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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome everyone to Episode 343 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I appreciate you being with me for this episode. We are live with Peter DeLuise, writer, producer, and director for the Stargate TV series. As this is a live show, you are invited to join us in the YouTube chat and submit questions for Peter if you have them, and then my mods will get them over to me. Peter, I have been so grateful to have you on a few different times now. You are one of the reasons, sir, that I keep the show going after 300 some odd episodes, because when I looked back on your body of work and the content, and all of everything that you’ve done, I wrote you earlier this week and I was, “Is it possible that I’ve only really covered 11 shows with him in the episodes that we’ve done?” And it’s true. So, I don’t feel like I’ve really done my job very well. I must apologize for that, for not getting that far.

Peter DeLuise:
Don’t blame yourself, David. I’m sure I blame myself, actually. Every time you ask me a question, I probably go on and on and on and don’t shut up. So, that–

David Read:
I don’t think that’s it at all. I think I’ve been focused on “Window of Opportunity” a little too much. It’s like, let’s talk about “Window of Opportunity” again! Come on!

Peter DeLuise:
That was a good one. That was fun, that one.

David Read:
It was a lot of fun. I finished — this was not on the list — poking around at an episode called “The Tomb.” I love that episode. I think–

Peter DeLuise:
That’s the one in the ziggurat with the Russians?

David Read:
The ziggurat. The Russians are coming. I think it was Ivana Vasic specifically who designed that set. I believe it was Ivana. The production team took the Goa’uld sets, the standing Goa’uld mothership set, and built inside of it that brick corridor, and made an absolutely stunning award-winning set. It was an extraordinary episode, and it was claustrophobic. And I think Ivana, if I’m not mistaken, was the one who said that people spoke quieter in there when it was all closed in. There was something that went off inside of them that said, “OK…”

Peter DeLuise:
It was also, there was no light, no… Technically there was no light source. Peter Woeste wanted to light it mostly with flashlights when he could. I remember him with a pie tin behind the actors, trying to make extra flashlight reflection so it would kick into their… And then off camera everyone had a pie tin on their chest, so if your weapons light hit the other person, it would bounce back into your face. And then much later, Jim Menard came up with a clever way to deal with the gun light situation, where it… Because, if you had this overpowering light right here and the face behind that, it would, why would there be light here if light starts here and goes that way? He made this kind of exhaust port on the back side of the flashlight; he cut a slit that looks like an exhaust port that you would see on a target-shooting pistol. And it would kick back light from the flashlight into your eyes. That’s when he got so sick of asking actors, “Can you please shine the light on this character?” And of course, the actor would say, “Well then I’m pointing my gun at them, so why would I point my gun at their faces?” So, he was like, “Forget it. I’ll just cut a hole in the flashlight.”

David Read:
There’s little tricks that I didn’t… OK, so they weren’t wearing pie tins…

Peter DeLuise:
No, off camera. Off camera.

David Read:
It was off camera being pointed at them and then back.

Peter DeLuise:
So, this is…

David Read:
The dental lights that were shot at the Enterprise in Motion Picture to light up the Enterprise in drydock.

Peter DeLuise:
So, imagine Peter Woeste off camera holding a pie tin and shining a flashlight in it to try to get something on their face, ’cause he had committed to lighting the scenes with flashlights. And much later Jim was like, “We’re not doing that. I’m just gonna cut a slot in the flashlight.” So, I interrupted your… That’s why we only covered 11 episodes, is that I won’t shut up about…

David Read:
No, it was that kind of thing. I remember in Motion Picture Star Trek, they got a tray of dental appliances, and they set them all up, and they shot a light at the dental appliances, and then took them and adjusted them so that when it hit the ILM model inside of the drydock, they could make up extra light sources. And in Universe, with the consoles for the second season, they took little light rigs, light bars, that rotated so that when you were shooting over at the actor’s face who was on the control board, they could turn these things around, and it would shine light on them. You just made things work. However you ever had to.

Peter DeLuise:
And we had these weird… I think when I first came on the show, right away I was not impressed with a lot of what I’m gonna call the uninteresting, flat background. And I said, “Aren’t we underground here? Where are the pipes and stuff?” I said, “This needs some love, we need more texture here.” And I said that, I guess I’ve said that a few times. And then somebody came up with a bunch of pipes being held by racks, and then they would put it and say, “This needs something. Let’s put the pipes there.” And then–

David Read:
Plantons.

Peter DeLuise:
Planton pipes. There was also the conduit in the ceiling. There was the conduit tray in the ceiling for stuff to look cool. And it started to look more and more like a submarine as it went. And then eventually, both Peter Woeste and Jim Menard decided it made sense for them to have what you’re calling plantons, a box with a light source.

David Read:
I see.

Peter DeLuise:
So, there was a battery-operated box, and there would be bits of lights and high points in the frame, not unlike what you have behind you. But they were less obvious, a little bit more subtle.

David Read:
BLUs, which stood for blinky light units. It actually said BLUs in these powered cases.

Peter DeLuise:
Named by the same person who named the GDO, the garage door opener.

David Read:
That’s it.

Peter DeLuise:
So, Ivana does deserve a lot of credit for that. I had not remembered that she designed that, but it was a beautiful set.

David Read:
It’s gorgeous.

