| Ron Moore: Expect a Spacier Roswell
By Don Lipper
posted: 07:41 am ET
08 December 2000
|
Ronald D. Moore was
on the writing staff for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep
Space Nine and Voyager, as well as writing two Trek flicks,
Generations
and
First Contact. Along the way he won a Hugo and was nominated for
an Emmy.
Now he’s landed in the strange
new world of The WB network’s teen alien angst series Roswell and
he’s boldly taking the series where it’s never been before. If you wanna
know about the new direction, here’s a sneak peek as to why the show’s
not just aliens in Dawson’s Creek.
SPACE.com: How did
you get involved with Roswell?
RDM: Last spring sometime
my agent called me up and just said, "are you interested in Roswell?"
I’d never seen the show, I’d heard of it, I know where it had been critically
well received, and of course I knew Jonathan [Frakes, known in Trek circles
as a film
director and Next Generation’s "Riker"] was working on
it, but I hadn’t actually seen it.
So they sent me over about
a half dozen episodes from the first season and I just sat down and watched
them and I got into it. I found it very endearing and very human and honest.
I really liked the cast,
I really took to the characters and the actors playing them and the writing.
I was especially taken with Shiri
Appleby [Liz]. The relationship between her and Jason
Behr [Max] was tremendous and it really appealed to me.
So I had a meeting with Jason
Katims who created and runs the show and we hit it off, and talked about
how we’d like to work on television and what are the important things to
each of us, and writing and working on staff and it was a good fit and
so we made a deal.
SPACE.com: What is
important to you when you’re working on a show?
RDM: First and foremost,
I want to be proud of the show I work on.
I was very proud to work
on Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It meant a lot to
me that I was able to write on a show that I could tell people to watch
and that I felt I was doing good work on. That was primary.
I also really value a close-knit
staff, where we’re all in it together and we’re all friends that hang out,
argue, cry and laugh together and work out the stories. I didn’t want to
step into a political problem. You can argue and have creative differences,
but if it’s all about the work, that was fine.
Next page: Roswell's second
season
SPACE.com: Did
they have a direction for the show’s second season before you came in?
RDM: If you watch
the evolution of the first season, by the end of it you see them looking
to find the voice of the show. By the end of the first season, I think
they had found the direction they wanted to go.
The last five or six episodes
sent them in a very specific directions. The season finale, called "Destiny",
revealed a great deal about these kids. Suddenly their mother comes in
this message and says, "You were the leader of the planet, this was your
bride, this is your sister, this was her husband, you were all sent here,
you all lived before, you were killed, you’ve been sent here to one day
come back and help us."
Once you laid that out, it
propelled you in a certain direction for the second season, they couldn’t
really ever go back to being just kids. Suddenly the stakes had been raised
and the universe had been opened to them in a very different way. They
sent out a signal and the implication was, people are coming, and bad shit’s
going to happen next year.
So at the beginning of this
season we all sat down and talked about how to deliver on that promise.
Where do you go from here? So there was a general direction the show was
going [in] before I even got here.
Next: on writing a non-ship
show
SPACE.com: You have
the experience of Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager.
How
is it different writing for a show where they’re not on a ship?
RDM: They’re people,
it’s more human. The characters are allowed to be more flawed and more
human because they’re not projected into this 24th century future. They’re
not Starfleet officers and they haven’t gone through all this training
and they’re not supposed to be people that have seen it all.
With the Trek crews, there
was always a presumption that if a shapeshifter walks through your door,
they’re not supposed to be totally blown away and start screaming.
The kids are kids, dealing
with the outlandish situations that they land themselves in. But they’re
still kids and trying to go to high school and trying to maintain lives
and relationships. There’s more freedom of character, because you can really
play the full panoply of human emotion and play the reactions and their
conflict and their conflicts among the groups and the shifting relationships.
It’s a different canvas than
Star
Trek. On Star Trek I was able to paint things bigger and in
broader strokes. We were dealing with the fates of empires, federations
and galactic wars and questions of great import for all of humanity.
Here, the stakes are much
smaller. It’s a very small core group of people and yes, there’s another
planet out there someplace, and the events here have great meaning for
untold millions of people elsewhere. But the heart and soul of the show
is about the core group of characters, who are mostly kids, and how they
deal with these things that are dumped on them every week.
Next: young people, small
dynamics
SPACE.com: What other
advantages does having such a young cast give to you as a writer?
RDM: It means that,
at the age that these kids are, they’re growing up, trying to mature and
they’re not fully formed people yet.
All the Star Trek characters,
even the youngest of them, except for the Wesley Crushers of the world,
were adults that had accomplished certain things, they had gone through
intense training, they had made all these different cuts, and they were
the best of the best.
And here, these are just
kids who struggle, some of them aren’t doing so well in school and others
have personal problems. They’re dealing with many different problems, more
relatable problems, than the Star Trek characters were.
SPACE.com: Roswell
is
a different form of science fiction television where the big sci-fi premise
is this really huge backdrop and character is this little tiny thing that
occasionally you squeeze in with rewrites.
But with Roswell, even
when you’re dealing with big science fiction premises, you’ve got alien
invasions, time travel and all that stuff, that the personal character
stories are in the foreground more, and it’s much more of the interrelationship
of how this particular alien invasion affects the dynamics of the group.
