We are thrilled to welcome back Stargate Director and Producer, Martin Wood, to talk more Stargate history and update us on his latest projects!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:15 – Opening Credits
0:46 – Welcome
1:05 – Guest Introduction
2:04 – Directing Fast-Paced VS Slower-Paced Programs
5:49 – Fine-Tuning a Performance
7:30 – A Different Delivery Time
10:05 – “Full Circle”
13:05 – Blowing the Pyramid
14:45 – Anubis’s Superweapon
15:47 – Filming the Jets in Stargate Continuum
18:15 – Blowing the Pyramid Part 2
22:23 – “Into the Fire” Tower Turret Explosion
26:05 – Dynamic Range Explosions and “Peaking”
28:00 – Bruce Woloshyn was Martin Wood’s Student
29:10 – Replicators in “Small Victories”
31:45 – The Torpedo Tube
32:50 – Running and Gunning in “Enemies”
35:40 – Replicators, Naquadah Reactors and Zat Guns
37:40 – The Nuclear Attack in “First Strike”
41:45 – The Power of Modern Technology
46:20 – Amanda Tapping
47:30 – Christopher Judge’s Son
48:07 – Working Again with Previous Talent
50:12 – Working in Water in “The Return, Part 2”
52:08 – Upcoming Projects
53:08 – Thank You, Martin!
55:18 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
56:19 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Dial the Gate, Episode 280, my name is David Read. We have “Part Four” of our ongoing interview with Stargate producer and director Martin Wood. I am always thrilled to have this guest on because he has a wealth of information. Martin, thank you for being with me, sir. Where is it you are again? I wanted to make sure I got this on the record.

Martin Wood:
Halifax, Nova Scotia.

David Read:
You are filming which series out there?

Martin Wood:
The series called Sullivan’s Crossing. It’s a CW series.

David Read:
OK. How long are you out there working on this show?

Martin Wood:
Eight weeks. I found out last week I was coming out. I was in the middle of doing another series and I was in my last three days. I got a call from my agent saying, “Can you parachute into Halifax?” I said, “Sure. For how long?” He goes, “The next two months.” I went, “Ah, sure. OK.”

David Read:
So much for lives with kids!

Martin Wood:
They’re closer to me here.

David Read:
They’re not at home anymore?

Martin Wood:
They’re closer to me here ’cause they’re in Ontario. It’s closer to me here. It’s a two-hour flight from here rather than a four-hour flight from Vancouver.

David Read:
That works. There you go. Before we started, you and I were talking about the content and pacing of a lot of different shows. One of the things that we mentioned was the velocity of this kind of show and Virgin River and some of the others versus sci-fi programming, which is there’s usually a MacGuffin. There are the plot elements, “We must hit these, we have to be higher concept.” With these kinds of shows, you get to explore character a little bit more, whereas in shows like Atlantis and SG-1 they were fleeting.

Martin Wood:
The interesting thing to me is that for years and years, I was pigeonholed as a sci-fi director. I could only do sci-fi. Then along comes this obscure series that was one of Hallmark’s very first series. A friend of mine was producing it and he said, “I need you to come in and do an episode of this.” He had to convince Hallmark that I could do it because Hallmark’s like, “Wait a second. This guy does action and sci-fi,” and that kind of stuff. I went in and did two episodes and they just kept calling me back. Over the course of about five years, my whole world changed into not doing action, but doing romantic drama and rom-com and things like this. I thought, “Do I enjoy this? Or do I…” and I was enjoying myself, but I didn’t understand why I was enjoying it. What I was telling you was that one of the things that happens in sci-fi is that it tends to be action-driven, tends to be situationally driven and it’s not human interaction-driven necessarily. It’s a team that has to do something and it’s the situation that we have to deal with. Weekly, it’s a different monster-of-the-week with Sanctuary or it’s a different thing. Of course you have interactions, you have human interaction with that, but they tend to be a little bit more defined around characters in sci-fi. It’s mostly because they’re function-based characters; they do have relationships. They do have all this stuff. They do everything that every other character does, but it’s not the relationship that necessarily drives the series.

David Read:
They’re part of an allegory.

Martin Wood:
Yeah, very much. Long arcs that drive relationship and long things that drive this. Whereas with this kind of thing, like Virgin River and with Sullivan’s Crossing and with a bunch of the things that I’m doing now, these are about two people sitting at a table having a really difficult conversation about an emotional thing and this doesn’t change. Last week I was on the Pacific Ocean, this week I’m on the Atlantic Ocean. I left one series that I’d shot, I started shooting it at seven o’clock in the morning, ended at eight o’clock at night. Got on a plane, flew overnight and started prepping this on the Tuesday.

David Read:
Count your blessings.

