Month: August 2009

James Roday and Dulé Hill Interview

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SciFiChick.com was able to participate in a conference call Q&A session with James Roday and Dulé Hill, stars of USA’s Psych. Here’s the transcript from that call.
And don’t forget to tune in to USA on Friday night, August 7th, for the season premier of Psych!

The show is known a lot for its fast-paced banter between your characters Shawn and Gus. How much say do you guys get in what goes on in the dialog, particularly between the humorous segments and something like the nicknames that Shawn makes up for Gus?

J. Roday: Unlike, I think, the majority of shows on television right now we actually have a frighteningly high amount of say in what we do with the dialog. A lot of times it comes in great and all we have to do is say it, but any time we sort of recognize an opportunity to throw something in or add something or if we have a better name for Gus than the one that came in we just pull the trigger.

We’re pretty good at monitoring ourselves so that we only do it if we’re making it better, and it’s very rare that we find out later that the people down in LA were disappointed because we changed something. They’re usually pretty pleased.

D. Hill: Yes. And the names that we come up with most of the time it has to do with somebody that we know, somebody in the cast knows or somebody that one of the writers knows or a producer, something like that. I would say pretty much eight times to of ten there is some relation to the crazy name that Gus is being called.

What detectives, in real life or in fiction, have been an influence for the characters?

J. Roday: You know what, I go to this movie called Without a Clue that not a lot of people saw. It was Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley, and the idea behind the movie was that Watson was the brains of the operation and Holmes was just this very theatrical sort of charlatan that diverted people’s attention and got all the ladies. It’s a very, very funny movie that not a lot of people have seen.

But I love the fact that it was sort of rooted in the idea that these two guys absolutely, positively were dependent on one another to solve a crime, because Holmes was sort of the face of the franchise but Watson was the guy that sort of kept their feet on the ground and did a lot of the thinking. That’s not exactly what the dynamic is on Psych, but the sort of ying yang element of it of there’s no way that either of these guys could work on their own and there’s no way that they could accomplish what they were doing without the other one is definitely sort of a big element of what we do on Psych.

So that’s my answer. I feel decent about it. I’m passing it off to Dulé.

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The Official Star Trek Magazine Issue 20 Extracts

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The Official Star Trek Magazine Issue 20

Here’s an excerpt from the interview with J.J. Abrams featuring in issue #20 of Star Trek Magazine.

Every director approaches a script differently initially; when you read a script for the first time, do you visualize it, hear it, and see it edited?

When I’m writing something, I tend to see it specifically, at least in ways that are usually more clear than I even realize – meaning, I’ll see things in a certain direction. I’ll see the composition of a shot or a sequence. But because it’s such a collaboration, part of the fun is discovery. The actors that you get, the director of photography you work with, the production designers: they all have ideas. While you may have a certain vision, there’s an immense amount of flexibility and fluidity that you have to approach any project with that accounts for the unexpected, which is usually the thing that makes it good.

Were there specific sequences in Star Trek where you had one idea going in, and then on the floor, it went differently?

What I tried to do on this movie was not storyboard anything that I could avoid storyboarding. For example, if it was any scene that didn’t require the kinds of visual effects preparation that would demand that kind of specific planning, I would try and let it go, and do it on the fly. We’d make it up as we went along, because that’s usually the fun of it. There are certain sequences where I had ideas in my head, certain scenes with the characters, that when the day came to shoot them, I suddenly found myself throwing out whatever preconceived notions I had, and seeing what felt right and what the actors would go to naturally, and adjusting things from there.

Read the full interview in issue #20 of Star Trek Magazine – on sale now.

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An excerpt from an interview with Alice Krige featuring in issue #20 of Star Trek Magazine.

“I came to the conclusion that the Queen was the Borg. Is the Borg. The Borg is an extension of her. I had read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking beforehand, and in the course of trying to find out who she was, I went out and got a copy of the video. Somewhere in it he says the old adage, ‘Energy is not created or destroyed.’ And I thought of the Borg Queen. She’s been around since the beginning of time, since the Big Bang or whatever. And she is the energy source behind the Borg. She is just the physical manifestation of that energy.

“I had some interaction on the mask with Scott Wheeler, who also did my old age makeup for my character on [the movie] Skin. For the Borg Queen, there were only two things I asked him for. He had sculpted in eyebrows and I asked him to take them away. I thought it would give her a fixed expression. The shape of the eyebrows was like Cruella de Ville and I didn’t want that painted on my face. The other thing was that my mouth was quite red. In contrast to the color of my skin, my lips looked redder. It’s almost an optical illusion. They had made my skin so pale that it stuck out. And there was a point when they wanted to damp down the color of my mouth. They thought it was too red. And Scott and I hung in there to be allowed to use the color of my own mouth.”

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The King’s Daughters

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The King’s Daughters, by Nathalie Mallet, is the sequel to The Princes of the Golden Cage. Following the events in The Princes of the Golden Cage, Prince Amir and Princess Eva venture north to Eva’s kingdom to ask her father for permission to marry. But Sorvinka isn’t the land Eva remembers. It has become war-torn … Read more