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It's Not About the Dinosaur: The EXCLUSIVE Damon Lindelof Interview

Initially Posted 18 August 2004 and 15 September 2004.

(Below is the first part of Lost-TV's exclusive interview with Damon Lindelof, co-creator, writer, and producer of LOST. Damon spoke to us via telephone last August 13 for 45 minutes. If you wish to post this or portions of this elsewhere, please give credit to Lost-TV by posting a link to http://www.lost-tv.com/ . Email me at webmaster@lost-tv.com if you reposted it.)

Lost is the series that almost really did get lost.

ABC exec Lloyd Braun called up whiz kid JJ Abrams (Felicity, Alias) and pitched an idea he had long been fond of: a plane crashes on a tropical island. JJ's response? A polite, "You must be kidding."

"JJ got a call from Lloyd Braun who was the head of ABC, back at the every end of January 2004," Lost guru Damon Lindelof said. "Lloyd told JJ, 'I want to do a show about a plane that crashes on an island.' This is an idea I guess he'd had since last summer. Normally networks buy ideas in mid-summer, then the writers write during September and October, and they get scripts ready before Thanksgiving. The networks decide around December which shows they're going to pick up and make pilots out of, and the pilot pickups are all after the first of the year in January. So that whole process had already gone by, and Lloyd called JJ at the very end of it and said, 'I want to do the show.' Most other pilots start production in early February which was a week later. JJ said, 'How can I possibly do another show this year? I'm running Alias and I've written this other show called The Catch (JJ's bounty hunter show slated for midseason) and I don't have time to do this island show. I don't even know what it is. What's the show? A plane crashes on an island? Is that it? What's the series?' But Lloyd was really attached to the idea, so JJ finally gave in and said, 'If you guys bring me a writer who I can bounce ideas around with and maybe I can supervise and they can write the script, maybe I'll be involved."

That's a whole lot of maybes. Time was running out. Other networks were going to start filming pilots the following week, and "this island series" was still in the "what if" stages. No writing staff, no scripts, no cast, nothing more than a one liner. "A plane crashes on a island." And the real kicker is finding someone else to work on the show.

Enter Damon Lindelof. Damon (Nash Bridges, Crossing Jordan) had written a script the previous summer for a cop show, and while ABC executives were impressed and liked the script, they had decided against developing a pilot. Still, it put Damon in good graces with ABC. So when JJ asked for a collaborator, Damon got the call.

"They brought me in to meet with JJ who I had been a huge fan of since Felicity and Alias," he said. "I was just happy to be in the same room with him. I didn't care what the idea was as long as it was JJ. So we had this amazing three hour meeting and started talking about ideas and the challenges attached to it. With this large a cast of survivors, the island itself has to be an interesting character otherwise all you have is people laying around in hammocks all day. If you don't have to go to work, you don't have to make money, fix your car, what do you do? After you solve the food and water problem, now what? What's going to create the drama?"

Already behind the proverbial eight ball when Lloyd approached JJ with his idea, JJ and Damon were now under the gun to produce a pilot. Eleven weeks later, they had written the pilot, cast the pilot, filmed the pilot, edited the pilot and it was picked up by ABC. Given the usual time frame for television pilots - a leisurely 9 month lead time - that had to be a world record.

They solved the problem by multi-tasking.

"The casting process and the writing process were both happening at the same time," he told us. "We knew that there was going to be a doctor, that there was going to be a female lead, but we hadn't figured out what her background was going to be. We knew there was going to be the comic relief who was this musician, so we had sort of very vague ideas and started meeting with actors. And the first thing we wrote for the show before there was even a script were character outlines. Like Charlie, for instance. We constructed him as a has-been musician, late 40s who'd been in a band in the '80s and then Dominic Monaghan came in and read and it was like wow! He was so amazing we changed the character and write for him (Dominic).

"Then JJ saw Jorge Garcia on television one night (in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm), and he said, 'Let's write a character for him,' because Jorge's character didn't exist yet."

"Yunjin Kim came in and read for the character of Kate. But then we thought, she speaks fluent Korean and we thought, wouldn't it be amazing if there was this Korean couple, a husband and wife, who don't speak the same language as every one else."

There were other changes in the script as well. Lost-TV reminded Damon of the rumor that Matthew Fox's character was originally slated to be killed off in the second hour of the pilot.

"Who told you that?" Damon asked. "Did Foxy tell you that?"

Foxy. Damon has a nickname for Matthew Fox. Foxy. Matthew Fox fans out there, feel free to unite in a big squee.

The real story is that the character was scheduled to die, Damon told us. But the writers grew to like him so much, they decided to let him live. Matthew Fox was cast after that decision was made.

But why think of killing off such a key character in the first place?

