Lost in Hawaii - Season Two
Michael Giacchino
Not on the guest list we were given and a pleasant addition to the event was Michael Giacchino, whose original music for Lost really elevates the series and gives it even more emotional depth than it already has. His action cues and use of dissonant sounds has really added to the mystery of the island, but it's his leitmotifs for the various lostaways that work best for the show. Speaking with him was fun, because he has such a passion for his craft and an enthusiasm for the process.
Interviewer: By Season Two, a lot of the show's leitmotifs or audio cues have been pretty firmly established. What's the challenge in terms of moving from one season to the next and expanding that musical palette?
Giacchino: Well, this year it was kind of fun to expand it with Henry Gale, and also expand it into the whole Others thing. I mean, the Others were revealed slowly, kind of more and more to us in Season Two, and what started off as a very simple motif for them slowly developed into something more complicated. It's just this thing that kind of naturally happens that as they unfold the story I'm able to then glean more out of that, get more inspiration from it and start adding to what I'm doing. But the simpler and more cryptic it is, the more simple I stay, and that's just kind of a natural way of working on the show. But it is a challenge, and to find new ways to use Locke's music, new ways to use, you know, Charlie or Hurley -- all of those guys -- it's always a challenge to try to find [something new], but you also don't want to be too different because that's their thing. That's who they are, and that's what they are. It's kind of like following an opera.
Interviewer: You've been very busy in recent years doing Alias, Lost, and The Incredibles to name just a few projects, and are creating a canon like that of Danny Elfman, a certain sound that people identify with your work. What's the challenge for you moving from one project to the next and being able to do something new while not straying too far from what people associate with your work?
Giacchino: It is tough, but hopefully what I always try to do is create either an orchestral set-up that is different from every [other project]. I mean, if you look at Alias, the Alias orchestra is completely different from what the Lost orchestra is, so they have different sounds to them. When I was a kid I used to play this game where I would listen to my parents watch TV in the other room and I would listen to the shows and try to figure out what shows they were watching just by listening to the music. Certain shows were very easy to figure out because they had a specific orchestration set up, and other shows were kind of nebulous and they sounded like other shows. So for us, every time we do one of these new shows or do a film for me the first job is, okay, what's the orchestra going to be, and how is that going to relate to the story, and everything that is going on in the film or TV show. We create a sound that is unique to that, and hopefully once I'm done, like if you're listening to Lost, it doesn't sound like any show on TV. Or if you're watching Alias, it sounds like you're watching Alias and not something you've heard a million times before.
Interviewer: How different is scoring for film as opposed to scoring for TV?
Giacchino: It's the same thing. People ask me all of the time, "What is it like for games, what is it like for TV, what is it like for film?" They're all unbelievably similar, you know? Television has not as big a budget as film does -- most of the differences are financial and schedule -- but as far as creativity goes, they're all very similar. You're always trying to find the story. That's the main goal: just find that story.
Interviewer: At the end of last season, and now the beginning of Season Three, there's a lot of stuff going on with the core cast members and the Others. What was your first challenge when you came back to work on the show?
Giacchino: This year? I haven't even seen an episode yet, so it will probably be some time mid-September when I actually see something. I've been kind of saying, "Don't tell me, don't tell me", so the honest answer is I'm not sure yet. I'll find out as soon as they send it to me, and I can kind of figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do with it.
Interviewer: Do you prefer not to know what is going to happen from one episode to the next?
Giacchino: Yes. I definitely prefer not to know.
Interviewer: Is that as a viewer or for creating the music?
Giacchino: Just for creating the music. For me, it's like if something happens to you in life -- like if your girlfriend breaks up with you -- you're going to react emotionally a certain way. If she comes back to you and breaks up with you again you're going to be like, "Okay, we did this already." So, you're not going to react the same way. So, when I'm watching the show, I like to kind of get the gut reaction down and write the gut reaction rather than write the reaction now that I've watched it a bunch of times, because I feel in this show, more than any other, it's so important to just be in the moment of what's going on. Because it is a show that you could argue that it's crazy, it makes no sense and could never ever happen, but as long as you're in the moment of the story, I think that you're able to pull people in and think, "Well, maybe this is really happening."
Interviewer: Is Star Trek on your radar at all?
Giacchino: It's kind of on the distant radar. I know they're working on it.
