BBC Interview: JJ Abrams on Fringe Clues

In what might be the longest JJ Abrams interview ever, BBC's Chris Moyles talked to JJ Abrams about Fringe, Star Trek, Lost, Cloverfield, and Monster Plane.

JJ confirms that there are clues in each episode that we should be watching for:

Q: You talked about Cloverfield and all the little clues, I'd like to know with Fringe if are you going to be doing the same for the series.

JJ: Yes, there are odd little clues on the show, there are these commercial breaks, there these odd little icons that come up

Q: Apples, and hands and things?

JJ: Apples and hands. And those all have certain weird meanings. There are little clues in every episode, about the next episode. So if you watch, it doesn't matter... you don't have to find them, but people like me, I'm obsessed with this crap.

JJ's other word of advice "Look out for an observer". Maybe this guy?

We have already seen that the Pen Rose rebus clue from Pilot was a hint at Dr. Penrose in The Same Old Story. What do you think will be the hint for next week?

* Thanks to SpoilerTV for finding this great interview!

News Update: Fringe Fresh, Fringe Sunday, Fringe Fans

Listen to an interview of J.J. Abrams on Fresh Air, Life On The 'Fringe'.

TVWeek - Fox Offers Previews of ‘Fringe,’ Feature Films on Sunday:

Fox is doing everything it can to turn Sunday’s encore presentation of the “Fringe” pilot into an event—including offering viewers advance looks at feature films “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “24: Redemption” and the second episode of “Fringe.”

In an unusual move, Fox will follow Sunday’s 8 p.m. “Fringe” repeat with a broadcast of the first four minutes of the second episode of the series.

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Forbes - Q&A: JJ Abrams Talks 'Fringe':

Your work tends to generate a lot fan interest online--do you read what your viewers write? How has it impacted your story telling?

J.J. Abrams: I do read it. Not all of it, of course, because there's a lot out there. We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get The New York Times and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.

It's amazing to me how the consensuses is no longer [garnered from] ripping open the newspaper or getting the printouts from the studio or network, but rather going online and seeing what the people--paid professional, amateur fan, casual viewer--have to say.

How does that impact where you take a story and how you tell a story?

J.J. Abrams: The experience of doing a TV show is a very unique one--and it's one of the reasons that I wanted to do a show again. Unlike a movie, which is sort of a one-off, there's an evolution, an ongoing transformation that happens when you do a TV series. You're always reacting to the stuff that you're seeing, whether it’s the stuff on screen in the editing room or the stuff on screen on your computer at home.

So I wouldn't say the fan's reaction ever dictates anything, but they are not only appreciated and in many ways the reason that we're doing the show, but also people with whom we have a dialogue. We take what they think and what they feel to heart.

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News Update: Abrams and Jackson, Kurtzman and Orci

MovieWeb - J.J. Abrams and Joshua Jackson Talk Fringe:

Did you purposely, were you staying away with the purpose for the last five years of not wanting to go back to TV and try to define yourself as not that character you had played? Or was it with intent or just happenstance, I guess is my question.

Joshua Jackson: There was some purpose in that TV is exhausting. It takes a little while to recover, but I don't know. It's hard to say. I try not to live my life as much as possible defining myself against something. So I wasn't really too worried about coming back and being labeled as "Pacey" or as that guy from Dawson's Creek because that's really an actor's job. If I get labeled as that, it's probably because I'm not good enough to define myself as something else. So I wasn't purposely running from that, but I certainly wasn't looking ....

Can you tell us who is playing her boss and how soon we might see him?

J.J. Abrams: I can't tell you that yet, but I can tell you that you will definitely meet him, he'll definitely be a featured part of the show. We want to make sure that when you meet him it's something you're hungry for, as opposed to something that you're just experiencing. So the way it's going to happen, which will happen over time, but by the end of the first season you'll meet "William Bell."

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Underwire - Two-Headed Brain Trust Injects Fear Into Fringe:

Wired.com: Mythology arcs are tricky to pull off. When it works on shows like The X-Files or Lost, or Heroes during its first season, audiences get hooked. But if the serialized story line gets too dense, you risk alienating the fans. How much mythology are you building into Fringe?

Kurtzman: Each episode will be close-ended with beginning, middle and end. If you miss an episode or two or even three, you can come in and catch up immediately. That's our mandate. We are also going to dole out little bits of the mystery over the course of a long period of time.

Orci: Our ambition was to create a new formula based on where we tend to err, which is to be overly complicated, and what we tend not to have that much of an instinct for, which is classic procedural storytelling. We're trying to crash those two sensibilities together and see if we can find the tightrope that is not on TV right now.

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News Update: Fringe Jumps The Shark Out Of The Gates Like Lost, And Fringe Is More ER Than X-Files

Underwire - Abrams on Fringe: Science, Conspiracies and 'the Pattern':

[J.J. Abrams] on Fringe's slam-bang setup: "When we did the pilot for Lost, we had the monster appear at the end of the first act because we wanted to say to the audience, 'We're jumping the shark now. We're not going to wait. We're doing crazy shit from the beginning.' On Fringe, we very consciously made what is in many ways a preposterous, front-end scientific story choice in order to say to the audience, 'This is what you're going to be getting on the show.' It may be more extreme in some episodes, less so in others."

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io9 - Fringe Will Jump The Shark Early And Often, Says J.J. Abrams:

It's not X-Files, it's ER

Abrams said in his own mind, he's comparing Fringe more to ER than to X-Files. "You have these ongoing relationships, these ongoing storylines, and yet week-to-week when the door first opens, you're faced with the insane urgent situation of the week," said Abrams. Looking at shows like his own Felicity or Dawson's Creek, there's nothing to interrupt the relationship drama, so the characters just deal with their issues non-stop. On ER, "if these characters were not doctors, if they were just hanging out, you would go through their emotional stories in a few episodes," but because they have fires to put out, the stories get stretched out more.

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News Update: JJ Is On The Phone. Which One? Both. Also, Mark Valley Part 1

Joshua Jackson and J.J. Abrams are on the phone with reporters, and Mark Valley, exclusively, and in 2 parts.

New York Post - J.J. Abrams Talks Big Business:

Despite the clear prevalence of a corporate conspiracy in the pilot of "Fringe," Abrams downplays it's role in the series over the long run.

"It's much more about the characters than a cliché look at corporate culture," he says, adding: "That said, I don't trust corporate culture at all."

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Reuters - JJ Abrams offers terrifying sci-fi on TV's "Fringe":

The terrifying thing, says J.J. Abrams, creator of the upcoming TV series "Fringe", is that those tomorrows are now within reach.

"The show is coming out a time when every week we read or see some kind of potentially horrifying scientific breakthrough ... We are at a time where science is out of control," Abrams told reporters in a conference call on Thursday.

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The Mayor of Television - Beyond the "Fringe":

Romance may be in the air for Peter and Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), the FBI agent drawn into a world of scientific horrors. There's chemistry between the two in the pilot, which airs Tuesday, but, as Jackson drolly noted, "It would be ... awkward to hit on a woman while her boyfriend's dying right in front of her."

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BuddyTV - Exclusive Interview: Mark Valley, from 'Fringe' - Part 1:

When you first read that pilot script, what was your reaction?

Mark Valley: I was compelled. It was very engaging. I just couldn't put it down. And I had read other scripts for television shows about science fiction things, you know, some of the usual suspects there which makes for, you know, kind of a mediocre read. But this one, for some reason, the way it delved into the characters [John Scott], the unique aspect of the cases they're investigating, the way the characters interacted - I couldn't put it down, I had to find out what was going on. It was one of those things. It was a real page turner. I said “Well, if I like it, then other people are going like it.” Also it was the only job that was offered to me at that particular time. I'm not going to go on about all these wonderful things that drew me to the pilot - the fact that I was unemployed was the most contributing factor...

