on a finale and there always has been. And this happens on a micro level, where the critically and fan-hated season, Season 3, also happens to have the greatest finale probably of the series. And the taste left in your mouth in the wake of the finale is really all that matters.
If the entire series is going to be judged based on our ability to execute the dive, you can’t do your job. Part of it is -- despite what people think or say, so much of it has been talked about and planned for years now that you’re just kind of executing the plan to the best of your ability. You're changing the plan when it’s not working, but otherwise, you’re kind of married to the inevitable -- the stuff that we want to do.
Cuse: We also spent a lot of time talking about how we don’t want the last season of the show to be didactic. It’s very dangerous to basically create a checklist of answers and then start trying to tick them off, because we want to make sure we’re telling engaging stories. For us really, while the mythology is important, for us it’s a story about these characters. And so most of our focus has been on, how are we going to resolve the character stories?
We really feel we are very committed to this notion of not stripping the show of its essential mystery. I mean, mystery exists in life and we kind of always go back to the midi-chlorians example [in the 'Star Wars' prequel films]. Your understanding the Force was not aided by knowing that there were little particles swimming around in the bloodstreams of Jedi.
There are sort of fundamental elements of mystery and magic to the show that are unexplainable, and any attempt to explain them would actually harm the show, and in our opinion, the legacy of the show. So we’re trying to find the right blend of answering questions, but also leaving the things that should be mysterious mysterious.
Ryan: Yeah. I did not need to know more about Boba Fett. He has a jet pack. He a ship named Slave 1. I don’t need to know more than that.
Cuse: Yeah, exactly.
Lindelof: And for us, there are questions that we’re clearly presenting. It’s not like Lucas ever presented in the first three “Star Wars” films, "What is The Force?"
And therefore, it’s like, when people ask us, "What is the island, what do the numbers mean?" You know, we don’t know how to answer the question, "What do the numbers mean?" We can tell you what the practical application of the numbers is in the series, but how do you answer a question like that?
It’s like, if you could have a sitdown with God and say, "Why is a giraffe’s neck so tall?" You know, because he can eat from large trees. And it’s like, "But you made all these other animals that don’t need tall necks to eat, so why?" So you get into a conversation where every answer you give only makes it more frustrating.
Cuse: Or that leads to the question of, did God in fact create that giraffe or not, which is also a very, very tricky question to attempt to answer.
Lindelof: Of course. Look, the franchise of “Lost” -- in addition to the primary franchise, which is the characters and the mysteries of the island that have always been in support of the characters -- there's this idea of, "What did they mean by that?" The zeitgeist of the show has developed around different iterations of that question. What do they mean by that?
Because the show isn’t like a traditional cop show where by the end of it somebody basically says, “Here’s who did it, here’s why they did it, and here is what is going to happen to them.” Or a law show with no ambiguity. There’s going to be an element of "What do they mean by that?" long after “Lost” is done and no matter what we did, there’s nothing we could do to prevent it.
Cuse: And also, we also are aware that answering questions inevitably raises other questions. We call it the Big Bang conundrum.
Lindelof: A.k.a, Kate’s plane.
Cuse: Yeah, if you go back and you say, "OK, Jacob is obviously someone who was of great significance to the mythology of the show, but who was before Jacob? And then but who created that person?" If you go back in the universe you can say, the universe was created in an event called the Big Bang, but then you can inevitably ask the question, "Well, what was before the Big Bang?"
I think the audience has to have a sort of respect for the fact that there is only a circumscribed set of answers that we can ever give. And we’re not sitting here trying to evade our responsibility to provide answers. We are going to answer the questions that, for us, feel like they need to be answered and we feel like we have some cool and satisfying answers for them.
Lindelof: One of which will be, we will answer what caused the Big Bang.
Ryan: It was giraffes.
Cuse: It was giraffes.
