BSG Documentary 1978

do i do something no you wait if you believe this man he's gone blank is there's this epic story and yet the character stories and the relationships between these characters was endearing i was a little tiny cog in a very big wheel i'll always cherish the opportunity and the honor to have worked with so many legendary performers [Music] we're talking about the famous never forgotten epic space odyssey adventure series called battlestar galactica produced back in 1978. battlestar galactica was was a huge show it was just mind-boggling it was so big we were on the cover of every major national international magazine oh yeah that was touted around the country around the world we had so much hype it was one of the biggest events ever on television i believe they had 60 70 million people watched the original episode air on tv and i think it was either number four number five it was the highest rated network sci-fi debut ever in history so it was a huge launch and in the middle of that was lauren greene which in the story of battlestar galactica he was the guy that kept us all again it was true of the production too so he kept everything sort of steady and we all kind of you know were finding our ways around him for us it was kind of getting getting to know one another and it happened kind of fast and kind of organically one of the biggest problems we had shooting battlestar galactica was the fact that there was very little lead time because we were forced to go to series so quickly and i believe glenn wanted to push it back a year abc wanted it now it changed from a mini-series very quickly into a series which meant they had to really rush and prepare scripts imagine being in the fourth hour of the mini series and realizing within a couple of weeks you're going into series and having to develop now a whole series of scripts and a story arc to take this series into 24 episodes we did some good things it was a killer i mean you know we were working around the clock you know sometimes you beg for a bullet put me out of my misery with this it was tough it was tough to get those things out in the time we had we were getting scenes at the last minute we were getting scripts at the last second right before you're gonna shoot hey here's the rewrite wait we're shooting oh sometimes we got the rewritten pages the day after we'd shot it we'd already shot the other stuff and they sent new pages we did this yesterday we spent a great deal of time learning the changes and it really kept us all out of trouble because we didn't have time for a social life we were so busy learning what we had to do there's one scene that we're all sitting around a table having a strategy meeting we literally had been given those pages that morning if you look at the scene there's an awful lot of deep thinking going on there's a lot of people going well i think and then i think herb actually like rocks back in his chair and does this and he's looking at the post where his words are there was a point where we would shoot two or three episodes at a time and scripts we were writing it literally as we went five minutes before we would get on camera they would you know hand us some new dialogue new pages and we'd learn them and i mean there were even times where they would mess the pages up we get pages from the other script and there was so much chaos going on sometimes where you just didn't know which end was up and we were running back and forth and we'd go in and look at the pages and go okay what show is this what's happening now it was kind of crazy i remember it was monday and we were waiting for a go-ahead on our next script wednesday afternoon about 3 30 or maybe even later we got the go-ahead to write murder on the rising star we had a log line we had murder occurs blah blah blah we had no story that had to be finished in mimeo friday morning at seven o'clock we didn't go home i quite honestly don't believe i even had a full script before i started shooting so a lot of the decisions were made on basically what we had we were pretty much kind of like on the run the minute we got it glenn and and don belisario were both under the gun to get them done to make them exciting interesting and humorous and and i think it was hard a lot of times you had to think on your feet sometimes we'd have to shut down for an hour while the actors went away and learned their lines and while i tried to figure out what the devil to do with the scene in the first place i mean first of all it was the biggest thing on american television you know that was being shot at that time was the first time they really went for a movie imagine doing not only a series but a series on the epic size and scope of the theatrical movie on an hourly basis weekly the conflict was to keep the pressure off of everybody my job has always been to give the crew all the actors everybody a chance to do what they do as well as they can possibly do it so that they can be creative to the best of their ability let's find the control center we found it all right where there let's go i never before or after that had an experience like that it's really what film is all about the magic pretending the sets and the costumes and the cylons and everything was so real you walk onto the set you feel like you're a part of what's going on for some reason i had always been friends with special effects people and i always thought that was really neat so they would always show me how they did it and let me play with the little flashes and and the explosions of course when the special effects are done right as in our case we had john dykstra the the best of the best doing all