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News Update: Joshua Jackson Interviews

CanMag - Joshua Jackson on Fringe:

Ah, the ever present reluctant hero. "I also liked, there's a built-in, ingrained conflict for Peter because he doesn't want to be here, period, but then he really doesn't want to be forced to confront his father. He's sort of a reluctant participant in the group. Then all of those things are his greatest faults that he can't commit to anything and that he's never really found an overarching passion."

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Josh-Jackson.net - An [Exclusive] Interview with Josh Jackson:

Mandy: It does seem great. Because everything I’ve seen so far . . . and I’ll admit, I’ve seen the leaked pilot…

Josh: Naughty, naughty, naughty!

Mandy: I know, I know! I just couldn’t resist! I had to see what all the hype was about. But it looks fantastic, and I can’t wait to see the real final results, and yes, it is like a movie.

Josh: The pilot, even though you’ve seen the leaked one, shows most of what’s there, it’s not quite the finished product; but it’s a lot of the schemes [sic], and like the music wasn’t finished, and it wasn’t a very good print of the show. But yeah, that one is like a movie. It has its own beginning, middle and end. But in size the whole universe, and that’s kinda the fun of the show; sorta piece by piece getting farther and farther to what is the fringe world.

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News Update: With Fringe in the Home Stretch, Some Signs the Media Blitz Has Begun

With Fringe premiering next week (Tuesday, September 9 at 8/7c) it is a safe bet that fresh Fringe news--interviews, press releases, marketing ploys--won't be in short supply between now and 9/9. With that in mind, we'll do our best to provide you with comprehensive News Updates in the coming days.

The A.V. Club catches up with J.J. Abrams:

AVC: Do you want to direct an episode?

JA: Well, I'm hoping. Maybe a season finale or a season opener or something. I've been wanting to do it since the pilot. We have great directors working on Fringe, but when someone else directs something that you're involved with, it's always their vision, and the director in my head is definitely wanting to get involved.

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BuddyTV, iVillage and Television Without Pity pepper J.J. Abrams with questions:

BuddyTV: I wanted to ask you, what's your obsession with mysterious boxes? You always have a mysterious box. Do you always know what's going to be in them when you write?

JA: No. But the funny thing about the box motif is, it's just human nature, I think. You want to know, what is it? What do you see inside of that thing? I think in certain situations, it can be a really fun story point. Even in one of the early episodes of Fringe, there's a teaser at the end of one of the episodes that is kind of a magic box-y sort of thing where you're like, “What the hell?” I just love that stuff, so that's my own personal interest.

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IGN writes a comprehensive piece on Why You Should Watch Fringe:

"There's a large mythology that we all decided on when we wrote the pilot and we knew that when we went to series we were going to have to reach a certain end point," says Kurtzman. "That end point's very flexible in terms of when we get there. If they let us run for 12 seasons, you'll see it in season 12. If they take us off the air by nine episodes, you'll see it in episode nine. So there's a lot of room there."

The team adds that they were lucky to figure out what that mythology was going to be early in the process of creating the show, because sometimes on other shows it doesn't come as easily or as early, forcing the writers to sort of "find it as they go."

"This time we really do have a plan," says Orci, while noting that this was a lesson they learned while working on the sometimes convoluted Alias.

"I think we're of the opinion that shows that sort of say, 'Yeah, we know our big answer,' but they don't really… you can tell," adds Kurtzman. "You can tell because the storytelling starts to feel like it's treading water. And we knew that if we were going to go into this, given how massive it was going to be to explore this world, we had to have our end point in place."

"[Standalone episodes] was one thing that we demanded from the beginning when we all were going to sit down and do this show," recalls Orci. "We have to learn our lessons from before. We studied procedurals specifically to try and merge [it with serialized]. And it's very against our instincts to do that, but when nine of the top shows on TV are called Law & Order and CSI, you have to study them a little bit and figure out what it is they're doing that's such a satisfying [experience]."

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Sci Fi Wire on the Set of Fringe with Anna Torv

Anna Torv talks to Sci Fi Wire about what has gone into developing her character (Olivia Dunham), how saying "Yes" to Fringe was a no-brainer and how Fringe isn't genre-specific.

Click here to read the full article.

Fringe's Torv Talks Exclusively

When Fox's Fringe debuts next week, it will introduce a new Australian actress to American audiences: Anna Torv, who has appeared in some TV down under and elsewhere, but is otherwise unknown.

But if Fringe--created by J.J. Abrams and his Star Trek writing team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci--is a big hit, as Fox and several critics expect, Torv won't be unknown for long. She joins a list of Abrams discoveries--including Felicity's Keri Russell, Alias' Jennifer Garner and Lost's Evangeline Lilly--who emerged from obscurity into the limelight.

"J.J. has this, I don't know, like, uncanny knack for casting women," Torv's co-star, Joshua Jackson, said. "It's crazy."

Torv, a native of Melbourne, is perhaps best known for starring in the BBC series Mistresses and the cable miniseries The Pacific. She auditioned by tape for Fringe and was one of thousands of actresses considered for the difficult lead role of FBI special agent Olivia Dunham. Before she knew it, Torv was on a jet to Toronto, where the two-hour pilot was shot, and is now living in New York, where the series will be filmed.

Fringe centers on FBI agent Olivia Dunham, who finds herself drawn into an investigation of a mysterious aircraft disaster in Boston. Olivia's desperate search for help to save her gravely injured partner leads to brilliant scientist Walter Bishop (fellow Aussie John Noble), who has been institutionalized for the last 17 years. And the only way to question him requires pulling his estranged son, Peter (Jackson), in to help. The investigation gets weirder and weirder as Olivia discovers that things--and science--are not what they seem.

Torv spoke with SCI FI Wire exclusively on the Manhattan set of Fringe last week. Fringe premieres Sept. 9 and will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Tell us about your character.

Torv: I play Olivia Dunham, who's an FBI agent, who ... all of a sudden is exposed to this whole other world and is kind of forced to deal with it, which she does. She sort of tends to take on all the responsibility she can get. She has a real sense of duty. When we first started shooting it, we were able to talk to a retired FBI agent, which was fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. And even just talking to him, I mean, not about any secrets stuff, but ... these people that do these kind of jobs have ... just such a strong sense of duty. Like, a strong sense of duty and just total focus and tunnel vision, ... high expectations of themselves, too. And I think Olivia really does fall into that category.

And she's ex-military, used to being in charge. She's used to being able to figure out what's happening, and suddenly is thrown into these situations that are mystifying?

Torv: I think so. ... I think she's used to hard work and, like, following the trail, and the stuff that she's dealing with is horrific, because it's huge. ... One of the beautiful things about J.J.'s show is that there's always this overriding thing that follows you that you can't quite get to the bottom of. Real characters in totally outrageous situations, and yeah, this is the same.

Roberto Orci told us that the subtext of the show for him was about the family that you choose: that these people sort of need each other and that's why they come together. Do you agree with that?

Torv: I do, absolutely. And I think that as the show progresses they will need each other more and more and more. ... The entire cast is fantastic. ... The power of three's a fun little number, because ... the dynamic is always going to shift, and you're always going to need one person more than the other. ... I was brought up in a family of three, and there's always two people against one.

Tell me about some of the crazier stuff you've had to do.

Torv: I don't know what I can say. I mean, seriously-- ... this sounds so boring--but, legitimately, standing outside of a hospital in minus-45 degrees with the wind blowing in my face, with no hat on, no gloves on, nothing on my face. That was insane. And the scene got cut from the pilot anyway. ...

In the pilot, they shoot you in a water isolation tank a la Altered States.