Peter DeLuise:
And I think it was quiet for a couple of reasons. There was sand on the bottom, and there was a naturally sound-absorbent material. I think we were surrounded by Styrofoam painted to look like rock. And then it was dark. It was a giant, wonderful maze, and that’s how we were able to do that running shot when the doors were closing and it was, “Ah, we gotta get outta here.” And we just kept running around in a circle and going this way and then I told the Russians to say a whole bunch of stuff that was–

David Read:
Naughty.

Peter DeLuise:
— a little bit silly, yes, and naughty, yes.

David Read:
Absolutely. No, that set was absolute magic. And there was so much going on in that episode in terms of… It was Douglas McLean’s set. Doug McLean. I’m pulling up his website. I did not want to move on without giving proper credit. Ivana has done some amazing work on this show, but in this particular situation — and my screen recorder is still not working so give me just a second here while I make this work. There. This is Douglas McLean’s work from his website, B-E-A-U — rainbow.net. And it’s just exemplary of the stuff that you guys were able to pull off on a television budget.

Peter DeLuise:
I can’t think of yours. Remember canopic jars? The main room was in the middle, and it had those… Where did they hide the bodies?

David Read:
In the tomb?

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah.

David Read:
I don’t remember where they found the Russians. I don’t remember where the Russians were, but I do remember this main court, this main hall here with Marduk’s sarcophagus tied up.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s what… Sarcophagus. I couldn’t remember the name. That room. That was big. Also, there was… If you kicked the sand around enough, there would be particulates in the air and you’d be like, “Ah.”

David Read:
But it looked great.

Peter DeLuise:
Yes, it definitely looked cool.

David Read:
But it was crap on the day, I’m sure.

Peter DeLuise:
You gotta take it, you gotta take one for the team.

David Read:
That’s it.

Peter DeLuise:
Between the mineral oil smoke and the particulate in the air, you gotta… It just looks cool though.

David Read:
The creature in that episode, the concept art for it, had the strangest face. It had two mouths, a weird pair of eyes. It had tentacles and it had spider legs. And we only see it for a blink on camera, really. Did you guys make it in pieces, do you recall? Or did you actually manage to make the full thing? It was one of the oddest-looking things. And I wish we had gotten more action with it.

Peter DeLuise:
I thought you were gonna tell me, David. Was it not a CG thing? Are you saying it was a practical thing?

David Read:
I think that part of it was– Because they have to cut into the back of its neck and look inside of it, so at least the head was definitely real, or they–

Peter DeLuise:
So, they made a little gut bag that they had to cut open?

David Read:
They had to have. I’m gonna pull up the concept art for it because it’s one of those things that–

Peter DeLuise:
I remember the concept art where it was all twisted and gnarly. It looked like somebody’s, like you’d opened up the… There it is.

David Read:
Look at that! Whose mind thinks that up other than Ken Rabehl.

Peter DeLuise:
I wonder if he was sober at the time.

David Read:
Exactly. Who thinks of that thing? But you guys made it work and this… You just can’t get bored with the artistry.

Peter DeLuise:
The image on the right, I recall that more than I do the one on the left. I remember seeing the one on the left going, “Oh, that would be a cool chopper motorcycle.” Tank parts, a tank part on a chopper.

David Read:
Absolutely wild, man. I want to talk about duplicating actors. So, there are a couple of episodes that really stand out to me in this context with you as director, and they both really heavily featured Amanda Tapping. “Point of View” was the first one and “Gemini” was the second, and these were five years apart. And in “Point–”

Peter DeLuise:
Did I direct “Gemini” or just “Point of View?”

David Read:
Did you direct “Gemini?”

Peter DeLuise:
It doesn’t matter. I love talking ab–

David Read:
Did you write “Gemini?” Directed by Will Waring. But did you write “Gemini?” What was your involvement in “Gemini?” There was something there.

Peter DeLuise:
I don’t know. But I–

David Read:
Peter DeLuise wrote the co… You, we were part of this episode. So, twin RepliCarter.

Peter DeLuise:
I can tell you, I love talking about twinning. Twinning is very challenging, and in “Point of View,” the Quantum Mirror episode, I think all of that took place on the base. Is that right?

David Read:
“Point of View” definitely took place on the base in multiple realities.

Peter DeLuise:
So, the thing with twinning, most people… In the old days, and when I mean the really old days, if you wanted to duplicate something, you would black out this side of the lens, and then you’d have an actor right here, and he would act and pretend to be looking at himself over here. He, her, he, or him or herself over here. And then you’d rewind the film backwards, and then you’d black out this side, which meant that this side had not been exposed to the light yet. And you’d black out the other side, and you’d have the actor on this side looking where they were before. And then you would expose that side of the film, and then when it came out together, it would look like you’d had two… the same person on both sides.

David Read:
So, you actually could put it in the same piece of film?

Peter DeLuise:
I’m talking about the Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin era.

David Read:
Not you.

Peter DeLuise:
No, no, no. ‘Cause they weren’t using —

David Read:
Way back.

Peter DeLuise:
Way, way, way, way back.

David Read:
So, you didn’t… You only exposed one half of the film each time? They did.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s how twinning started. When they didn’t have options like we have. Now, what we would do is we would lock off the frame, which meant that we were gonna photograph one spot. So, if my hands are, I’m trying as best I can ’cause this is in a mirror for me. So, the camera will be locked in this frame, and we would be filming only this spot, and we would have the actor here. So, we wouldn’t have to black it out because we have non-linear editors, editing systems. We could take this half of the frame and then splice it down the middle and then put it together with this half of the frame. And if the actor was on both sides, after the splice, but then you had to be careful where you were splicing, that you had no… There could be nothing moving through the middle, so, a tree branch…

David Read:
And no lighting problems, no shadows.