the special effects for us the realities they created was was extraordinary i think it was a little groundbreaking at the time they didn't have the advantage of what they have nowadays with the cgi computer generated imagery we didn't have that luxury we had mat shots and some miniatures the interesting thing about making galactic is that some of the scenes were very mechanical and were all composed in the camera the bridge is a combination of a live set it's a combination of the actors who are playing on that and the effects guys who set the charges and the effects guys set the beams to drop into place it's what is on the monitors themselves and all of those sunk to 24 frame camera and the front projection screens that all had to time to what's going to happen in front so it was interesting in terms of timing to try to put all those things together and composite in the camera other times certainly when the compositing didn't really happen in the camera we were talking about the attack of the cylons that we shot down in long beach where the cylon ships came in and that was all digital and composed even before we went and picked the location the shape and form of the flight of those was already something that john was developing because it took a while frame by frame to animate that so he said to me here's what they're gonna do they're gonna come in like this they're gonna come in like this we said okay then we can put the charges here and put the effects people in here so it was be able to create then that part which was composed in the camera and left to send over to apogee and to john to put the vipers in and with the streaks that came down and hit the mechanical charges a lot of it was uh matte it was a black screen later they would put a mat into the camera and show what world they wanted back there some of it was front projection like in the vipers they had loops projected behind us and we would sit in our vipers and then in front of a screen in the middle of a sound stage and a guy running around with a broom okay look over here look over here now we're down here i said well where are the cylon aircraft which way do we look and hold it here and then hold it up there i had a great deal of difficulty doing the viper shots when we first started it was so antiseptic first of all you were just alone i just hope the pegasus is still around when you get there and they saved it all until usually friday and you do all the viper shots in one day and you just sit there and they do scene after scene after scene after scene i got him on the right i got him apollo no look out look out it's all right apollo i'm picking him up dive oh frack velga carb cut and there were times when we'd have two or three guys on each side of the cockpit mock up and if we were meant to bank left or right or nose up or nose down they would physically just yank you this way or yank you that way or lift you up a little bit we all wanted to get in there shoot through space at light speed i built it up into this extraordinary experience and i was couldn't wait to get in the viper and fly through space but it was nowhere resembling the fantasy and then they pulled a joke on me because they actually had two of these vipers and so one time i'm flying through space and trying to be serious and all of a sudden i'm looking at the right side and i see another viper and it's going the opposite direction and it's sitting next to me i'm supposed to be going breakneck speeds and he's slowly going by and i look over and it's dirk and he looks he does this wonderful double take because all the ships are going the other way except for him i don't know if they turned the cockpit mock up around or something it was it's terribly funny it was challenging to get the background plates to time with the actors or the actors to type with the background plates as a case may be action right here apollo the loops that they used on the projection behind us we're very short that's i think you'd have three seconds or six seconds to watch it react and then say you're lying and action here starbuck holy frack apollo let's do it again ready and action starbuck holy frack a paul throw all around us okay ready one more we got one more maybe i should get an action starbuck only frack apollo okay cut i can do love scenes in three seconds but i couldn't do the the viper shots make me leave like it's wonderful starbuck did have sex in the show but there's only one really kind of love scene [Music] we shot that scene by the way two ways one with my shirt on and one with it off it was great fun we giggled a lot listen if it goes for 30 or 40 seconds it was great to have those love scenes with something that you really liked really liked you know [Music] they called and they said we have to reshoot the launch tubes and i said why and and they said well you guys were having a little too much fun we were laughing so much and and and starbuck had his shirt off [Music] the network went this is the kid time we can't starbucks shouldn't have a shirt off that implies something else is going on in there and we just want it to be a romantic sweet thing okay cut it that's fine you know when you think of moments that were memorable to you one was triad actually playing we got to play it i mean we'd hang out on the set and while they were setting up and we were all evolving the game so we were actually playing games against each other that was extremely fun day they put us in these like jock straps they were so embarrassing we were nothing more than hunks of flesh we were beefcake there was exploitation of male sexuality action take it easy take it easy take it easy you know