Torv: Yeah. I don't know, how long did we do it? I think only a day, I think it was only one day in the tank. And that was OK. They were really sweet. They had to put Epsom salts in so I could float a little bit. ... I was having to use my stomach muscles. But I was glad I was in first, because they did all of my stuff, and then the camera guys got in the tank with their big boots, and shot back up. So I got off easy. ...

Can you talk about the sort of concept of the show. It's pretty out there, and sort of tough for people to wrap their brains around.

Torv: I'm really excited for the show to premiere so then I stop getting asked the question, because ... I never know which way to go. It's kind of got a bit of everything, I don't think it's genre-specific. I think that it is very science fiction, but more emphasis on the science as opposed to the fiction. There's drama, because your characters are all real, but they're dealing with these ... horrific [scenarios], so I think there's elements of horror. There's elements of action. There's investigative [stuff]; there's crime-solving. I mean, it's just all consuming and far reaching. ...

It sort of feels like a J.J. Abrams show because he'll take many genres and sort of smash them together.

Torv: Totally. And seamlessly, you know? And that's the kind of thing. I was actually just thinking about that the other day, going, "Oh, my God. We were up to episode four, and the cases are the things you've looked at and seen, or the characters have seen, is ridiculous. And yet it all seems to kind of gel and work.

Just briefly watching you this afternoon, rehearsing with the other actors, it's like you guys have a lot of fun.

Torv: Yeah. Well, especially scenes like this, because ... we're all together doing stuff, and it's not, like, high high high stakes. It's legitimately doing and asking questions and moving and doing. I love any scene were we actually get to move or walk and talk. That's my favorite.

This came up pretty suddenly for you. You were in Australia, and suddenly you're moving to New York and you've got this TV series.

Torv: Good things sometimes come really quickly and easily, actually, and it was just the most painless audition process I think I've ever had. And I got the part really quickly, and I mean it was a no-brainer. I said, "Yes, thank you, I am so excited." And I actually hopped on a plane the next day. Went to Los Angeles and met J.J. and some of the others and flew to Toronto, like, the next day, and we started shooting that week. And then we had a little bit of time between the pilot and starting the series, so I had a little bit of time to prepare to come to New York and sort all that stuff out. But, yeah, I don't know. I think also, and then since I've been in New York, too, I've just been working nonstop, so, all this sort of external stuff that's going on is really almost nonexistent. We're working so many hours a day, and I literally go from home to set to home to set. But I'm having fun. ... I'm really having fun doing the show. --Patrick Lee, News Editor

Kurtzman and Orci on LIFE AFTER FILM SCHOOL

This Sunday, August 31 at 7:30pm ET (4:30pm PT) Fox Movie Channel will feature Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci on their half-hour series, Life After Film School. The Fringe Co-Creators, Writers and Executive Producers will be interviewed by aspiring student filmmakers Codie Elaine Brooks, Katie Lovejoy and Oren Peleg.

Kurtzman and Orci discuss how their partnership grew out of a college creative writing class. Kurtzman brought Orci onboard the writing staff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys where they eventually became show runners. Their collaboration with J.J. Abrams began writing and producing on Alias, the feature film Mission Impossible III and continues on the new Fox series Fringe, debuting September 9.

...

“Alex and Roberto reveal to our film students how writing spec scripts got them to the next level in television,” commented Adam Lewinson, VP of Programming. “They share the secrets of their success as a writing and producing team who have proven to be hugely successful while working on multiple projects simultaneously.”

That's how the press release bills the show. However, what the press release doesn't say is that a good third of the program is devoted soley to a Q&A on Fringe. Having seen it, it's a must see for Fringe fans, and I'd further recommend it to--fans of Transformers, Mission Impossible III, Star Trek, etc--anyone who has ever seen the names Kurtzman and Orci a second, third and fourth time, and wondered, who are these guys and why are they writing all my favorite stuff?

Sci Fi Wire on the Set of Fringe with Joshua Jackson

Sci Fi Wire on the set of Fringe interviews Joshua Jackson who gets a bit spoilerish with his answers.

Click here to read the edited, spoiler-free version of the article.

Fringe's Jackson Spills All

When we last saw Joshua Jackson on regular series television, he was resigned to staying in Capeside forever, even though Joey decided to choose him over Dawson.

That was more than five years ago, in the finale to the sixth season of Jackson's breakthrough series, Dawson's Creek.

But hold on to your rowboat: Pacey's back.

"I think he's finally going to leave the Creek after this season," said J.J. Abrams. "Really, all I love to do is make Pacey jokes."

Jackson is a regular on Abrams' upcoming Fox SF series Fringe, and he tells SCI FI Wire that it took Abrams to lure him back to the grind of an hourlong drama.

"It was something I have been hesitant about for the last five years, since Dawson's Creek ended," Jackson said in an exclusive interview on the show's set in New York on Aug. 26. "And, you know, the time commitment and the being-in-one-place of it all is a massive life shift, and I had a really great five years of not being on TV. But I don't know, the stars sort of aligned for this, and J.J.'s a great guy."

Jackson added: "Beyond the lifestyle choices of working on a television show, the thing that had kept me from doing TV was knowing how hard it is to tell good shows, good stories, over a long period of time. And he ... and his group--he works with the same people over and over again--have a track record of being able to do that. And that was the thing that sort of tipped it to the other side for me."

Jackson spoke during a break in shooting on Fringe, in which he plays Peter Bishop, the smart but damaged son of brilliant but eccentric scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble). Peter finds himself reunited with his estranged father at the urging of FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) as they investigate strange cases on the "fringe of science": cases that hint at a nefarious conspiracy underlying strange phenomena across the globe.

Below is an excerpt of SCI FI Wire's interview in which he discusses his character--and why he made a trip to the emergency room.

Tell me about your character, Peter.

Jackson: Yeah, well, ... Peter is just sort of discovering he's part of this world right now. Because when he's initially brought in, in the pilot, it's completely against his will, and he's only brought in because Olivia needs him to serve a function and get access to my father. But then, like anybody who's got a bit of curiosity, he sees this wild world and the access that he has through being a part of this world, and it sort of draws him in.

The character sort of functions in a couple of different ways, in addition to the father-son dynamic. On the one hand, you're sort of the voice of skepticism, on the other hand you're sort of interpreting what Walter's saying. And then you're like the Greek chorus that gets to make jokes.

Jackson: A little bit, yeah. ... I think the Greek chorus, the peanut gallery and the skeptic part come together. Because the person who stands one step removed is usually the one who is most capable of pooh-poohing. But just as an archetype, every show like this--every show, period--needs to have somebody who sort of stands at a remove and says, "Doesn't anybody else think this is ridiculous?" And Olivia is a sort of very straight ahead, trying to fix things. She's just a very hard-nosed, go, go, go type of girl. So that's great. I get that character who gets to sort of release the tension every once in a while.

Co-creator Roberto Orci said that, for him, the show is about the family you choose.

Jackson: The family you choose, and then-- ... I don't believe in fate--but people whose paths you're fated to cross. ... There's obviously [a] broken dynamic between me and my father. But then you throw this Olivia character into the mix here, and we become this sort of dysfunctional family unit by necessity. But you throw people in high-pressure situations like this, and they just sort of naturally come together and bond. ... If you take it off the television and put it in real life, that's how you get to know people, seeing them in action.

Tell me about some of the crazier stuff you've had to do so far.

[spoilers removed]

Can you talk about working with Anna and John?

Jackson: Yeah, she is terrific. J.J. has this, I don't know, like, uncanny knack for casting women. It's crazy. And ... they're two Aussies, but they're both sort of dedicated, lovely people, which is why I say the drama all stays on camera. There is so far--and I don't see why it would change--this feeling of "Well, we're all here, and we're in it, and we're doing it together, and we take our jobs just seriously enough that everybody shows up ready to work, but not so seriously that it's, you know, the end of the world if something goes wrong."