Martin Wood:
What happens is that in all of these scripts, they’re all very similar in that you get into the minds of the characters, especially with this series ’cause I hadn’t seen this series before. I watched 20 hours of this series over the course of a week to see what the situation was with them. The situation is nuanced inside the characters. As a director – I think I told you the story about what I used to do on episode number 44 or whatever of Stargate. One of the first things that I did was I started looking at it and seeing how many boardroom scenes I had to do. I had to think of something new to do in the boardroom, a new way to get in there, a new way to cut the table in half. I’ve told you those stories. Here it’s you know this situation is gonna happen with these characters. With Virgin River, I’ve done like 25 of them. I’m not bored with it yet because the emotional situation that happens between the two characters changes and so what it draws out of a director is it draws the dramatic urge to sit there and fine tune a performance. It is still exciting to me to go into production and go in every day. What’s funny is I go into a series, like I just finished doing a series that I’d done 15 episodes of before, but the crew goes, “It’s so great to watch how you shoot this because you don’t shoot it like a lot of the other directors.”

David Read:
You have your fingerprints on it.

Martin Wood:
I take in a little bit of what I learned in terms of shooting action and shooting. The momentum of a scene can be changed by what you do with the camera and what you do with the actors. II appreciate the fact that I can do a hybrid between the two genres in the way that I actually direct them.

David Read:
I would imagine that despite the difference in genres, your toolkit, your toolbox is only expanding from one to the other. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think that your prep time would be less because it’s far less technical. Or am I wrong about that? Is it the same?

Martin Wood:
You would think that, but it is the same amount.

David Read:
Really? Not blowing up pyramids in “Full Circle?” No?

Martin Wood:
No. I use every second of it. The interesting thing is the delivery time is different.

David Read:
That makes sense.

Martin Wood:
You still have to prep in this three-week period and then you have to shoot in this three-week period, but what happens afterwards with it is this gets cut, music gets applied, color corrected, it can go on the air. That doesn’t happen when you’ve got visual effects or special effects and that kind of stuff. Then you’ve got that 27-week delivery period and whatever. There’s a difference at the back end of it, but the front end for journeymen directors and things like that, and writers too, it’s very short. It’s the same amount of time for both of them. Your brain does a different type of process. I do a shot list. If you ever saw the 200th episode book, you saw the example of the shot list I do, which are always this insane thing that I put together and I do it on every show I’ve ever done. There’s an entire bible for the entire show before I start the show and it has written down what I need to do in every scene. My process doesn’t change no matter what I’m directing. There is an extra step if I’m doing action because I’ll do a storyboard with it sometimes or I’ll do pre-vis with it or I’ll do some of that kind of stuff. That’s just a tool to tell everybody else what’s in my brain. That doesn’t have to happen when you’re gonna have five people in a room and there’s not much to pre-vis or anything like that. That process is a little different for me. The idea of doing action, when I have to explain it to a bunch of people, then they’re gonna see storyboards, they’re gonna see concept art, they’re gonna see that kind of stuff has to come out. I couldn’t do Sanctuary without being able to do that, especially because it was actors walking onto a green screen.

David Read:
There’s nothing there.

Martin Wood:
What is happening here?

David Read:
Geez. It’s interesting that we’re kind of going in that direction, because one of the things that I’ve looked back on the three that I’ve done with you for Dial the Gate and one of the things that I find a gaping hole in my content that you could drive a semi through is we haven’t talked a great deal about some of the bigger set pieces of the franchise. One of the ones that I recently talked with, I think it was Craig Van Den Biggelaar about, was blowing the pyramid in “Full Circle.” The episode “Full Circle,” what a huge show that was.

Martin Wood:
That was pretty epic.

David Read:
What do you remember about “Full Circle” and working on that shrinking plot of sand out by the airport?

Martin Wood:
Yes. There were so many different elements to “Full Circle.” The biggest thing I remember is Rick in the chair. I think that’s the episode where he’s…

David Read:
That’s “Lost City.”

Martin Wood:
“Lost City.” Sorry.

David Read:
This is a year before. We have to go to Abydos to save them from Anubis who’s about to blow the pyramid out of the sky. We have Michael Shanks back for this episode. That was a big deal. Thomasina Gibson, the author, was on the set for a scene. There’s a lot of little things running through this.

Martin Wood:
God, I have to remember “Full Circle” then because I was remembering “Lost City.”

David Read:
You blew up the Abydos pyramid in that.

Martin Wood:
I do remember that.

David Read:
I love that sequence because it’s bittersweet in that we’re losing a cornerstone of the franchise.

Martin Wood:
It’s been there from the movie.

David Read:
How long does it take to get something like that ready to go? Obviously, you have practical explosives on set and then it’s gonna be enhanced with digital effects later, particularly the sand, sweetening that up. How does that go? No pressure, Martin. It’s only been 30 years.

Martin Wood:
Honestly, I just want to look at the sequence.

David Read:
The fact that you can do that is just, that’s just wild. Take your time.

Martin Wood:
Sorry.

David Read:
No. Please, take your time.

Martin Wood:
This is not good podcasting if I do this. It goes to exploding star.

David Read:
Let’s see here. Pull this up here. Isn’t it amazing when we can have something ready to go and then be looking for a specific scene. There’s a beam that comes down out of the sky with Anubis’ mothership and then it stops. You guys loaded explosive charges underneath, this model of the pyramid, which had to have been 10 feet square.