i've had a baritone voice since i'm about 13 14 years old you gotta know that don't go i think i mean these things were so doggone tight i thought i was gonna turn into a tenor man well loretta and i just had the best time with those boys in those triad uniforms because they came out little speedo shorts with hockey helmets on and we just teased them terribly i mean she has a much more vivid memory of this and it was the whole thing about those those costumes that the guys wore were a scream you know they were they just cried out for for you know teasing i mean these guys had been in these great warrior costumes with their laser guns and then they come in and these little funny triad things with their little helmets and their ears sticking out they were so cute and so we kept trying to think of funny things to do there's a shot where both dirk and richard are about to go into the arena of you know to play their triad game and us girls are standing behind them like you know you go guys you go win this triad game for us girls and they turn and look at each other and give one of these heroic let's go into the field of battle looks to each other at which point loretta and i grabbed the back of those little speedo pants and went yank and we gave those boys wedgies they still remember she's the instigator on that one but we laughed so hard we felt that we had the upper hand in that situation with the guys the raid on gamora when we all parachuted in our very slick looking black leather spandex outfits we all thought we were so hot in those and hockey helmets again god bless jean-pierre dorliak he was the most creative designer that was where i got to get out of my med tech uniform they were hot but they were you didn't care i mean annie lockhart and i were so thrilled to have something like that and strut around a little bit and have laser guns there were lots of you know explosions going off and we did have our lasers our handheld lasers and there was lots of you know ducking and hiding so it was pretty cool had skydivers they actually jumped right over cal state northridge and they came in and landed right on the money for the actors scene they had a crane and they had us uh in a full harness and they just swung us down to the ground you know at speed you know of course firing the lasers blowing up the cylons [Music] don't shoot that was my dream episode in that way and working with lloyd bridges first they were going to bring in richard crenna to do that which at that time i thought oh wow that would be so great and these guys had to be bigger than life and lloyd bridges was all of that commander kane is a uh incarnation of someone like general patton a good cylon's a dead cylon and why are we running we should stop and get rid of these guys now or they're gonna be on our ass forever he became a really popular character when he came in and there's fruit there for further exploration he was quite a bit older than me and it was a little intimidating for me to to do scenes with him in the beginning but he made it very simple he'd say well let's run it through let's run it a couple of times they had a romance and starbuck got jealous you know lloyd bridges comes in and he's used to cassiopeia hanging out waiting for him and all of a sudden there was a guy in her past first i thought i was an old guy and then when the minute he showed up they made a better couple than starbuck and cassiopeia did and i thought their scenes together very very good i ran into his wife a couple years ago i said i worked with your husband years ago and she said that's right and we talked about it she said he was a little old for you and we had we really laughed about it [Applause] the other character that i responded to very much was patrick mcnee [Music] patrick mcnee came aboard as a mysterious character who was really mythologically or in reality supposed to represent the devil he was a very clever character i was i played over two weeks very well incidentally um and you never knew whether he was good or bad and that was the whole point of character yes so it was directed in two parts i was in two episodes on a very good show there's a piece of that episode which is my favorite line ever spoken to me by any other character in battlestar galactica and patrick mcnee said it to me although it was cut there is a scene in the aggro ship when i am very much in a trance and he has got me under his spell and he's saying you know i can be what you want and i know what you're looking for put your trust in me and i promise you that everything will be possible and then he kisses me and prior to kissing me i had a line which was something like i'm afraid or i'm scared and pat's next line which he did his best to deliver with a straight face was oh sheba nothing can harm you as long as i am inside you we cannot touch you so long as i [Music] am inside you i burst out laughing he burst out laughing we we tried to he tried to look past my ear and say it to me i tried to look at his forehead when he said it and we just it was so funny we just got you know terrible giggles we did finally actually manage to get this line of dialogue out in those days it was standards and practices who were the network sensors and i think they looked at it and said you can't have that man saying that to her when they first land on the planet to see the spaceship where ibly has crashed it was shot in infrared to give it a real otherworldly look you say that your knowledge of the universe is infinite have you ever heard of the planet earth i have been there the part of war of the gods that was shot on infrared film a decision was made to try this process and