You know, ultimately, we’re excited though, because it does feel like we concocted the mythology of the show a long time ago and it’s like having a Christmas present and you kept it on the shelf a long time and people are finally going to get to open it and see it. So we’re finally getting to deploy the ending of the show and that is exciting to us. It is a story and I think as storytellers, that’s always what’s delicious -- you set up the audience and then you basically finish the story. There’s a payoff and we’re actually going to finally give the audience our payoff.
And we are going to go off the grid after the show is over to avoid the actual issue of having to interpret the ending. Again, we’ve always felt that one of the compelling elements of “Lost” is its intentional ambiguity. The fact is, it’s open for interpretation and discussion and we feel like we would be doing a disservice to the fans and the viewers to say, “No, you must only look at this in one way.” We don’t think that is really good for the show or for people’s ability to read into the show what they want. I mean, that’s what I like to do when I read a good book -- basically be able to debate what the real meaning and intention of that story is.
Ryan: So, what you’re saying is, you're going to France?
Cuse: We’re not saying. We’re not saying where we are.
Lindelof: It’s an undisclosed location. Ryan: Is it Dick Cheney’s bunker?
Lindelof: Exactly. The one promise that we are making is that what we’re not going to do is leave the show hanging so we can pick up the ball and run with it two years from now in some other television project or movie. I think that we owe ourselves and the story and the audience a sense of finality.
Cuse: The most complete ending that we can give them.
Lindelof: Yeah, you can’t break up with somebody and say, "Let’s not go out anymore, but I still want to sleep together, I still want to live in the same house, and we should still go on dates all the time." No. If it’s over, it’s over.
We’re trying to create a season that really feels like it’s over as opposed to [left open-ended]. People keep saying, "Is there going to be a Sopranos movie?" And I actually feel the question in itself is offensive to anybody who likes the cut-to-black [ending] because it completely neutralizes the deftness. Carlton and I happen to be huge fans of the “Sopranos.” But to do a “Sopranos” movie, you could never watch that series finale again with any level of respect [if you know] know that something followed it.
Cuse: The other phenomenon which is interesting is that the immediate interpretation of the ending of “Lost” may not be the same as the ultimate interpretation of the ending of “Lost.”
I mean, you as a “Battlestar” fan probably have experienced the sensation that there was an immediate reaction to how “Battlestar” ended, and [now] it seems like there’s a bit of and evolving reaction to how “Battlestar” ended. And we anticipate that the same thing might happen with “Lost.”
There’s an instantaneous sense of loss, and using the “Sopranos,” again as an example -- a lot of people were sort of outraged because the story ended and it wasn’t conclusive, but then with some perspective and a little distance from the show, the metaphor of what Chase was doing there became clearer and that seemed to resonate better over time than in the immediate aftermath.
Lindelof: What was so impactful about that ending is, as a huge “Sopranos” fan myself, I can tell you almost nothing about that episode other than that Anthony Jr. was considering going into the military and then he got into a car accident. But the episode itself is like completely like sand through my fingers. I don’t remember anything about it. All I remember is that [last] scene... Ryan: The only other thing I remember, apart from the final scene, is Meadow trying to park the car.
Lindelof: Right. All I remember is that Journey song. What are people going to take away from the final episode of “Lost?” Will it be the final image?
Cuse: Will it be the episode in its totality?
Lindelof: We keep getting asked about the final image and we’re like, "Yeah, sure, we know what it is." But people are acting like the final image of the show is revelatory in some way, as opposed to maybe [what's revelatory] is what happens in the first hour of the finale.
Cuse: But what’s happened is, I think people have expectations that have grown from other shows, where that last moment is such a sting. Whether it’s all of a sudden you see a snow globe [as in "St. Elsewhere"] or you cut to black or somebody wakes up and it’s all been a dream. Whatever it is, it’s like that final twist negates or completely overshines everything that’s come before it.
Lindelof: Which is amazing because the fact that people invested six years of their lives and over 120 hours on “Lost” and they’re going to pay it all off in this 30-second scene. "That is going to change the entire way that I feel about the show."