Peter DeLuise:
Where’s a tree? Let’s say this is a tree branch. If a tree branch was behind my head and going through the cut the tree branch would move and it would give the effect away. ‘Cause it wouldn’t line up. So, there had to be a natural way to cut it down the middle. So, that was the next generation of twinning. And the generation after that was you could just as easily put a person in front of green, that would be the foreground element. So, it’s still a lock off, but here’s the foreground element, and there could be stuff going across the middle of the frame where the cut was eventually gonna be, because everything behind this, sorry, everything behind this was gonna be the background plate. And in the background plate, also a lock off, was the other version of the actor. So, you’ve got a foreground and mid-ground, but they seem to be looking right at each other. OK. Here’s the problem with twinning. Then it got even more sophisticated. Everyone would say, “Well, that looks like a twinning shot because it’s just stuck there.”

David Read:
It’s static, you mean.

Peter DeLuise:
Static. Yes.

David Read:
There’s no motion control anything.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. So, the next interesting level of intrigue was you would punch in to the frame after getting actors on both sides, and then you would just pa… There was an old thing called panning and scanning when they would take a feature film that was this big and they would make a square out of it. And sometimes there would be a two-shot that the square could not contain, and they would pan and scan across from one actor to the other.

David Read:
But the full shot had actually been filmed and after the fact they were doing it?

Peter DeLuise:
That’s right. So, now what we could do is we could punch into a much bigger frame and then just create a little fake movement. There was no parallax. So, if you saw a tree in the background, it wouldn’t… Trees wouldn’t go like that, but it was subtle enough that you go, “Oh, there’s some movement to this shot. I wonder how they did that.” Because most twinning shots are just stuck in the same spot.

David Read:
They’re almost faking a handheld thing.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. Now, the next level after that, you could… Will Waring used this trick very successfully because he was a cinematographer, or a camera operator rather. He was very familiar with a piece of equipment called a repeating head. And a repeating head was the part of the camera which was between the dolly and the camera itself. So, it had gears on it, and it would remember, it would record the movement. So, if the camera went like this, or up a little bit, or like that, it would do it exactly the same in the same timing, one after the other. And so, if you had one character, let’s say you had one character go behind another character. You could pan the camera over with that actor, and as long as the one in the foreground was on green, you were good, ’cause then the one who passed behind the other one needed, sorry, the one in the front needed to be cut out from the one that was passing behind. So, Will Waring…

David Read:
As an isolated plate.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. So, Will Waring used a repeating head, which was awesome.

David Read:
Wow. And that was for “Gemini.”

Peter DeLuise:
That was for Will Waring’s episode. When he brought that in, I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting piece of equipment.” It was another piece of equipment that not only had a repeating head, but it also could move the dolly back and forth. And that’s what we used on, I don’t remember the name of the device, but if you said it to me, I would remember, but it was a weird-sounding name. But it was specifically for the repeating of a camera movement in exactly the same time. What would happen was… The challenge always was how do you get the actors to synchronize their performance in the exact same way that they had done it, and also have the camera move at the appropriate time? Because you couldn’t see — after you’d laid down the track — you couldn’t see the other actor. You couldn’t see the first version of the actor because they weren’t there. Because the frame had to be clean so that the second pass of the second twin had to pretend to be looking at the other actor.

David Read:
Exactly.

Peter DeLuise:
And you couldn’t give them an eye line. So, that system came with an audio recording that would record the performance that the actor could hear and also —

David Read:
And react to.

Peter DeLuise:
What I remember, we created a system where I would count down really loudly so the actor could hear it on the second pass. I would say, “In three, two, one, action,” really loud. And not for the benefit of the first person. It was because my voice was re-recording on the track so that the actor on the second go would now go, “Oh, we’re acting. The scene has started.” And they would look in the place where their previous performance had been. And they could hear their previous performance and act in real time. The trick, of course, was now they had to get their entire response in the tiny window that had been left for them. Do you know what I’m saying?

David Read:
But you had the freedom of being able to do that pass again and again on the second one, because you had picked and were happy with —

Peter DeLuise:
Yes.

David Read:
— the first one.

Peter DeLuise:
Yes.

David Read:
And that one was going to stick, so they had to make it work the second time.

Peter DeLuise:
We committed to the first performance. And once we got that one, now we were working on the second performance, and the actor, in the case of Amanda Tapping, who was very technically savvy. She would have to listen to her first response, respond in the exact amount of time that had been provided for her because the first version of it wasn’t gonna wait for her. The first version of it was gonna respond in the amount of time that we had allowed. And that performance that she was bouncing off was often done by an off-camera actor because they couldn’t be on camera ’cause they would contaminate the frame. So, if I was acting with somebody that was supposed to be here, they were really just here, and I was looking at them there. And the off-camera actor would give the performance, and Amanda had the ability to adjust the speed of the, “I wouldn’t respond that quickly, or I would do this, or I would do that.”

David Read:
‘Cause she knows she’s gonna be going back in and giving the other half of this.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. So, now you’ve got the… She gives the first response, and somebody has to drop the sound out so that we can now record this, the pre-recorded thing that was on the machine, that everyone could hear. Someone had to drop the sound out of the off-camera actor responding so that there was a space for Amanda’s real voice to come in.

