Article : Now and Then

In a parallel universe, Lost’s stars are back on Oceanic flight 815 this season. But do they look the same as they did six years ago?

more losties here : www.bettyconfidential.com

Chicagotribune interview with Darlton part1

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.

source : chicagotribune.com

Naveen Andrews interview with skyone

and coming later this week yunkim's interview :)



source : skyone

Ausiello

Question: I have a really fun assignment for you, Aus. Create a chart listing every Lost alum there ever was, and then next to their names, tell us where things stand in terms of them returning for the final season. I just know how much you love to make lists.
—StevenAusiello: I have a better idea: Let’s scrap the chart and forget we ever had this conversation. In return, I’ll share this Lost nugget with you: I hear Team Darlton will give us the answer to one of Lost’s oldest and most confounding mysteries. And I’m pretty sure it’s an answer none of us expected to get.

source: Ausiello

Ausiello answers

Question: Is Emilie de Ravin going to be back in Lost for the whole season or just a few episodes? And will we get to see what happened to her? —Jared

Ausiello: The answer to both of your questions is a resounding yeppers. Better prepare yourself though. My Lost mole says season 6 will showcase “a version of Claire we’ve never seen before — a Rousseau-esque version.” We’ll be in need of a Rousseau fix since the real version will be MIA. According to a Lost insider, the French Lady’s portrayer, Mira Furlan, turned down the show’s request to return for the final season due to a “prior overseas commitment.” Anyone know how you say “big bag-o-nuts” in français?


Question: What’s this I hear about one of Lost’s planes going down on Wisteria Lane? Tell me this is not true. Desperate Housewives is solid enough, it doesn’t need any cross-promotion with other ABC shows. —Kellen

Ausiello: Someone at ABC suggested it might be fun to slap an Oceanic logo on the ill-fated plane, but the idea was quickly (and thankfully) nixed.


source:: Ausiello

Sonya Walger interview about Penny

Here the part concerning LOST, if you want to read about FF, you can find here :
Dream Tvshow Blog

TVGuide.com: All right, when are you returning to Lost?
Sonya Walger: No idea. Not a clue. I don't even know if I'm in the last season.

TVGuide.com: Do you think Penny should die in the end?
Walger: Are you saying in a sacrificial way, Penny needs to die? I hope not because Penny's so great. There would be mass outcry, but you know what, they killed off Charlie, so anything can happen. I feel like her dad should be the one to bite it. I am not kidding.

TVGuide.com: Were you nervous about joining another mythology-heavy show?
Walger: No, not at all. It's funny, I didn't even think of Lost when I read that script. It sounds bizarre or naïve, but I really didn't. I read the script and I was so excited by the writing and by this character, by this woman who is complicated and says 'I hate you' to her husband when she means 'I love you.' She's a professional and a surgeon and a mother. I didn't see any similarities to Lost. I honestly still don't. I see them as big shows that have one big exciting event, the catalyst that gets it all going with an ensemble cast. I see that, but after that they just part ways. There isn't a mythology to FlashForward in the same way. There's not codes to decipher ... There's not islands moving and polar bears and smoke monsters, that's not in our show ... yet anyway.

TVGuide.com: Did you ever work with Dominic Monaghan on Lost?
Walger: This is the joke of me being a part of Lost, I haven't met three-quarters of that cast. I'm not kidding. I would be as star-struck as you would be if I met Matthew Fox. I actually only met Dominic on a photo shoot for FlashForward — that was the first time we met. He comes into play in quite a significant way in this show. I can't really tell you anymore than that. He's a good part of it.

source : tv guide

Scifi magazine article about LOSTseason6

thank su from outlaws for the scans of the magazine.
here little quote of darlton concerning s6 especially juliet and dan but mostly the article contain spoilers we learnt at comic con this summer.

If the explosion did succeed in sending the survivors back to that fateful flight aboard Oceanic 815, then in that respect characters, like Juliet, should theoretically come through unscathed.

“Yes, she will,” said Cuse getting straight to the point.

“Well, again I think all this returns to the idea of whether or not her detonating the bomb had the desired effect,” said Lindelof elaborating on his colleague’s statement. “If it did, my guess is that she’s okay, and if it didn’t work, then probably the prognosis is not so great, considering the fall but I think we can say that Elizabeth Mitchell will be in Lost in the final season.”

Technically speaking, if Jack and his crew were successful, that could mean that Faraday was alive,” said Lindelof before going on to comment: “But I think you can say that you will be seeing Faraday on the show this year.”

LOST filming report for epi 6x04

hi guys i'm back and seem we got some filming report for episode 6x04

Hey All,
The LOST crew returned to the infamous beach camp set at Police Beach in Hawaii. When I visited the set last month it was a surreal feeling and now seeing the camp setup to look like it did in the Season 5 Finale, it is an awesome feeling to know how soft that beach sand is and how beautiful it truly is out there!!

Below is a little report and some pics of what took place today. This scene is most likely for Episode 6x04 the Locke centric episode and is a continuation of the Losties leaving the 4-Toed statue with a dead Locke.

NOTE: There is a pic of what looks like Michael Emerson (Ben) or his stand-in on a cell phone and I am pretty sure that it is not a part of the scene unless he is calling Annie. ;)

Thanks to a lucky visiting LOST fan named Lostie4eva for sending in the report and pics!!

Here you go:

I was planning on going to just to check out the beach set and to my surprise they were filming! The scene they were filming was of Sun, Frank, and Ilana and Ben walking on the beach. But Ilana and Ben were carrying back Locke's body on the stick wrap thing. (Don't know how to describe it) The only pictures I got were of all of their stand-ins doing the scene and I was only there for an hour.

