Stargate Universe: Robert C Cooper interview

Are you happy with how it's worked out, then?

The experience has been the best in my career.

Really?

Oh, for sure. The cast is phenomenal. The studio has been unbelievably supportive and responsive to what we're doing. We had a tremendous amount of creative freedom. And people across the board are just really enjoying themselves - having a great time and some of that comes from Robert Carlyle and his enthusiasm and that trickles down on the cast. And the crew is just a crew that has been around, in many cases, for a long time with us in the franchise and they've become reenergised and reinvigorated. 

It's kind of a vicious cycle that everyone involved is just giving that little bit more of themselves and, I think, feeling quite proud of the work they're doing.

So, yeah, so far I don't have any regrets whatsoever for having pursued this. It's been a fantastic experience.

And you've gone through quite a reflective documentary feel with the show?

That was certainly one of the elements that we hoped would bridge some of the gap with today's audiences. That maybe the sort of documentary, verité style would help people to accept science fiction as more reality. That this was potentially really going on because it was speaking to them in the language of reality TV, which seems to have become a bit of a vernacular, a visual vocabulary for people that when they see things in that style, it feels more real.  

That was one of the things I was going to ask. I know it sounds horribly pretentious, but in some documentary material, and on reality TV, it's almost like the camera is a character within itself. Is that the kind of thing you were going for?

Yeah. We wanted people to feel like they were voyeurs. One of my favourite shows of all time is The Shield. 

Oh, that's a great show.

Yeah. We ended up hiring the DP from The Shield, Ronn Schmidt, who shot our pilot for us and he helped to bring that tone to the show. And he talked about the fact that when they were first putting The Shield together they wanted...they looked at a lot of Vietnam War footage.. and the whole idea was: what would happen if we dropped a documentary crew into south east L.A. to cover the gang wars and the cops trying to deal with that.

There's just something kind of intriguing about feeling like you're a voyeur, like you're on the ship watching what's really happening there, as opposed to something that's staged and going on.

What it has done - and this was certainly something we hoped would happen - but, what it does is it actually inspires better performances from the actors. What you're doing is setting up almost like a stage play on the set, and you're lighting it in a more free and open way, so that they can just walk in and perform. And the cameras are going to capture it and cover it.

I think when you try and set things up in a traditional Hollywood style, on a television budget, on a television schedule, it's really hard to get the kind of magic you might get if you had the time a feature does.

On a television show, when you create a formula where almost anything can happen you do end up capturing these magic moments that are, sort of, accidentally on purpose. I'm finding we're getting a lot more of those accidentally on purpose great moments.

Certainly the actors have felt very encouraged to explore - really push the envelope - and we're finding really, really strong performances that are coming from that style.