Below is a new article from IGN.com. (It contains some minor spoilers).
LOST’s executive producer/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse spoke yesterday 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 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.”
Damon talked to AMCtv.com about different aspects of writing Lost:
Q: When it comes to Lost, you seem very willing to respond to audience demands about what we want to see. Why?
A: We’re writing a television show that’s supposed to be consumed by the masses. In the same way that a gladiator in the Roman arena lived or died based on whether or not he was entertaining, we feel like an instantaneous thumbs up, thumbs down response is huge for us. More importantly, the majority of the writers on Lost are fanboys. There’s a ripple effect that occurs where we say, “Nikki and Paolo are not working. We don’t like them, the audience isn’t going to like them.” By the time the audience starts complaining about Nikki and Paolo, we’ve already written a script where they get buried alive.
Q: Is it difficult to change course midstream when so much of the show is plotted from the beginning?
A: The uber-mythology has to stay the same because there’s stuff we’ve set up that has to pay off. But there is wiggle room in terms of the way the characters experience that story. In our minds, Mr. Eko was going to be a character who made it to close to the end of the show, but because Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was so unhappy being on the show, we had to say, “Alright, life intervenes. Who else can we tell the story with? Can we re-jigger Locke to have it be him, or can we make Benjamin Linus a little bit more of a man of faith?” You adapt the characters as you go.
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