[spoiler removed]

John told me he actually gets to milk the cow.

Jackson: He did milk the cow. I enjoyed the fruits of his labors. I did not actually milk the cow myself.

Anything else about Fringe?

Jackson: Fringe, it's the hardest show on TV to talk about.

...or read the full, unedited article at Fringe Spoilers.

E! News: Anna Torv - On The Fringe

E! News has an On The Fringe special, featuring Anna Torv.

* Thanks to MultipleVerses for the video!

Popular Science Interviews JJ Abrams About Fringe and Science

In it JJ tells PopSci.com about his science background and influences and reveals one of Fringe's central conflicts.

J.J. Abrams Gets Lost Again

J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost and director of the forthcoming Star Trek movie, brings his spooky brand of science to bear on the new television series, Fringe, set to premiere September 9th on Fox. The show centers on a mad scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who’s sprung from a mental ward by his estranged son Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) and the blonde bombshell FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv). Together, the unlikely trio sets out to solve paranormal mysteries on behalf of the US government. Think X-Files—only people believe them.

Popular Science: Where did your interest in science come from?

J.J. Abrams: My grandfather was a huge inspiration. He was the owner of an electronics company, and after World War II he sold surplus radio and electronics kits to schools. We would spend hours building and soldering things. As a young kid, it’s so inspirational to see that you can build things that aren’t made by the hand of God, that you can attach the motor to a wire and make something work. My interest in technology and science actually came from his explanations of how radios and transistors work.

Click here to read the full article...

PS: Your shows seem to use science as a metaphor for other, more sinister things. In Lost, for instance, the science on the island seems to be a proxy for man’s failed attempt to control the world around him. What does science mean for you?

JA: For me, science is about wide-open thinking and the sense that anything is possible. The most visionary minds are the ones that are the most fluid about what is absolute and what is variable. The idea that something is impossible doesn’t come easily to a character like Dr. Walter Bishop.

PS: You tend to make a lot of the conflict between science and faith. Do you feel it’s easier to make the case for one side or the other?

JA: Many scientists throughout history have rejected the idea of God and faith while others have embraced it. The show is a wonderful arena for that conflict. When one character is essentially a man of faith and the other is a man of science, it sparks a great debate.

PS: How do you account for the recent rise in shows about science and scientists?

JA: Popular culture is a mirror, and we are living in a time where every day some kind of shocking or amazing announcement is made. To read today, for instance, that researchers have found a way to destroy HIV or help 80 percent of Alzheimer’s patients, it’s amazing. These types of things are becoming more commonplace. There’s more science in our lives, so there’s more science on TV.

PS: Where do you get the inspiration for the science in your shows?

JA: I’ll find myself constantly grabbing science magazines or looking at articles online. But the most important thing when making entertainment is finding something that’s inspiring. Whenever I do, whether it involves technology or not, it’s like fuel for me. It could be a three 3-minute clip on the Internet that someone sent me that makes me consider something that I hadn’t thought about before.

PS: Any examples?

JA: Oh, everyday there’s something. Yesterday somebody sent me a picture of this crazy pig with a monkey face. So, yeah, there’s always something.

NYPost Video: Red Carpet Interviews From The Fringe Premiere Party in Manhattan

The New York Post's Jackie Strause talks to Fringe's cast and creators including Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv and JJ Abrams.

SciFi Wire Interview: FRINGE Premiere

Sci Fi Wire has an interview with FRINGE creators J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner, at a FRINGE news conference the evening of the premiere, where they discussed the show's genesis in their favorite SF&F series of the past and how the series will deal with "the family you choose."

What were your favorite films, TV shows that led to this?

Orci: The first thing I brought up was Real Genius. Remember the old Val Kilmer movie comedy? It was about a bunch of geniuses at the university, solving scientific problems with science? So that was my sort of weird touch point. ... Alex was a big Twin Peaks fan. So he wanted the sort of surrealistic FBI element to it. And J.J. loves [filmmaker David] Cronenberg. He loves The Fly. He loves those kind of [shows] where medical science or something like that goes just slightly wrong, and it becomes kind of horror, you know? Just kind of those three sensibilities mixed in together.

Abrams: The Twilight Zone, you know, for me was the most impactful show, mostly because it combined characters that were ultimately damaged--and often heartbreaking--with situations that were absolutely terrifying and weird. ... And clearly The X-Files is a huge influence; Altered States is a huge influence; the David Cronenberg films. There were a lot of things that for me were obsessions, and I feel like we get to, you know, play in that arena now.

There are so many shows now with mythology arcs they end getting less interesting the more they end up revealing. How do you make this different from those?

Orci: I don't think the stories that we're generating and will continue to generate are dependent on "the answer." So we can in theory indefinitely continue to do what we're going to do, whether or not we have the answer. The fact that we actually know what we're doing, and have an end point, is kind of a bonus that allows us to have everything sort of make sense retroactively. But I don't think our show is predicated on the notion that we're going to have to be revealing our secret every week.

Pinkner: The mythology of the show is one of the rails of the storytelling, but it is by no means the one that we all think that people are going to come back for. It's really just the cherry on the top of the sundae, and ... it's there already: It's there in the pilot. You won't even know it's there. And, ... unlike show's we've done, we're not asking the audience to be wondering [as in Alias] "Who is Rambaldi? What is Rambaldi about? What does Rambaldi want?" It's much more of an open mystery, and the sense of revelation won't be like "Oh, thank God they finally answered that question. Now I can move on to another." We're approaching it from a different point of view.

Click here to read the full article, or visit SciFi.com.

Fringe Creators Reveal Secrets

J.J. Abrams and his co-creators and producers of Fox's upcoming SF series Fringe talked about the show's genesis in their favorite SF&F series of the past and how the series will deal with "the family you choose."

From J.J. Abrams and his Star Trek writing team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Fringe centers on FBI special agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), who finds herself drawn into an investigation of a mysterious aircraft disaster in Boston. Olivia's desperate search for help to save her gravely injured partner leads to brilliant scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been institutionalized for the last 17 years. And the only way to question him requires pulling his estranged son Peter (Joshua Jackson) in to help. The investigation gets weirder and weirder as Olivia discovers that things--and science--are not what they seem.

Abrams and executive producers Orci, Kurtzman, Bryan Burk and Jeff Pinkner spoke in a news conference in New York's meatpacking district on Aug. 26 about the series before attending a premiere party in Manhattan later that evening. SCI FI Wire was there; following are excerpts from the news conference with details of the upcoming series. (Abrams brought a box of cupcakes to apologize for showing up late.) Fringe premieres Sept. 9 and will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

How did this show come together?

Orci: I call this a planned pregnancy. Which means we literally said, "Let's sit down in a room together and create a show." And the three of us just sat down for weeks on end and just went through the history of our TV loves and our movie loves and just--planned pregnancy. So it was all three of us.

Did you set out to remake The X-Files?

Orci: We did not set out to remake The X-Files. We set out to kind of just blend our three tastes, you know?

What were your favorite films, TV shows that led to this?

Orci: The first thing I brought up was Real Genius. Remember the old Val Kilmer movie comedy? It was about a bunch of geniuses at the university, solving scientific problems with science? So that was my sort of weird touch point. ... Alex was a big Twin Peaks fan. So he wanted the sort of surrealistic FBI element to it. And J.J. loves [filmmaker David] Cronenberg. He loves The Fly. He loves those kind of [shows] where medical science or something like that goes just slightly wrong, and it becomes kind of horror, you know? Just kind of those three sensibilities mixed in together.

You would say this is a science fiction series first and foremost, where X-Files was supernatural?

