Lots of Tidbits from Lindelof & Cuse at the Screenwriting Expo

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse spoke about Lost at something called the Screenwriting Expo hosted by Creative Screenwriting. Here are the highlights (with help from AICN, IGN, and DarkUFO):

-Season 5 will be "a little more science fiction-y."

-Season 6 will be "f**king crazy!" (Thanks, Carlton.)

-Scott or Steve (whichever one is still alive), perhaps with all the other extras, might meet a tragic end this season.

-When asked what his "favorite scene from the Season 6 finale" is, Lindelof may or may not have been joking when he said, "it involves a volcano."

-We'll never "meet" the Degroots, but we will see them again.

-Cuse joined Lindelof as a showrunner in Season 1's "Solitary" (Sayid's first episode), and that's when they started fleshing out the specifics of the Lost mythology. Prior to that, Lindelof and J.J. Abrams had decided, for example, what the monster was, and that a group of people had brought polar bears onto the island to do experiments in the past, but it wasn't until Cuse came aboard that they decided it would be called the Dharma Initiative, and that some characters would get off the island early, etc.

-In the third season, before ABC agreed to let them end the show, they did indeed start stalling: "Claire strapping a message to a frigging bird's foot!" for example.

-James "Sawyer" Ford is specifically named after Harrison Ford, because Sawyer is "the Han Solo of Lost."

-Close followers might remember that Season 2's second episode, "Adrift," was originally meant to be a Sawyer flashback and not a Michael flashback. The Sawyer scenes were shot, and involved him conning a woman played by Jolene Blalock (Star Trek: Enterprise) in Florida. I figured they would eventually throw the discarded flashback on a DVD, but apparently it was so horrible that they buried it, and later recycled aspects of the storyline for Season 2's thirteenth episode, "The Long Con."

-Cuse says they spend more time on the characters than the mythology, and specifically decided to wait a while before diving head-first into the heavy sci-fi stuff. From IGN:

"We sort of suckered people into this show but not presenting it as a science fiction show right out of the gate," noting that there were elements early on that were, "like a Rorschach test", saying that when Flight 815's pilot is killed, someone who didn't like sci-fi would think, "there has to be a rational explanation." Even the reveal that Locke could walk on the island was tempered by the fact that they still hadn't revealed why he was in the chair in the first place, leaving the opportunity that, "it could be psychosomatic." Lindelof said Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great example of a story that has blatantly science fiction elements, noting, "Nazis melt and ghost fly out of this ark," but that it waits a long time before presenting these elements, allowing the audience to fall in love with Indiana Jones first. Lindelof said he felt shows like Invasion probably had a harder time finding a wide audience because, "They said 'Alien!', right out of the gate.'"

-Unlike Heroes, there are no possibilities for time travel paradoxes on Lost. Put another way: the future cannot be changed.

-Originally, Mr. Eko's role was to challenge Locke as the spiritual leader of the island. The plans evaporated when it became clear that Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje didn't want to stay on the show: "Adewale's unhappiness was almost instantaneous. On his second episode, he was expressing extreme dissatisfaction."

-So far, ten of Season 5's seventeen episodes have been written.

TAGS: Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Interview, Mythology
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