Edward James Olmos Talks To AOL On "The Plan"

[JamesG]

Battlestar Galactica star Edward James Olmos was just as reluctant as fans to let the BSG universe go. Shortly after wrapping the series -- and his role as Admiral Adama -- Olmos stepped behind the lens to direct a film based on the Cylon point of view called The Plan.

Olmos recently explained to AOL Television that he has a plan of his own, and it's to make as many BSG films as possible. In fact, he's convinced that if you stop what you're doing right now and buy The Plan on DVD, he may get to do just that.

Read on to find out what other Galactic tales he's got on the backburner, why he's still fuming over the sale of the set and how he draws a parallel between BSG and that other little sci-fi epic he was in, Blade Runner.



The Plan really did Battlestar Galactica great justice. Why did you decide to do direct this film?

Well, the honor of working on the show is monumental. It was a privilege to be able to direct it when it was a series. And then when they asked me to do the movie, I was just stunned.

And I understand why, in many ways, out of all the directors that we've had, they would ask me to do this, but in many ways I can't believe that it's ... my destiny to hold onto this last experience to go into this universe.

God-willing that millions of people will purchase the DVD and/or Blu-ray and force the greedy hand of the powers that be to actually say to themselves "Wow, we should do another one of these. We can make money with it." You know?




We would love to see that. I mean, I may have gotten my screener copy, but I'll be purchasing it on Blu-ray, anyway.

That's what I'm telling people today that, more than ever, if you're a fan, if you're one of the hundreds of millions of people who have really shown a love for this piece around the world, buy it for Christmas gifts, buy it for friends, do what we did with Obama, you know, vote him in with your dollar.

In order to really go into this universe -- and really be able to explore what happened to Starbuck, or what happened to Adama, and Ellen, and Tigh and Lee on Earth, and where did the final five come from 2,000 years ago, who created them and how was that done -- those are questions and stories that have to be told.

I'm anxious to see if we can go to that universe again and start to answer some of these questions and make it really, really exciting. People would flip out. I mean, it's enough that we have Caprica and we're going into that sphere. But there's also something that is missing from the presence of what we've been exposed to already.




If people do buy the DVD, do you think you'll be signing up to do a whole bunch more stories like this?

I think so. I think they will make more movies as long as there's some financial profitability in it. Basically, you're talking about tens of millions of dollars in profit, and that is what makes the world turn in the world of the entertainment business.

So, you can tell where they're coming from by what they did to the set and to the entire stages and everything that we had; they sold it, or they destroyed it. And so, for them to turn around and say "We want to make another one," that's when people start to realize how important some things are to us, and we have a chance to make that difference.

We can actually make them continue to put this thing together and make it work by the participation, just like the franchise of Star Trek. That continues to move forward.




Is that why The Plan was pulled from the SyFy fall schedule?

I think they made the decision to air it later than in a couple of weeks due to the fact that I think they wanted to center it around the attention given to Caprica.

I think they wanted to launch into Caprica (on Jan. 22, 2010) with the exposure of this on their television network.




So The Plan is definitely going to air on television?

Yeah. It doesn't have an airdate, and I think that it will probably be at least a week to two weeks before Caprica is put on the air that this will be aired.

And the difference is that the film right now is one hour and 52 minutes, I think, long, and what they're going to air on television will be 88 minutes long.




Will TV viewers get a distinctly different story?

How are you going to take out 20-some-odd minutes of film? What would you edit?

I think it's going to make a not as pleasurable a journey, and I think that that's why basically a lot of people would rather buy and wait for the DVDs to come out, or download them from the Internet, than watch them on Syfy, because the kind of way that they cut them up.

They gave us 41 minutes of actual screen time out of an hour show, and usually all of my episodes were 62 to 63-minutes long.




They sold off pretty much the entire set, and you seem unhappy about that.

I just hope that somebody loses their job over it. I hope that whoever decided to destroy the sets, and destroy everything, and go by way of CGI and take photographs of them so in case they want to do other stuff that they'll just use the photographs, I hope that people realize that they would've gotten a lot more mileage ... had they had the courage to hold onto it.




Did you have any revelations as a result of putting your point of view behind the lens?

Yeah, there was, many times over. I really defined some stories that were really nebulous: The story of Rick Worthy's character of Simon ... and the story of what really went on between the two Cavils, between the Fleet Cavil and the Caprica Cavil, and those were revelations that were just overwhelming.

And what really was put ahead really strongly in this plan was the fact that the one emotion that stopped the plan, done by the Cylons to destroy all human kind. The one emotion that really got to them that they weren't accounting for was love.

So they ended up having every single model, whoever downloaded after experiencing the situation had to deal with love once it was exposed to it, which just became unbelievably difficult for them ... at the end of the series they had to reconcile and detested their own ability to recreate or reproduce. They helped destroy that; they helped destroy a lot of their own values.

In turn, they got to be more human, and they got to share their experiences with humans, and they actually created life on their own. Love took over, and a baby was actually conceived, and it happened between Six and the Colonel.




Do you think that another director could have done this job on this movie?

It's not to say that nobody could do a movie like this. It's just a matter of how intricately inside of everything the director was. Now, that doesn't mean that some of the directors that were around us couldn't do it.

The only difference, I think, became that there was a tremendous amount of humor that was had to be understood by way of situation. I'm the only one that ever directed comedy, the comedic version of Battlestar, which was 'Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.'

So, it kind of leant me to understanding the extreme pressure that was had to be weighed into this episode in this film. But yeah, I think it would have had a different thumbprint.




Do you have any feedback now that the series is over about how it all resolved in the end?

More than I ever knew, and once I saw it, I realized what we had stumbled across and what we had done.

Not only did we bring it up to the year 2008, contemporary time, which then made everybody had to deal with the facts of what happened, from 200,000 years before to that moment of evolutionary process, which we took partook in.

But it also led the way for the year 2019 to be represented, and that is what Blade Runner did. Blade Runner starts in 2019.




So you're saying this sets up Blade Runner?

Yeah, in the biggest way possible. As a matter of fact, Gaff [Olmos' character in the 1982 sci-fi classic] is part of a direct descendancy of Adama; they even look alike. And basically, what ends up happening is that we are given an opportunity to understand that what has happened before will happen again.

That's exactly what Six says, the very final words she says on camera, and the response to that is Baltar saying "Well, not this time. Maybe humans have learned their lesson," and they go walking way down Times Square in the present day right now.

And then what happens is you put in, right at the end of this movie, you turn around and put in Blade Runner and you realize that 2019 is just a few years later, and what do you have? You have replicants coming back and becoming a threat to humanity again.

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