Cuse: We hope it doesn’t.
Lindelof: We’ll be riding either a wave of goodwill into the finale, or bad will, and it’s happened different ways in different seasons for us. Last year, [we had] the overt time travel story mechanism and the rise of characters like Faraday and the risk of putting Sawyer with Juliet. All of those things could have been [big problems] in any other world, and we were just fortuitous enough that it worked. But we really don’t have any sense of how this season is going to be received until it’s on the air. Ryan: James Poniewozik [Time's television critic] has written about this, about how the finale of a sci-fi show can't just be a finale, it has to provide an Answer. It can't just be an ending, it has to solve the problem. And I felt like I definitely saw that split in the "Battlestar" fandom, between the people who wanted or feel they got character payoffs and the people who don't feel various solutions to the plot and the story were arrived at correctly.
Your show, if anything, has more fans and more different camps invested in different people and also in different parts of the mythology.
Cuse: I feel like there will be diverse opinions and again, we understand that the hardcore mythology fans might react differently than the people who are really waiting to find out if Kate ends up with Sawyer or with Jack. And for us, we feel that the story lines that ultimately will be the most satisfying are the character stories. In discussing the various conundrums of mythology answers, we are very well aware that for people who are really focused on the mythology, it’s hard to provide probably completely sufficient answers for those group of people. So there will be there’ll probably be different levels of satisfaction based on what it is that interested you about the show in the first place.
All we can do is trust our guts, which is kind of where we’ve been from the beginning. We started the show sitting in my office every morning having breakfast, talking about what we thought was cool. And whatever we both would get excited about would go into the show and that’s how we’ve approached it [all along] and that’s how we approached it at the end.
So, our barometer can only be: Does this ending feel satisfying to us and to the other writers? And if we can achieve that, we feel like we will have done what we can do and what we should do. Beyond that, I think every show – certainly a lot of people have rejected “Lost” along the way. We started with a 10.2 rating at the beginning of the second season and a certain group of people said, “You know what? This is too much to invest; this is too much mythological show to invest in."
People found a way to part with the show for various reasons, or they embraced it all the way down the line. So, we’re not trying to reverse-engineer the process, we’re basically committed to doing the best version that we feel we can do and that’s all we can do.
Lindelof: There’s a certain amount of security in the idea of saying the show was never supposed to work in the first place. In the wake of the pilot, to say, "This show is actually going to be on the air for over 120 episodes," we would have laughed in your face. So the idea that it sustained as long as it has and that some of our best episodes were in our fifth season as opposed to [earlier in the shows run], or that we were able to bounce back from some sub par episodes and sort of regain our momentum. That makes us kind of think -- it’s becoming a lot more about the journey for us than it is about the ending and we hope that that’s the show's ultimate legacy.
But I think the sci-fi distinction you make is an interesting one because, when you talk about the “Sopranos” ending or the last episode of “Seinfeld” or “Friends,” there’s only so many iterations of what can happen. The “Sopranos,” the only thing that people were talking about is, "Is Tony going to live, or is somebody going to kill him?"
With “Lost,” nobody can even guess what the ending is going to be. If you were to have a contest right now saying, "In one paragraph, summarize what you think the last episode of 'Lost' might be" -- if you say it to 100 people, you will get 100 paragraphs that have nothing to do with each other.
If you say that to somebody about the “Sopranos,” 50 people will say, "I think Tony’s going to get whacked," maybe 10 people will say, "Carmela is going to kill him, but he’s going to get whacked." But no one would have said, "They’re going to be eating in a friggin' restaurant -- onion rings." That's what was so brilliant about it -- how do you do the unexpected? Ryan: You brought up in the first season and how you thought it would never last this long. As you look back, are there things you wish you could have done differently?