Martin Wood:
It was. I really wanna see the sequence ’cause I can actually describe to you the entire sequence of it.

David Read:
I would pull it for you but I would get a copyright to show it to you live.

Martin Wood:
OK, here it is.

David Read:
I won’t do this to you next time, my friend. I’ll have things ready to go beforehand.

Martin Wood:
No, it’s totally fine. I just don’t wanna waste podcast time on this. OK, here it is. Let me see if I can find the actual sequence.

David Read:
It’s about eight minutes before the end of the episode.

Martin Wood:
One of the things that came up with this… OK, there it is. I’m just watching it now. The interesting thing was that was the Cheops class pyramid ship that we brought in?

David Read:
This one was Anubis’ mothership. It’s like a flower; it unlocks and unfolds. He’s just acquired the last of these crystal eyes, one of which I have, actually, right here.

Martin Wood:
Yep. That’s the Cheops class.

David Read:
He manages to get this from SG1 and tricks Daniel into getting that. He kills all the Abydonians, except Oma takes them and ascends the entire culture.

Martin Wood:
I love remembering this.

David Read:
It was a good show you guys did.

Martin Wood:
It was fantastic. It’s funny because I just watched part of Continuum the other day. I was thinking about a sequence that I had shot in it and wanted to remember myself.

David Read:
Which sequence was that?

Martin Wood:
The flying sequence, where we’re all in the planes and Brad Wright is one of the pilots. I thought I had done one thing with it and then I looked at it again and I realized I had changed sort of midstream with it. I was towing the planes in a circle. I had done that once before and it had worked really well. I may have told you this before, but as we’re flying into it, as each time we do the circle, there’s outtakes of somebody’s line starting. I go, “Sign,” and this big Exxon sign would come up behind them because I had to pull them past the hangar. We’d wait and I’d go, “Sign off” and then they’d start the line again. As we’re dragging around in this giant circle, there’s this indication of everybody wanting to get their lines done before the sign came in ’cause they knew that there’d be this brief pause when that happened. One of the other things I was doing was I had a smoke tube at the front of the plane to blow smoke past so it actually looked like there were clouds that we were going through, which doesn’t actually happen when you’re flying. You don’t see that. I did it again for a movie that I did for Netflix called Operation Christmas Drop.

David Read:
Good film.

Martin Wood:
I had Alexander Ludwig as the pilot. I could put my own co-pilot in, I could put the other actors in the plane and have them doing everything except the pilot’s seat. I had to make it look like Alexander was flying this. Again, we’re dragging this giant transport craft around, I’ve got a camera on him and him framed against the sky so every time you cut back and forth to him – it was the same process I used in Continuum for that. Back to the pyramid blowup. Anytime that we did a big explosion, one of the things that we had to do with it, one of the things that a lot of people don’t know is that there was a lot of sand in the base of it. In order to get sand to interact, I had to put sand inside, in a couple of layers, which literally made it that much more dangerous for everybody when we were blowing it up. The thing that happens for me with miniatures a lot of times is, a miniature blowup, you use det cord to blow it up. You tend to fragment it so much that it starts to look like wood splinters. What we did on the side of the pyramid was, there are actual panels that were put on the pyramid that were not supposed to explode, that would blow off of it but would not be splintered.

David Read:
It’s like the rock has just been propelled off? Like it’s giant stones.

Martin Wood:
That was a big part for both VFX and for me, to make a miniature not look like it was made out of wood.

David Read:
‘Cause it’s stone.

Martin Wood:
You can’t make it out of metal; you can’t make it out of rock; it was putting panels on that were small enough that it would be propelled. Again, everything that you put on it becomes a projectile, so you move further and further away from it behind protection. There was another one that we blew up that we used so much det cord in, it was crazy. I’m trying to remember what episode it was. It was one that we had John, what, was it “The Gatekeeper” one?

David Read:
More information.

Martin Wood:
It was Q.

David Read:
John De Lancie.

Martin Wood:
John De Lancie.

David Read:
He blew out in Prometheus but that wasn’t really an explosion.

Martin Wood:
No, it wasn’t. I’m sorry, I’m mixing John up. If I can remember the guy’s name, you’ll be able to tell me who it was. Let me see. It’s funny ’cause I just used him, he’s in Virgin River, I just used him. He’s Jack’s father in Virgin River.

David Read:
Keith MacKechnie?

Martin Wood:
Keith MacKechnie? No.

David Read:
MacKechnie, who plays Nick?

Martin Wood:
No, that’s Nick.

David Read:
That’s Jack’s father. Jack Sheridan?

Martin Wood:
Jack Sheridan is Martin Henderson’s name. I’m just looking for a full cast here. This is so funny. I’m wasting your time with this.

David Read:
No, it’s OK. You’re usually spitting ’em out so I don’t think- “Ah, I’m not gonna give him an episode just beforehand. He knows it all.”