Interviewer: Is that different for you, since you will potentially be incorporating previously composed cues into a new score?
Giacchino: It is so far away we haven't even discussed it yet.
Interviewer: Do you expect it will be the same kind of thing that you did when you worked on Mission: Impossible III, which incorporated previous composers' work into your own?
Giacchino: I think that ultimately you might pick the theme that you think is the important one and utilize that in a certain way and then go completely somewhere else with it. That would be, I guess, in the same way as Mission: Impossible was fun like that to take that and go somewhere wholly different with the score that the other two dudes didn't do. Not that it's better or worse, but just different.
Carlton Cuse
Executive producers Carlton Cuse and Bryan Burk were available to field more plot and behind-the-scenes questions. Cuse, known for his work on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., is credited with co-writing many of the show's most pivotal episodes, usually alongside fellow executive producer Damon Lindelof.
Interviewer: I heard the season was going to be broken up a little bit.
Cuse: It's going to be 6 episodes and then 17. The whole season will focus on The Others. That's what Season Three is all about, our characters interacting with the Others and obviously, the first 6 episodes are going to focus on what we set up on the finale last year: the fact that Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are in captivity, the fact that the Hatch blew up. And also, there's Sayid, Sun, and Jin off on a sailboat and what's going to happen to them, so there's a lot of balls up in the air. All those things will get addressed in the first 6 episodes and then, obviously, new story complications will arise and there's going to be a great cliffhanger at the end of Episode 6 which, hopefully, will keep everybody chomping [sic] at the bit for the show's return in February. Then we'll run straight through May, which we'll love. We'll love the momentum of that, and that's very exciting for us.
Interviewer: You say the focus will be on the Others. Your current cast will be interacting with them?
Cuse: We're sort of seeing the Others through the eyes of our characters. They are the window from which we learn about this other group of people on the island.
Interviewer: Will we see a more likeable side to the Others?
Cuse: Yeah, they actually have a comedy talent show which is going ... no! (laughs) What you think about the Others now is not the complete story. There's a lot more to know about them, and I think you'll have a very different view of them after the end of this season, and certainly even as the season goes along, the Others are going to change.
Interviewer: Can you give us a hint as to what Emily's character is going to be up to?
Cuse: Well, Emily and Charlie, that relationship is something we love. They had their big kiss at the end of last season, and I think that's the start of something.
Interviewer: You said you're going to focus more on the love interests of some of the characters and relationships?
Cuse: Yes, I think it's time in the show to do that. We had a lot of mythology in the show last year, and I think we're just interested writing-wise -- Damon and I -- in telling stories more on a romantic side and more action/adventure this year. There will be plenty of weird stuff in the show this year, for those who love Lost for the unexpected twists and turns, but that's what we're really focusing on.
Interviewer: Who do you think would be better for Kate: Jack or Sawyer?
Cuse: That's going to be for Kate to decide. They both have their virtues. Who would you choose? I like Sawyer, because he's a lot cooler than me, but that doesn't mean she's going to choose him. We'll have to see.
Interviewer: If someone asked you, "What's the reason to watch Season Two on DVD?", what's the reason you'd give them?
Cuse: There's something, watching the show continuously and having all the episodes and having 8 hours of bonus features -- the show has such an arc this season from beginning to end, opening the hatch to blowing it up at the end, that having the ability to watch those episodes continuously is great. And everybody I know who gets the DVD set starts watching them, gets hooked and addicted and they're like, "Oh my God, I didn't get out of the house for 8 hours, I've been watching DVDs!" And they're beautifully done. We really make the show for the DVDs. We shoot it in widescreen format, we make it in surround sound Dolby, and most people don't get to see that normally. When we finish up, we're always thinking how it's going to show up on DVD.
Interviewer: And your favorite on the bonus features?
Cuse: My favorite thing is all of Sawyer's insults strong together. I can't believe we thought of that many insults for him to throw out at everybody. It's just a good moment.
Interviewer: Now that the DVD for Season Two is coming out, how would you differentiate Season One from Season Two?
