Monsters & Critics have an insightful interview with Fringe co-creators, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and show-runner, Jeff Pinkner (right to left):
How do you feel about the shift from Toronto for the pilot to New York City for the series?
A. Kurtzman I think we were very excited to be able to shoot in Manhattan because it felt to us like Manhattan is becoming the perfect backdrop for our storytelling. We will actually get to do more at the production level in Manhattan because of the tax breaks that are coming with shooting there.
R. Orci I was torn. I actually lived in Toronto as a kid for a few years, and so I was excited to visit some of my old … and I got to do that during the pilot. Obviously it’s easier to travel back and forth to New York.
And even though I’m an L.A. native, I will say that Manhattan is the best city in the world. I’m just happy to be there.
What are the challenge of continued storytelling for Fringe and figuring out what the series is going to be on a manageable week-to-week basis?
R. Orci The good news for us is that they are not skimping on resources. And since the pilot itself was two hours, the pattern for – no pun intended – the pattern for our hour-long show should allow us to fulfill the production that you saw. We also get part of the production value that you see on the show comes from not shooting in L.A. We very consciously wanted to shoot someplace where the production value would be visible merely as the environment, and so shooing in New York gives us that as well. It gives it a reality. You can tell when you’re shooting a show in L.A., and this show will not feel that way.
A. Kurtzman We really don’t limit ourselves at all when it comes to what we want to do and what we want to see. We will open our episodes with kind of … an incident event, and that’s always a fairly large thing. But mostly it’s just about how do you hook an audience and how do you keep them interested in what makes us interested in the show. So far, we have not been told to be limited by anything, so that’s great.
I think what’s really fun for us, as the series unfolds, is that when we sat down, we had a million ideas about where we wanted to go with these characters and the kinds of stories that we wanted to tell. But of course, until you’re picked up, you never really know, so those ideas just stay bubbling in the back of your head. Now it feels like the floodgates have opened, and we can just keep peeling back the layers of the onion and going for all the stuff that we wanted to do that we couldn’t put in the pilot.
Are you happy with the ratings for the Fringe premiere?
R. Orci If it was a movie, we’d be concerned, but a TV show is a marathon, so next week I think will be more a time to celebrate or be concerned.
A. Kurtzman Yes. And I think we got exactly what we wanted out of our key demos, so that was the most important thing. There is a period of time early in September where people are still finding television again because everyone is going back to school. And I think, for us, we kind of thought it’s very likely that people will be still coming back to the television sets, and there’ll probably be a two- to three-week ramp up. So we didn’t see it as particularly daunting in any way. I think we just feel like, in a way, you always take that into account, but you have to tune it out a little bit and just keep telling the stories that you want to tell.
R. Orci And that’s probably why we were trying to be disciplined about having a show that you can come in week two, week three, or week four and still catch up. So if you’ve missed the pilot, it’s okay.
A. Kurtzman Yes. The serialized elements of the show will have to do with kind of the emotional … of our characters, but you certainly don’t have to have seen the pilot or episode two to know what episode three is about.
What interests you in the fringe science?
R. Orci We’ve always been fans of science fiction, period, and it started becoming more apparent to us how often mainstream media news sources were covering things that just sounded very unbelievable, things that ten years ago would have seemed like science fiction. The example we keep bringing up is we just read on MSNBC a couple weeks ago that the Pentagon has developed an invisibility cloak.
So that kind of story, any time you look now in the science and technology section of any major media outlet, there are some really strange stories in there.
A. Kurtzman I would go so far as to say we would not even have pitched that kind of an idea for Alias because it would have sounded too insane, and Alias was as crazy as it gets when it comes to plotting. Suddenly, when that’s actually your reality and your TV has to match up to that, I think we just kind of felt like there’s just a whole new opportunity here.
R. Orci Also, it feels like it’s … that things aren’t exactly as they seem. I think a lot of people are feeling that, and I think Fringe is sort of a codeword for us as well for looking behind what is presented to you as reality, both media and just your beliefs growing up.
A. Kurtzman Yes. I would say, taking that a step further, that at the character level, these characters, while touching fringe science, are also either revealing or being forced to reveal the fringes of their personality, and that was always what really attracted us to, say, Cronenberg movies where someone was … or even Altered States, which we obviously make reference to in the pilot … someone wants to dig deeper into science, and in so doing, reveals a part of themselves that they didn’t necessarily know was there or were actually afraid to see.
So it just felt like a great way into that.R. Orci Growing up, you find out Columbus didn’t discover America. George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree.
What made the actors appealing to you for the cast of Fringe?
A. Kurtzman The pilot process is a crazy process because you see literally thousands of actors in an incredibly short period of time. It can be exhausting, but in a way that exhaustion works for you because when the right person walks in the room, you just know it immediately. You don’t have to try and shove them in a box. They just are that person.
And a lot of the time, I think, for us, an audition is just as much about what they say when they’re not saying the lines and how they walk in and out of a room as when they’re actually saying the lines. And the three of them were just, they seemed like incredibly warm people, which I think was important for us because there’s accessibility about each of them, but they also bring, I think, the unique characteristics we needed each character to have to the table.
R. Orci Yes. Noble is warm, but there’s a dark side to him. Josh is as smart and as sort of jaded as his character. And Anna is appealing, but real, and we like the idea of discovering someone as opposed to having a character that brings some kind of preconceived baggage or notions or previous characters. We like the idea of the audience getting to know her as a character for the first time.
You can read the rest of this great interview here (may include some ‘slight’ spoilers, so read at your discreation).
