Neither
Damon Lindelof nor Carlton Cuse came up with the idea for ABC's cult favorite Lost, but while any number of people have had a hand in shaping the show—from producer J.J. Abrams to ABC
to the show's signature director, Jack Bender—when fans want to complain
about a dangling plotline or an implausible scientific explanation for what's
going on with that crazy island, they hold head writer Lindelof and show-runner Cuse responsible. The
duo have embraced that role, by hosting podcasts, appearing together at
Comic-Con, and doing whatever they can to answer curious viewers' questions,
without revealing too much. On the heels of a strong end to season three of Lost and an even stronger
start to season four (give or take a couple of episodes), Lindelof and Cuse
spoke with The A.V. Club about plotting the final third of this season (which begins
airing Thursday, April 24), writing a geek-friendly series in the Blog Age, and
whether fans misunderstand what kind of show Lost is.
(Two
notes. When this interview was conducted, Lindelof and Cuse were in the middle
of writing a two-part, two-hour finale. Since then, it's been expanded to a
two-part, three-hour
finale. Also, this interview contains numerous spoilers, though only for episodes
of the show that have already aired.)
The
A.V. Club: Are you done writing the finale yet?
Carlton
Cuse: We
were literally just talking about our weekend logistics, because we have been
holed up in our office here, working very late every night. It's like writing
an equivalent to a feature film in two weeks.
AVC:
It'll be two hours long?
Damon
Lindelof: It's
going to air in two separate hours this year, because Grey's Anatomy has a two-hour finale that
airs on May 22. They run from 8-10 p.m., and then the second hour of our finale
will run from 10-11 p.m. So Hour One will air the week before. They're going to
air it like they aired the original pilot, which was shot as a two-hour, then
split up into two parts.
AVC:
Which means you also have to think about how to end the first hour too, right?
So it's on a cliffhanger?
DL: We do
that with our two-hour finales anyway. We hope that hour one ends with some
degree of momentum going out, because, believe it or not, ratings-wise, our
two-hour finales always pick up viewers every half hour. We have to design hour
two like you're just coming into the show anyway.
CC: To as
much a degree as anyone can ever just drop into Lost.
AVC:
Before you even started writing the finale, did you already know what was going
to happen? Would you have known, say, three years ago?
CC: We don't
have a detailed map, but we knew, for instance, that this year we'd be going
from Denver to Kansas City.
DL: But our
car broke down for a hundred days, and then we had to get there twice as fast.
[Laughs.]
CC:
[Laughs.]
Yeah, we'd planned a lot more driving on the rural byways, then we
ended up having to get on the interstate. The episodes after the writers'
strike have been a real push, because we were going to do eight hours, and now
we're doing five.
DL:
Basically, the entire writing team sat in a room between Valentine's
Day and the middle of March, and over a five-week period, we broke down all
five hours of the show that we're going to produce. Then one entity would peel
off and start writing as the rest of the room pressed forward. So we finished
breaking down both hours of the finale just about a week ago, and everybody is
taking a scene here and a scene there. Carlton and I have spent, as he said, 'til
1 or 2 in the morning every night this week whipping hour one into shape, and now
we're proceeding with hour two.
AVC:
Do you write in L.A.?
DL:
Yes, we do.
CC:
We're on the Disney lot, where we do all the stories, script work,
casting, and post-production for the show. The filming itself is done on the
island of O'ahu, but everything else is done here in Burbank.
AVC:
So right now, they're filming in Hawaii without you?
CC:
Oh, yeah. Several crews simultaneously, in fact.
DL:
They'll be shooting through the first week of May.
AVC:
You mentioned having to change the road map. In a recent interview, you both
said you felt like the strike-enforced break was good in some ways, because it
gave you a chance to reflect on what you'd already completed, and think about
what you needed to do. What do you think has really worked well in the season
so far, and what maybe not so well?
CC:
Well, I think the thing that Damon and I were most concerned about was
whether the flash-forwards would play. Had there not been a strike, by the time
the show started airing, we would've been writing the finale, so we would've
already been positively committed to the idea of flash-forwards, without any
viewer feedback. So I think the thing that was most gratifying for us was that
the strike allowed us to see how some of these episodes were playing before we
started writing the remaining five. That the flash-forwards did seem to engage
the audience was something we were very pleased and relieved about.