Also they built up the Losties weathered camp seen in the finale. I think its the same, but I didn't watch the finale and check. They all were in the same clothes so I'm guessing this is a continuation of the nice long walk they took to the four-toed statue. They were probably walking over to it and were walking right in front of Eko's church and next to that is the camp site.

source : the odi

The LOST season5 the interview with Darlton !

thanks su from outlaws for the head up

Time travel, murder, religious parables—Lost’s shepherds, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, reflect on its fifth season.

Rich in mythology and character development, and tantalizingly complex, Lost is not something to be watched passively. Throughout its five years, the ABC series has brilliantly weaved a human drama about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island into a Byzantine tableau. We’ve witnessed smoke monsters and polar bears, unearthed a bygone scientific initiative, met the native inhabitants, and sidled up to a four-toed statue and a hydrogen bomb named Jughead. There have been flash-forwards, time travel, meditations on faith and destiny and redemption, literary and pop-culture references, and the occasional Latin phrase. What’s more, all of these bizarre components are all somehow connected. The show’s intricate and cryptic details have sent many a rabid fan to reference books and online chat groups in an effort to unlock the show’s secrets.

But even for those who aren’t content to parse through the myriad clues to find out what it all means, Lost, while epic in scope, is also intimate in its relationships. The overarching story can be incredibly dizzying and confounding as it travels around the world and through time and back again, but its writers (including executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, or “Darlton,” as they’re called on message boards) take care to keep it rooted solidly in its characters—who, over the show’s duration, have grown as rich and deep as the mythology that surrounds them.

And this fifth season—which featured a return to the island for those who had been rescued and erratic time travel—was not only enthralling; it was satisfying. The energy intensified as the series began answering integral questions, ramping up acceleration and purpose as the show barreled toward its sixth and final year.

State of Shock

“There have been some seasons when the show was nominated, and there have been some seasons when the show wasn’t nominated,” said Damon Lindelof of this year’s Outstanding Drama Emmy nod. “When it’s not nominated, it’s because the show’s too weird, or too genre, or it’s too mythologically dense. So…those are the three characteristics of the fifth season of the show. We did time travel the entire time, so it was incredibly genre, it was very sci-fi, and the mythology was more dense than it’s ever been. So we were like, ‘This is definitely not the year that we’re going to be nominated for an Emmy.’ And so when it happened, we were genuinely shocked.”

Damon’s Favorite Moment

“The standout scene for me...is the moment in ‘The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,’ where Locke [Terry O’Quinn] is about to hang himself, and the scene begins with the guy about to commit suicide, and then bridges all the way to that guy getting murdered by another guy. The maneuvers between Ben [Michael Emerson] and Locke, the summation of their relationship up until that point, the surprise of Ben killing him, the mystery of why would you talk someone down from killing himself, only to kill them with your bare hands. There were just a lot of hoops to jump through, and in the writing of that scene, and then in the actors’ execution of it, and Jack Bender’s direction of it, it was just one of those moments where you go into the editing room and you watch sort of the editor’s first pass at it, and you just go, wow, it worked. This could have been the biggest disaster in the history of television, and we somehow pulled it off. And I think that in that scene is indicative of what we try to do on the show, which is we have a bold goal—you know, we reach for the stars. Sometimes we fall short, but when we accomplish our goal, it can be really special.”

Carlton’s Favorite Moment

“The moment [in ‘The Incident, Pt. 2’] when Sawyer is basically holding Juliet [Elizabeth Mitchell], in the shaft that will one day become the Swan hatch. You know, that is also, I think, a moment that really resonated for us because you know, it was really the culmination of Sawyer’s relationship with Juliet, and Josh Holloway’s so good in that scene, and just kind of what went on between those two actors in that final moment. We wanted to try and make it somewhat ambiguous as to whether she sort of lets go and dropped, or whether it was just basically inevitable that she couldn’t take hold any longer, so it kind of embodied a little of the ambiguity that we liked to have. And it was such a strong, powerful, emotional moment for both those characters. That was another moment when, again, on a character level, you know the bulk of the scenes that we described are really, you know, hinge on the emotions between our characters, and again, there’s mythology surrounding those events, but the actual scenes that we chose, and the moments we love are when our characters really connect with each other in profound and emotional ways that make the audience feel that emotion.”

Our Man Sawyer

“We really looked at Season 5 as the year of Sawyer,” said Lindelof. “I think that the focus has been on the kind of Jack, and Locke, of it all, and obviously, Michael Emerson who came, then, as the villain, has been a very prominent character in the third and fourth years. But we had this really cool idea to basically say let’s completely flip the paradigm for Sawyer, who we’ve always perceived as kind of the Han Solo bad boy, and put him into an entirely different position, where he’s having a leadership position and he’s responsible, without sort of selling out the spirit of who he is…. And then we would do it overnight, literally. In a single episode, we’d jump three years ahead and show this sort of before and after of this guy.”

Ben’s Journey

“The great thing about Ben Linus is he sort of wears his bad guy stripes on his sleeves, and Emerson this year, especially, sort of did the opposite of what he’d been doing in previous years, obviously as a result of the storytelling, and sort of really humanized this character,” said Lindelof. “Instead of seeing Benjamin Linus as a guy who’s completely in control and all of our characters were at his mercy, now suddenly, we flipped the script on him as well, so that in addition to feeling these grave responsibilities for the death of his daughter, he’s also now Locke’s acolyte. As opposed to the way that it had been in previous seasons. And seeing Michael kind of play that pathetic version of Ben, and seeing how angry he is, about suddenly being stripped of his power, the first half of the season he’s ruthless and manipulative in getting the Oceanic 6 back to the island, and the back half of the season is now, he’s basically kind of Locke’s lackey, I think was, again, this guy just keeps finding new levels to that character.”