Cuse: No, I don’t think so. You could ask the same question about your life. I suppose everyone has regrets, but at the same time, you can either focus on your regrets as a path to nowhere. The journey of the show has been the absolutely right journey of the show. We had to take all the steps and the occasional missteps that we took in order to get where we are. So, everything that we’ve done has been sort of right in the larger karmic sense.
It’s interesting that you talk about this. One of the central themes of the show is free will versus predetermination and that same issue was very much in play in how the show was constructed. Yes, the mythological architecture was constructed back in the first season and between the first and second season, but the actual journey of these characters is something that evolves literally, episode by episode. We view the process of making the show as a very organic one. We watch what happens and how characters play off each other, what relationships are working, what aren’t working.
So there still is an element of discovery that is a part of getting into the finale. We sort of know what the Incident is, but how that’s going to play out with the characters is still something that we discover as we write each episode of the show.
We are not only the stewards of this journey, but we also have this wonderful process of discovery ourselves, which is, I think, the essence of the creative process. It's when you get into that transcendence where the show tells you what it wants to be and that’s something that we didn’t even anticipate. So, that to us is what’s fun.
Ryan: You guys have obviously a unique relationship with the fans. Have you ever changed what you wanted to do, or reconfigured what you thought you were going to do, based on good or bad fan reaction?
Lindelof: There hasn’t been an instance in the show where we disagreed with fan reaction, or were incredibly surprised by fan reaction. By the time fans saw Nikki and Paolo deliver their first lines of dialogue, we were already writing [their final episode,] 'Expose.' Had the fans said "We actually love these characters," maybe it would have given us pause, but by then we fundamentally acknowledged we had taken a shot and it didn’t work.
We did the Sawyer/Juliet thing last year. We were introducing Juliet into a relationship with Sawyer, [even though] the debate has been about whether Kate going to chose Sawyer or Jack. Now we’re changing it into a quadrangle for the first time, and it’s going to be it is a mature love at that – we don’t even see how [their relationship] really starts. When we introduced the audience to it, [the relationship] is already up and running for three years. That was the bold risk, but when we saw those dailies with Elizabeth [Mitchell as Juliet] and Josh [Holloway as Sawyer], they just sold it and we’re like, "This works."
If the audience doesn’t like the relationship, hopefully they won’t fault us for the idea and the good news is, “LaFleur” is Episode 8 and the season is only 16 episodes long and then Juliet falls into a hole. So, if they hate it, it’s only going to last for eight episodes, but it’s really going to govern every decision that Sawyer makes from here on out.
So, there are moments where we go, "What is the fan reaction going to be to this thing?" But especially since we started premiering in January [the season is mostly written by then]. On February 2 [when the final season premieres], Carlton and I and the writers are going to be writing Episode 15 of Season 6.
Cuse: Yeah, there will be no time for course correction. Last year we committed to this concept of time travel with a certain expectation that some people really might not respond to it. I think the most pleasant surprise was how much people embraced it, because it was difficult and it was much more overtly science fiction, and yet people really seemed to like the season.
But we have the same anxiety about what we’re doing this season. We kind of feel like the fundamental tenet that we’ve tried to follow as storytellers is "Be bold." But in being bold sometimes you fall on your face.
So we committed to a narrative approach this season which we feel is bold and it’s different than what we’ve done before. And if it works, it’ll be exciting, but it might not be everybody’s cup of tea either.
Next: I give them grief about the time travel in Season 5. I know, I know, some "Lost" fans loved it. Which we discussed.
Last Friday, I talked to "Lost" executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse for more than an hour, and I'll publish a complete transcript of our conversation in a few weeks. I especially can't wait for you to read the part about the Ewoks.
here the tibits we got :
From Lindelof and Cuse:
"Lost" executive producer and frequent director Jack Bender will direct the series finale. "He’s definitely directing it. He’s been such a humungous part of the show and he’s our third partner in Hawaii. You know there wouldn’t be anybody else to do it besides him," Cuse said.