DL:
And we were nervous. We loved the ideas of the
flash-forwards in terms of liberating the show from what it was, and pointing
us in a new direction. But whereas the flashbacks before had been an emotional
storytelling technique—like, "Here's how Sawyer became a con man, here's
the time that Jack ratted out his father, here's when Kate held up a bank"—on
a story level, they weren't that complicated. They were sort of the one thing
the audience could grasp onto, no matter what sort of wackiness was happening
on the island. The flash-forwards are the exact opposite of that. When you see
Sayid in the future killing people for Ben, that's all story. Or when you see
Hurley being approached by Matthew Abaddon, that's all story. So the show
actually becomes vastly more complicated. And also in terms of the time frame
of the show… The audience had to figure out that they saw a flash-forward at
the end of season three, when Jack was bearded and popping pills and yelling at
Kate that they have to go back. But the Jack that you see at the beginning of
season four hasn't come to that point yet. The narrative wheel of these things
is tricky, and we were sitting in the editing room going, like, "Oh, shit! We
made a terrible mistake here."
AVC:
Do you pay a significant amount of attention to fan response and critical
response? Does it affect how you proceed?
CC:
Well, you know, we do, but in sort of a filtered manner. We don't really
get on the boards and read all those comments. It just feels like people who
are writing on the boards tend to be more focused on the mythology, and for us,
we're making a character show. The thing that we spend the most time on are the
character dynamics of a given episode, and what we're learning about these
people. The mythology is sort of the frosting on the cake. But that's what
everybody talks about, and what we're asked most about.
DL:
And we find that the boards can be really toxic. Nobody goes on the
boards to say: "Wow! That was awesome!" Traditionally, they go on the boards to
nitpick and say, "Oh, I don't understand how Michael could have gotten off the
island, gotten back to New York, parked Walt, then got indoctrinated by
Friendly all in a month." Well, I don't understand how [on 24] there
was a coup in the Oval Office, Jack's daughter got abducted, and there was a
nuclear attack in Van Nuys, and it's not even lunchtime yet. But it's
television. The reality of it is, if you go on the boards and people are
saying, "I saw that coming," or "This is lame," or "I can't believe they're
doing this again…" Having been one of those people myself, I know better, and
try to avoid it. [Laughs.]
But there is a groundswell of what we hear about the show.
When we were in season three after the break last year, it was a much different
vibe than it is right now, in terms of how the audience responded to those
episodes. If people are loving the show, Carlton and I will be walking around
on the Disney lot, and some guy will literally pull over in his little fire-marshal
truck and go, "I'm loving the show this year! What's the monster?" That won't
happen if people aren't digging the show. So we do get a sense of what the fans
are thinking and feeling. And what the critics are saying, because it's in the
paper. The day after a really good episode airs, we'll get a lot of e-mails
from people we know. After the "The Constant" aired, I don't think Carlton and
I had ever gotten more e-mails. You just get a sense of, "Wow, that episode
really landed with the fans."
AVC:
Can the intense interest of the fan community interfere with how the show is
enjoyed? For example, between the set reports and the message-board
conversations, the fans had pretty much predicted that Harold Perrineau's character, Michael, was going to be
Ben's "man on the boat," and when that turned out to be the case, a lot of them
were disappointed that there wasn't some crazy twist.
DL:
Well, we would argue that we brought back Harold in front of 4,000 of our most intense fans at the San Diego Comic-Con,
and basically said, "He's coming back to the show." So the fan community had a
huge hint. And then they saw his name in the opening credits, in the episode
where Ben says, "I have a man on the boat." We're not complaining that people
saw it coming. We wanted you to know that it was coming! So why are you
bitching about the fact that it wasn't as surprising as you thought it would
be? The fans would like us to pull the wool over their eyes every time, and I
would basically say, "What would've happened if we hadn't brought Harold out at Comic-Con?" What would've happened
is that people would've seen him in Hawaii, people would've found out that he
closed a deal to come back to the show, and then we would've had no control
over how they found out. And there'd be the same result.