Evil Ben for Supporting Actor

“People really love a villain,” said Lindelof of Michael Emerson’s nomination. “And I think if you look at the actors who traditionally walk off with that supporting drama award, or the ones who are nominated, there’s always this sort of degree of a dastardly air about them. You know, John Slattery or William Hurt, you know, those guys are playing characters with a sort of nebulous moral intent, and I think that audiences really respond.”

Ben v. Locke

“Every time we write a Ben and Locke scene, we just can’t wait to see what we get back from Hawaii,” said Lindelof. “Because as Michael Emerson has mentioned multiple times, he loves working with Terry, and for some reason, those guys are like the wonder twins. When they are put in a scene together, they are ten times more powerful.

The Lost Ensemble

“We’re kind of at the point where we recognize the challenge for actors to be honored on our show,” said Cuse of the lack of acting nominations. “We have so many characters—we have 15 or 20 regular spots, and a huge supporting cast—so our actors don’t get the kind of screen time that actors who do get nominated get, and I think that puts them at a disadvantage. You know, Hugh Laurie is awesome, but he’s also in practically every scene of House, and he really is so integral to that show. Our actors are collectively integral to our show, and yet no one of them gets to be on center stage more than a few episodes at a time.

“When we’ve had success, it’s been in a supporting actor category,” Cuse continued. “Terry did win before, and Michael is such a tremendous talent that we would be so pleased if he won, but that, I think is about as tough a category as there is in the Emmys, and I think you can make a case for all of the actors that he’s up against, and so, we’re obviously rooting for Michael, but understandably, it’s a tough thing to win in that category.”

The Human Element

“Despite the fact that people perceive our show as a genre show, or a mythology show, we like to think we’re making a character show with sort of a frosting of mythology,” said Cuse. “But you know, when people eat the cake, the thing they remember the most is the frosting. We focus on the characters of these stories, and I think we felt that we told some good character-based stories this season. It seemed that because of the context in which we told those stories, we were surprised that we got nominated, but we were very pleased that people sort of recognized the fact that I think we’ve worked really hard to try to have a strong kind of, humanistic character base underpinning to the stories.”

Emmy Recognition

“As incredible as it is to be nominated for an Emmy, and what that means, in terms of, you know the support you’re getting from your peers, the only thing on our minds in terms of writing the final season of the show is making it worth everybody’s while, who came this far,” explained Lindelof. “Most importantly, our own. We’re now trying to end what will essentially be 120 hours of this kind of epic story that Carlton and I have spent full time, without doing anything else, really, you know, telling. So the primary motivation for us is that everyone will love it and that we ourselves will feel proud of it. and if that results in an Emmy nomination, well, that would just be the icing on the cake. But, you know, amazing shows like Battlestar and The Wire finished their run, and they don’t get Emmy nominations in their final seasons, so at the end of the day, the legacy value of the show itself, and the audience’s reaction to the final season and the final episode of the series is really what’s driving us.”

The Sixth and Final Season

“We’re in the early stages of it, but it’s very exciting,” said Cuse about the last show’s last run, which begins in early 2010. “I think it’s sort of exciting and bittersweet at the same time. It’s exciting because we’re finally getting to the core mythology that we’ve known for a long time, and we’re anxious to see how it lands with the audience…. At the same time, you know, I think we will be sad to see Lost go. It’s such a special thing to have any sort of successful show. And especially in this economic climate, doing a really big-scale action adventure series shot on location in Hawaii with a huge crew on 35mm film. Not only is it a question of the show coming to an end, in a lot of ways, I think it’s this era of television is coming to an end, with the economics of the business changing so profoundly.”

Any Season 6 spoilers for us?

Lindelof: “You know you had to try, but no. We can’t say squat.”

source :http://www.thedailybeast.com

Matt Parkman back on LOST ?

sorry i couldn't resist, imagine if parkman was really on LOST lol
in Tv guide interview, gregg grunberg spoke about a possible return of the pilot on LOST !

It might be a busy season for Grunberg, who has also been approached about appearing on Lost. The actor, who played pilot Seth Norris of the Oceanic flight in the very first episode, got a call about coming back for the last season of the hit ABC show. Grunberg is totally game for anything the Lost producers can cook up for him, but he has no idea what they are planning. “That’s literally where my call ended,” he says.

Norris didn’t survive the island, but as more of Lost’s characters who met the grim reaper are signing on to appear one last time, it would only be appropriate to bring back the man who flew them to the island in the first place. “If NBC will allow it,” Grunberg says. “I will go back.”

source : tv guide

Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof dop hints about how ABC hit drama will end

Lost masterminds Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been dropping hints about how the show will end next spring.

Among the mysteries unravelled in the very last episode will be the significance of the four-toed statue, what the Smoke Monster really is and who the skeletons in the cave were.

(We reckon Egyptian fertility goddess Taweret, conscience and Penny & Desmond respectively, for what it's worth!)

Says Cuse: "The end of the show will be a combination of trying to answer mysteries the audience still cares about, such as the statue and the Smoke Monster.

"We'll also be answering the skeletons in the cave question. We will answer the questions we feel are important and central to the plot.

"At the same time we will be trying to tell redemption stories about the characters. These characters do indeed have a destiny.[/quote]
source : http://www.sundaymercury.net=

Darlton's interview about finale season5 and hints for season 6

This season of "Lost" has been the story of how five of the Oceanic 6 - all but young Aaron - returned to the island, which has jumped back in time 30 years.