As expected, Cuse and Lindelof will write the show's 2-hour series finale. Cuse on the final season and the unveiling of the ending: "We kind of concocted the mythology of the show a long time ago, and it’s like having a Christmas present and you kept it on the shelf a long time and people are finally going to get to open it and see it. So we’re finally getting to deploy the ending of the show and that is exciting to us. It is a story and I think as storytellers, that’s always what’s delicious -- you set up the audience and then you basically finish the story. There’s a payoff and we’re actually going to finally give the audience our payoff."
Cuse said that "Lost" will unveil a "narrative technique" that is "different" this season. He didn't elaborate on what the new technique would be, but he compared the deployment of this Season 6 element to the show's use of time travel in Season 5: "Last year, we committed to this concept of time travel with a certain expectation that some people really might not respond to it. I think the most pleasant surprise was how much people embraced it, because it was difficult and it was much more overtly science fiction, and yet people really seemed to like the season," Cuse said. "But we have the same anxiety about what we’re doing this season. We kind of feel like the fundamental tenet that we’ve tried to follow as storytellers is 'Be bold.' But in being bold sometimes you fall on your face. So, we committed to a narrative approach this season which we feel is bold and it’s different than what we’ve done before. And if it works, it’ll be exciting, but it might not be everybody’s cup of tea either."
Lindelof on whether constructing the final seasons and finale have put more pressure on them and on the show: "Despite what people think or say, so much of it has been talked about and planned for years now that you’re just kind of executing the plan to the best of your ability and changing the plan when it’s not working, but otherwise, you’re kind of married to the inevitable -- the stuff that we want to do."
Both Cuse and Lindelof sounded adamant about not wanting the show to continue in future TV or film projects (so presumably we won't see "Lost Babies" show up on ABC Family). They also said they aren't thinking about writing a "making of" book. Lindelof: "The one promise that we are making is that what we’re not going to do is leave the show hanging so we can pick up the ball and run with it two years from now in some other television project or movie. I think that we owe ourselves and the story and the audience a sense of finality. ... You can’t break up with somebody and say, 'Let’s not go out anymore, but I still want to sleep together, I still want to live in the same house, and we should still go on dates all the time.' No. If it’s over, it’s over."
Cuse said the duo is going "off the grid" after the finale airs in order to avoid "having to interpret the ending." More from Cuse on this topic: "We’ve always felt that one of the compelling elements of 'Lost' is its intentional ambiguity. The fact is, it’s open for interpretation and discussion and we feel like we would be doing a disservice to the fans and the viewers to say, 'No, you must only look at this in one way.' We don’t think that is really good for the show or for people’s ability to read into the show what they want…. We really feel we are very committed to this notion of not sort of stripping the show of its essential mystery. I mean, mystery exists in life and we kind of always go back to the midi-chlorians example [in the 'Star Wars' prequels]. Your understanding the Force was not aided by knowing that there were little particles swimming around in the bloodstreams of Jedi. There are sort of fundamental elements of mystery and magic to the show that are unexplainable, and any attempt to explain them would actually harm the show, and in our opinion, the legacy of the show. So we’re trying to find that kind of right blend of answering questions, but also leaving the things that should be mysterious, mysterious."
Cuse on their approach to the final season and the finale: "All we can do is trust our guts, which is kind of where we’ve been from the beginning. We started the show sitting in my office every morning, having breakfast, talking about what we thought was cool and whatever we both would get excited about would go into the show. That’s how we’ve approached it [all along] and that’s how we approached it at the end. So, our barometer can only be: Does this ending feel satisfying to us and to the other writers? And if we can achieve that, we feel like we will have done what we can do and what we should do."
