Monday, July 31, 2006

Verbatim

Relevant passages highlighted in bold:

"See, we were young once and when the old guy spun his tales of Apollo and Starbuck, we were satisfied with clear-cut heroes and nakedly evil villains. But we're older now. We've eaten a lot of popcorn over the years. We're ready for a bigger meal. Make the story more complicated. Make the people less black-and-white. Challenge us, provoke us, grab us by the throat with those massive hands and dare us to invest ourselves in flawed characters who face ambiguous choices in an imperfect world. Dare us to root for heroes with all-too-human weaknesses. See if we'll still embrace them if they fall prey to their imperfections.

Ask us to care for human beings instead of caricatures.

With those words leading the way, I turned in the final draft of Battlestar Galactica. Bold words, perhaps. Arrogant even. But they accurately describe the ambition driving this project:

We believe you can explore adult themes with adult characters and still tell a ripping good yarn.

We believe that to portray human beings as flawed creations does not weaken them, it strengthens them.

We believe that bringing realism to science fiction is neither contradictory nor a fool's errand.

We believe that science fiction provides an opportunity to explore our own society, to provoke debate and to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our fellow Man.

We believe science fiction can still be relevant.

We believe all these things and more.

If you agree with us, then this is the show for you. If not, then thanks for coming, but the popcorn is in a different aisle.

- Ronald D. Moore
- Executive Producer / Screenwriter

2 comments:

  1. It's a good thing you posted this, otherwise I would have lived the rest of my life believing every word that came out of your mouth was falsified crap. You can quote me on that. "Her exact words described John's spouting as 'Falsified crap'..."
    :) Love you, Poops

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm just glad that's all cleared up. Can't very well have random people impugning my integrity in public. Now people who know me - they can impugn my integrity all they want. In fact, I encourage it.

    ReplyDelete

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