When four of those five - Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and Sayid (Naveen Andrews) -- finally are reunited with Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), Miles (Ken Leung) and the now dead Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies) - back on the island, they find themselves 30 years in the past.

Heading into the two-hour season finale on Wednesday, May 13, Sun (Yunjin Kim) is in the present with Ben (Michael Emerson) and Locke (Terry O'Quinn), who are battling over who will lead the island. "In the grand mapping out of things, one would assume Sun has a larger role to play," says Lindelof.

Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid are all in 1977. Sawyer, Juliet, Sun's husband, Jin, and Miles have made a home for themselves there among The Dharma Initiative, a group that's set up camp to study the island and construct research facilities. Sawyer, Jin and Miles are all part of Dharma's security team, but that cover has just been blown.

Dharma has enemies on the island, The Hostiles, so the Initiative is a bit jumpy. The arrival of Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid upsets the balance; exposed as outsiders, Sawyer and Juliet are forced to arm themselves and fight their way out.

Meanwhile, Jack and Kate must decide their next course of action.

"There are two fundamental approaches to the show. There's the Jack approach, which posits that there's no real explanation for what's going on. Or there's the Locke approach, which assumes that everything on the show is happening for a very specific reason. We are very strong supporters of the Locke approach," says Lindelof.
The reason some folks have traveled back to 1977 was explained by memory-challenged physicist Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies). Faraday thinks people might be the variables in time-travel equations. That means it might be possible to diffuse the electromagnetic energy that brought down Oceanic 815 by exploding a hydrogen bomb (named "Jughead") that just happens to be on the island, allowing the past - and thus the future -- to be changed. Faraday dies before he has a chance to test that theory out, now it's up to Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest to decide what to do - try to change the future or let it ride.

"Not everybody is interested in Faraday's mission," says Lindelof. "It's a very divisive issue and one that the audience is feeling too. It would be a big cheat, erasing the last five years of the show, and making it so that we never came to this island in the first place."

Jack, however, has already expressed interest in Faraday's mission, while Kate is clear she wants to stick with the life she has. Regardless of what Jack and crew decide, next season will find the show's core characters all back on the island resolving why they landed on the island in the first place.

In the finale, more will be revealed about such mysterious symbols as the four-toed statue and the Egyptian hieroglyphics, says Lindelof.

The show has been a wild and often confusing ride, but Lindelof and Executive Producer Carlton Cuse say they know exactly where it's all headed.

"That was a conversation that started back between seasons one and two of the show," says Lindelof. "We are following the plan pretty much to the letter, although there is room for improvisation." Lindelof says next season - which will be the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning series' last - will bring things full circle.

"Season six will feel a lot like season one," says Lindelof. "The focus comes back to the characters with whom we began. We've been winnowing away everyone else who came along. The Tailies are gone, only Miles [Ken Leung] is left of the Freighter Folk and only Juliet [Elizabeth Mitchell] is left of The Others. We're getting down to the end now."

"The metaphor we like to use is that this is a road trip. We know we intend to end up in New York City, but maybe we'll pick up a hitchhiker or stop at a bar and get drunk along the way," says Cuse.

"And then linger there for six episodes," jokes Lindelof.


source : nypost.com
it's interesting the way they make us feel it will be like s1 and focus on our losties BUT also remind us only juliet and miles are not the original losties too

kristin spoilers for finale season5 and season 6 !!

Gisselle in Tampa, Fla.: When are Sawyer and Kate getting back together on Lost?
No time in season five, but check back for season six. You should like what you see... (P.S. Exec prod Eddy Kitsis says, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not, "Season six is free to be you and me. Do what you feel.")

Melva in Orlando: My favorite Lost characters have remained Jack, Charlie, Boone and Sayid since the first ep. I'm down by two. So, can you help a sister out: Are Jack and Sayid a sure bet to live through next season? I can't imagine a Lost series finale without either of them!
No promises about a series finale, but neither Jack nor Sayid are the major Lost death happening in season five.

Tony in Hoboken, N.J.: Hey, guys, any word yet on what the code name for the Lost finale's final scene will be?
Yes. It's not as boring as "The Bagel," but not as laugh-out-loud silly as "Frozen Donkey Wheel." This year's name was chosen from fan submissions, and the winning name is..."The Fork in the Outlet," according to ABC reps. The actual episode, though, is titled "The Incident." Sounds like the Losties are going to be messing with the electromagnetic power of the Island, to return to the future or to unleash the metal-shavings monster. (Remember what Michael Emerson told us about Smokey? "I think it all has something to do with metallic dust. I think the smoke monster is connected to that ring of powder that surrounds Jacob's cabin. They've established that there are supermagnetic forces at work on the Island, so what better medium for those forces to work through than through fine filings of metal.")

source : kristin eonline

More infos about the Screenwriting Expo

I am from Vancouver, Canada, but I flew down to Los Angeles for the 2008 Screenwriting Expo. More specifically, I was there to see the writers of Lost and I sat front row, centre. Eric Goldman from IGN, who I shared a few words with in the audience, has done a pretty good job hitting most of the major points from the first ninety-minute panel with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse at http://tv.ign.com/articles/930/930680p1.html, but for some reason, he did not stay for the second panel with Edward “Eddy” Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, so I can give you a rundown of what happened there, in addition to some things that the show runners said that is not at IGN.