Orci: Yeah, the title itself refers to fringe science, so I think the idea is to keep it so that it's maybe a couple of minutes in the future, but not weeks in the future, not years. We're trying to do what you can read any of the tech science parts of the newspaper nowadays, and there's just really strange articles in there that 10 years ago would have been, you know, unbelievable, and now it's like "Oh, the Pentagon has an invisibility cloak." It's like "What?" You know?

How far are you into it? In terms of scripts?

Orci: We are six scripts in. [Fox has ordered 13 episodes for the fall.]

How much of the mythology do you figure out before the show actually starts? Or is it make it up as you go, as you write the show?

Kurtzman: There's a large mythology that we all kind of decided on when we wrote the pilot, and we knew that when we went to series we were going to have to reach a certain end point. That end point's very flexible in terms of when we get there. If they let us run for 12 seasons, you'll see it in season 12. If they take us off the air by nine episodes, you'll see it in episode nine. So, um, there's a lot of room there.

Orci: Yeah, we were lucky to actually figure it out early. Sometimes you don't figure it out early; you kind of find it as you go, and this time we really do have a plan. ... [It's a lesson we learned from] Alias. We learned it from Alias. We learned a lot from Alias. ...

In J.J.'s previous shows that you guys have worked on, as much of a genre show that they are, there's always a central metaphor. Alias is sort of about a girl who's coming into her own. Lost is about this other thing, these characters dealing with their troubled pasts. Is this about that sort of thing as well?

Orci: I mean, for me it's about the family that you choose, you know? We're trying to crash a procedural with kind of the more genre-type stuff that we like. In a classic procedural, the characters are together because they're assigned to be. In this show, they're together because they kind of need each other. And one of them's father, and she needs him, and he can't be there without his son, who doesn't exactly want to be there, either. So it's a tenuous situation that they're in, which is obviously very exciting dramatically, because there's a lot you can milk out of it for that reason.

Kurtzman: And I think literally, Fringe refers both to fringe science and to these characters who are exploring the fringes of their personality. ... The demons that they face in these cases force them to confront their own demons that they haven't ever necessarily wanted to face in their lives. ...

How will you balance the case-of-the-week episodes with the serialized arc of the overarching conspiracy?
Orci: That's one thing that we demanded from the beginning when we all sat down and were going to do this show, that we have to learn our lessons from before, and we studied procedurals specifically to try and merge the two, and it's very against our instincts to do that. But when nine of the top 10 shows on TV are called Law and Order and C.S.I., you have to study them a little bit and figure out what they're doing that's such a satisfying ... stand-alone.

Kurtzman: I think where you can actually play with serialization a little bit more in a show like Fringe is that where we make sure that our episodes are self-contained--have a beginning, a middle and an end--the character stories can be serialized. They don't have to resolve themselves over the course of one show, and that's actually OK, as long as an audience comes in. If they haven't seen two or three shows before, they can still quickly enter the point of view of the characters, I think we're fine. ...

[Abrams comes in, carrying a bag with several boxes of cupcakes. He passes them around the room.]

Before you got in, Bob was talking a bit about the genesis of the show. Can you talk about that, how your love for a particular show, the genre, fed into this?

Abrams: Sure. My guess is my answer should probably be "What Bob said." But I will add, in probably the same spirit but slightly different language, that the fun of this for us was taking the kinds of things that we loved growing up and combining them and sort of playing with them and making them into something ... that's hopefully brand-new while being in the spirit of things that inspired us. So The Twilight Zone, you know, for me was the most impactful show, mostly because it combined characters that were ultimately damaged--and often heartbreaking--with situations that were absolutely terrifying and weird. And that combination, you know, those elements probably both stand on their own anyway, but together, you know, done well, is my favorite lethal combination. So the idea was "Let's come up with a world and characters that feel of that ilk and a situation that would put them constantly into [it]." Because I know you can't do an anthology show, I don't think, in the way Twilight Zone did, now, for a number of reasons. So it really is a way of doing that. And clearly The X-Files is a huge influence; Altered States is a huge influence; the David Cronenberg films. There were a lot of things that for me were obsessions, and I feel like we get to, you know, play in that arena now.

And regarding subtext, Bob said the show for him was about the family that you choose. For you, what is this show about?

Abrams: Bob is a much deeper thinker than I am [laughs]. I tend to feel more "What is cool?" and sort of find stuff in that. My feeling is that ... they're characters that are compelling to me in any situation, and the fact that they are together and they're thrown into these really weird situations--all I know is that it feels like fertile ground for drama and comedy and terror and romance and the unexpected, and that to me is the show I want to watch. ...

I'm curious about the mythology of this. There are so many shows now with mythology arcs they end getting less interesting the more they end up revealing. How do you make this different from those? It all seems like shows like this succeed most in the first season, before you reveal any of the stuff, and then once the reveals start to happen they start to run out of gas.
Orci: I don't think the stories that we're generating and will continue to generate are dependent on "the answer." So we can in theory indefinitely continue to do what we're going to do, whether or not we have the answer. The fact that we actually know what we're doing, and have an end point, is kind of a bonus that allows us to have everything sort of make sense retroactively. But I don't think our show is predicated on the notion that we're going to have to be revealing our secret every week.

Pinkner: The mythology of the show is one of the rails of the storytelling, but it is by no means the one that we all think that people are going to come back for. It's really just the cherry on the top of the sundae, and ... it's there already: It's there in the pilot. You won't even know it's there. And, ... unlike show's we've done, we're not asking the audience to be wondering [as in Alias] "Who is Rambaldi? What is Rambaldi about? What does Rambaldi want?" It's much more of an open mystery, and the sense of revelation won't be like "Oh, thank God they finally answered that question. Now I can move on to another." We're approaching it from a different point of view.

Can you talk about the casting of Joshua Jacskon?

Abrams: Well, I think he's finally going to leave the Creek after this season. Really, all I love to do is make Pacey jokes. ... Um, sorry. ... Literally one of the things he says [in] one of the very first episodes ... is he's like a babysitter. He's like, "What the hell am I doing here?" ... There is something that happens fairly early on that compels him to stay. And one of the fun things about his character, as you'll see as the series plays out, is ... he's been this odd sort of nomad, sort of journeyman guy, who has sort of had every job. ... He ends up having an important point of view. He's like sort of the third, you know, leg of the table. He's necessary to be there for the stability of the show. So part of it is about deciphering what the hell Walter [Noble] is talking about. Part of it is you know, sort of being a sort of bridge between Olivia and Walter. Part of it is that he's actually, despite himself, [he's found a purpose]. One of my favorite things about it is, he's this guy's son, and he's never really found a purpose. And the odd thing is, in his life, despite his screwed-up relationship with his father, despite really not wanting to be there and really not being good at staying in one place, this guy finds his purpose in this unlikely situation. So I think that his good qualities and the aspects of character that he brings to the group, beyond just sort of being critical for the solution of the mysteries, is also there's a compelling emotional reason understated.

J.J., how involved are you going to be in the show, given your career in feature films directing Star Trek and your other shows?

Pinkner: Have you met the other J.J. Abrams?

Abrams: I don't know. All I can tell you is my involvement in the show right now is about as involved as you could get. We are all talking far too often and to each other, and the truth is, because it's something we all care about, and we want to see be as sort of functional and as successful in the storytelling as possible, ... you can't walk away from something that matters like that. In a case of something like Lost, where I went off to do Mission Impossible III and [co-creator- Damon [Lindelof] really took over that show, day to day, it was so ... easy, because he simply ran with it and did just such an extraordinary job. And it wasn't like I was needed to do this or that. In fact it quickly became clear that I wasn't, necessarily, to have that show be what it's become. On Fringe, we [writers] have such a shorthand--we know each other so well--my gut is that we will be as involved as the show needs us to be, and that’s really going to be an evolution. --Patrick Lee, News Editor

NY Times Interview: J.J. Abrams on FRINGE

The New York Times has an interview with J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Bryan Burk on FRINGE, where they discuss the FRINGE formula, and the lessons learned on Lost, Alias, and Felicity on how to make a TV show complex, without making it confusing.

