Carlton talks Season 5

Carlton Cuse was interviewed by a TV Forum in China a couple of weeks ago, and he dropped a few hints about Season 5. Not many, but the most we've gotten so far.

He also talks about the writing process, producing, and the writers strike. You can check out the video here, but beware...it's really, really dry. And 35 minutes. So here are the highlights, impeccably transcribed:

On the arc of Season 5:

What's interesting in this next year is that Jack will become more a man of faith, and Locke will become an empiricist. And that reversal is one of the interesting character dynamics we're going to explore in Season 5.

On Locke's fate:

At the end of Season , he was dead in a coffin, so that's a fairly serious predicament for the character.

Don't give up on Locke. Just because he's dead doesn't mean his story is over...there's a very famous guy named Jesus Christ that got resurrected.

(In case you just went wide-eyed, it didn't sound like he was confirming Locke will actually get resurrected. In context, he was just saying that you shouldn't think Locke's story is over just because we've seen him dead. I think.)

On the futility of theorizing:

We try to stay away from everybody's theories. It kind of gets in the way of telling and expressing our own story. It can be more confusing than enlightening...the problem with people that come up with theories is that they don't know enough. For instance, people have been theorizing since the beginning of the show. They had no idea that at the end of Season 3 we were going to have a flash-forward and tell stories where characters were off the island. So it's hard for people to predict.

The other mistake people make is that you can't reduce Lost down to a one-sentence or two-sentence explanation. There's not just a simple little two-sentence answer for what's going on.

On writing the Season 4 finale:

We came up with the story, and it was very ambitious, and we didn't censor ourselves in the story process. Normally for one hour the script should be like fifty-five pages. And we had an eighty-page script. So we sat in my office over breakfast and were like, okay, now we have to cut a bunch of scenes out of the script. So we read through it, and by the time we got to the end, we only cut out one half of a page, and we realized it was unproducible. So instead of wrecking the story, we went to the network and asked them to give us one more hour of program. And we went in, and we put all the scenes up on our white board, and we added fifteen more pages to make it a two-hour story.

And finally, an adorable anecdote about how he started writing for TV:

I thought I was going to be a doctor. And then some guys came to Harvard to show this movie called Airplane!. And I ended up helping to organize the screening of the movie, and hung around with the filmmakers...and I was like, 'wow, this seems much more interesting.'

TAGS: Carlton Cuse, Interview, Season 5
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