Some notes:
* There were not a ton of people at these specific panels (300 maybe? definitely not 4000 like at Comic-Con) and the audience was less fanboy-ish than Comic-Con. The moderator even specifically said not to ask spoiler questions because they are a waste of a question. The only question that seemed to be from Comic-Con was the one from the teenage girl (she was the only other teenager than me in the room, I think) who was disappointed that Rousseau was killed not because of a promised flashback but because it killed her longtime fantasy of Locke-Rousseau love. Well, I guess there was one person more Comic-Con: the guy who won the life jacket signed by all the writers showed up to say that he could not read any of the signatures while holding the jacket up. Ha ha. Also, Damon and Carlton and Adam and Eddy were very funny. Later, I saw Tim Kring (Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb were originally scheduled to appear as well, but I think we know why they did not show up.)

Things that Goldman missed:

* One of the first questions that the moderator (Jeff Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of Creative Screenwriting magazine, which runs the Expo) asked was what were Damon and Carlton’s worst jobs that they have had in the television industry. Carlton told a humorous story in which he used to be a writers’ assistant. His boss was horrible and at one point, broke his mint green toilet seat so he decided that it was Carlton’s job to go across the city and find a new one, which Carlton did. (The moderator wondered how Carlton’s boss could have accidentally smashed a toilet seat in the first place. Damon’s worst job was when he was the official employee to pick up the business magazines (Variety, Hollywood Reporter) and take them to the executives. But sometimes it would rain and the magazines would be damp, leading Damon to put them up on a clothesline before delivering them to his employer. Damon also said that he had an antagonistic relationship with the delivery guy.
* It was while writing the pilot that J.J. told Damon that he was not going to be a show runner because he wanted to do movies. One day, Damon walked into the editing room to find Tom Cruise screening the pilot.
* Damon was shocked by the ratings and said “Now we have to tell them what the monster is!” That got a lot of laughs from the crowd.
* Goldman mentioned this, but I must repeat it. Damon said a couple times that the pilot cost “11 and a half million dollars”. Various websites have speculated between 10 and 14 and now we know that it was ~11.5.
* Damon and Carlton used to be different forms of studio executives and this helped them because they read so many scripts. They said that they were surprised by how many unemployed writers were unprepared for interviews (Damon would ask what the story was about and the guy trying to get hired would not really know).
* Damon learned that you need to think that whatever show you are working on is the BEST show ever, even though he said that there are probably better shows on television out there. The moderator corrected him.
* In the pilot when they introduced the polar bear, they knew that a group of people had brought it to the island for experiments, but they did not decide who these people specifically were until shortly after Carlton joined Lost for “Solitary” when he and Damon had a discussion about all the big mysteries that did not have answers yet. For example, Damon already knew what the monster and the island were, but they talked about question such as, what if the group of people is called the Dharma Initiative? What if the characters get off the island before the end because the audience would totally not expect that? What if the series becomes about the characters getting back together on the island at the end of the show? What is the final episode of the show? What is in the Hatch that is soon to be introduced?
* Did road map and Harry Potter analogies.
* They acknowledged that they stalled in the third season because they did not have an ending, pointed specifically to “Claire strapping a message to a frigging bird’s foot!” That also got laughs.
* They have written the first ten episodes of season 5.
* They never planned on Tom being the leader of the Others, when asked.
* They talked about how they kind of disguised/introduced the science fiction show as a character show and said that there is no subjectivity in the Heroes pilot, for example, it could not be debated that Nathan was flaying and that Claire went into a train.
* Four scenes from the first four seasons were not shot in Hawaii. (Based on past interviews, we know that the Widmore scenes in “The Shape of Things to Come” and “There’s No Place Like Home” and the hospital scenes in “Through the Looking Glass”, but what is the fourth?)
* Carlton used to travel between Oahu and California more often than now in the first and second season
* He (and sometimes, but less often, Damon) now talks on the phone to Oahu ten times a day for a combined ninety minutes
* Carlton and Damon’s day begins with them talking about what needs to be accomplished that day and how it should be accomplished (do both of them need to be there for editing or can one of them oversee what happens in the writers’ room?) over a ninety or forty-five minute (sorry, I did not write that part down) breakfast (in Damon’s office, I believe)
* Jack Bender, Jean Higgins and Stephen Williams are the three people who run the show in Hawaii
* There are three stories per episode: main island story, flashback and “C-story” (”ping-pong”, says Damon to more laughter)
* Newest script by Brian K. Vaughan and Paul Zbyszewski starts filming on Friday (based on what they said earlier, this would be 510, but that doesn’t seem right with postings on the DarkUFO website, so maybe 510 is not fully edited)
* Sawyer is a surrogate for the audience–if the audience asks a question then it is bad, but if Sawyer points out how ridiculous someting is, the audience accepts it
* Scenes in episodes get moved around, i.e. flashback is placed at different spots, but “The Constant” is pretty much the only episode that is exactly the same from script to final cut
* Normal episodes take two weeks to break/outline, but “The Constant” took five and would have taken longer but Adam Horowitz stepped in and said “stop”
* Sawyer is the Han Solo of Lost, so they named him (James Ford) after the actor who played Han Solo (Harrison Ford)
* “A Tale of Two Cities” originally began with a Talking Heads song but it did not fit the mood at all so they changed it in post-production
* Sometimes, Gregg Nations will come up to Damon and Carlton and say that there is a continuity error with flashbacks where a newspaper date will be inconsistent with the story and instead of trying to fix it through effects for the DVD, Damon just says “Fuck you”.
* And finally, the story of the scrapped Sawyer flashback and the Tampa job. Originally, a flashback story was written and shot for Sawyer in “Adrift”, in which Sawyer goes to Florida and falls in love with Jolene Blalock’s character, who he is conning, but it was apparently was absolutely horrible so they got rid of it.
* In “The Cost of Living”, the writers thought that it would be cool if the Others had a weird funeral service and the scene was much longer, but it was just so bad so they edited it down to its bare essentials
* When asked if they get writers’ block, they said not really, because most of the season is mapped out in a three week minicamp between the seasons. There is also a smaller minicamp halfway through the season to re-examine how the plot is progressing. Now that they have set an end date, they really do not get writers’ block because they know what needs to happen.
* We are never going to meet the DeGroots, but we are most likely going to see them.
* After making sure to sign everything that people wanted to get signed (I got a couple scripts and a poster signed), Damon and Carlton escaped out the back door with security guards to be escorted back to building 23

