ROCKNE S. O'BANNON…WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER 

Rockne S. O'Bannon is a writer, director and producer working primarily in the medium of television. His credits include 'Fatal Error', 'Invasion', 'Amazing Stories', 'The Twilight Zone' and Peter Benchley's 'Creature'. He has also created three television series, 'Alien Nation', 'Seaquest' and 'Farscape'. I spoke with Rockne about how he created these TV series, working in Australia, and what he's working on next.

 Q: With all your success do you still have to go out and look for work? 

 Yes. Especially in the writing game. Spielberg and Zemeckis aside, I guess, the reality is that we all have to work even harder these days in order to get work. I'm kind of an odd fish in the way that I've done a little bit of everything. I've written and directed features, I've done long form, you know, mini series, I've had three series in television. So it's been a lot of things here and there, whereas there are other people, for example, who stayed strictly in television. Moved up from story editor to show runner. Right now I'm co-writing a mini series and I have a spec feature I'm about to go out with, plus I've got one or two series ideas I'm out pitching.

Q: You're also working on a game for John Woo?

He's opened an offshoot of his production company called 'Tiger Hill Productions' which is specifically intended to create the ancillary market product first. Games and comic books and that sort of thing. Have them premiere in that form and then develop them as a feature film after that. I've never done a game before but I thought it was an interesting arena. I did develop an online "show" a few years ago. It was the first professional science fiction entertainment created specifically for internet called 'Eon - 4'. It doesn't exist anymore because we were so new that, at the time, the company funding the project couldn't figure out exactly how to make money off of it. You could do it as an offshoot of something else but as an internet-only form of entertainment it couldn't sustain itself. It was a fun project to be involved with, and I'm still very proud of it.

 Q: Wearing so many different hats do you find it difficult to excel in any one area?

 I think the reality is that people like to work with people they have relationships with. But yes it can be harder. Look at episodic television for example. If you're on that particular track of story editor to producer to co executive producer and ultimately show runner then it is more comfortable for them to stick with these people. They're a little more wary of someone who's just had a glancing blow with it. Sometimes they'll take a chance on someone new, such as with me on 'Seaquest', but I think that kind of glancing blow thing is a little bit harder for them to accept.

 Q: How did 'Seaquest' come about?

The TV side of the Spielberg's production company wanted to do a futuristic submarine show. They were basically thinking 'Star Trek' underwater. They were talking about maybe five hundred years in the future and mankind has polluted the planet so they're going to the last refuge under the sea to try and populate that new frontier. I went away and thought about it. I'd just started to have kids and I started thinking about how the majority of the futuristic shows tend to paint the world as grim or bleak in some way, a nuclear holocaust or something like that. So I came up with the idea of setting the show twenty five years in the future and showing a world that our children were going to inherit and painting a hopeful future. We're going into the ocean because we're capable of going into the ocean. I pitched this to Steven and Roy Schneider and the network, and they were really taken with it. The problem was that my contract was to create the show and help get it off the ground, and not stay with the series. I didn't want to run the show because it was such a big undertaking, so they hired other show runners who weren't part of the original pitch. So it eventually strayed from the original vision.

Q: Tell me about the idea behind the talking dolphin.

I think that this was also one of the things that sold the show. What I wanted to do was basically Mr. Spock as a dolphin. The notion of there being an alien officer who was not just a servant, but actually a line officer. I thought this was a terrific, kind of egalitarian concept by Roddenbury. It also provided a very interesting opportunity to get a different perspective on human foibles, through an observer who was also very articulate. So I wanted to apply this to the dolphin. My idea was that a team of scientists had been able to capture the dolphin's thought process and means of communication and have it translated into spoken word. What I wanted it to be was an articulate being who actually held rank and could speak. But after I left the show I found that they'd created dolphins that spoke only pidgin English and I thought that was a real lost opportunity.

 Q: Tell me about creating 'Farscape'.

Well I learned after 'Seaquest' that I needed to stay on with a show to have it develop in the way I'd originally intended, so with 'Farscape' it was about episode nine where I was satisfied this was happening. I'd pitched it to the Henson company who were also looking to do a ship show. Brian Henson, who was by this time running the company, was wanting something with a little darker vision, to put his own stamp on the company. They also wanted to do something that would show other facets of what the company could do, CGI, prosthetics and so on.