Martin Wood:
There are things that come up that I sit there going, “Oh, that’s why.”

David Read:
It may come back to you when we when we move around a little bit-

Martin Wood:
I’m gonna show you his picture and you tell me…

David Read:
OK.

Martin Wood:
There’s his picture.

David Read:
On the left?

Martin Wood:
He’s on the left. We blew him up.

David Read:
You blew him up.

Martin Wood:
With a tower. He was in a tower. Man.

David Read:
Blew him up in a tower. What’s the actor’s name?

Martin Wood:
That’s what… I’m just looking.

David Read:
Fandom, are we guys seeing this? Did you guys recognize him? I didn’t recognize him. It’s been too long and I’m usually pretty good at that.

Martin Wood:
Tom Butler.

David Read:
Tom Butler.

Martin Wood:
Tom Butler.

David Read:
I believe that would be “Into the Fire” because he was Hathor’s Jaffa. Yes, there was a lot of that in that.

Martin Wood:
There was a massive tower explosion that he was in.

David Read:
OK. I believe he was on the ground as one of the Jaffa, but one of the commanding Jaffa. There was a Jaffa in the tower, these things that came out of the ground and had the turrets in them. When Teal’c and Hammond came by in the needle threader, they blew that thing away. That was a big explosion.

Martin Wood:
We used too much det cord in that. I remember Ray Douglas saying to me, “We should probably move back.” This was made out of wood. We’re like, “OK.” I said, “Are the cameras OK?” He goes, “Unmanned, they’re OK.” I’m like, “Unmanned, they’re OK.” OK, so we lock him off, we put protection in front of him and we move back and he goes, “I think we should get behind the trucks.” They had their special effects trailers there and we got behind, he goes, “Behind the wheels of the trucks.” I’m like, “OK.” It was this massive explosion, blew this thing up and I remember looking at the footage going, “You can’t see the thing blowing up.” We had to augment that because it happened so fast; det cord detonates so quickly. It’s not like gas bombs. Gas bombs, we use to actually have the big things go up in the air. This was just blowing it apart and it atomized it. That was the kind of thing that we’d think about when you’re blowing up something that you wanna see explode into these pieces.

David Read:
I would think, as a layman, bigger is better. I guess if you blow away the detail you’re missing the point. You don’t just want to see fire.

Martin Wood:
That’s it. Very much. The other thing is that we were still shooting film at that time. The difficulty with shooting film is that you really have to register how bright it’s gonna get. If it gets too bright, it just goes negative on the film and you can never recover it. Our cameras nowadays have a much broader window for being able to accept that kind of thing. Those days when you’re doing film, you had to be exposed for the day, but you also had to be exposed for the explosion. I remember when O’Neill went into the face hugger and we were blowing up the field out there. That was in August. I remember that we had fire engines and everything like that there because it was very much a fire problem for us. As the gliders were coming in, they were blowing these things off but we lost a lot of detail in them because the explosions were too big and bright. It’s one of the reasons you use gas bags; they’re literally a plastic bag filled with gasoline. Gasoline burns yellow rather than that white explosion that you get sometimes when you use straight det cord.

David Read:
I have a conversation with Bruce Woloshyn that I did when “Rising” was still on the cutting room floor. I’m interested to know now, for my own education as well as just a little bit of detail for the audience. He said that with film, you can tune the film so that you can change some of the details of the explosion. At that point, with digital, what you see is what you get.

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
A lot of the explosions in Atlantis were just yellow. Is that not the case anymore with the range of HD?

Martin Wood:
It’s called dynamic range and the camera is much more able to see that kind of stuff. He’s right. With film you had a huge dynamic range but you also had to worry about exposure an awful lot more. Right now, you can manipulate exposure very much more because you have it digitally.

David Read:
In the editing bay?

Martin Wood:
We do it in the editing bay but a lot of times it just goes into the resolver, the color, whatever we’re using to do the Da Vinci, whatever we’re using to do the color correct. Sometimes they’ll pull it back for us. The danger is going to a place where it’s called peaking, where you have from here to here you can actually expose it. If it goes over that, it literally folds over top like that and turns into mush. If you get higher than that peak, it turns to mush. What you need is something that’s holding it inside that and often what holds it inside that is stuff that will turn it to mush too. You’re trying to have a dynamic range that’s big enough that it will accept that.

David Read:
Wow. I wanna talk about taking digital elements and…

Martin Wood:
I didn’t tell you, by the way, that Bruce Woloshyn was a student of mine.

David Read:
Was he?

Martin Wood:
When I was teaching school.

David Read:
I did not know that.

Martin Wood:
He came in without knowing anything about film and television and I taught him for two years at the Institute of Technology in Edmonton. He was always, always, always wanting to do film. I remember he did a video, a music video, because he had this black Trans Am. He wanted to do a video with that Trans Am and he shot this video to the music, it was to Photograph, by Nickelback maybe?

David Read:
I’m not familiar with that.