Second ninety-minute panel with Kitsis and Horowitz: “Anatomy of an Episode”

* The moderator asked some trivia questions, e.g. what is the name of Ben’s childhood sweetheart? what did Widmore bid on? and gave out prizes, such as a Dharma hat (which is what I was hoping to win, but was not chosen to answer), the season 3 DVD or the 2009 calendar (I picked up the 2008 yearbook magazine).
* The episode for them to analyze was voted on the the Expo website. “Greatest Hits”, which I voted for, won. Th other choices were “Dave”, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”, “Exposé” and “Ji Yeon”. They ended up briefly going through these as well.
* Between the panel, they showed “Greatest Hits” on a gigantic screen
* The moderator also asked them what their worst jobs were and it seems that both Adam and Eddy worked their way up the television ladder like Damon and Carlton. Adam once had to bail a network executive’s son out of jail–the sixteen-year old had been driving without a license. Adam was not sure how it was his responsibility or why it should be his money, but he followed orders. One of Eddy’s employers made him obtain an obscure movie from Bulgaria just to see if he could (this was revealed once Eddy finally tracked it down and got it). On a more positive note, Eddy said that he used to work for Joel Silver (go look him up on Wikipedia or IMDb. A bit of trivia that I happen to know: He also invented the sport of ultimate Frisbee)
* They really like the casting of Nestor Carbonell (and Michael Emerson, of course)
* Eddy and Adam joined the show while “Numbers” was being written and they were immediately tasked with coming up with the episode’s C-story and they pitched Claire’s birthday to Damon and Carlton and that Locke would make her a crib and wrote that (I am not sure if they mean the outline or if they really did contribute dialogue to David Fury’s script while uncredited)
* Adam went home to his wife and said that he had come up with a Locke and Claire story and instead of being proud of or congratulating him, his wife got mad at him for ruining that Claire is okay because “Raised by Another” had just aired
* They were really surprised by how fans “universally hated” “Fire + Water” (which they pronounced “Fire and Water”). They thought that it was a good story and Dominc Monaghan gave a great performance. Then Adam corrected himself: His mom and his wife liked the episode so it was not “universally hated”
* They had a great time writing “Dave” (which was written because they knew that they were going to do a Hurley in the institution story eventually) and wrote the role of Dave specifically with Evan Handler in mind
* It was decided in the minicamp between seasons 2 and 3 that Charlie would die in “Greatest Hits”, but they decided in the midseason minicamp that Charlie should have one more victory and would die in the finale instead (great decision, I think)
* “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” is Eddy’s favourite episode that they have done. The idea was to do a hopeful episode because there had been a lot of bleak and heavy episodes at that time. They said that it was fun to stick a heavily mythological element, which was merely funny at the time, into what was pretty much the most character-driven episode of the season (”Roger Workman”)
* One time, Adam was discussing “Exposé” with Damon and went to give a thumbs up, when a tendon or something in his thumb suddenly snapped, and Eddy shrieked/yelled and fell over in pain as he was beginning to give his thumbs up. This is now something of a running gag in the writers’ room where Damon will give thumbs up and mock Adam
* Beginning in the first season when the writers would get writers’ block, they would come up with long and elaborate episodes of Exposé (the show about three strippers who solved crime with the Cobra secretly behind the murders), e.g. “I don’t know how we are going to reveal what is in the Hatch, but I do know that what happened that time that two of the strippers from Exposé solved the murder of the…” followed by details
* The chairs in the writers’ room now have Exposé seatbacks
* Damon and Carlton decided to prank Adam and Eddy in the final days before “Exposé” began shooting and Adam was extremely sad by the fake news that Billy Dee Williams had passed that it was not funny when Damon and Carlton realized that they should not have joked about this and told them that they were kidding
* The average Lost script is 57 pages and then they give it to Damon and Carlton for them to leave notes. They said that they and the other writers really try to avoid going past 59 pages because Damon and Carlton like the number 5 (even though it is not one of “the numbers”) and too many scenes will have to be cut. Before writing the script, a 30-page outline is written. Based on what other professional writers said in other panels and seminars at the Expo, I now know that this is ridiculously long. The script for “Exposé” was 65 pages long and they had to cut a lot of material. They wanted the episode to rewarding for the fans who had really been paying attention and tried to redo as many old scenes as they could.
* It was one of the most difficult episodes to do because they had to reconstruct the plane crash site and the editors had to search through archives for unused angles of footage from previous episodes
* They also tried to answer every minor mystery in the episode–their favourite one that got cut featured Paulo finding Shannon’s inhaler and saying “what’s this?” before tossing it aside into the jungle
* Adam thought about what he would need on the island and he is addicted to Nicorette since he quit smoking six years ago so they worked that into the story
* Damon and Carlton came up with the “Ji Yeon” plot device
* “Ji Yeon” happened to be written and outlined really smoothly
* They like how Michael never went back to the island, but had a huge influence on his fellow islanders. Also, Michael’s story was told just how they wanted it and was not affected by the strike
* They said something about the freighter people arriving at the end of season 3 (they have just been referring to Naomi, or they may have been referring to how Michael was originally supposed to return in “Through the Looking Glass”
* The “Born to Run” scene where Charlie and Kate talk and Charlie is really excited and confident that they will be rescued was a side that they wanted to explore
* Usually, Jack, Sawyer and Locke get the heroic moments and with “Greatest Hits”, they wanted to show that Charlie was also a hero and had always been something of one throughout his life
* Group speeches where Jack or somebody is talking to like fifteen people, such as the “we’re gonna blow ‘em all to hell” speech, are the hardest scenes to write
* But they are not as hard to write as the one with Sayid talking about the Looking Glass. That scene was originally several pages longer than it ended up being in the final product because they were so concerned with how the Looking Glass could still be working if it was flooded, which at that point in the episode, is what the audience is led to believe. Jack asked how it could be and then Sayid and the other characters came up with a variety of elaborate explanations for how. They finally fixed it by saying “who cares?” In the actual episode, Jack asks how it can still work and Sayid responds with “How it still works is irrelevant. What we do…” That was another funny story.
* In season 2, either Eddy or Adam (did not write down which) would burn CDs for the writing staff, saying that something like “here is what the Dharma Initiative is listening to this week!” and Shambala (”Tricia Tanaka is Dead” was one of them)
* The executives at ABC are great because they really are fans of the show and basically give suggestions only where something might be confusing to the audience, but the writing staff has an unusually large amount of leeway for network television with science fiction storylines and elements
* This year, Paul Zbyszewski (from Day Break) and Melinda Hsu Taylor (from Women’s Murder Club, Vanished and Medium) are new staff writers; Kyle Pennington (”Cabin Fever”) has worked his way up from post-production and is now a staff writer; it is never explicitly said, but strongly implied that Drew Goddard and Christina M. Kim are also no longer staff writers
* Eddy and Adam spent more time post-panel with fans before leaving before they also were escorted out the back door by security guards (I got them to also sign my poster, but I forgot to print off a script for them–I believe that “Fire + Water” is online.)

