 
Beware minor SPOILERS for Stargate: Continuum in the interview below!
Martin Wood has been involved with Stargate since the very first season of SG-1 and has directed nearly a quarter of the franchise. GateWorld has considered itself long overdue for an in-depth discussion with this influential producer. We spoke with him at the Stage 3 Media offices earlier this year.
In Part One of our video interview, GateWorld talks with Wood about the excitement he had filming the for the direct-to-DVD feature, Stargate Continuum, dodging submarines in the arctic, and bringing all his learned lessons to bear for Sanctuary.
GateWorld's interview with Martin runs 24 minutes. The video requires QuickTime 7.0 or higher. The interview is also available at GateWorld Play! Rather not view the video? It's also transcribed below!
Check out Part Two of our interview here!
|
|
GateWorld: For GateWorld.net, I'm David Read, and I'm here at Stage 3 Media with director Martin Wood --
Martin Wood: -- and Amanda Tapping [points to photo behind him].
GW: And Amanda Tapping. The lovely Amanda Tapping. Currently over here working on your new project, Sanctuary. Everyone is buzzing about it.
MW: I hope so.
GW: Oh yeah, definitely. Where are you guys at now? SCI FI has just approved you for the series.
MW: SCI FI has approved us for a series. They've approved some of our scripts -- some of them, not all of them. They're being really good about moving the stories ahead. We're trying to shove them ahead and they're slowly moving them ahead so it fits with the model they want to put on their network, which is fine with us. It's a whole different show than what you saw on the net. Anybody who's watched it on the net will be stunned by what they see. There's some vowels that we used in the initial one, but there's not whole sentences that we used.
Wood works with Emilie Ullerup and Christohper Heyerdahl on the set of Sanctuary. | |
The characters are a lot more full. The storylines are a lot more rounded. What they saw on the net was an experiment for us. We experimented in how we could do this virtually, how fast we could do it, too, which is one of the things, believe it or not. We did it really fast.
GW: So Sanctuary, the online version, was basically a stress test to see if this could be done or not on a television budget or less?
MW: On much less than a television budget. It was testing a market that is going to be the marketplace soon. We were trying something to see how the market would accept it. The market was very accepting of it, by the way. There's been over 3 million hits on the show -- well more than that. Everybody's idea is still that the net is free and it's difficult to get past that right now. Everyone is experimenting with different ways to market things on the net. We did our experiment with it and learned an amazing amount from it. Now we're going to do a TV show and go back to see how the net reacts.
Let me say it this way: When you do what we did, essentially that shot that James Cameron did on "Titanic," you jump back and there's a little tiny Titanic in the middle of the ocean, in a black ocean, and there's a little flare. It goes up like that. That's essentially what we did. We went on with no advertizing. It was totally viral. We went to see how far we could go with that, and it was an experiment in doing that. Once we've had the exposure on television, let's see what happens.
GW: OK, sweet. I'd like to come back to Sanctuary momentarily but I'd like to start off, let's springboard into Stargate with this. How has Sanctuary influenced your work on Stargate this year? In all honesty?
MW: Other way.
GW: "How has Stargate influenced your work on Sanctuary?"
MW: I grew up on Stargate. I spent the last twelve years there and learned, if not everything, then most of the things I know in terms of the choices I make as a director, how I direct. Directing, I learned to do on Stargate. Even though I've done a lot of other series, they've been offshoots of what I've done from Stargate.
The majority of my time has been spent, every year, for eight months doing Stargate and Stargate Atlantis. Those two shows allowed me, because I was there so long, allowed me to do things I didn't normally get to do on a series, as a visiting director, because you can't push the limits the way that I did on Stargate.
| 
Wood's first directing gig for Stargate was Season One's "Solitudes." |
We all grew up together on Stargate. The crew, the executives, the ones that are referred to as The Powers That Be, we all grew up together on that. Everybody cut their teeth on those two shows. Even though people came in with other experiences, that's where everybody got to experiment and play. Everything I learned there I turned into being able to do Sanctuary.
A virtual show like this hasn't been done before, so what we're trying to do is take all the things we learned from all I did, that incorporated virtual sets, and put them into a show that is entirely that way.
GW: Will you be directing fewer episodes on Stargate this year in order to have some more time over here?
MW: The hope is that I'll be able to finish the season with Atlantis, and maybe even do another movie. The fact is that we have to wait and see how our schedules mesh. Atlantis has been great. They've actually come to me and said "Would you like to do some episodes," and I've said "Of course I do. I can't imagine a year of my life without a least a few of them." It's an incredibly important thing to me to keep Atlantis alive, and Stargate alive, in my life.
|
|
|