Martin Wood:
That’s what I remembered of Bruce. When Bruce started working with me on Atlantis, when we were doing the prep for Atlantis and the place, it was so funny because he had a position. I’d seen him come from – he was never little, but he was from being this neophyte to the whole thing.

David Read:
You know talented people when you see them.

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
When they come into your life later on, it’s like, “Ah, I’m not surprised.”

Martin Wood:
Very much.

David Read:
Can we talk a minute about replicators?

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
I had Craig Van Den Biggelaar on and I had an amazing conversation about replicators. I wanna talk about a purely digital sequence later on, the “First Strike” sequence that lasted over a minute. You started off with the replicators in “Nemesis.”

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
In “Small Victories” you started…

Martin Wood:
Small Victories, it was in the tube.

David Read:
Exactly right. We talked a little bit about the submarine, but I remember from the special features, you guys talking about the red dots that were secured on the top of this set piece that in some cases you kept in because they looked cool. Tracking these elements, how does that all work?

Martin Wood:
The replicators were the first thing that James Tichenor ever let me move the camera on as a 3D character. That made such a huge difference. We’d already seen the replicators, we’d already seen what they were. We came back into it and he said, “I think we can do it handheld.” That sequence, running down the hallway where replicators are up the walls and coming after us and things like this and us running backwards. We were always limited with things like the kawoosh and with something as a lock-off. When you get into 3D, it is very difficult for them to track. We had rudimentary tracking systems, like what was called the Boujou system, which would throw up all these tracking marks and then it would try and find it inside there, rather than you putting tracking marks into it. With replicators, it was one of those things where there was enough dynamic motion inside them that it wasn’t like when we did dinosaurs for Primeval. It was a whole different thing, where it was, “As long as I’ve given you the space to be able to do it, and sometimes give you interactive pieces for it, they’ll figure out where the dinosaur is in that space.” With this kind of 3D effect, like the kawoosh or something like that, where it had to live inside the ring, it had to do this kind of stuff, it would always lock-off. Then we started moving into, “OK, we can go handheld with this or we can go into motion, where I could actually follow something.” At the end of the torpedo tube, when the replicator comes out and jumps out, that can be in motion. I told you about my whole ordeal of being in the torpedo tube, to get that scene from inside the torpedo tube.

David Read:
I couldn’t do it, man.

Martin Wood:
I’ll never forget that. It was one of those things where I remember Jim Menard, the DP, opening the hatch, ’cause he sealed me in. Opening the hatch, he says, “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” I said, “Not until now.” My feet were against the seawall, which meant it’s right against the water. I have a camera in front of me and my shoulder’s like this ’cause I’m just too big to get inside this thing and all this rust is dropping on me. I’m sitting there, waiting for them to open this thing and I’m thinking, “This is weird.” It just goes black as soon as they close that.

David Read:
What if I never come out?

Martin Wood:
That was it.

David Read:
You have to entertain that for a brief moment.

Martin Wood:
Having him push that camera forward was, at that moment, wild to get that perspective.

David Read:
I don’t think I’ve ever told you what my favorite sequence of yours is, my favorite single-camera shot, and it has to do with replicators. You alluded to it in the hallway, you’re referring to “Enemies.”

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
They’re aboard Apophis’s ship. It’s been half-eaten by these things. You’ve got Carmen on the radio, trying to get a hold of Jack and Sam, and they come around the hallway and these things are following ’em behind. You come back and we see what it looks like to go into the matter stream of the ring transporter.

Martin Wood:
Correct.

David Read:
That whole sequence, with the replicators coming down on the walls, that was so cool. I love this sequence.

Martin Wood:
I appreciate that, thanks.

David Read:
What was it like, only really a year after you started doing a lot of this. You’re shooting weapons in this hallway. Everyone’s got their glasses on. These things are coming down off of the walls. How do you storyboard that sequence? It’s a lot of Rob Fournier there as well; making sure that everyone’s safe.

Martin Wood:
For me, with the actors, it was, “Shoot anything, anywhere and there will be replicators there.” You don’t have to shoot down the hall. You can spin up like this and shoot into the wall. There will be replicators there.” That is very freeing for them. When we did dinosaurs, it’s… We had Chuck, our stand-in, in a gray suit, sometimes holding a big head, running at them. That process hasn’t changed for anything. When you see some of these things…I was watching the behind the scenes on Avatar and they do the same thing. They have guys running with a head and it’s like, “That’s what they use for motion capture, too.” It’s so that everybody’s looking at the same spot. You don’t have to when it’s replicators. That was one of the liberating things about replicators, is they’re everywhere. James would literally look where they’re aiming, and then blow that one away, blow that one away, put some there, bring them up. One of the things I said about that was I wanted them to surge. What happens is that some of them would surge to one side. It wasn’t just randomly coming down the hallway, that they were coming like this, and then they’d go up the sides and they’d come and it was scarier.

David Read:
They’re communicating with one another like animals would.

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
They’re like a flock of birds.

Martin Wood:
A hive mind.

David Read:
That’s exactly right. How cool is that? Man, oh man.