Will 18 hours be enough for the last season? (By the way, Season 6 will consist of a two-hour season premiere, 13 episodes and three-hour series finale that will air over two weeks -- but as Cuse joked, "I’m sure the network will sell it as a six-part finale if they can.") Cuse: "For us, [18 hours] is just about right. I mean, we aren’t sitting here feeling like, 'Oh my God, we need a ton more hours to tell the rest of our story.' It feels like it’s going to work out just fine. It will have been the right length."
Below are ABC's promotional photos of the Season 6 "Lost" cast. Don't look if you don't want to know who will be getting a fair amount of screen time in Season 6.
I don't consider the bits of information that come before the photos spoilery. In fact, I don't think of them as spoilers but rather as Informational Tidbits. But on the off chance that you don't want to know these Season 6 Informational Tidbits, here's your chance to jump out now.
Last bits:
Time-wise, Season 6 begins exactly where Season 5 left off. Cuse: "There’s an eight-month gap [between seasons], but when you actually buy the DVDs, you’ll put the finale in for Season 5 and then you’re put the first disc in for Season 6 and it will feel like a very continuous experience."
I jokingly suggested that this season we'd see either the much-discussed Zombie Season or at the very least a "Lost" musical. Unfortunately it was a no on both counts, but Cuse did say that in Season 6, we will see "a character singing."
Via his Twitter account, Cuse confirmed the return of a "Lost" guest actor here and the identity of a new-to-"Lost" guest actor here.
let's hope it's just the beginning and more interviews will come by the team we all LOVE !
TVGuide.com: Tell me about how each of you got involved with Lost. Damon Lindelof: I got a call from an executive at ABC named Heather Kadin. It was late January. She was tasked with trying to coerce J.J. Abrams into rewriting a script that they had about a plane that had crashed on an island. J.J. said that he did not have time to do this because he was writing another pilot for ABC at the time and running Alias and trying to launch his feature career.
[Since I was a] stalker of J.J. and his work, Heather basically felt like this was a prime opportunity to put me in a room with him, even if the project went nowhere. I jumped at the chance. I met with J.J. on a Monday afternoon and we ended up geeking out for four hours, and five days later we had the outline for Lost. Ten weeks after that, we had the two-hour premiere completed.
Carlton Cuse: I created and ran a show called Nash Bridges and I hired Damon to be a writer on that show. We not only had a really good professional relationship, but we developed a really strong [friendship]. After the pilot process that Damon described, J.J. left to go do [Mission: Impossible 3] with Tom Cruise. Damon and I had been talking about the show and I had sort of fallen in love with what J.J. and Damon had done in the pilot and the world that had been created.
There were very few people who believed this premise was sustainable as a series, and that was incredibly liberating for me. Damon and I would sit down and have breakfast every morning — as we continue to do to this day — and we kind of approached it like it was just 12 episodes and out, how do we make these the 12 greatest episodes of television that we would want to see ourselves? We basically liberated ourselves from all the rules of traditional television narrative. We thought this thing would probably end up on DVD and would be like Twin Peaks or The Prisoner.
TVGuide.com: Did you ever think about syndication when you were creating the show, in that it's so mythology-heavy? Lindelof: I think at the time that Lost and Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy came along, serialized was a dirty word. But those shows basically proved that you could create a water-cooler zeitgeist around a show because it was serialized. To [ABC president] Steve McPherson's credit, I think that there was a lot more focus on being successful while you were on the air, as opposed to thinking forward to what the possible syndication deals would be.
Fortunately for us at this time, the DVD television market was exploding. That provided a revenue stream for them that made up for the fact that the show probably wouldn't [syndicate] well. But if you watch the first season of Lost, the heavy mythological elements were not really in play. There was character serialization, the romance, that kind of stuff, but in Season 1 it took them eight episodes to build a raft; in Season 5, they jump through time four times in a single episode. I don't think we could've gotten away with that in Season 1, nor did we want to.