Click here to read full article

Complexity Without Commitment
By DAVE ITZKOFF

IF you’ve ever been utterly baffled by a television show that J. J. Abrams had a hand in creating — too confused to follow the serpentine plot twists of “Lost” or “Alias” or, heck, even “Felicity” — know that Mr. Abrams, the prolific writer, producer and director, has been annoyed too. With you.

“I just got tired of hearing people say to me, over and over, ‘Yeah, I was watching it, but I missed one, I got really confused, and I stopped watching it,’ ” he said in a recent phone interview.

If viewers find this kind of show frustrating, it’s his own fault: he practically invented it. Over the past decade Mr. Abrams, 42, has helped pioneer a storytelling style that demands total commitment from audience members, requiring that they keep up not only with complicated single-episode plotlines (can a time-traveling castaway alter past events to help himself in the present?) but also with fiendishly intricate narratives (how did the Oceanic Six get off their mysterious island, and how might they get back?) that can take an entire season — or seasons, plural — to play out.

It is a strategy that has built cult followings for Mr. Abrams’s series and won him praise for his braininess. Yet even he recognizes that when it comes to recruiting new viewers, it’s about as effective as proposing to go steady on a first date.

“If you start going out with someone and immediately they’re like, ‘Look, we have to see each other every week,’ you run from that person,” Mr. Abrams said. “It’s like, ‘Can’t we just see how it goes?’ ”

Mr. Abrams is especially mindful of the television-series-as-relationship metaphor as he prepares “Fringe,” which will have its premiere on Fox on Sept. 9. Created with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the screenwriters of “Transformers” and Mr. Abrams’s forthcoming “Star Trek” film, “Fringe” is an hourlong drama about an investigative team whose explorations lead to a shadowy world of science fiction and the seemingly supernatural.

It is also Mr. Abrams’s attempt to rectify the narrative (and viewer attention span) problems he faced on previous shows and to synthesize the many lessons he has learned from them into a series that is both complex and accessible, and that is capable of arriving at a determined conclusion over an undecided number of episodes.

“The evolution from your ideas and expectations and intent to what actually occurs in the series is a massive gulf,” Mr. Abrams said. “It’s a best-effort scenario. But I think that’s what a series is anyway.”

His newest show was born from pragmatism. In 2007 he was preparing to direct “Star Trek” for Paramount, but he also owed a television series to Warner Brothers, the studio that produces “Fringe,” and he turned to Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Orci for help. They traded ideas about beloved fantasy films and television series — “The X-Files,” “Altered States,” the early movies of David Cronenberg — but also looked carefully at procedural crime dramas dominating the networks. “When 6 of the Top 10 shows are ‘Law & Order’ and ‘C.S.I.,’ ” Mr. Orci said, “you have to be a fool not to go study what it is that they’re doing.”

Cross-pollinating these genres, they came up with three characters — a neophyte F.B.I. agent (played by Anna Torv), a brilliant but mad scientist (John Noble) and his wayward son (Joshua Jackson) — who solve a single mystery each week. (For starters: Who unleashed a flesh-melting virus on an airplane, killing all its passengers?) The initial goal, Mr. Abrams said, was to create a show that suggested complexity but was comprehensible in any given episode — a goal he felt eluded him on “Alias.” On that series, a spy thriller that appeared on ABC from 2001 to 2006, the internecine warfare between the C.I.A. and a rival agency called SD-6 became so bewildering that, Mr. Abrams said, no casual viewer could keep up.

“You’re trying to track this show,” he said, “in which these bad guys are acting like good guys, the good guys are acting like bad guys, and the good guys are letting the bad guys exist. I can completely understand tuning in to Episode 3 and being like, ‘Huh?’ ”

In the second season of “Alias” ABC asked Mr. Abrams to conclude the C.I.A./SD-6 story line, an abrupt move that he said hurt the show. “There was this inherent joy that the series took in its Byzantine DNA,” he said. “Once we destroyed that convolution, the show was a little aimless in some ways.” But not all of Mr. Abrams’s colleagues agree. “I was often taking the side of the studio and the network,” said Mr. Orci, who produced “Alias” with Mr. Kurtzman. The lesson of “Alias,” Mr. Orci said, is that “you can slow down, and you can tell stand-alone episodes with the same scale of story and mystery.”

As the “Fringe” creators further developed the show, they decided it should have an overarching narrative — that its many paranormal phenomena and mysteries would turn out be part of a larger pattern, referred to simply as the Pattern — to tie its individual episodes together.

Such storytelling devices, Mr. Kurtzman argued, were practically mandatory for a science-fiction-theme show in an era when Internet spoilers are a perpetual hazard. “When we were kids, you had to wait three years between ‘Luke, I am your father’ and Luke showing up at Jabba’s palace,” Mr. Kurtzman said, referring to the original “Star Wars” movies. “You want new information, you’re going to have to wait for the sequel. Obviously that’s not an option anymore.”

Yet the strategy of the multiepisode (or multiseason) story arc — of soap-opera-like story elements that are revealed, drip by drip, over the life of an entire series — is one that Mr. Abrams has introduced to his other series, often spontaneously.

When “Lost” began (with an idea from Lloyd Braun, who was then the ABC Entertainment chairman, for a series about survivors of a plane crash), Mr. Abrams and his collaborator, Damon Lindelof, quickly composed an outline that introduced major characters but lacked the arcane story components that became synonymous with the show: no Dharma Initiative, no Hanso Foundation, no enigmatic Others. Once this outline was approved, Mr. Abrams gathered the founding creative team of “Lost” to figure out what the show would actually be. In this meeting he began to concoct some of its more fantastical elements, including the use of flashbacks to reveal who characters were before they arrived on the island.

“Immediately we were like, yes!” recalled Bryan Burk, Mr. Abrams’s longtime producing partner. “And then J. J. was like, ‘And there’s a hatch!’ ” — a mysterious underground bunker, introduced halfway through the first season of “Lost,” whose full significance has not yet been revealed.

The hatch, Mr. Burk said, posed a problem: “Do you discover the hatch in Episode 2? Or do you discover it in Episode 10? And upon discovering it, do you go in it in Episode 11? Or Episode 12?”

The solution to such narrative puzzles, Mr. Abrams and his colleagues said, is to have a game plan with clearly defined goalposts that can be moved around as a season and a series unfold. Know the ending to your series when you begin it; hope your show continues in perpetuity but always be prepared to wrap it up. (In this spirit the producers of “Lost” announced last year that the series would conclude at the end of its sixth season, in 2010.)

In the case of “Fringe” its creators say they have figured out a finale — naturally, they declined to describe it — that could be deployed at any point in the series. “If we’re canceled at Episode 13,” Mr. Orci said, “we’ll tell you at Episode 13, and if we go on, you could literally find this out in seven years.”

Recollections differ as to how much of the increasingly complicated “Fringe” story line was pitched to executives at Warner Brothers and at Fox when the series was ordered. “You always have to be on the up and up with your studio and your network,” Mr. Burk said. “There’s too much at stake, and they’re taking the biggest gamble.”

But Mr. Abrams cautioned against too much candor. “There are certain details that are hugely important,” he said with some mirth, “that I believe, if shared, will destroy any chance of actually getting on the air. These are the kinds of things that scare people away.”