David Read:
This is nuts.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. And then back and forth and back and forth. So, the trick of it was synchronizing that and then knowing that at a certain point, if the actor was passing behind them, they went, and then they went like this, and then you would, and the camera was now doing that. It would have adjusted over to allow for the second actor, or for the second pass rather. Now, we did that again with Stargate Universe.

David Read:
That’s correct. With “Twin Destinies.”

Peter DeLuise:
And we used that process and I think…

David Read:
It was Nicholas Rush’s charac… or the actor was Robert Carlyle.

Peter DeLuise:
Of course. So, Robert Carlyle, he was not a fan of that, I can tell you. He was like, “This…” ‘Cause it was onerous.

David Read:
Sure! It’s technical.

Peter DeLuise:
It was because we wanted movement. So, I said, “Robert, there’s a much easier way to do it that is less onerous.” And I said, “If you want, we can do a much wider frame, and you can do whatever you wanna do on this side, and then do whatever you wanna do on this side.”

David Read:
Just remember …

Peter DeLuise:
So, we had less ability to play with the performances in there, so we would just only do a couplet. So, we’d do one line, one line, one line, out, and we’d cut to somebody else. And then we’d go one line, one line, and then what we could do is on this side of the frame, if it didn’t line up properly, we could speed it up a little bit. So, that the answer was right on the tail of the other performance. And then we would use the old trick, which was we would now punch in and pan and scan and create false movement inside. Nowadays, I think they even did this when Rick was fighting himself with Bill Nikolai.

David Read:
The face substitution with Bill Nikolai?

Peter DeLuise:
They would swap out the face, but that was very limited. He was holding his neck, and there was a really clear spot where the head could go, and you weren’t looking at where the neck was meeting up. So, they had a lot of latitude on that, and I think that was designed that way on purpose. Nowadays, you can swap somebody’s face like that. They did that on… Yeah, this is a great example. The Fast and the Furious, they completely replaced somebody’s face.

David Read:
Are you talking about the homage at the end to the actor who had passed? Is that the one you’re talking about?

Peter DeLuise:
Yes. He died before he finished the film.

David Read:
Who had passed away.

Peter DeLuise:
And his brother had to complete it, and they put his face on.

David Read:
Who almost looks exactly like him anyway. It was pretty extraordinary. That whole —

Peter DeLuise:
There were wonderful examples of —

David Read:
— process.

Peter DeLuise:
— of people who did twinning. Moon is a great example. There’s limitations in the past where you couldn’t touch. If you’re doing a face swap, you can. But you couldn’t hand something to somebody, or you couldn’t touch their chest. In Moon, they got away with it by doing this. They had the one actor stand like this in front of a green screen, and they had a second person reach out like that and touch the second performer. The arm that was emanating from behind the silhouette of the first pass was not his arm. It was a totally other person’s arm who was now grabbing —

David Read:
Sam Rockwell.

Peter DeLuise:
Sam Rockwell was not touching his own chest in the second performance. That was part of the background plate.

David Read:
And they were superimposing him on the other one, but it’s… So, as long as he generally followed the same movement or was static while the other person was static and just moving their arm, you sold the illusion.

Peter DeLuise:
Do you see how you can’t see how my arm really connects to my shoulder here?

David Read:
Yeah. Not from this perspective.

Peter DeLuise:
Yes. That was the point: Sam Rockwell did this performance, looked at his shirt and said, “You’re a mess. Clean yourself up.” Then he got on the other side and a second performer’s arm reached out and fixed his collar like that.

David Read:
It’s just madness.

Peter DeLuise:
And it is madness. But it was a great trick. We used a similar trick with Amanda when she was holding her own hand in bed. That wasn’t her hand, it was somebody else’s hand up through the bottom of the frame. And also, Multiplicity with Michael Keaton was amazing.

David Read:
Not seen it. OK.

Peter DeLuise:
They went through an enormous amount of trouble, where he would be on this side of the frame, and his counterpart, the scene partner would be filming him from here, and he would look at them, and then he’d play out to whoever else was in the scene and he’d say some stuff to them. And then when he went on this side, they would take a monitor, a video monitor, and put the video of his own performance on that monitor so he could actually see what he had done and answer in real time. ‘Cause they had time to do that. And at one point they did four Michael Keatons in one frame. Multiplicity, and they were limited by the lack of the technical skills. But they had a great strategy to overcome it. And nowadays, you don’t even need that. You can just mo-cap somebody. You could have a complete other person fiddle with them and then just put the skin over top of them. Or you could just tell an AI to do it. You can create —

David Read:
That’s the thing now. I imagine, perhaps not with “Gemini” and with “Twin Destinies” and “Point of View,” you would also have clean plates with no actors in it. Just as reference material.

Peter DeLuise:
You would always do that. Every time you needed something to disappear or be translucent, we would always… Even if we didn’t think we needed it, we would get a clean plate —

David Read:
Just in case.

Peter DeLuise:
— just in case. So, a clean plate for your listeners is simply somebody going like that. So, now that background, we have got the entirety of this background and if we were missing it or we never saw it we could now replace it. But with AI, the AI could assume that this line continues on and that this shade of gray probably exists behind my head. So, AI could…

David Read:
Or for the fact that if there’s an actor crossing in front of the other, if the AI has information of the clean plate, it could probably have them seamlessly transition without an editor having to do it at this stage.