RDM: Absolutely, that’s
what we care about as writers on the staff. How do the events affect our
group? How does it affect the Max/Liz relationship, what does it say about
Michael, what can we learn about Isabel through this episode?
It’s really about this core
group of people, and that’s what I think is the show’s unique charm. Science
fiction is truly a background, even when it’s dominating the story.
SPACE.com: I think
that science fiction has always fallen down because you have great premises
and robotic characters.
RDM: That’s one of
the traps. I think too often writers and writer/producers focus on the
outlandish situation and how to deliver the big technical yadda yadda,
and how do we get another spaceship in here, and where’s the space battle
and where’s the creepy-headed monster and all that kind of crap. Roswell
just
approaches it from a very different place.
The reason the original
Star Trek succeeded, I have always firmly believed, has more to do
with the characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy than it really did about the
adventures that they went on. With Trek, through the years, the struggle
has been to keep the focus on that -- it’s about the characters and how
they deal with these situations, not the situations themselves.
SPACE.com: My perfect
example of that is ER, because no one watches ER for the
trauma, they watch it for the characters.
RDM: I know, that’s
a good analogy, because ER throws around a lot of techno talk and
a lot of babble and medical jargon that I haven’t got the vaguest idea
what the hell they’re talking about, but you’re watching it because you
care about the characters who are saying it.
SPACE.com: Is there
a series arc?
RDM: Overall? Yes,
in general terms. I don’t think you’re going to see the characters ever
get home. I think going home and what it means to go home and whether they
want to go home and are they more human than alien is sort of the largest
of the series arc. Where do these kids belong and where do they want to
belong and what are they going to do with themselves? That’s the big overriding
question of the series.
SPACE.com: Are they
going to get offworld this year?
RDM: I don’t think
so. Jason and I talked pretty early and said, I think the second you put
these kids on spaceships, or take them into an alien planet, it’s going
to change the tone and feel of Roswell, which feels very much like
it belongs here on Earth.
I think if you take the kids
too far out of that and stick them into something else, if you put them
on the bridge of the Enterprise, I think you’re watching a different show
and it changes the whole tone of the piece.
SPACE.com: But you’re
sending them to New York?
RDM: Yeah. To New
York, sure, or Los Angeles. Anywhere here, I buy that. It just seems
more real, I can accept that and find things to play there.
And frankly, let’s face it,
New York is going to be more alien and crazy than anything we ever came
upon in Star Trek. The joke among the writers on Trek was
always that there are more fascinating, bizarre, alien cultures on Earth
than anything we ever tried to portray on any of the series.
The New York episode [felt]
very unlike any of the other episodes. It starts off differently, it’s
a different musical cue, it’s a different visual cue. Everything about
that episode feels a little different than what we’ve done so far. And
that’s a deliberate choice, it’s the first time any of the kids have gone
to something like that.
SPACE.com: What sort
of image are we going to get of the galactic conflict out there? We’ve
got the planet where the Skins come from and we’ve got the planet where
the Roswell kids come from. Are we going to see that sort of a ground
war on Earth?
RDM: We go back and
forth on how much combat we want to see on Earth and what the stakes should
be. I think you always want that threat, but it’s a very fine line.
We got away with doing something
like "Wipeout"
where the entire town disappeared and none of them noticed. But you can’t
do too much like that.
SPACE.com: Does each
season have a theme in your mind? Are you working toward season five where
all hell’s gonna be breaking loose?
RDM: No, I don’t think
we have it out that far. We know where we want to end up at the end of
this season, and because of that we know how it’s going to set the table
for things next season. And beyond that is all uncharted territory.
Next: what's up for the rest
of the season
SPACE.com: So what
can fans look forward to for the rest of the season?
RDM: The Dupes
episode answered a lot of questions of what the backstory is on the
Pod Squad and the Dupes. So that cleared things up quite a bit.
After that, we do a Christmas
episode, which is kind of a stand-alone episode that’s tailored to Christmas.
Then after the first of the year we start a new arc that launches us in
a different direction. That one starts in a pretty dark place. With Isabel
getting flashes of a girl who’s been kidnapped and being held and tortured
someplace. She’s trying to help her and doesn’t know who this girl is.
SPACE.com: Do you
see a time coming when the franchise broadens, so that in effect, you have
them fighting crime?
RDM: I think we can
do stuff like that, [but] I don’t think that it would ever become their
drive. We’ve talked about them using their abilities and powers and nature
as aliens to help a human problem get solved in some fashion.
SPACE.com: Right from
the start of this season, Roswell has broken out of the box of just
being Roswell-centric. Was there the idea right from the start that, we’re
gonna do a flashback
episode, we’re gonna do a time
travel episode, we’re gonna do the
Skins invading?
RDM: Yeah, we just
said "let’s go for it and let’s not be afraid to tell different kinds of
stories and to mix it up a little bit." There’s a lot of different ways
to do something in this format, the canvas is larger. This isn’t Dawson’s
Creek, so let’s not pretend it is. Sometimes you’re gonna fail, and
that’s okay, and then you get back up and try it again.
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