Mr. Abrams has learned the hard way that a network gets what it wants, and that it’s not always detrimental to his shows. In 2002, when he was producing the final season of “Felicity,” his college soap opera on WB, the network told him that it was ordering five additional episodes of the show — just as he was preparing to shoot the graduation episode intended as the series finale. He and his staff quickly devised a five-episode epilogue styled after “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which the title character revisits crucial moments from her past. “It was the craziest idea,” Mr. Abrams said, “but as soon as Felicity went back, she was the most interesting character she’d been in years.”

If “Fringe” is a hit, such decisions about what plot devices to employ and when to employ them will fall less and less to the show’s creators — who are busily preparing films like “Star Trek” and a “Transformers” sequel — and more to a writing staff led by Jeff Pinkner, a former “Lost” producer.

At this early stage in the show’s progress, Mr. Abrams acknowledged, it can be hard to let go of the reins. “We’ve been thinking about this story for a year, and our staff has been thinking about it just for a couple of months,” he said. “Right now it’s all hands on deck, to micromanage every decision.”

But on that day, some months or years away, when he is no longer fully immersed in the making of “Fringe,” when his writing staff produces plot points that take him by surprise, Mr. Abrams said, he will know the show is a success. “It takes discipline to be able to be gracious and go: ‘I had nothing to do with it. They really ran with it. This is their ball now.’ ”

TV Addict Interview: Lance Reddick

The TV Addict has an exclusive interview with Lance Reddick, who plays Department of Homeland Security special agent Phillip Broyles in FRINGE, but is better know for playing Matthew Abaddon on LOST, and Cedric Daniels in the HBO series The Wire.

Lance talks about working on FRINGE, LOST, and The Wire, but is very careful not to reveal any secrets.


Click here to read the full article, or visit TheTVAddict.com

Exclusive Interview: FRINGE Star Lance Reddick

Let me start of by saying that you play TV’s most mysterious characters. From LOST to FRINGE I have absolutely no idea what you are up to! Do you?
Lance Reddick: In LOST I can definitely say I have no idea!

Do you get that type of reaction a lot?
A fair amount. I have to admit that not that many people have stopped me about LOST, especially after coming off the last and biggest season of THE WIRE. I get stopped for that a lot more.

Thanks to the critical acclaim of THE WIRE and your guest spot on LOST did you even have to audition for your role on FRINGE? That was the funny thing about FRINGE. I didn’t have to audition for LOST, but with FRINGE I actually auditioned for a different role.

Which role?
Actually when I first read the script the role I thought I was most right for was Broyles. But when I went to audition they had me read for Charlie. So I didn’t hear anything and a month later I got a call to come back and audition for Broyles. And a week later I as in Toronto.

Which coincidentally enough is my hometown! What did you think of the city.
I love Toronto, I’ve actually shot a couple of films up there. But now we’re shooting in show in New York.

Do you think it’s going to be a challenge arranging your schedule so that you can make it back to Hawaii ? When can fans expect you to return to LOST?
As with all things on LOST, I don’t know. I only know that I am going back. But I don’t know when or for how many episodes.

As an actor do you have a preference between working on a gritty realistic show like THE WIRE versus shows with more of a Sci-Fi bent like LOST and FRINGE?
My preference had always been to do gritty realism. But I’ve done so much of it in my career that I find myself now ready to have fun. With both LOST and FRINGE it’s like reading an Alexander Dumas Novel. I’m just ready for the action, adventure and fun.

As is the case with most of J.J. Abrams shows, the motivations of your FRINGE character Agent Phillip Broyles aren’t exactly clear. Do you know where your character is heading this season?
No.

Is Broyles good or bad and as an actor does it make a difference?
It’s a little harder for me on LOST. But as far as FRINGE goes, I’m not saying that the creators have told me I’m good. But I’m fairly confident that I’m a good guy.

That’s what I love about all of JJ’s shows. The line between good and evil is pretty murky.
Exactly. Let me put it this way, there is always more than one dimension.

Do you ever worry that you’re going to accidently spill a massive secret to a member of the press [TV Addict note: Fingers crossed!]. Or have you gotten pretty good, as the British say, at keeping ‘mum’?
Especially on this show, because I know a little more than I do with LOST, I tend to generally be on pins and needles that I’m going to say the wrong thing.

I imagine it wouldn’t be too good a feeling to wake up to a phone call from J.J. saying, “Lance, You ruined the season I can’t believe you gave away….”
By the same token. I only know as much as I have seen in the latest sript.

Don’t miss the series premiere of FRINGE on September 9th at 8PM on FOX

TV Guide Interview: JJ Abrams on Fringe

TV Guide has an interview with JJ Abrams, where he discusses FRINGE, his love of airplanes, Mad Men, and the upcoming Star Trek movie.

Click here to read the full article

J.J.'s Next Missions

Lost's J.J. Abrams explores strange new worlds with Fringe and "Star Trek"

BY SHAWNA MALCOM

Your sci-fi series Fringe is the most buzzed-about new show of the fall. Are you feeling the pressure?

I feel the pressure every time. I felt it on Felicity, on Alias, on Lost, and I feel it on Fringe. It goes with the territory. But I'm far more excited about people seeing it than I am nervous that they may not like it.

What can you tell us about it?

I don't want to give away too much.

What a shock!

(Laughs) I know, right?

OK. So the show revolves around a female FBI agent who investigates bizarre cases with the help of a formerly institutionalized scientist and his equally brilliant but estranged son. Will the story line be ongoing, like Lost's?

For the most part, you'll be able to tune in whenever you want and get it. You'll have a beginning, middle and an end. But if you want to track the big bad guy and the big overarching story, you can do that, too.

The first episode opens with a troubled flight. Was it an intentional nod to Lost?

It's almost embarrassing, but I wasn't even thinking about that. The idea for that sequence came to me, and then I thought, "Oh, Lord." [Laughs] Then I was like, "Do we change it?" But the Story could not be less like Lost. To me, there's just something about airplanes. I was obsessed with the "Airport" movies when I was a kid. I saw all of them, including "The Concorde-Airport '79." So it's a place that's kind of a go-to for me. But I'm guessing I can't really do another airplane thing for a while.

You've become known for writing strong female characters: Alias' Sydney, Lost's Kate and now Fringe's Olivia. Is this another go-to place for you?

It's funny because I don't consciously write strong women. I just hopefully write strong characters who may happen to be women. If Olivia were a guy, I don't know that you'd be saying, "Oh, it's a strong male." But what I love about Olivia is she's got a lot going on that's just barely alluded to in the pilot. And Anna [Torv] is so good because she's clearly the prettiest person in the room, but she's not inaccessible. She's not phony pretty. When I saw her audition, I had the same undeniable feeling I had when I saw Jennifer Garner or Evangeline Lilly.

In the last few years, you've primarily focused on film-directing "Mission: Impossible III" and the upcoming "Star Trek," and producing "Cloverfield." Did you miss TV?

I did. It's a lot of work, but every time I get to do television, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Are there any shows you watch now and think, "Man, I wish I would've come up with that"?

There's only one that I am in awe and envious of: Mad Men. My dad wasn't an adman, but he sold advertising time for CBS in the '60s and early '70s, and he lived that world. Mad Men doesn't just take place in that world - which is incredibly rich and funny and ironic and oddly heartbreaking - but it does so beautifully. It's just an incredible thing to behold.

You always have a million different ideas and projects bubbling at once. Does J.J. Abrams ever suffer a creative block?

Every day. I'm not kidding. You literally just described my status quo.

How do you overcome it - candy, alcohol, a baseball bat?

Part of the way I dig out of the hole is being reminded of the people I'm getting to work with.

On "Trek," one of the people you worked with was Leonard freakin' Nimoy!