Peter DeLuise:
I’m continuously completely blown away. So, there was this other thing that we would always say, “We didn’t want to rotoscope anything if we didn’t have to.”

David Read:
Frame by frame.

Peter DeLuise:
So, rotoscoping involved… If the shape of my silhouette was in front of me again and I’m… There’s no way for you to separate me unless you have me on green. And the whole purpose of having me on green or having a live organic thing… Imagine this is green screen. You’re telling a computer, “Ignore the green.” Everything inside of the green has been cut out for you automatically because it’s a silhouette against green. If you don’t have that green, the problem is now you’ve got to go frame by frame and have somebody who’s working probably in a third-world country for very little money, having to go frame by frame, which is 24 times in a second having to cut me out manually against my background, and that was rotoscoping, and it was very expensive and very time-consuming. So, we always wanted to avoid that. But now, with the way things are and the kinds of stuff I see from behind the scenes, I don’t think they care anymore. They just go, “Ah, this is not a problem. Our computers can handle this.”

David Read:
That’s the thing. Bruce Woloshyn and I had a conversation in 2004 ’cause I was talking to him about, I imagine it’s just a… I had made the assumption that anything that you see that you guys do, people are aware of, and he’s like, “Not some of the hardest stuff.” And I’m quoting him, “Some of the hardest stuff we ever do is rig removal where there are cables in shots and we have to digitally erase them. That’s hard, and if you do it right, no one will ever know you touched it.” But that’s the same type of deal, going frame by frame and taking things out.

Peter DeLuise:
You’d be shocked at the kind of stuff that they used to pay money for. What’s the Autobots franchise? The–

David Read:
Transformers.

Peter DeLuise:
So, Transformers. I once was down at the hotel and I was talking to these guys and I said, “You work on Stargate?” And he said, “Yeah,” and he goes, “Well, we worked on Transformers.” And I said, “Oh, you guys do visual effects?” “Yeah, we do visual effects. We’re one of the vendors for Transformers.” And I said, “So, did you do the robots, the explosions?” And he goes, “No, we removed the blemishes from Shia LaBeouf’s face and Megan Fox’s face.” “They had that?” They had that. So, if you had a whitehead that day, they’d say, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll fix it.”

David Read:
We’ll clean it up in post.

Peter DeLuise:
“We’ll clean it up in post.”

David Read:
Clean-up screw.

Peter DeLuise:
So, imagine you worked on Transformers. They’re gonna say, “You worked on Transformers?” “Yes, we took the blemishes off of the performer’s face and it was like they were flawless the entire time.”

David Read:
Jeez. It’s madness. I always wondered how there’s so much noise on the screen. How do you get it in there clean, and then clean it? It’s like, “David, the noise was generally incorporated after the fact to make everything seamless.” ‘Cause you had shots that were super 16, especially in Stargate, and then you had these gorgeous HD film-quality shots. John Gajdecki was talking about how you have to make it all look the same. So, there’s a certain level of noise that’s dialed in to go from shot to shot to make it so the audience doesn’t get pulled out.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s so weird that you say. Yes, why is there suddenly a picture quality difference? When Wide first came onto the show, if we knew that the next shot, not this shot, but the very next shot was the one that we were gonna shoot a visual effects shot we had to say, “Get the 35-millimeter ready.” We were shooting on Super 16 to save money, but all the visual effects shots were shot on 35 millimeter because that was a bigger frame and they needed more information to shoot this.

David Read:
Bigger canvas.

Peter DeLuise:
So, John Lenic and those guys, they all had to figure out, they had hard and soft costs for two different kinds of cameras, right? And you also had to anticipate the next shot was gonna be 35, and so then one of your camera techs had to go take the camera body, put the lenses on it, put the batteries on it, and then make it ready to shoot. And then you would shoot with the 35 millimeter and then, “Are we done with the visual effects yet?” OK, now we’re back to Super 16.

David Read:
I can’t imagine the millions you guys saved just being frugal like that and making sure that you had the equipment there so that when you were doing shots with pieces of the actors needed in a shot, you did that in 35 and then you returned to Super 16 for everything else.

Peter DeLuise:
When people are shooting–

David Read:
And people are like, “Why haven’t we done a Stargate in HD? Why is it just, you know, up-res?” It’s ’cause there’s a lot of complicated stuff in it and the genuine up-res process would cost tens of millions of dollars for one series.

Peter DeLuise:
So, of course you’re right, but in addition to that, when we were shooting the show, most people at the time… We were in transition. People watching the show on four by three. So, you’re currently looking at me. Is this going out in 16 by nine?

David Read:
Sure is.

Peter DeLuise:
So, you see there’s a rectangle from here to here, it’s this rectangle, it’s this 16 units across for every nine down. But prior to that, it was four by three, so it was four across and three up, which is much closer to being just square. In the old days we had square. So, if anybody wanted to make their show available to what they knew was going to be the next generation of television viewing future, this is called future-proofing. If you want to sell your show in syndication, you had to provide a version of the show that would, in fact, translate to 16 by nine. So, we had two frame references: this one, the 16 by nine, and the four by three. Now imagine you had an actor right here. You’re shooting a close-up of me, and you had an actor right here where my hand is. So, the four by three frame ends there, and this actor starts to wander or lean this way, or this actor leans that way, and that character now only has one eye like this, one eye in the frame. But it’s a hero character. Maybe it’s Richard Dean Anderson.