CC: I also think that it's rewarding for the
audience to not always be frustrated and behind. We have certain mysteries on
the show that we hope the audience figures out on their own, and can have the
satisfaction of saying "Aha! I knew that! I knew that the guy on the boat was
going to be Michael!" But there are other times when we have real surprises, like Michael shooting Libby and Ana-Lucia, where we go to
great pains to make sure that nobody sees it coming, so you're genuinely
surprised. We intentionally mix up the degree of difficulty in solving the
puzzle.
[pagebreak]
AVC: You mentioned the road map you generally have for each
season. How detailed is the map for the rest of the series?
CC: The most liberating and significant event
that's happened for us was getting an end date for the show, negotiated with
the studio and the network. Before that, Damon and I didn't know if the
mythology we'd created was supposed to sustain us over two seasons or six
seasons, so it was very hard for us to do any sort of planning. But once we
agreed upon a number of episodes before we were going to end the show, then we
were able to start a situation where we could sketch out the rest. Once we
finish writing the finale, we'll have a mini-camp on season five. We have a
mini-camp every year, but because we're getting close enough to the end, the
mini-camp on season five will also involve a lot of discussion about what's
going to go on in season six.
AVC: Do you both already know what's going to go on?
DL: Do we know the absolute end of the show? Yeah.
We've had that in mind for quite some time. But can we hand you a script for
the last episode of the show right now? No, because there are market
fluctuations that we are unaware of at this point. Certain characters that you
want to write more for sort of wear out their welcome sooner rather than later.
New characters are introduced, and pop in unexpected ways. The essential nature
of that last episode is more specifically about what the last three or four scenes
are, and us working toward those has always remained pretty constant.
AVC: At some point, is Lost going to have to shift from
flashing forward and flashing back and having mysteries and character moments,
and instead become a straightforward action-adventure, in order to get to that
big finish?
CC: In terms of abandoning mysteries, no.
Fundamentally, Lost is a mystery show, so I think
that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature. In terms
of how we'll tell the story, that's something very much in flux. This year, the
degree of difficulty went up, as Damon was alluding to before. Before, we were
putting the tiles of the mosaic in the present and in the past. Now, we're
putting tiles in the present, the past, and the future. But what you consider
the present, the past, and future is dependent on where your point of view is.
The only rule that we have about that is that we're not bound to any rules. We
will basically tell the remaining stories in the way we think is most
compelling from a narrative perspective.
AVC: Is it right to think of Lost as one big
narrative, like a novel, or should it be thought of as episodic?
DL: You know, both. Ultimately, the legacy value of
the show will function more as a novel. On your bookshelf there will be a DVD
set, or maybe on your hard drive, you'll be able to click on any episode you
want to watch at any time. That's the way people read books. Fundamentally, you
can digest what will be all 122 hours of the show over the course of a marathon
viewing session in one week. Or, you can watch one every couple nights, or
however you want. Ultimately, that's the way the show is going to live on. The
way you're watching the show now is incredibly unique. You know there's going
to be a season finale on May 22, and then you'll have to wait all
the way until the end of January 2009 to see the next episode, whereas three or
four years from now, people who are experiencing the show for the first time
will basically only have to wait a day or an hour or a minute before they decide
to slide in the next DVD. It's like Harry Potter. Now, all seven books exist, but when we were reading them, we waited up
to two and a half years between books. We're writing the show to stay in the
zeitgeist as it's airing. We have to write finales that are compelling enough
to bring the audience back for the next season. But at the same time, the superstructure
of "every season is a book" is the way we've always talked about it, and every
episode is a chapter in that book. That feels like the most apt metaphor.
AVC: Going back to your comment about "market fluctuations" and
how they affect character arcs, are Fisher Stevens and Zoe Bell going to be
returning?
CC: You know, I think we'll duck that question.
AVC: How about this: Were the "tailies," particularly Eko, Libby, and
Ana-Lucia, always going to be funeral-home fodder, or did you have other plans
when you first introduced them?