Martin Wood:
Whenever I think about this, I think about how appreciative I was of the brains of Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner and Paul and Joe and Damian; these guys that would think like this and then give it over to us. We’d go, “OK. If this is the design of these things, then let’s make them do this.” Even the ones that come back to life, where they sort of transform themselves back into things. The minds that went into making this, I’m always fascinated by them. It’s funny when you watch television. You don’t think the same way you do when you’re in the middle of it, because when you’re in the middle of it, you get the process happening. You see that Naquadah bomb behind you? I know where that came from. I saw the first design of it. I know how it came into that being and I needed something that would be able to be activated. Originally it was a switch and I went, “No, no, it has to be something that lifts and turns, so it’s much more visual.” That’s where that sort of comes from. I wish I’d been around when the Zat’nik’tel had been invented, but that was not me. I can’t take any responsibility for that bit.

David Read:
You got to deal with it for the next nine years.

Martin Wood:
Exactly.

David Read:
Geez.

Martin Wood:
Don’t push it three times, ’cause it disappears. I think it disappears and then…

David Read:
Sometimes, some stuff that’s with it will disappear if you need it to. It can break locks.

Martin Wood:
Weird. Did anybody ever figure out the timeline? If I got shot with one yesterday and stunned, or two hours ago, and then you shoot me again now, am I gonna die?

David Read:
Or disintegrate? I think it comes down to their own personal immune system or whatever. Technically, no, it was not. It was kept free. Taking shots like this, going totally digital. You had the longest digital effect sequence in the franchise.

Martin Wood:
I did.

David Read:
“First Strike,” where we nuke Asuras, the replicators in the Pegasus Galaxy. The Daedalus delivers a payload and we follow it down almost to the surface of the planet watching these nukes detonate. What a sequence! Was that something that was more freeing because you have more time to do this? Joel Goldsmith is going nuts with the music. Or was this something that was more complicated?

Martin Wood:
It was a question of whether we wanted to do interactive with it or not. When we decided not to do interactive with it, when it was gonna become a fully digital sequence. When you start talking about digital sequences, today it sounds weird, because we’ve seen movies that are made like this. Any Marvel movie that you watch, most of the action sequences are almost all totally digital. At that time, we were still very much it has to have some kind of physical effect in it to be able to make it work for us. Of course, anything that’s in space would be totally digital and even glider flights on Earth and things like this. When it comes in, do we wanna actually go and clip some trees? Do I wanna get some footage of the trees themselves to make it feel like it’s more practical? As soon as you sit down with vis effects to talk about it, you’re talking about how much practical you want in this to make it feel like we’re grounding it in a place that the audience doesn’t just go, “Oh, it’s just totally digital?” We made some mistakes with total digital stuff too. I remember there was a fight between two motherships. I’m trying to think of what it was.

David Read:
Was this at the end of Season Nine with “Camelot?”

Martin Wood:
No. It was where Teal’c and his son and who else was with him?

David Read:
It’s Bra’tac probably.

Martin Wood:
Bra’tac was with him and they’re watching the gliders come in.

David Read:
So this is, um, “Redemption Part 2.”

Martin Wood:
“Redemption Part 2.” There was a space fight before that, though. There was a fight and I remember looking at it going, “That one doesn’t hold up very well.” Often, for me, it was a personal thing, where if you have ships that are that big, turning and moving quickly, it just felt like, “OK, the physics is gone.” You can’t move those things quickly. Even depending on what propulsion system you’ve got on, it still takes a run-up to it and it would never work like that. We had discussions about that kind of stuff and it was always, “Yeah, but it’s a TV show.” Nobody ever said that out loud, but it was always, “We only have this much time to be able to do it.” Moving the motherships around, I always liked it better when they were just these dreadnoughts that were moving. I think that they got much better at that as they went and so did my planning of sort of the storyboarding of what it was gonna look like. I’d have an idea about how it went together; Brad would then enhance that with what he wanted to do with it. It was very often a storyboarded sequence in space that would take us down to the surface of the planet. Then, for me, it would be, “OK, now I have to involve some physical effects so that when the glider comes in to take out what it’s taking out, can I blow stuff up for real to make it feel like now we’ve got that interactivity with us?”

David Read:
Now with some of the visual effects that are coming along, with Unreal 5, you can’t tell. I just saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the opening sequence is of Indy back in the ’40s and the most unrealistic thing about it was his voice. He sounds too old. The visuals, I’m looking at it, and I’m like, “This is so much further from Peter Cushing in Rogue One just a few years ago.” I can tell a little bit, with the eyes and with some of the lighting, but otherwise, gosh, we’re so close now.