David Read:
You need to see him.

Peter DeLuise:
You cannot present the show with only one eye. So, what would happen was, if the guy who’s not being seen in four by three by anybody, if he moved over, then the operator was obligated to move the frame over like this to make sure both eyes of the other character were in. Now, what did that look like? That looked like… So, if I’m shooting close-up in 4:3 and I’m this close, suddenly the camera goes like this. Well, why did it do that? Because you still can’t see the secondary character with one eye out there. So, we were constantly having to compromise between the 4:3 and the 16:9, until we just said, “OK, now we’re only shooting for 16:9.” We’re not perfecting it anymore.

David Read:
In that period before the transition was made, were the camera operators given 4:3 stencils so that they had that as context?

Peter DeLuise:
So, the ground glass, those are the reference lines on the We had a box, a 4:3 box and a 16:9 box. We had both.

David Read:
So, you’re a safe zone. Absolutely.

Peter DeLuise:
And we had to protect for both, knowing that we were gonna put it out in both, which compromised both versions of both things. So, they made it so we’re like, “What? Why, why have you done that?” And you couldn’t just put one character all the way over here and one char — couldn’t do a North by Northwest frame, if you’re familiar with Hitchcock, of the two wonderful moments where they’ve… All the way down that wonderful, old rural road, country road, with the two characters on the very far side of the frame. It wouldn’t look like anything in 4:3. It just looked like a big empty space. Which is why you would have to now pan and scan. So, before everyone had a 16:9 frame, the film would scan. It would start here and show one of the characters and then scan across the negative to the other character and show… But you’d never see it in its entirety ’cause it couldn’t show you the whole thing. And people were like, “Why did they do that?” And it was because they were trying to show you what the original frame looked like, to give you an idea of it.

David Read:
And I was thinking, as creatives, we’ve got 16:9, it’s great, but you can’t use all of the real estate all of the time for certain key shots because you have to keep in mind largely the syndication audience. I don’t know if Showtime originally broadcast it at 4:3 for Season One and the early ones or not, but it’s not there yet.

Peter DeLuise:
No. We were being told that… When we were still protecting for 4:3 a couple of seasons, I remember Michael Greenburg was like, “Why are we still protecting for 4:3?” And the answer was, because some countries still broadcast in 4:3 and a predominant amount of people have 4:3 television sets.

David Read:
Star Trek only switched over in 2001 with Enterprise Season One, and all of a sudden, these black bars were on the bottom and top of my screen, and it’s like, “What is… Oh, they finally transitioned.” So, ’cause people started accepting the fact that there were HD TVs.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, they didn’t wanna see black bars. They thought they were being cheated.

David Read:
My mom hates it. My mom goes, “Why are those there?” “Well, Mom…” “No, I don’t wanna know.” “OK, fine.”

Peter DeLuise:
So, in each territory and every country you could sell it to that territory. So, if you didn’t make arrangements for that, then you were making less money, or everyone’s mom was saying, “Why are there black bars on my screen?”

David Read:
Exactly. Just make it full size. What’s more complicated than that? And I’m so glad we’re past the period of where it was, it’s the HD screen with the 4:3 screen with the HD screen in it, and we don’t have to go through that feature on our TVs anymore where we blow it up to make it all go in, then everything’s fuzzy. Thank God for Blu-ray.

Peter DeLuise:
And of course, when they do that, the frame looks very suspicious. Why is that, why is that frame like that? That seems so, such an odd choice.

David Read:
I want to talk about one of my favorite episodes. Go from something that’s extremely visually complicated to something that’s wildly visually static for most of the episode.

Peter DeLuise:
OK. Oh, I think I know where you’re going with this.

David Read:
A certain pair of men hanging out in a certain glider floating through space on a trajectory past Jupiter to the Oort Cloud. “Tangent” is one of my favorite episodes, where if I have an hour and I need to kill some time, I don’t know why, Peter, but I throw this one on, and I think it’s because Rick is on his A game and if… He loves spending time with Teal’c because Teal’c puts up with him and gets it. And, at the same time, it’s a really clever, great story. You used rear screen projection for this one, for Jupiter, for instance. What a week that must have been, and I’ve heard all… I ask for episodes like this, I ask for, “Give me some meaty stories about this production,” and everyone goes to the fart jokes. It’s like, “Well, we were in confined spaces.” Yes, I get the fart jokes.

Peter DeLuise:
And Chris was operating on a high protein diet, so he was a known culprit. Yes.

David Read:
My God. Tell me about what you remember from working on “Tangent.” The X-301.

Peter DeLuise:
The X-301… I have a picture of it here. I’m gonna show it to you. We had the flyover. Do you remember the flyover?

David Read:
The general and the blowing out the glass?

Peter DeLuise:
Do you know who that…

David Read:
Vidrine. What’s the actor’s name, I can’t think of right now? I’ve been trying–

Peter DeLuise:
Stephen Williams. Do you know why I know his name?

David Read:
I don’t.

Peter DeLuise:
Because I recommended him for the role of that part because he played my captain on 21 Jump Street.

David Read:
Ah. If you’re still in touch with him, tell him I want him on. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him. He’s so cool.

Peter DeLuise:
He is so cool, and I knew that he was so cool and I was, “Yeah, we need a cool general man.” And then I have another picture here I wanna show you. So, this is an example of where we would’ve shot Chris in front of a green screen. We were able to block this off, put those… We would have shot a clean plate with Chris Judge in front of a green screen because his silhouette is overlapping with an object that isn’t there. That’s the 303 behind him.