TVGuide.com: How do you respond to the criticism that people who were passionate about the show at the beginning have gotten "lost" along the way? Do you ever think: We've made things too complicated. We need to be simpler. Cuse: In order to sustain a show over what ultimately will be 120 episodes, it has to be complex. If you took a non-Harry Potter viewer and asked them to watch the fourth or fifth movie, I think they'd be very confused about what's going on. We feel like Season 5 was the highest degree of difficulty. We hope that a lot of viewers who left will come back for the end of the show. We tried to design the show with a certain circularity and we feel like Season 6 will be very much like Season 1 and while you do need to know backstories to follow what's going on in Season 6, it's very character-centric.
TVGuide.com: At what point did you decide: We really need to set an end date for the series. And why? Lindelof: For us, the primary belief in the first season of the show was that we would not be able to sustain this premise forever because that's what the story tells you. If the story starts with a plane crashing on an island, the story's going to end when the people get off the island, and for us, the process of keeping them from leaving the island was going to be very finite.
By early in the second season, we engaged in a series of dialogues with the network, saying, hey, these flashbacks are not going to last forever. Once we answer the seminal mysteries of what it is that Kate did or how Locke ended up in the wheelchair, why Hurley ended up in a mental institution, then that phase of the story is done and we have to move into the next phase of the story, which we knew was basically the flash-forwards and the story of the Oceanic 6. We didn't pull the trigger until we were allowed to move to the inevitable conclusion.
We always did our best to make the show great, but when you're halfway through Season 3 and you're doing episodes about Jack flying a kite in Thailand, then the network finally said, "Oh, this is what you guys were talking about." So we were able to agree upon how many episodes were left and at that point we knew exactly how much time we had to arrive at our destination.
TVGuide.com: Have you always known what the end of the series would be? Has it changed at all? Cuse: Always is the operative word. We developed a mythology, as I said earlier, in the first season and between the first and the second season, and we're actually moving toward that exact end point. I mean, that has not changed. Certain details of how the show ends have evolved over time but that's mainly on a character level as we've gotten to know the characters and seen how the actors interact. So there are parts of the ending that are still living and breathing, but the actual mythological endpoint has been constant since we developed the show.
TVGuide.com: Damon, during the writers' strike, you wrote a piece for the New York Times mourning the loss of TV. I'm wondering how you think it's going two years later. Lindelof: I think that mourning the loss of TV was a very clever angle into [the way] the editorial was shaped but what I was really feeling was a tremendous level of excitement about the way television is watched. The fact of the matter is, people are still watching a lot of what we call "television," except my brother-in-law goes to [college] and none of the kids in his dorm have televisions, they have laptops. They don't watch television at 9 o'clock on a Wednesday night, they watch it on Hulu or ABC.com or the Comedy Central player. So can you really call that TV anymore? They don't say, "I'm going to my dorm room to watch 'computer.'"
Mourning television is this idea of [mourning a] traditional sort of broadcast, but the fact that content is so pervasive that anybody in the world can watch it is very, very exciting if you're a storyteller. Two years later, what's really great is all the things we went on strike for [and that we said] were going to happen are happening, and two years from now it will be even more profound.
TVGuide.com: What TV shows or entertainment figures inspired you or your work? Cuse: For us, a lot of literary heroes, ranging from C.S. Lewis to Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut and even the Bible, have been real sources of inspiration.
Lindelof: I think that there are also a number of TV writers, from David Kelley to David Milch to David Simon — the guy basically changed the form of storytelling on TV, character-centric storytelling. Carlton and I went to a panel at ComicCon this year that was Peter Jackson and James Cameron and one of the things that really struck me personally was, here are two guys that are willing to commit six or seven years of their lives to just one thing. Peter Jackson did it with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; Cameron does it every time he makes a movie.
So the idea that we were inspired by, you know, we saw this thing through. We were there in the beginning of Lost, we're going to write the last episode. There have been a lot of times when we had very tempting offers to go off and do other stuff or leave the show and leave it in the hands of others, but the ideas we've committed this chunk of our lives to — this show is something that was inspired by guys like that.