Cuse: I think Season One was the initial condition of crashing on this island and these characters being in denial about their situation and having to come to terms of "Probably we're not going to get off of here", and when that raft blows up and Walt is taken, it's like "OK, we're stuck here." Season Two was about the hatch and metaphorically going deeper inside the island. That was the focus of Season Two: what is that hatch, who put it there, who are these people, and then when we blow it up at the end, we sort of told the story of the hatch. Season Three is going to focus on the Others. There are these other people on the island; who are they and what are they about, what is the construct of their society, and how do our characters interact with them? Each season is like a book, like the Harry Potter series. Each one has its own character and shape, and I think that that's kind of the way the three seasons lay out. This season will be lighter, a little funner, and more romance and action/adventure. Last year was more mythology oriented, and the first year was kind of a combination of mythology and action/adventure with no romance basically.
Interviewer: Last year Damon [Lindelof] kind of indicated he had four seasons of material thought out. Now that the show is kind of a juggernaut, have you planned past four seasons?
Cuse: We have a mythology, and we have an end episode, and the question is how long can the show sustain? I think in a perfect world, we would love to end the show after four or five seasons, but ABC is making a lot of money on the show and that's their prerogative. It's kind of trying to find a happy medium on how long we can sustain the show and have it be good. I mean, we don't want to basically do the show beyond ... it's a story and meant to come to an end. It's not a franchise like Grey's Anatomy where there's always another patient that's going to come wheeling into the ER. This show has a beginning, and it has an end. The question is, "When do we get there?" The thing with the show is at what point do you reveal this information, and at what point do you create new mysteries, like the Twin Peaks thing. That's the challenge in knowing how much to reveal and telling stories that people don't mind that you're not revealing anything? I think the lesson we learned from Twin Peaks is you have to provide answers along the way, and so we've tried to answer questions along the way. If you look over the course of last season, we did answer a lot of questions, and we really paid a lot of attention to that at the finale. I mean, all of the questions about the hatch and Desmond and Kelvin, you know, we tried to answer a lot of questions. At the same time, if you don't have new questions, the show is over. It's like, if you solved your mysteries, the audience loses its compulsion to watch -- so it's a daily dilemma. Damon and I, we literally sit down for breakfast and have some form of that conversation, which is how much do we spill, how much do we hold. You just have to kind of trust your gut and so far, it feels like it's working okay. You can't think too far in the future and future-trip about it and think, "Is that going to work in 25 episodes?" Right now we have a good plan for this year, we're really excited about it, and it's going to be really good. We feel at the end of this season, we still have some stories to tell.
Interviewer: You mention a couple of times on the bonus features of the DVD that you were really surprised at the negative reaction after the first season finale. How much do you take into account those fan reactions?
Cuse: We took it hugely into account in writing the finale for Season Two. We really said, "Okay, we're going to answer questions." In fact, when we watched the first cut of the finale it was like, "Oh my gosh -- is this too pedantic?", because so much of it was just answers and dealing with a lot of expositional information. So, yeah, our attempt to answer questions in the finale for Season Two was in direct response to our perception that fans didn't feel we answered questions in the finale of Season One.
Interviewer: How do you feel about the way Lost is being aired this season?
Cuse: We love it. We totally love it, because when Lost is on, it's on, and when it's not on, it's not. There's no confusion in the audience, there's no frustration with our repeats. We don't lose the momentum of our storytelling, and it's been really fun to construct a six-episode story arc. It's been really, really enjoyable.
Interviewer: How involved are you in all the other material: "The Lost Experience", etc?
Cuse: Depends on the individual thing. The Lost Experience, Damon and I kind of came up with it. There's a guy named Jordan Rosenbrook who wrote it, but we conceptualized it, and we are going to write these mobisodes that are going to be coming out between the 1st [portion of the 3rd] season and the 2nd part of Season Three. Those are the things we're putting most of our time into, but we have meetings on all these things: the mobisodes, the video games. I mean, there are so many ancillary products, but the thing that we really have to realize constantly and focus on is that if the mothership isn't good, though, none of this other stuff really matters. There are only so many hours in a day. But really the mobisodes and the Experience are the two things that we put the most time into.
Photo courtesy of Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Bryan Burk
Executive Vice President of Bad Robot Productions and more of a producer in the traditional sense than a writer/producer, Bryan Burk was a very engaging speaker with a lot of passion and thought behind his words.
Interviewer: Now that you've completed two seasons, how would you differentiate your experience working on Season Two from Season One?