Martin Wood:
Yes, it’s a fascinating cusp that we’re on and I always feel this way about progress like this. It doesn’t frighten me at all. Having AI involved in what we do doesn’t frighten me because we’ve been doing that, we’ve been asking for it. Being able to duplicate 1,000 replicators with AI would be a much faster, much cleaner process than what we did. What it allows us to do, and what AI is gonna allow us to do, and what the digital effects are allowing us to do is expand our brains. This is what we thought was possible before, but now what we think is possible is this. I actually ran into this yesterday, or Friday, on a location scout. I was in a set that had been built on Sullivan’s Crossing, a practical set built from an existing set that exists in the world that is too difficult to get to. We rebuilt it in a studio and the production designer, I said something about if we wanted to do this, we could do this. He goes, “Yeah, that’s so expensive that I think you should probably do it VisFX.” I said, “Great.” Somebody else said something about, “Well, they do it when they do the animation for these things. An animated show would do this and this and this.” I started thinking, “We’re getting closer to what animation can do.” I remember watching…it wasn’t Studio Ghibli, but it was another one that came out a few years ago. An anime thing that came out that was called Your Name, or… I think it was Your Name. What’s Your Name? Or What’s My Name. I can’t remember what it’s called. I’m stupid with those kinds of things.

David Read:
That’s okay.

Martin Wood:
I remember looking at it as a director and going, “Oh, this is so beautiful. They’re able to do this and this and this and this and this.” I thought, “You know what? Nowadays, I can do that.” It’s these massive shots that start up here and end down here in an eye, or it’s this kind of stuff. “I can do that.” A couple of years ago, I couldn’t. There’s stuff right now, David, that I take my 249-gram drone and I walk up to the DP and say, “Hey, can I do this?” He goes, “Sure.” I throw it up in the air and I get a shot that does that. It starts up there and it comes down and, boof, lands on somebody’s face. I’m sitting there going, “Phew, I didn’t have to animate that at all.” I can actually put this thing a kilometer up and drop it down at full speed and it comes into this shot.

David Read:
Wow.

Martin Wood:
That used to be a huge amount of animation. Now I can do it practically with a drone.

David Read:
And it’s real.

Martin Wood:
I’m a huge fan of the advancement of technology. I love it in what we do. The older I get as a director, I’m more and more appreciative of it. I told you, I think, last time we were talking about the number of times I’ve used a light wall in the last four or five movies I’ve done. The light walls, for me, are these things that are the greatest invention for filmmakers. Every driving sequence I’ve done, everything I’ve done, snowstorms, this kind of stuff, I do on light walls.

David Read:
It interacts with the stuff that’s in front of it so that’s just amazing.

Martin Wood:
Every reflective piece shows us everything.

David Read:
Martin, do you have a few more minutes for questions?

Martin Wood:
I do.

David Read:
OK. Brian King wants to know, “Who do you keep in contact with from Stargate the most?”

Martin Wood:
Amanda and I live a block away from each other. We see each other all the time. We walk the dogs together; we see each other all the time. We are always comparing notes about where she is. She’s in Ontario right now doing a new series that she’s producing and directing. I’m here, but I know just before she left, it was like, “I’ll see you in December.” I’m like, “OK, I’ll be here.” Then I’m over top of her and saying, “Hey, I’m gonna be closer.” I see Michael and Lexa all the time because of our kids, we’re great friends. I have talked to Rick a couple of times, not as much as I want to, just to say hi. Brad and I have passed in the night a couple of times, talking to each other. I see a lot of the actors that we had. I just finished something with Steve Bacic. All the actors that we use, somebody will come in and go, “Oh, you remember me? I was a Jaffa you killed nine times.” I’m like, “Oh, great. OK.” There’s a lot of that. But of the principals, I haven’t talked to Chris for a long time. Did I tell you the story about hearing his voice on set once?

David Read:
No.

Martin Wood:
I came onto set and suddenly I hear, “Martin Wood!” I turned and I went, “Chris?” It was Christopher, his son.

David Read:
Wow. Just like him.

Martin Wood:
He sounded exactly like his dad. Exactly. He’s huge. He comes over and gives me a big hug and says, “My dad said to give you a hug.”

David Read:
Yeah, the one who appeared in “The Changeling.” I’ve met him. He’s a good guy. Sandra Rankin, “When you bring actors in that you’ve directed before, do you find it easier to communicate with them, or is it just like anyone else. Is there a benefit from an established relationship from the past?”

Martin Wood:
It’s interesting that you ask that question right now. This morning, one of the actors on the series I’m doing right now is Scott Patterson, who I worked with on the very first thing I directed. It was a TV movie called Them and it was written by Kim LeMasters. I was the first assistant director on the show. I replaced the director for the very beginning and end sequences of the movie, with Scott as an actor. Scott and I were reminiscing about that and what’s interesting to me and the reason I say that it’s interesting that it happens right now, is because that makes it much easier for me to direct him here because we have something… He knows me already. It was 30 years ago, but he did remember me and he said, “Oh, I remember this about you.” Often with actors that I’ve directed before, because there’s a rapport already and because they already know that they can trust you, I’m hoping it makes it much easier to direct them. Whereas with new actors that have never worked with you before, especially if they haven’t researched who you are, there’s a reticence to trust you right off the bat. Trusting a director and trusting an actor are the two biggest things that have to happen on a set.

David Read:
There’s a proving period that always has to occur?

