Q: New york times article, both Heroes and Lost provide an alternate reality for those who don’t fit comfortably in there own society.
A (Damon Lindelof): Yes absolutely. Most of the characters are uncomfortable in their own skin. Scared, ambivalent, angry. Interesting to watch on tv. A departure from the lawyer, cop, television shows. We have characters who have this feeling that they are different from other people. What makes you essentially smurfed up makes you interesting to watch on TV.
Q: Originally, this concept came from someone at NBC and they brought you in. So what you’re doing today, are you going in a different direction from the original idea, or the same direction?
A: The show has come significantly further than the original concept of people stuck on an island. How to make “survivor” a TV drama. Idea came from the head of ABC. I don’t think we would ever have come to a network with the idea of a plane crashing on an island.
Q: Flashbacks, do you always envision flashbacks in the future of the show? How did you overcome the flashbacks stopping the action?
A (Carlton Cuse): The flashbacks are very liberating. We see them as little short films. We’re telling a character story every episode, and making it character centric. The flashbacks also allow a new viewer to come in and see the flashbacks as self-contained stories.
Q: Hurley's flashback in this episode
A (Carlton Cuse): Hurley needed hope, and he saw completion on the island that couldn’t have been resolved back in his old life. We see the island as offering the characters tests and resolutions.
A (Damon Lindelof): We attack a story by using flashbacks and basically “activating” a character. During the writing process, we decide what is going to be in the flashback first and then find a way to tie it in with what is happening on the Island. Without the flashbacks, you’re not getting the real thematic, character, elements of the show.
We get our chops busted a lot, (nothings happening, story isn’t advancing) but for us, the show IS the flashbacks, all the dharma stuff, the island stuff is secondary. What’s priority for us is understanding why the characters do what they do. The advancement of the mythology of Lost is secondary to the characters.
Q: To the composer, what is the process for scoring Lost
A (Michael Giacchino): In a sense, I feel like I’m writing an invisible script. Writing something that supports what they’ve done. It’s very operatic. All the characters have a theme, some have multiple themes, like Hurley. Those themes come and go as the characters act a certain way. For me it’s about building these thematic moments that match with the story.
Q: Should we as viewers be conscious of the music?
A (Michael Giacchino): Well the way I write the score is that I don’t watch the show the whole way through. I go scene by scene and react to the scene, stop the show, and write for that scene. This way I can get the true emotion of that moment.
A (Damon Lindelof) : I think the music sounds very different from everything else on TV. He does it with a live orchestra that’s rare in Hollywood these days. There’s real resonance there. Michael is making it up as he goes along. Beautiful organic quality to it.
Q: Biggest mystery to lost is whether the writers of lost are making it up as they go along.
A (Carlton Cuse): We do have a super structure for Lost, but we don’t know how much longer lost will go on. Two seasons, three seasons, we don’t know. And it would suck to plan everything in advance and not go with the flow of the writing process. We like to react to everything that happens during the writing and shooting process. Desmond is an example of that. He was only supposed to be in a few episodes, but we loved the actor so much that we kept him around and wrote a whole story around him. Why would you want to limit yourself to a strict plan?
A (Damon Lindelof): The big picture has all been laid out, the question is when to reveal these parcels of information. And hopefully the studio lets us end the show when we creatively want to.
Q: Composer, do you ever write something that you feel is too over the top?
A (Michael Giacchino): Yeah, sometimes. The feeling on Lost is that less is more. The story is so good already that I don’t need lay it on too thick. Sometimes I’ll have just one note on a harp. But other times like the launching of the raft, you can just pour it on.
A (Damon Lindelof): There’s a mysterious sonic quality to lost that transcends whats on the written page.
Q: Sometimes you keep characters on longer than you intend, and others who leave sooner than you intend. I’ve read quotes about mistakes you felt you might have made like with Eko. True or no?
A (Damon Lindelof): It's funny how you get quoted sometimes. Essentially what I said was that I wanted Eko to have died differently than he did. Real life intervenes and with Eko, we were the victims of circumstances that we can’t control. The only regret we have is that eko didn’t sign on for more episodes and because he didn't sign on for more, we didn’t get to play things out like we wanted and write the death the way we wanted.
Q: Influenced by things online, fans.
A (Damon Lindelof): We are cognitive of which characters are popping and which aren’t. Boone and Shannon were the first casualities of Lost, because in the writing room, we had a harder time writing for these two younger characters. We have Shannon who is essentially the Paris Hilton character, and Boone who is just this pretty boy guy. And because they were younger characters, they didn't have the depth as the older characters. So it was harder to write for them. What we eventually did was tie them in with the older characters. Boone became Locke's acolyte and Shannon got tied in with Sayid. So when she died, it opened up the things we could do with Sayid's character. We haven't killed people off because the fans demanded it, but for the first time this season, we had characters that fans really weren't happy with. And so our decision to kill these characters spectacularly was based on the viewers pure hatred of these characters.
Q: How much do you have to do with all the products outside of lost but are tied in with lost, books, online material, etc.
A (Carlton Cuse): All that stuff stems from us, but we actually have specific people whose sole job is to deal with all the additional material. We have to make sure that everything outside the show is still canon with the show.
A (Damon Lindelof) : Part of the evolution of what’s happened is that all the studios are out to be the first to conquer the digital domain. So there’s all kind of pressure to come out with things like webisodes and stuff for mobile phones. For us, our concern is to make sure that the stuff that comes out with the Lost brand doesn’t completely suck. There’s enormous market for this. The studios and everyone recognizes that this is going to be a future market.
Q: Can this shape how you design or execute the series?