I know! But it's funny, because it wasn't until very recently that it really hit me how cool that was. There was so much work to do during the shoot and there were so many fires that needed putting out that there wasn't much time to sit and acknowledge the reality of working with him. Then the other day I was watching the movie, and there he was. There was Spock! And it hit me like, "Holy s---!" [Laughs] It was kind of like a huge delay.

There are still nearly nine months until "Trek"'s release. What can you tell us?

All I can say is that I think this movie is going to be worth the wait. It's blessed 'with a wonderful optimism and an incredibly alive and invested cast. While the visual effects are gonna be unbelievable, the movie is working right now with only 50 of our 1,OOO-plus visual effects finished. It's funny, it's scary, it's dramatic, emotional and entertaining - all without having the stuff you'd think a movie called "Star Trek" would require. That to me is exciting.

FRINGE Series premiere: Tuesday 9/9, 8/7c, FOX

* Thanks to Susan via SpoilerTV for the scans.

Sci Fi Magazine: Fringe

The October issue of Sci Fi Magazine has a Fall TV Special with a section on Fringe, which they call 50% The X-files, 40% Alias, and 10% Young Frankenstein.

The article features interviews with J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, where they layout the overall plan for the show - stories with a beginning, middle and an end, plus slightly more engaging, conspiratorial stuff for the fans. They also have the endgame for Fringe already in sight.

"There is an answer. We know what's causing the Fringe," says Orci.

"We do know what the pattern is," Kurtzman laughs.

Click here to read the full article:

FRINGE

THE CREATORS OF LOST CRAFT A NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY SERIES THAT AIMS TO BE A NEW GENERATION'S X-FILES.

"THE WORLD OF THE DAVID CRONENBERG science pushed to its limits, mad science or science gone awry, corporate culture versus consumer culture, that place where the flesh and the synthetic begin ... these are kind of an obsession for me," says executive producer J.J. Abrams. "Altered States is a movie that I've been obsessed with since it came out. There have been these influences that have stayed with me. I was certainly obsessed with Twilight Zone. I loved Night Stalker. I loved X-Files.

"All these things have been percolating for me as a result of not seeing something like this or with this spirit on the air. I simply felt that coming up with something that would be in the spirit of those types of shows and movies, that would be fun to do. And then the specific story just came out of long discussions that I had with [co-creators] Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci," says Abrams.

What these longtime collaborators of such works as Alias, Lost and Transformers came up with is the new Fox mystery series Fringe. In the series, an FBI agent finds herself up against a rash of unexplained phenomena, and she recruits a possibly unstable genius and his son to help figure out what's going on. Fringe stars Australian actress Anna Torv as FBI agent Olivia Dunham, Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop and John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop.

"I feel the show exists on the fringe," says Abrams. "It exists in that cutting-edge place where the things you would think are absolutely impossible are actually happening right this moment in the world or on the precipice. And that to me is a very cool and weird and dramatically fertile place to be."

"One of the themes of the show is that today's advancements can be used for unbelievably beautiful, wonderful things, but they can literally destroy us," says Orci. "And it is alluring for its potential benefits and its potential horror. That is a great thing literally; the science of the show and what happens with it is in the eye of the beholder."

"I think the other aspect of Fringe that is very exciting to us is that it's a really interesting character story," says Kurtzman. "We spent a lot of time thinking about what was our trifecta of characters that we knew we needed to put in this series.I think we came to the idea that telling a father/son story and a relationship story was a really compelling in [to the story]."

"It is a show about people who have real internal lives and real heartbeats and real points of view," says Abrams. "They're relatable characters. They're pitted against incredibly hyper-real and often terrifying situations. In other words, it's a recipe for my favorite kind of storytelling."

According to the producers, Fringe will be a mix of the procedural with strong mythology elements. "You still get crimes. You still get stories with a beginning, middle and an end. But then for the fans there will be slightly more engaging, more conspiratorial stuff.... The idea of literally crashing Law & Order with Lost is very exciting for us," says Kurtzman.

And yes, they are creating Fringe with an end in sight. "There is an answer. We know what's causing the Fringe," says Orci.

"We do know what the pattern is," Kurtzman laughs.

Beyond that, they aren't fighting the online buzz calling Fringe "The X-Files for a new generation."

When we did Alias, we were accused of ripping off Mission: Impossible, and when we wrote Mission: Impossible 3 we were accused of ripping off Alias. And so here we have The X-Files, which itself is a derivative of Night Stalker in the '60s, which is itself a derivative of The Twilight Zone. We'd love to be favorably compared to X-Files, but on the other hand I think we'd be doing this with or without The X-Files," says Orci.

- Kalhie Huddleston

Fringe Televison Talks to J.R. Orci - Part 2

Here is Part 2 of our exclusive interview with Fringe supervising producer J.R. Orci (part 1 can be found here):

Q: Who does the cow really work for?

J.R. ORCI: Arvin Sloane.

Q: What are your favorite movies / TV shows?

J.R. ORCI: I can't say I have ONE favorite of anything. But in my top five I'd count "Back to the Future" in the movie column. I'm a sucker for well executed time paradoxes. And any movie that has a scene where the main character is forced to make out with his mother to restore the timeline gets a gold star. For TV, I'd say "Battlestar Galactica" is among the current favorites. As a classic sci-fi nut you'd be hard pressed to find a more perfect example of the genre going back to its roots. That, and I like giant spaceships that make things go kablooey.

Q: Buzzsugar reports your brother Roberto Orci as saying that the Fringe team devours the press in search of "constructive feedback". Do you recall a specific instance of feedback that was especially constructive?

J.R. ORCI: It's extremely helpful in giving us insight into the audience's perceptions of where they think the story is going. That allows us to play with expectations and deliver unanticipated twists.

Q. Speaking of your brother, what did you have to do to get Roberto a job on Fringe?

It was easy... Since everyone still thinks we're the same person.

Q: I seem to have misplaced JJ's email address. You wouldn't happen to have it?

J.R. ORCI: I wish! I've never -- technically -- met him. In fact, I don't know of anyone who has. I'm not totally convinced he exists. There's a theory here among the staff that he's actually a sophisticated artificial intelligence program controlled by Bryan Burk.

[Bryan Burk was unavailable for comment]

Q: What is the general plan for the online presence? Is there a story to tell before the show, or will we just see more examples of "the pattern". Any chance of a full-on ARG (like Lost) maybe down the road?

J.R. ORCI: I don't want to give away too much about this... There are some things out there already and more on the way.

Q: Are you writing for the comic book too?

J.R. ORCI: I'm not currently involved in the comic book side of Fringe. It's in the very capable hands of some of our resident geniuses. Among them: Zack Whedon, Julia Cho, Alex Katsnelson, Danielle Dispaltro, Matt Pitts and Mike Johnson. [...more on the Fringe comic book team]

Q: Did you get to go to Comic-con?

J.R. ORCI: Sadly, I wasn't able to go... Some of us had to stay and man the fort! Which is a bummer since I was hoping to find myself a TNG-style Commander's Starfleet uniform with tricorder and phaser accessories. You'd think my brother would've been able to dig me up one given his Trek connections...but no dice.

Q: Who will play William Bell?

J.R. ORCI: That's a closely guarded secret -- even the actor doesn't know. However, we have a backup offer out to Bill Gates now that he's retired.

Q: Was "Massive Dynamics" repurposed from Transformers 2?

J.R. ORCI: That's preposterous. The notion that a respectable corporation like Massive Dynamic would be interested in ginormous extraterrestrial transforming robots just seems silly to me.

Q: Is there any connection between Massive Dynamic and The Hanso Foundation? The Pattern and The Dharma Initiative? William Bell and Thomas Mittelwerk?
YES -- and I can't believe you guessed that! It's actually an integral piece of the series mythology puzzle. We're planning to reveal that connection in season five. So if you want to know the answer, please watch the show so we can stay on the air.