it made everything look really weird and eerie because it changes the colors of everything our makeup had to be kind of a mint green it was sort of this pale greeny thing they put on our faces and i remember sitting there looking at myself in the makeup trailer thinking i don't want to be seen like this they said oh no no you're going to look great i went great i look like pea soup you know you're too odd to see yourselves you look really weird really i've never seen you look better probably my favorite shot because who didn't grow up wanting to be in a western and strap on a gun and you know be able to basically have a gun fight i got to do that in the lost warrior i got to go up against red eye and that was one of my obviously favorite shows it was a really interesting father-son shane kind of story which i thought was pretty neat and then a little high noon thrown in you know for good measure and the town kind of being oppressed by these other guys because they had the big gun you know once they lost a big gun they showed you know who they really were weaklings and in a sense it kind of epitomized the show the technological the human you know the controlled and the liberated free thinking free expressive human being and i think in a sense all the battle star was about that but it was so cool to pull the gun fire away and see that big cylon explode and then i remember they had the little strap on the back and the special effects to slam him backwards against the wall i don't recall the lost warrior being much of a long day type of shoot we were on the back lot as a matter of fact the horseback scene was up where the universal amphitheater is now up on that hill it was so cold well it's a bang and a bang and a boom and you're done but you're up there three four five hours i mean your jaw starts shaking you start chattering it's so cold from the winds across the top of that hill but when we got into the maga character on nine lives and with the balthar's escape they were killer days it was terribly hot there's about 40 pounds of wardrobe a brillo pad beard and apache type wig and it was a five o'clock makeup call on the set about 7 or 7 15 and we didn't get we had another hour to take that stuff off so that it could be reused the next morning they took about i would say about three hours of makeup maybe even more but those guys i have to admire them that's brutal and i must have been even more brutal then because you know a lot of the techniques that have been developed on your on the motion pictures you know in those times the eyebrows were plastic you know he couldn't do a thing with it so that i'm sure was not what i would consider unadulterated fun it was itchy and it was hot it was uncomfortable those are plastic pieces glued to your face to get that uh cro-magnon forehead and then there's a kind of a really tough brillo pad type beard which is glued on so you have to kind of talk like this and you don't move a lot and then what do you have for lunch well you can't chew it was too hot to have soup but the best thing would be a broth through a straw you just couldn't do much because of the heat and then of course you got back a little early to get it all made sure it was going to stay on those shows those characters took a lot out of you he needed a weapon that they would use we figured well these guys seem a little bit less than scientific if you will they don't seem too futuristic but yet they would have something that would be futuristic what is a weapon that people who don't have a lot of technology would use and we ran through the gamut and we thought about the bolos in south america that the gauchos use and we thought yeah but wouldn't it be cool if as soon as these two balls got apart a laser beam okay no matter how far apart they were and it would just slice through anything i mean that's nasty they were a crystal ball lit up and then the actual flight of the weapon was put in later we had to imagine that you would unstick one velcro biggity bang draw back throw and then they would put in it leaving your hand they probably put the glow in when they put the streak in because they were just a lit crystal ball you threw it like a baseball and where it hit was put in later there was no way you could throw a charged missile across the room at actors go go i'll always cherish the opportunity and the honor to have worked with so many wonderful people on on this show fred astaire for example a living legend i went up to medium at his house and i and i i said with don and i said to fred i said what is it that draws you to this she says my grandkids want me to do it so they can watch me they said you know we have a little dance scene he said oh no no no dancing i said listen this is a slow dance that you're having a conversation with somebody this is not fred astaire dancing and you could just shuffle that's all you and he says oh that's all you're going to get is a shuffle i said that's fine he didn't want to dance he just didn't want to do it so rod holcomb the director cajoled him and he finally acquiesced and he did it and it may be the last time that astaire ever danced on film one of the vipers they had these guns on the vipers that that actually were practical they would fire and the thing breaks down they won't fire so they're working on them and fred astaire is i'm sitting in my chair and he's about 20 30 40 feet away with his arm leaning on the wing of this mock-up viper it's the biggest the big mock-up the actual size of he's leaning there and i'm looking at him thinking i wish i had a shot of fred astaire as chameleon leaning against the viper it's gold it's so fantastic as i'm