Q: What was your vision with the lead character?

I wanted him to be a normal guy, just like you or me, who had been propelled into space but was incredibly driven to get back to Earth because it was his home and he had people waiting there for him. A regular guy who grew up watching 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars'. Someone people could really identify with. A lot of his references on the show are to shared popular culture icons such as 'Star Wars' and 'Monty Python'. What you see in the writing room, for the most part, is that the writers are pretty intelligent, culturally aware. So they're constantly making references to movies or current events. So what I would then say is '...put that in the script. Give that to John Crichton'. For example, in season one we introduced this character called Scorpius who had this torture chair, and Crichton kept referring to it as 'the comfy chair', which comes from 'Monty Python'. The Farscape fans who know Python definitely got the reference. So he (Crichton) kind of talks just like us. The fans would often come up with great ideas themselves but we had a steadfast rule among the writers to never use any ideas posted on the internet -- no matter how terrific! That would be cheating. The other thing I wanted to do was create a world where Crichton and the bad guys, the Peacekeepers, were the only human looking people and everyone else was either a machine or in prosthetic make up. It was a challenging notion. Also, the human is usually the leader but we wanted him to one, be the least effective character and two, look exactly like the Peacekeepers, the Nazis of the universe. To try and throw as much stuff as possible at him, to make it difficult for him. Ben Browder, the actor, really knew how to do it. I wanted the characters to originally be iconic, you know, the tough chick, the peace keeper, the funny looking alien. As part of this agenda, I wanted Crichton to be traditionally hero handsome. So that you get immediately who he and the other characters are. However, part of the joke is that you put him on Earth and he's totally effective, but then you throw him into this living spaceship with all these aliens and he doesn't even know which way to hold the tools. In other words, the joke is that we totally degrade this hero handsome guy. Ben was great. He was always up in the writer's room contributing ideas. He was very much involved in the process and had a great sensibility as to what was funny and what was not.

 Q: What was your goal in developing each character?

 One thing we tried to do was make the cultural aspects of each character very specific to their species. The one unifying thread among all sentient living beings on the show is some sort of emotional connection or some sort of emotional aspect to their personality and that seemed to really work well. The nature of many television shows is that the characters start out apart and at each other's throats but eventually end up bonding with each other. In 'Farscape' we tried to keep the characters apart for as long as possible and if you look at the dynamic of the ship they were all escaping prisoners and had a common goal which was to stay alive, but they all had their own individual agenda too. D'Argo, for example, was this brutish creature who would probably never open up to anyone, but when he was faced with this kind of softer human it started to change his personality.

 Q: Why did you decide to shoot in Australia?

 Initially it was just a financial decision. It ended up being one of the greatest creative benefits imaginable. We discovered the remarkable pool of acting and production talent they have there. Ben was the only American actor in the show and I think we used two American guest stars. The Australian acting pool was just so rich. It was interesting that the whole premise of the show was a man dropped into another culture and this was actually true of Ben being dropped into the Australian culture. We were certainly able to get a much higher level of creativity and performance and production value than say, if we had shot it here or in Canada. It was a dream situation. We were able to make it as weird and out-there as possible, also with the full encouragement of the networks. For example at one point Rygel bites Aeryn's arm and swallows the piece of flesh, something you were never usually see on network television.

 Q: How was the show received in Australia?

 Unfortunately our original network in Australia chose not to be very supportive of the show. They played it at odd hours. It was a bummer for the cast and crew who were doing this incredible work which was really unusual and distinct for Australian TV. Most shows there are about cops or doctors -- often seeming to take their inspiration from tried-and-true American network television. That Farscape never received a proper Australian airing was very frustrating for everyone concerned. That goodness for the internet -- because the fans in America and around the world certainly made their love of the show known loud and clear.

 Q: How did you find writers for 'Farscape'?

It was actually difficult to fill these positions because the premise of the show was so different. The tendency for so many writers was to make Crichton the typical hero, the man guiding the ship. But he was the least likely one to act as Captain. So part of my regular speech to writers was that one thing that Crichton could bring to this world, because he doesn't have any technical knowledge of this world, was a willingness to just stick the knife between his teeth and dive in. So we needed writers who understood this.

 Q: Do you have any plans to work there again?