Damon said that the idea of killing off a "main character" was to throw the audience a curve ball. If you kill off a perceived hero, you set the audience up for the unpredictability of what is going to happen and who will live and who will die.

"The thinking that the one person who can really help them, the doctor, the hero, for him to die would be so earth-shaking (for the other survivors), but it was so unsettling (for the writers), because you spent the first hour getting attached to this guy and then he was gone."

This thinking makes you wonder: who of the 14 main characters will in fact survive? Or to whom will the writers get so attached that he or she will live, despite the diminishing odds against their survival?

Because, in real life, heroes do die. The good guy doesn't always win.

And sometimes they even die.

Strangely enough Xander hasn't even seen the pilot. He was offered the pirated version but his computer won't let him play VCDs.

"I'm proud of you!" Damon said, when he found that out. Of course when "Lost" officially premieres on September 22, hopefully Xander will have upgraded his computer.

In a previous interview with Bryan Burk, Bryan told Lost-TV that the internet was a blessing AND a curse. Yes, the bootleg version making the rounds raised interest, but no that's not what exactly you're going to see when the show premieres.

(Note to self: tape the pilot when aired and compare the two).

We wondered what the time line was for the characters. How much time elapsed during each episode?

"The first season is the first 40 days on the island," Damon replied. "Every episode begins the day after the episode before it ended so we see everything that is happening. We don't go away and come back three weeks later and find they've built a village. It means we (the writing staff) have to put our heads to together to put together a story arc for the characters. They need food, they need water, they'll explore the island and get to know each other.

"Every episode is about one character (since the cast is so huge) and it will tell you the story of their past before the crash in flashbacks. Every episode starts with the idea that this will be Kate's episode or Jack's episode. This will be Charlie's episode and it will connect to whatever it happening on the island at the time and goes from there. Ideas come from a billion different places. There is no specific writing hierarchy. JJ and I are the creators of the show but that doesn't mean that we create every episodic concept."

Forty days? Was that coincidental? It does seem to rain a lot for no apparent reason on the island. We asked the obvious question: was the biblical reference intentional? Damon's answer was immediate.

"That was NOT unintentional," he said with a hint of glee in his voice.

Most of the fans know that Lost is currently filming eleven episodes. A season is typically 22 episodes. So where does that leave the rest of the season? Will we see the 40 days and 40 nights in those 13 episodes (two-hour pilot plus the other eleven)?

"The 13 episodes will be roughly the first 20 days," Damon told us. "Each episode is roughly 48 hours. But we are anticipating being picked up."

We were particularly interested in the "mix" of survivors on the island. What lead to this diversity in age and ethnicity?

"The diversity was deliberate," Damon said. "This is an international flight originating in Australia. It's going to Los Angeles, and it's an American TV show, so the majority of characters are going to be American. This is also a possibility to have something more than a diverse cast with all ages, and religions. If half the case is white, then half the cast should be non-white. Like Star Trek with Vulcans and humans... to say that the color of your skin is not relevant is ridiculous. To say that racism in American doesn't exist is absolutely ridiculous. But on the Island, the color of your skin in completely irrelevant and so are all those things about how much money you have or what your race is or what your religion is or what you've done in the past. That life is over. You're not going back to it. We wanted characters from different backgrounds. That was an extremely deliberate action. For every single character, including Jack and Kate, we chose the best actor regardless of skin color."

As a result, Damon went on to say, after Harold Perrineau was cast as the African American father, the search went out for African American kids, and the result was the very talented Malcolm David Kelley.

Then of course there are the extras. The expendable people. "Red shirts" in Star Trek lingo. You know, the security guys in landing parties who were offed at frighteningly regular intervals.

Damon and the lads refer to them as "meat socks."

"That's what's great about Lost," he said. "One of our regular characters can go out on an expedition with two people you haven't seen, then the regular gets killed, the other two come back and now they're regulars, so we certainly want to keep the audience guessing. There is a reason that in addition to the 14 regulars there are 33 other characters who survived the crash. They're not just monster food."

Regulars get killed? Oh no, Mr. Bill!

And speaking of groups, what about group psychology? What about the sociology of this whole "experiment"?

"We talk about that a lot," said Damon. "I minored in sociology in college and a couple of the other writers have a background in sociology. You talk about things like the Stanford Prison Experiment (Ed. Note: Conducted at Stanford University in Palo Alto California, this project sought to answer the question: What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions posed in a simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971.) But at the end of the day, there has never been an experiment done about a group of people surviving on an island for a protracted period of time.