watching him the guns the guys that are working on the guns just get the guns to fire and they start firing but in a very uh inconsistent way they go [Music] and fred like you plugged him into a an outlet comes alive and starts to dance in the shadows unnoticed by anybody but me fred is dancing to this weird rhythm he comes over and he sits down i said fred i saw you dancing in the shadows he looks at me he says you know there's something about that that rhythm that rhythm he says i got a whole idea for a show a special done in outer space he said i dan you said but that rhythm triggered it ah he says yeah when i'm done but it's funny we had fred astaire ray bolzer and bobby vann three of the all-time great dancers now bobby van people may not remember but bobby banner became good friends bobby van and i were shipped off to canada we get to montreal it's like 30 below zero it was so cold that the cameras would freeze they had this motorhome for bobby and i it was buried with ice it was like an ice house something out of dr chivago it was 30 below zero was so cold my back on terror i doubt if i'd be given another an enema okay way back on terror i doubt if i'd even bring you a license to the floyd fever hector and vector greetings from earth they were so funny in real life to have been on a call sheet and had a scene with the likes of ray bolger fred astaire lloyd bridges lauren greene these are the memories i will always carry with me lauren was the anchor we all kind of gravitated to it he just filled my heart one time the people's choice awards there was politics and everybody wasn't invited the guys were invited glenn larson because annie lockhart and i weren't invited to go with a group glenn took annie lockhart and lauren called me and said he said you know what come with me you know my wife can't go and she said why don't you take lorette he sent a limousine to pick me up and it was a black tie event it was so exciting and we talked all the way there and that's just the man lauren was he was very caring and told the worst jokes it's like hearing an off-colored joke coming from one of your parents you know you kind of whoa did you just tell me i mean we'd be standing on the set and behind the scenes he would tell tell a story and get us all laughing and then say okay you know let's go action it would take us forever to compose and lauren could boom he could compose himself in two seconds more of those unidentified chips he had a great sense of humor and he was kind of a father figure for everybody in the cast and uh there was as there is usually a certain amount of tension and dissension but but he brought us together it's just a quality he had that was very wise casting i think the show was very well cast i can say that objective i think it was very well cast i think definitely richard was is perfect and he and lauren richard and lauren had had a chemistry and they were very similar in a way they had us very sort of they have a serious nature and a passion i'm into egyptology i'm i'm into exploring all those kinds of historical things and battlestar went into all those those areas i that's what i loved so much about it i started reading about the mayans and the egyptians we actually sent a crew to egypt just to do those couple of shots where they're walking towards that great temple it was funny they would not let a girl wear a man's clothes so they put this dumpy little boy in this outfit that's supposed to be jane seymour and the minute she walks away from camry i look and i say oh my god her butt's hanging touching the ground and jane is going to kill me if we use any part of this so we had to cut very carefully so that we didn't hang on any of these shots in which this little boy was playing jane seymour you know in one of the flight suits we sent an associate producer over to egypt to go to luxor with some of the costumes and you know he i don't know we found a couple of guys at the hotel and dressed him up and he ran through and he did some other shots of the pyramids and so forth so that was kind of fun you know the hard thing with sets is that you never know how explosions are gonna go or how far out they're gonna hit and you have to be very careful whenever you're gonna get wounded or someone's firing at you and you have these squibs on that sometimes explode inward but when the set crumble when that whole thing crumbled inside that little vault i hate to say it but all the materials they use to build those sets is just you wouldn't want to touch that stuff you know it's probably some of the most toxic material on the face of the planet we were just covered with that material that went crashing down on us our costumes our hair everything part of us was was inundated with all that crap i remember baltar was in that scene as well you it was the joy of john in that character that that character was so evil and went through and directed all this and was such such a traitor to mankind and that finally in the end as he said you know you can't possibly be me i'm not going to be lost here am i surely you don't mean me and uh was then decapitated you can't you can eat it john was very much into his character you know he had to be a little careful of tearing john down from the rafters sometimes and getting him down to a little size down here because he would really eat that stuff up you know he just enjoyed playing that villain so much but he didn't play a character that was john john was this larger than life you put him in the costume and put him on the chair and when he got up there he was king of the world you know and when he wasn't up there he was still king of the world and we always