A (Bryan Burke): I think ultimately on a creative level, it’s a weird thing to have so many off shoots of the mother ship. I think that immediately when a show begins, there has to be someone assigned to creatively take charge of all these off shoots so that it stays consistent with the big picture.
A (Damon Lindelof): I think the bigger issue is that people don’t like to be told what’s cool. People like to discover something, decide they like it, and ask for more. We don’t want to force anything down anyone’s throats. People started demanding webisodes etc. rather than us introducing it ourselves.
Q: Criticsms of promos promising more than the episode itself can offer
A (Carlton Cuse): It’s a very sore subject. The promo last week was ludicrous, I sent out a lot of angry emails. It was a real oversell.
A (Damon Lindelof): It was pouring gasoline on the fire of discontent. People are already discontent that we don’t answer enough questions, so we don’t need promos that promise things we can’t deliver. “I HOPE YOU WEAR A smurfing DIAPER CAUSE YOU WILL 
YOUR PANTS OVER THIS EPISODES!” I mean, Hurely finds a bus. That’s it. I mean, as a show watcher itself, I take issues with the promos of 24, which show only the last minute of 24. The promo guys, their job is to get people in the seats.
A (Carlton Cuse): I was listening to KROQ and people were just ragging on the promos, it sucks.
A: Heroes really stepped up with the promos game (and they’re actually delivering on those promises) and ABC is playing catch up. Since Heroes has done so well with their promo campaign, with all these promises of something big happening, and something big does happen because they're in their first season and they're able to carry through, ABC saw that and just made the assumption that they need to make the Lost promos bigger and more explosive, even when the epsisodes don't reflect that. The next episode with Sayid is HUGELY revealatory but by the time we get to that, people might not believe the promos.
Q: Mythology, genre
A (Carlton Cuse): We do dip into the well of the ‘jouney’ story.
Q: Nikki and Paulo why did they appear out of nowhere?
A (Carlton Cuse): There was a lot of drugs involved during the writing of that show.
A (Damon Lindelof): You know when you get really hungry and you go to the super market and you buy a bunch of food, and you eat one snack and by the time you get home you find that you're not hungry anymore? We had really good intentions with Nikki and Paulo, but when we brought them on the show, we found that we were full. We intended to show these other characters who we haven’t heard from before. Another beach community that lives apart from our main characters. Nikki and Paulo would be members of that group. But because we tried to shoe horn them into those first few episodes where there was already a lot going on. As soon as they appeared on the screen, viewers had a violent reaction to them, who are they? How DARE they speak on this island when we don’t know who they are? We got a very vitriolic, negative reaction to them. (SPOILER)Thus the spectacular deaths. So, lesson learned. When you do any serialized show, there’s gonna be missteps. If there aren’t mistakes, the show isn’t being bold enough.
Q: Ana Lucia, Libby deaths why were they killed off so suddenly? Did it have to do with outside forces?
A (Carlton Cuse): DUIs? No. That’s not the reason we killed them off. Michelle came on with a one year deal, and so we already knew we were gonna kill her off. And we didn’t want to do it on the season finale. We wanted it to be before the finale so we could play off their deaths prior to the finale. We had the feeling that Ana Lucia’s character wasn’t beloved enough that her dying wasn’t going to be powerful enough on its own, so we added Libby’s death (a sympathetic character) to make it more emotionally powerful.
Q: Why do you think your ratings our down?
A (Carlton Cuse): It’s a mystery based show, and a lot of people won’t stick around when there’s no specific end point in sight. We don't know when the series will end, so we don't know when the mysteries will come to an end. And secondly, once the immediacy of “WHATS IN THE HATCH?” question was answered, viewers slowly petered out.
A (Bryan Burke): It’s also a show that started at 8, then 9, now it’s at 10. Two hours later is late. What was great about the 8 oclock time slot was that parents could watch this with their kids and so we had a much younger audience tuning in the first season.
A (Damon Lindelof): A big factor is a factor of commitment. Lost is essentially someone who you have a crush on who will not commit to you. They’re fun to date for awhile, but eventually you’re gonna sit them down and ask them where it’s all going, and if the show looks at you and says “hey, you just gotta stick around and more good times and see where this goes” you might not stick around. But the show owes it to you to make a commitment and say exactly where it’s going. The fans are owed that. I hope we CAN find out from the network when lost will be kept until so that we can start making plans and making that commitment for where this is all going.
Q: Casting
A: We reverse engineer casting. 3 years ago today, we didn’t have a cast. And we were sorta making up roles and people came along and auditioned. Yun Jin, came in and auditioned for Kate, and we loved her so much that we created a character for her. Same with Hugo and Dominic.
A (Damon Lindelof): Quite simply, when you’re casting a show, you’re building a team. We wanted a really great cohesive team. Like when casting with Juliet, we wanted her to be threatening as an other but also vulnerable, and most importantly, we wanted her as a love interest for Jack. So when we were casting for Juliet, we saw a lot of great actresses but we really needed someone who would work well against Jack's character.
Q: Are you just trying to put out a great show or is there some great cosmic message to lost.
A (Carlton Cuse): I think we use the show to explore issue in our own lives. Issues of faith, etc. But I don’t think we’re pretentious to say that we’re trying to deliver a message. I was once in a film class where a student was asking a director about all the symbolism of a piano that kept appearing in his movie, and he pauses, looks at the student and says, “It’s a smurfing piano”. I think it’s great that people blog and theorize about things but our IQs aren’t that high to be credited for all these little meanings that people find.
A (Damon Lindelof): Sometimes a boar is just a boar on the show. But we do add easter eggs for fans to find. We don’t want to force our meanings onto the show, we want it to be subjective and different for people.
Originally Posted by RedXIII13
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