DL: Our deal with Michele Rodriguez was always for
a season-long arc. And then when we came to the moment when Michael was going
to kill her, we also thought that if we killed Libby, it would be a one-two
punch. Because Ana-Lucia is a character that a lot of the audience had mixed
feelings about, but Libby is a character that nearly everybody loved. So to
make Michael's act as heinous as possible, Libby ended up dead. Eko… there were
deal complications with the actor going into that season, and though we did
have plans for that character that would have extended well beyond season three
of the show, as a result of the practical considerations of producing a show,
it just didn't pan out.
AVC: So with a show as well-planned as yours, what do you do in
that case? Do you move pieces of Eko's story to somebody else, or do they die
along with him?
CC: Television shows aren't made in a vacuum.
They're made in the real world, and the real world is complicated by the fact
that you are coordinating your creative plans with hundreds of other people. In
the case of Adewale [Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the actor who played Mr. Eko], he
wanted to go back to London. People go to Hawaii, and either they love it or
they get island fever, and Adewale was sort of in the latter camp. He just
wasn't happy being in Hawaii, so we had to accommodate that. We made
adjustments. You can sort of dictate to a certain degree what you want the show
to be, but you have to listen just as hard to what the show is telling you it
wants to be. Certain actors we write for and they pop, like Michael Emerson,
and we find ourselves doing a lot more with him than we originally planned.
Other ones like Mr. Eko, we had bigger plans for, but, just on a practical
level, they didn't mesh with that actor's desires.
DL: We've got time for one more question, by the
way.
AVC: How about a two-parter? a) During your partnership, have you
ever have any major disagreements about the direction you want to take the show
in? And b) Are there any story decisions that you now regret?
CC: Do you want to take A or B?
DL: I feel like we've talked about B ad nauseum, so
I'll take B. As obnoxious as this sounds, we really regret nothing. Though we
acknowledge that we've made significant mistakes, the reality is that the
intent behind all those mistakes was the right intent. You take something like
Nikki and Paolo, or spending nine episodes with our characters trapped in
cages—at the time we made those decisions, our heart was in the right
place. For Nikki and Paolo, we kept hearing fans saying, "What's going on with
the other 30 people on the island? Why don't they go on any adventures?" And we
were like, "That's a good and legitimate gripe, and let's see if we can figure
out a way to get some of those guys into the show." And fundamentally, it just
didn't work, but we don't regret having made the decision, or else fans would still be griping about [the background players]. Plus, it was a question we
had ourselves.
As for the people in the cages, it's been
pointed out to us recently that when we were writing that arc, basically we
were trying to negotiate for an ending to the show. We ourselves as
storytellers felt like we were trapped in cages. And the story could not
progress until it was progressing toward something.
Which is why the second half of season three really felt like we were answering
questions, moving forward, introducing Cooper, having Locke and Sawyer
acknowledge their mutual connection to the guy, and so on. All of those things
were about us being able to move forward, as opposed to finding new ways to
stay in place. We don't regret having written that storyline, with everybody
trapped in the cages. It was an issue of necessity. You have to make mistakes
in order to get it right.
CC: You know, I think for us, we're always going to
try to push the envelope with the show, and when you try to push the envelope
and fly close to the sound barrier, that plane is going to shatter, and
sometimes it's going to break apart. And sometimes it's going to blow on
through, and it's going to be exciting when it goes supersonic. We're always
going to keep trying that, and sometimes, we're going to miss. But I think if
we didn't do that, then people would really get upset.
As for your first question, the kind of
beautiful thing about the show is how well we do collaborate. We see eye to eye
on virtually everything. Occasionally, when we do see differently, it really
just comes down to who feels the most passionate. We've always agreed that if
one or the other feels more passionately about something, then the other one
will yield. But you would be surprised how infrequently that happens.
DL:
And Carlton and I aren't writing this show in a vacuum. There are six
or seven other incredibly talented individuals that we spend many, many hours
with in a room. The fact is that nobody can get territorial about any one idea,
because it fundamentally always becomes a hive mind, and the best idea always
wins. Carlton has always said, and I think he's right, that we're just trying
to write a show that is cool for us. And the reason that we all work so well
together is, we all think the same things are cool. We've never gotten to a
point where somebody pitches something, and they think it's really cool, and
everybody else goes, "Oh, that's not cool." We all sort of get onboard and
rally around it.