shot up at him made him look bigger than life well because and he was he was the arch villain show was only as good as its villain he was brilliant that takes a tremendous theatricality and stage background to be that big and yet believable to be so wonderfully enthused i'll be about being so evil oh you have done well i have done well what have you done what have i bargained my colony was to be spared i don't think they ever used any of the close-ups of that creature i think it was just always the wide shot of just him on the pedestal and the voice too bad the lizard was lost [Music] you know showing up to work and seeing all these uh creatures from various planets with all the because they would they would go to makeup like ours before we start shooting and have all this stuff done so we so it was wonderful as an actor to come in and see all this and of course then the android sisters the fact that they had what was it four miles and three eyes sets eyes because there was a whole sexual undertone i remember trying to play that but it was like whoa you know so many mouths to kiss and that was really funny to work because these girls were really pretty man until they put the uh all the makeup on them i thought that was one of the most interesting things that they had done at the time it was a mask that fit over their face so you could see their eyes and to their mouth there was a mouth below and there were eyes out to the side and the eyes out to the side would blink and move because it was remotely controlled and the mouth underneath was remotely controlled it's like the ears of the daggett you know not cute the dang daggett the daggett was a very interesting we had a very interesting actor it was a little monkey uh eve evie uh it's a chimpanzee she she was like my best friend on the set whoever came up with that brilliant idea to have a chimpanzee in that dog because the movements of this little robot were so unpredictable and sometimes i would be just biting my lip when we were rolling because i'd be behind the camera and starting to break up because this darn thing would be moving around and looking at things because it was curious you know what was going on and so i think that the interaction with that dagget it added a element of humor we had all kinds of performers in that show the ovios were probably i think the most effectively frightening creature that was created for the show i remember rescuing cassiopeia from being in their tunes where they put them before they eat them and her screaming i screamed a lot a lot i lost my voice doing that it was so creepy but very cool they put me in a drawer and slid it out and then these guys come in with all their bee makeup and once again very it's very sexual you know that whole thing is like kind of you know to me or maybe i just have problems in there the whole show is one sexual uh no yeah okay what a great fantasy and here comes here come the handsome guys they're coming in to rescue me the ovions were pretty spooky they were spooky and we had that whole shootout and that run and that escape this way run boxing escaping from the ovions when we had that great bridge and then the blue screen behind that was so incredible because we were on the um phantom of the opera soundstage and there was was this big thing set up with a ramp running across i mean really high across the top of the sound stage we had to run up on a platform that was like 40 feet up in the air i was free so they brought in a little stunt man and dressed him up like me and they had him run you know it was a little scary for me we ended up on stage 27 and it still it was still there the stage was there and the opera house was still there and within one of those cylon shootouts we caught stage 27 on fire and everybody had to leave the stage it was a big fight it was a small photo there's fire nonetheless they didn't want to lose the phantom the opera stage you know so all the fire department came and they finally put this fire out we went back to work fire and space that was a lot of fun and i got to do like a stunt like diving through an air vent you know it was like my first stunt i ever did and and i just remember yeah i was you know i was gonna do this dive into this air van and i went i think come back foxy foxy everybody stood up and clapped and and and i think that was probably one of my favorite things he was a very athletic little fella he did all that you know in fact we had to really tone him down a little bit because he'd get so athletic he'd jump right out of the frame that kid was in good shape they did an explosion where boomer very dramatically dived through the door just as the explosion goes off and the door closes behind him yeah it was kind of neat [Music] foxy looks like i mashed your messy working with noah was a pleasure kind of a neat little thing where the little fella holds on to my hand walks away but he he pulls me over to my mark because i miss my i missed my mark and he nailed his off the show i i babysat for him a couple times although noah referred to it as a date and um he wanted to take me one time to see saturday night fever which was his his favorite movie then and i went to pick him up and i pull up and he comes out in a white suit he was so cute and he's got a he's got a white jacket and white pants and we went to the movies and we saw saturday night fever together and he held my hand and um gosh he was he was just the cutest thing one time i remember they uh lunch they gave me a beer you know half a beer and uh we had done my close-ups before lunch and i i couldn't get a line out and everybody was cracking up and and it was just funny i