Martin Wood:
Always.

David Read:
It’s not like, “Well, this person has been hired, so I’m just going to trust fall.”

Martin Wood:
That trust fall will happen, often, after a scene or two, of just being able to give them good direction or being able to find out what they can show you. I’ve spent 20 hours watching all these episodes but I don’t know some of the actors. I don’t know what direction they were given to get them to certain places. It’s interesting for me to hear them and talk to them too, so both ways.

David Read:
A technical question. La Fronce en Farces says… I butchered that. I apologize, sir, or ma’am! “How hard is it to shoot scenes with a lot of water, like in ‘Grace Under Pressure?’ Do you shy away from that?”

Martin Wood:
It’s my favorite thing to do. I love it.

David Read:
Yeah? Really?

Martin Wood:
I put water in everything, ask Amanda Tapping. She hated it because I used to put it in everything, all the Sanctuaries that I could. It’s like, “We’re gonna be in a water tank. You’re gonna be like this.” There were these huge things that we do with water and I love working in water. It’s one of my favorite things. I think I told you at one point about how having Richard Dean Anderson just surprised the hell out of me. I sank with a camera. He has to swim from the ladder over to release the things to be able to drain the water and he has to do it. My thinking was, “OK, Rick, we’re gonna do this in three parts. Go as far as you can. I’ll follow you, then we’ll just turn around and I’ll do this.” He came underwater and I was down with Ricardo, or not with Ricardo, with our underwater camera operator, and he came down. He swam across, we followed him over with him. Both of us were underwater as well, ’cause that’s one of the things I always do, I’ll always be under with them. Came across, he manipulated the controls, acted, like you see it on his face.

David Read:
It’s not working.

Martin Wood:
He’s acting, he’s trying to get it to go and finally it happens. He swims back and swims up and I’m sitting there going, “he held his breath for a minute and a half.” I just love what it is. With David and Amanda in “Grace Under Pressure,” it was so much fun. It’s a great medium to work in.

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely. Before I let you go, what’s next? You’re gonna be staying out east for a while? Do you have further plans beyond this?

Martin Wood:
I’m out here for a couple of months to do this and then I go back. I have a murder mystery series that is just coming up right now that I’ve done two of. I’m gonna do two more this coming year. I have this thriller that I wrote with Kevin Smith and Pascale Hutton and Peter Benson and Julia Benson. We wrote this thing that is this really fun thriller that’s just four actors and I’m really hoping that comes up. I’ve been asked about a motorcycle movie, a fairly substantial feature that would be fun to do.

David Read:
They’re in vogue now.

Martin Wood:
It sounds like a really good one. I read the script, I really liked it, so I said, “Yes, absolutely. If it’s gonna happen, let me happen with it.”

David Read:
I’m always excited with what you’re doing next, sir. I appreciate the time that you’ve given coming on and sharing some of these older stories. When I have you back next year, I will make sure to give you a more detailed list so that you won’t be like, “Uh.” My apologies.

Martin Wood:
You know what? I appreciate it. What I appreciate about it is… I wanna mention two things. One is I appreciate you reminding me about these things because, for me, it was an incredibly happy time. My career has been a happy time for me. I really enjoy doing what I do and have always loved it and had such a beautiful education starting with “Solitudes” and just being thrust into “Solitudes” and “Politics” that first year and going, “I love this. I’m never going back. I am only gonna do this.” Then being given the opportunity to do as many of them as I did and then Atlantis and then Sanctuary and then Primeval and series after series of all these things, and Olympus. I so appreciate you reminding me and reminding of everybody because Stargate was such a fantastic series to work on for everybody.

David Read:
That’s the major question that I get asked from laymen is, “It went on for 17 seasons. How did it do that?” Because they were happy.

Martin Wood:
Amanda and I talk about it all the time about how much fun that was and then following it with Sanctuary was a perfect cherry on top for us.

David Read:
That’s good stuff. I can’t wait to have you back next year, Martin. Please be well. I’m gonna wrap up the show on this end here, but you take care of yourself and you have a good fall and holiday season. All right, sir?

Martin Wood:
Absolutely, David. Thank you for calling.

David Read:
Be well. Bye-bye.

Martin Wood:
Bye-bye.

David Read:
Martin Wood, everyone, producer and director for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis. This guy, his body of work continues to be so extensive and I’m thrilled that he’s continuing to have the success that he’s having. Before we let you go, if you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, please click Subscribe. It will notify you when we have more content coming your way. We’ve got a few more episodes left this season. If you liked this episode, give us a thumbs up. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both Dial the Gate and the GateWorld.net YouTube channels. I had one question for me. “Are we getting Jill Wagner anytime soon?” I have requested her before; I will make another request. We’ve got new episodes coming up next week. I’ll be building the list on DialtheGate.com, so stay tuned. Wormhole X-Tremists is coming up later on today, we’re doing more of Season Five. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate my moderating team for keeping me on track today. I had Antony and Jeremy; you guys are awesome. I’ll see you on the other side.