source : andy blog

Lost's Past and Future

US, November 15, 2008 - Lost's executive producer/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse spoke today at Creative Screenwriting's 2008 Screenwriting Expo, for an informative and fun Q&A about their creative process on the fascinating series.

The duo talked about their history together, dating back to when Cuse hired Lindelof as a writer on Nash Bridges. Cuse recounted how he'd specifically asked to see something original Lindelof had written (as opposed to a spec script based on an existing series), and was very impressed by the 17 page sample he was given of a one-act play Lindelof wrote… only to later discover Lindelof had hastily written those pages specifically for Cuse to see.

Nash Bridges star Cheech Marin plays Hurley's dad on Lost, and Cuse revealed another Nash alum, Patrick Fischler, will be guest starring on an episode in Season 5. Mad Men fans will recognize Fischler for his recent role as Jimmy Barrett.

After working on Kevin Williamson's Wasteland, Nash Bridges and Tim Kring's Crossing Jordan, Lindelof recalled a meeting where he was told he'd have, "'a great chance for you to meet J.J. [Abrams],' who I'd been stalking for years, since Felicity and Alias." When Abrams made it clear he had no interest in running Lost on the heels of four years each of Felicity and Alias, and also thanks to his interest in features, Lindelof knew he, "needed someone with experience" to help him, and turned to his old boss Cuse.

Lindelof admitted he was initially intimidated by the "insane creative challenges" of Lost, recalling that while they were waiting to hear if the project would be picked up as a series, he had people at the network telling him, "Yeah, the pilot is great, but there's no series there. How are you going to do this every week?" Lindelof joked that his reply was, "I have no f**ing idea. Please don't pick it up!"

Lost
Lost had a very expensive pilot, costing 11.5 million dollars. Cuse and Lindelof recalled that the ABC executive who greenlit it, "knew ABC was going to fire him, so this was sort of his final f**k you to them."

Discussing the flashbacks on the series, Cuse said it was really exciting in the first year, answering the question, "Who are these guys?", as the flashbacks could reveal big surprises about the character and their history. However, Cuse said eventually the problem became, "There's only so many revelatory flashbacks," and that by the time you get to flashbacks answering, "'Why does Jack have tattoos' and 'Why does Desmond call everyone brother', it's a fairly good illustration that these flashbacks were running out of steam"

Cuse and Lindelof expressed their thankfulness they they've firmly established an end date for the series, saying the challenge of the flashbacks were one illustration that, "there's a finite amount of material" in the story of Lost.

However, Cuse noted how helpful the flashbacks were early on, bringing up the example of the episode where Sawyer is trying to kill the boar – by showing flashbacks that helped explain why Sawyer could become so obsessed with something seemingly so random, it could flesh out the character without having him stop to deliver a long monologue, which Cuse said would have consisted of, "Here's why I need to kill that boar, because it represents X!"

Asked if they know the answers to all the questions they raise on the show right away or sometimes figure it out as they go along, the duo said it was a combination of the two. Lindelof recalled how the entire pilot was put together – including writing, casting and production – in 12 weeks, which didn't allow much time to come up with any long-term mythology. However, once the series was given a full season order, beyond the initial 12 episode order it received, Cuse said he and Lindelof sat down and discussed, "What the overall mythological underpinnings of the show would be. We quickly landed on the ending, and then constructed this broader road map of other mythological points we'd hit on this story."
While each season of Lost is mapped out, the duo said you have to, "let the show organically tell us what it's going to be," bringing up the character of Ben Linus as an example. Ben was originally only intended for a three episode arc, and Lindelof and Cuse were playing a bit of wait and see as to whether or not he would turn out to be the leader of the Others, based on how things went with the actor playing the part. But once Michael Emerson was cast, "he was so good, we ended up writing eight episodes for that guy," in Season 2, and then made him a regular. The decision to extend the original Ben storyline, in which he was held captive within the hatch, then had an influence on other storylines – Lindelof said they'd already decided that Michael, forced to help the Others to get Walt back, would kill Ana Lucia and Libby. But by extending Emerson's time on the show, Michael's specific task now became to free Ben.