couldn't remember one line so they had to have somebody read my lines off the side to richard and we did interesting things like that like get noah you know tipsy you know i had the biggest crush on jane seymour the whole time i was working on it it's just beautiful you know remember having my mom buy her perfume for her birthday six hustler little mac daddy at six i can't even imagine a more beautiful woman than jane seymour we hit it off i mean i was felt very fortunate to have a romantic love interest in the form of jane seymour and i i must say i did have a secret little fantasy [Applause] there [Music] and i think their their relationship was it was a wonderful tender sense of love story between the two of them and i thought there was kind of a nice way that they handled that as that relationship slowly developed in in the second episode where we got married the wedding was very important i remember with all the candles i remember that we shot part of it one time and it just wasn't satisfactory we didn't have enough candles and so we really just like went overboard and that's what we ended up crap all right i remember when they killed off the mom um jane seymour was just a really i remember that day i think better than anything it was just very somber everybody was crying it was just a very very heavy heavy emotionally day it was probably one of the most poignant episodes on battlestar galactica and the scene where i take her son and basically explain to him what happened but it's her body that's gone boxing not her spirit or her love for us we'll have that always forever i think that that day pretty much stuck out in my mind more than any other day it was just uh that was the first time i really had to cry on camera and it was the first time ever dealing with an emotion like death at six or it was it was a very rough day for everybody i remember i think that was one of the most poignant days on the film for me when she told me she's gonna leave i was very i was very uh i was frustrated because i i didn't want to see her go i thought she was a tremendous asset to the show i just felt that we were losing something you know losing a very important component for the show even if you only had a brief time it'll be worth an eternity hand of god really kind of brought home what the series was all about in the sense it brought us full circle everybody walks out their back door at night and looks at the stars we all wonder is there life out there and probably that element was one of the most important elements about battlestar was exploring the fact that life may have begun out there maybe it started here and evolved out there and it's returning where did these people come from where are they going at what point in in the history of earth is is this all taking place we've gone a second and third season if the show had continued i don't think there would have been a limit to to where it would have gone because you've got the religious aspects you've got the mythological aspects you've got the scientific aspects you've got the humanistic aspects of this it was all there and we were just getting out of the blocks and somebody pulled the plug and of course the great tragedy being that the the series had such potential and the politics were oppressive i know there are greater tragedies in life but in the television world that was a biggie and it was a very sad thing to see it go especially in hindsight seeing the loyal following of the people that have stayed with us for all these years it's such a phenomenon to all of us it just amazes me wherever i go in the world you know people know how to say battlestar galactica and god knows how many languages it had a phenomenal appeal i think battlestar galactica was was kind of a milestone in american television there was a spirit to the show that was beyond the plot beyond the acting beyond the special effects there was the core of the show that i think people responded to battlestar galactic it wasn't just another sci-fi show it wasn't just a space opera it was actually about something it was about the the epic journey in all of us to find our place in the world and i think it touched people in a very profound way and it will always touch people even watching the original episode which i just did i realized that you know even 25 years later that heart and the spirit and the soul of that story is still there and it's always about the epic journey that we're all on as as spiritual human beings trying to find our place and i think battlestar really embodied that the heart and the spirit of that the show stumbled into a universal theme that uh is unique to all things that are successful about the about mankind you know family and survival and getting along and i think that everybody can relate to that i think that's why it's grown in popularity and also you're left with this i wonder what it could have been or what it would and the story is truncated what was cut what was coming next and you and there was this tremendous feeling of of a foreplay foreplay you know what the best was yet to come you know the best was it was just in all the characters where there was these relationships happening and the show got better as it went on and then it was and then it was just like unceremoniously so there was no announcement there was no last show there was nothing but gone [Music] you really gonna give us some medal did i say us i think they're just decorating me i tell you you

Channel: Tomaz Verbinc

Views: 155,078

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Id: d1_oPIpq3hA

Length: 44min 58sec (2698 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020