Burk: How would I differentiate Season Two from Season One? Oh, completely different for me. That's what was so exciting. We try to reinvent the show every year, and the idea that Season One was really about these people trying to figure out how they were going to survive and where the hell were they and what the hell was going on -- kind of really the first chapter, so to speak, when you crash on a desert island where there's weird things going on. Season Two really started to open up the door, and you realize that there have been people here before you and in fact one of the people is still there, with Desmond. There's really a whole world that was going on on the island long before you crash, and I think we definitely answered that world and answered what was going on in the "Swan" hatch. We really told a lot of that story, so much so that people talk about whether or not we're dispensing information too slowly or too quickly. We just think, well this is definitely at the right pace, because when you look at how much further along on the show you are now than you were a year ago when our conversation would be, "What's in the hatch?", if I told you it was a guy pressing a button every 108 minutes you'd be like, "What?" And suddenly it all makes much more sense a full season later. Hopefully we'll reinvent ourselves again, because it's going to be much more about the Others -– all you need to know about the Others, which will shed a lot more information as to what the hell's going on in the world of Lost.
There's never going to be an episode where all of your answers come, like "Here it is!", but what will happen is by the time the show has run its full journey, you will know everything you need to know about the show and you'll be enlightened in a completely different way. As you watch the show, your perception of watching the show changes. Like as you go into Season One, obviously you don't know about the Dharma Initiative or any of that stuff. Going into Season Two, you also didn't know about it, but now it's a whole different thing. So now you go into Three, your whole perception of what's going on is a different thing, so you as an audience will completely change in your viewership so to speak. So the information you're getting is on a completely different level from where it was two years ago.
Interviewer: So, do you plan to continue using the same structure or formula for the show, or is there a point you might like to get to where audiences are informed enough about the characters' back stories that you no longer need the flashbacks to fill out the episodes?
Burk: No, I think we have so many stories that we haven't told yet as part of the thing, the bigger picture. When we've run out of stories, the show's over, so the flashbacks are definitely part of the show. The island story is one element of it, but I think everyone's flashbacks and everything really tell the story not only of who these people are, but who they were, and particularly I think a lot of it ties into what the hell is going on too.
Interviewer: What are some of the things that you learned during Season Two in terms of viewer response, or maybe just things you realized didn't work as well as you anticipated, that you will be applying to Season Three?
Burk: Hmm, that's an interesting question. Well, the big thing we learned was that people hate reruns almost as much as we do, so thank God that ABC really has helped us out and helped the show in a way that I'd never heard of them doing which is so great for us, which is that they heard people's complaints, and they've set up the show in two different parts. So we're showing the 6 episodes followed by a break where they will introduce a new show, and then we're going to come back with our 17 and go straight through. So just the idea that a show that has so much forward momentum and drive as ours, to break it up with repeats obviously does not behoove anyone. So I think in this case we're really taking advantage of the fact that we're going to have a pod of 6 episodes followed by a pod of 17 episodes, or the rest of the season. That was our biggest thing and stumbling block.
Interviewer: How much viewer input do you listen and/or respond to? For example, it worked out either by accident or design that the less likable characters on the show didn't survive the season.
Burk: You know, I don't know. It's kind of ... it's the magic of television, which is if we do our jobs right, whether or not you like or hate somebody is all contingent on the character you're creating. I remember when we started Lost we would look at test scores, whatever that means, and read about things and Shannon, the Maggie Grace character, drove people crazy, this kind of rich obnoxious girl. But a year later when we killed her, people were horrified and that's kind of the greatness of television, where you can start with characters that people definitely want off the air and are like, "I hope they kill her", and then eventually you get the replies -– and we actually do -– where people are horrified. And we say, "Wait a minute! You hated that girl."
The truth of the matter is the idea of Ana-Lucia's character not making it to the end of the season was something we knew from the beginning, so that was kind of a journey that you go on. But ultimately we're very aware of all of our audiences and how they feel about it and everything, and that only fuels us in a way that is necessary. We really look at it more of whether or not what we're doing is landing properly, and if people are liking a character that is not supposed to be liked or they're not liking a character that's supposed to be liked, or if [developments] are landing properly, that's really how we kind of look at the audience response.
Interviewer: Building on that, are we going to find out more about Libby, or is her story over?
Burk: It's Lost. Nothing's ever over.