Lindelof said they also knew from the start that Kate had killed someone and that it was probably her father – but, "the question became 'when do we pull the trigger on [telling that story]?" and that the key was to, "bring it to an emotional point where it's relevant to what's happening on the island. "

However, Lindelof and Cuse said that things had changed considerably now that they know the end of the show, with Lindelof explaining, "Certainly since we got an end date, that sort of fly by the seat of your pants story is gone now. Showing scenes [set] three years from now, you can't change it."

Cuse said that while they know the fans love to dissect the mythology, "We probably spend 80% on character, and 20% on mythology," stressing that he thinks the focus on the characters, is "Why the show crossed over to not being a small genre show." That being said, he acknowledged, "This year will probably be a little bit more science fictiony."

Lindelof laughed that, "We sort of suckered people into this show but not presenting it as a science fiction show right out of the gate," noting that there were elements early on that were, "like a Rorschach test", saying that when Flight 815's pilot is killed, someone who didn't like sci-fi would think, "there has to be a rational explanation." Even the reveal that Locke could walk on the island was tempered by the fact that they still hadn't revealed why he was in the chair in the first place, leaving the opportunity that, "it could be psychosomatic." Lindelof said Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great example of a story that has blatantly science fiction elements, noting, "Nazis melt and ghost fly out of this ark," but that it waits a long time before presenting these elements, allowing the audience to fall in love with Indiana Jones first. Lindelof said he felt shows like Invasion probably had a harder time finding a wide audience because, "They said 'Alien!', right out of the gate.'"

Lindelof said that when it came to slowly building into more science fiction, "Lost has really been about the long con, because by the time we get to season 6, it's going to be f**king crazy!"

The duo stressed that while they have introduced time travel and flash-forwards into Lost, they've firmly decided to never do a paradox story, with Cuse saying, "It's not like Heroes," where the future is always something that can be prevented or changed, but in fact on Lost, "There's nothing you can do to stop it from happening, and the more you try to stop it, the more potential there is for you to be the cause [of that future event]."

Cuse said he felt that if the future is always alterable, the stakes are lower, and they wanted to "set the bar higher. What they saw [in the future] is what actually happens. That is going to inevitably occur."

As for the end of the series, and whether every question will be answered, Lindelof noted, "Sometimes we're presenting things that are not really questions for us, but they become questions for the audience, and we don't have an intention of answering them." He said that something like what is causing that roar in the jungle they certainly intend to answer, but, "that's not to say there won't be some questions left," depending on the individual viewer and what they become fixated on.

He went on to say, "There's a fine line between The Sopranos ending and the way we plan on ending our show. There are going to be a lot of mythological wrap ups, but our suspicion is most people really care how the characters end up - who's going to end up with who? Who lives? Who dies? Those are the questions we're really interested in answering." Cuse gave an example he's given before, The Phantom Menace's infamous midichlorians, of how you want to be careful of going too far explaining things that probably don't need to be explained. The duo noted that there are certain questions specific people can get hung up on that aren't integral to a story – two examples given were "Why are certain people born with the ability to use magic?" in Harry Potter and "Why is the wardrobe a portal to Narnia?" in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Acknowledging the failure of Nikki and Paulo with the audience, Cuse answered a question about the oft-confused Steve and Scott and said that not only would there not be an episode focused on them, but that there is "a very tragic event that happens this season." Lindelof said the original plan for Nikki and Paulo was to have them be like Rose and Bernard, "and occasionally have these characters melt out of the chorus so they had a voice. We weren't going to make them part of the grand story arc." Cuse said that when they decided to write Nikki and Paulo out, they took plans they had for their overall back-story, and "put it into one episode. We would have played that out over a much more elaborate set of flashbacks. Instead we compressed it into one episode."

Discussing how Mr. Eko became a much shorter-lived character than originally intended, Lindelof noted how it stemmed from actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who did not like living in Hawaii. Lindelof said, " Our Mr. Eko plans very quickly derailed. Adawele's unhappiness was almost instantaneous. On his second episode, he was expressing extreme dissatisfaction." This led to them quickly changing Mr. Eko's storyline to one that would only last one season. Asked what might have happened with Eko had he been the long term character he was going to be, Lindelof answered, "Originally he was going to be someone who challenged Locke for the spiritual leadership of the castaways."

Talking about Desmond and Penny and the fact that they reunited at the end of Season 4, Cuse and Lindelof said they liked putting a big dramatic beat like that in well before the end, instead of saving it all for the final episode. Lindelof also said that having played out their separation for so long, "If we'd waited any longer to get them back together, it would have risked people going, 'Enough already.'" That being said, going forward, "It's a challenge, because they're together now." Evoking other famous TV couples like Ross and Rachel, and on the negative side, David and Maddie, Lindelof said the question becomes, "Do we still have compelling stories to tell with these characters?"

As the panel ended, moderator Jeff Goldsmith jokingly asked the duo their "Favorite scene from the Season 6 finale." Cuse's answer was obviously a joke, as he said his favorite scene was, "the set up for the zombie season." Fans can speculate however on whether Lindelof was joking or giving any sort of real hint, when he said, "It involves a volcano." Come May 2010, we'll find out.

source : ign.com