"The reality is we don't know what would happen. All we can do is extrapolate based on who they are as characters and what would happen. We also looked at political formation in terms of what would emerge in the very early stages of them being on the island would be some sort of communism: We're all going to pool our resources, we'll share our food and water. But then human nature begins to exert itself and individuals say, 'Well, I'm the one out there who's hunting the boar, why should all of you guys get to eat it when I go to bed hungry every night?' Then that person who has the ability to hunt the boar becomes a powerful person. We start with communism, and then it evolves into a dictatorship. Then the dictatorship is overthrown or becomes so strong that it breaks off from the initial group, and you have a couple different societies and maybe one of them evolves into a democracy that elects its leaders. But at the end of the day, episodically, we're talking about what are the seeds of that. The reality is that the week after a plane crash, you're not going to have people sitting down electing their leaders. They're still trying to figure out how to get off the island and how to survive so the society formation issues, while they begin to color the ethical debates the castaways are having with each other, don't begin to manifest themselves in any real way until much later on."

Well, this is an election year. This reporter knows who SHE would vote for.

Of course by this time, quite a few people have seen Lost. Not only via the internet, but test screenings, cable channels, Comic Con and since this interview, the Sunset on the Beach premiere. This has generated a lot of positive buzz, not just from audiences, but from critics as well. Did JJ and Damon expect this?

"It's exciting and flattering but at the end of the day we're writers and we'll always remember the one person who hated the show rather than the 99 who like it but it's exciting. One of the things about JJ is that he has an amazing talent and reputation and associated with projects that have a high expectation. I'll get excited about seeing a movie and hold it to a much higher standard because I am a fan of the filmmakers. The fact that Lost is being received well... that's exciting and encouraging."

And it's no secret that ABC is trailing in the ratings game. Could this show save the network?

Much like wishing a stage actor "good luck" (rather than "break a leg"), Damon, while pleased, was still wary of THAT idea.

;"It's a question no one can answer til the date the show airs," he said. "Like when I was writing on Nash Bridges, The Fugitive was the show that had all the buzz. It was going to be a BIG deal and a little show called CSI was going to be on after The Fugitive. Nobody was talking about CSI at all. Well, the first night came and went and no-one was watching The Fugitive, but 3 years later, everyone is watching CSI. I'd rather not have the buzz. People are looking at you to save the network. Buzz creates high expectations. There is nowhere to go but down."

And then Damon had a question of his own for Xander. "It's amazing that you have gone to such lengths to set up such a well thought out site and you haven't seen the pilot yet. What do you know about the show?"

Xander explained he was a huge fan of Lord of the Rings and Alias and seeing Dominic Monaghan attached to the Lost project was very exciting.

"Dominic is an amazing guy and an incredibly talented actor and we're lucky to have him," Damon said fondly.

Damon admitted he wasn't aware of any other Lost fansites, except one or two in French. He became aware of Lost-TV when Ian Somerhalder told him during the first week of filming. At first he thought it was a joke, until he got a look at it.

And now one of the big questions (but not THE BIG question): What is that thing in the bushes? We know it's not a dinosaur. Was it always NOT a dinosaur?

"JJ and I have always known what it was and we're VERY discriminating about who we tell, because that's one of the biggest secrets of the show. We know from the beginning it wasn't a dinosaur. If the network ever said anything about it to us it was more on the order of, 'Please tell us it's not a dinosaur.' And we're like, 'Ok, it's NOT a dinosaur!'

"Because of Jurassic Park or Land of the Lost, that's what people expect to be on a mysterious island," Damon explained. "I think you'll find that what that thing is not a constant presence in every episode. It's not a TV show about what is that thing in the jungle. It becomes more about the monsters in each other as opposed to the monsters out there And some of the secrets are much darker than others.

"People have been there (on the island). There is a transmission that is being transmitted in French, from somewhere on the island, repeating on a loop for 16 years and this keys into this idea, asking the audience, what do YOU think this is? Where might it be? Who might have left it? Why did they come here in the first place? Are they still here? Are they stranded? What is the content of that message? The word 'mythology' is used alongside a show like the The X-Files which is built on the mythology that his Mulder's sister is abducted and that is the beginning of his obsession with extra terrestrials and his search for the answers and every couple of weeks they would service that mythology but eventually that was all the show was about anymore."

So the question becomes, how do you maintain the level of tension without exhausting the audience? If they move from crises to crises, the audience will wear out. And yet this isn't Gilligan's Island either.

"That's the trick isn't it? This is not the easiest show in the world to write which tells me that it is something that might actually be good. This is not your typical, 'someone gets killed at the beginning of the episode and we have to find out who did it.' It's not doctors or lawyers or cops. That's what the challenge is."

And now for THE burning question: We've seen the chicks in bikinis. What about some male eye candy?

"Yes, I promise," Damon laughed. "You'll get more eye candy that you've bargained for."

Oh god, we certainly hope so.

(Later on in the season, Damon promised we could visit with him again so keep those questions coming as the season progresses!)