David Read:
301.

Peter DeLuise:
Sorry, 301.

David Read:
Get it right, Peter.

Peter DeLuise:
And it was X at this point ’cause it was still experimental?

David Read:
That’s correct.

Peter DeLuise:
Now, notice how in the clever way in which they have composited this, there’s no way to tell how this is touching the ground. There’s no wheels. Is it hovering? What the hell?

David Read:
That’s exactly right. It looks like how it parks in the movies when they would park up on the dunes and the Jaffa, or whatever they were, came down. Very cool. So, that’s just him in front of another plate?

Peter DeLuise:
That is him. We would’ve shot this plate thinking, “OK, where is the X-301 gonna be?” And then we would’ve shot… We probably shot him, then we shot the background extras. You see that this one fella here, over here, he’s overlapping the wing. So, we probably got him on green screen as well. Or if he wasn’t moving very much, we could have roto’d him, but he’s out of focus, and out-of-focus lines are blurred and that’s not ideal for cutting out. And then we would–

David Read:
Make sure that the sun is in the right place and…

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. And you see all the shadows going across like that. Here’s a reference to the cockpit. So, those stars, this is not the best way to do this, but…

David Read:
I can pull up the photography of the episode. You go ahead and talk.

Peter DeLuise:
We had the cockpit itself, not the wings, but the cockpit itself, and that was on a lazy Susan. Sorry, the cockpit itself was on a lazy Susan, which we could rotate very slowly, and we had a star field behind the spaceship.

David Read:
Like here?

Peter DeLuise:
I think that is an image of us removing the glass because we found out that shooting the angle of the glass was giving us too much kickback, and it was making it impossible for us to, A, see through the glass to their faces, and there was a bunch of stuff in the ceiling that we didn’t wanna see. So, the decision was made to take the glass away, which was very expensive ’cause then they had to imply that there was CG glass in front of them, which they had to insinuate afterward. I think that was an expensive thing that we had to do.

David Read:
You can see that there’s no glass there.

Peter DeLuise:
I think they felt like the audience would be like, “Yeah, we trust that there’s no glass there.” But the far side, the front glass and the far side glass was there, but not the foreground glass. I believe that had been taken away because of the reflections that we didn’t wanna see.

David Read:
It’s this… All the components that come together to sell a specific illusion from shot to shot.

Peter DeLuise:
I think the decision was made because Peter Woeste was used to shooting the gate control room without glass. He preferred to have it without glass, and Jim Minard preferred it with glass, and he would deliberately put in reflections, which eventually culminated in a rear projection of the puddle in the glass that he would put in the frame as well. Which was onerous because you had to get it just right.

David Read:
And that… If you look really closely, folks, in the control room scenes, the glass is on a hinge for each of them. So, you can, if you’re paying attention, you can tell very clearly that when the hinge is offset to not get the reflection of either the Gate or the crew and…

Peter DeLuise:
You would see the shadows of the frame in just so, those pieces of glass in the control room.

David Read:
But here, we’ve got Jupiter in the… But go ahead and finish your thought, Peter.

Peter DeLuise:
So, this spaceship on the… Do you have one of the starfield?

David Read:
Let me go through there.

Peter DeLuise:
There it is, OK. So, imagine that our camera is attached, well, not attached, but the assignment was to rotate with the thing. So, as we rotated the ship, the background stars… You see how I’m moving the background of my thing? The background of the stars very subtly would seem to be going by.

David Read:
‘Cause the stars aren’t actually moving ’cause we’re just in the solar system, but the ship is ballistic, and so it’s kind of doing this as it’s not flying straight.

Peter DeLuise:
So, theoretically, the ship is moving and based on what was established in Star Trek very early on is that you see the stars go by. So, we wanted… But you would not see the stars go by. They would appear to be very static, I think, for about… But we wanted to insinuate movement into this motion. By slowly rotating the ship against a still star field. And getting them in and out of the thing was… We had to get ladders, and they had to climb out and climb back in.

David Read:
So, they were high up?

Peter DeLuise:
They were. You know how it says “No Step On the Wing?” I think a lot of it was Styrofoam, so they really couldn’t step on the… And, of course, there’s tons of switches and stuff in front of him that look cool. In the insert, you see those, but that’s not the part that gets the most screen time. Those blinky lights behind his head get screen time. You see, go back to that picture for a second.

David Read:
Hang on.

Peter DeLuise:
This is the most neglected part of any spaceship, is right behind the actor’s head. You see those wonderful blinky lights? That texture is vital to us not being bored because, this… I’m gonna move my thing to make a point. This doesn’t look like a spaceship very much. Hey, I’ve got a… You’ll just have to trust me. Right outside there, it’s a spaceship. And so, in closeups, we tried to do three-quarter closeups so you could see a sliver out the window as much as possible. And it was a marathon for those actors in the cockpit. But of course they could have access to their lines–

David Read:
Their scripts.

Peter DeLuise:
— and water, and–

David Read:
They can tape it down, that’s right.

Peter DeLuise:
— protein bars. As much as they wanted.

David Read:
That’s funny.

Peter DeLuise:
But they were in there for a long haul. And of course all the fart jokes you can muster. Especially with Chris Judge being there. And no joy on the burn.

David Read:
No joy on the burn.

Peter DeLuise:
No joy on the burn?

David Read:
We have. It went the wrong way. So, it was so nice to have…

Peter DeLuise:
Who’s that wonderful writer who wrote Redshirts? He was a tech writer for our show for a while.

David Read:
John Scalzi? Yep.

Peter DeLuise:
I believe Scalzi, some of his technical advising was used, and Brad had an enormous, an abundant amount of material from Scalzi on this. And I remember that after all was said and done, one of the only things that Scalzi had contributed was whittled down to “No joy on the burn.” And Joe and Paul just crucified. They said, “Why did you do…?” He goes, “Well, I had to use ‘No joy on the burn’ because that’s what they would say.”

David Read:
Scalzi was contributing in Season Four of SG-1?

Peter DeLuise:
I believe he was. I believe there was a discussion–

David Read:
Wow. ‘Cause I know he participated in SGU for sure. He was given creative consultant credit.

Peter DeLuise:
I think there was. That’s my recollection. But Scalzi didn’t write that episode. Somebody else wrote the, got the written by credit, right?

David Read:
Exactly.

Peter DeLuise:
And Brad Wright wrote, rewrote, and Robert Cooper rewrote an enormous amount of the scripts that were originally penned by outside writers because often they didn’t understand or they weren’t privy to the arc that was going to happen in that season or the things that needed to be set up.

David Read:
Or character tone.

Peter DeLuise:
Or a lot of the mythology.

David Read:
Like when characters talk. That everything… It’s like Roddenberry always touched everything that everyone went through his office in the original series. And all the writers were so upset about that. You’re getting credit, aren’t you? It’s his show.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, yes. How do I feel about that?

David Read:
But I’m sure there’s a line.

Peter DeLuise:
I think Roddenberry was way ahead of his time. And was a genius. But he also wrote lyrics to the opening theme song so that he could get paid.

David Read:
That’s true. 50%.

Peter DeLuise:
And nobody ever heard those lyrics.

David Read:
That was a dick move. That’s true. But also, the number of folks… Just to bring up John Scalzi just for a blip, or that thread. The number of folks who went…

Peter DeLuise:
I have great admiration for Scalzi, by the way.

David Read:
He’s really amazing. The number of people whose hands touched Stargate over the course of the… Neill Blomkamp, I mean…

Peter DeLuise:
Sounds dirty when you say it.

David Read:
I know. He touched Stargate in the wrong places. No, but as a visual effects composer…

Peter DeLuise:
Blomkamp sounds like a strange thing to do.

David Read:
But, I mean this… The director of District 9, you know? I mean, he contributed visual effects for…

Peter DeLuise:
Is that who it is? District 9.

David Read:
Yeah, I think he was with Image Engine if I’m not mistaken.

Peter DeLuise:
That dude is untouchable. He was amazing.

David Read:
So, good. Craig Van Den Biggelaar, we had him on, and the amount of stuff that he did with all the…

Peter DeLuise:
What’s with all the names? Are you trying to trick me?

David Read:
No, I just had them on. So, the replicators, you know, were his project in going from “Nemesis” in Season Three to Ark of Truth where he could put in collision and let the bugs take off and make their own path. The advancements over a handful of years were just extraordinary. And it keeps on going. Absolutely amazing.

Peter DeLuise:
District 9, and then what was the one with the robot that he did after that?

David Read:
Chappie.

Peter DeLuise:
Chappie. God, that was so great.

David Read:
It didn’t deserve the ratings that it got. It was much better than that.

Peter DeLuise:
So, is he South African?

David Read:
I think so.

Peter DeLuise:
He must be.

David Read:
Yeah.

Peter DeLuise:
He’s gotta be.

David Read:
Alive in Joburg was what District 9 came from. And I saw District 9’s first trailers and I’m like, “This is a total rip-off. Someone is going to get sued.” And it was the same guy. It’s like, “OK. All right.” He’s just going bigger, like with Lights Out. It was a short and then it became something else. If you have not seen on Disney+ Light & Magic, you need to go watch it, Peter. It is one of the single best documentary miniseries that I’ve seen in a long time.

Peter DeLuise:
Light & Magic.

David Read:
And it talks about designing the Dykstraflex, which was the original motion capture device that they created for Star Wars. Designing the technology to make these passes happen, and all through Empire and Jedi and into the modern era. It’s about nine or 10 episodes total and I was amazed at what I learned. The snow walker sequence in Empire Strikes Back is the single greatest sequence, in my opinion, in all of cinema where everything comes together. If you are a fan of visual effects, anyone who’s listening, go and watch Light & Magic. You will not be disappointed because the guy who wrote Jedi, I can’t think of his name right now, but he was the one who actually directed the series and it’s terrific. One of the other ones… Are we good on time for a little while?

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah.

David Read:
One of the other ones that I definitely want to get to is another favorite of mine because of the intricacies of what you had to do practically on sets and the cleverness of the idea, was the “Serpent’s Venom.” This is one that is so far out there in so many ways. Let’s scuttle a diplomatic meeting between two Goa’ulds by letting one think that the other one is firing on them. And all we have to do is go to an alien minefield, bring it aboard, reprogram that mine, release it again, while also not letting it hit the interior of the bulkheads of the cargo ship while we’re at it, and play around with codes and everything else. The banter between the characters is just great. Carmen is fantastic in this episode. Rick is on point with thinking that he’s all amazing and sitting down in the chair and putting the hood on, and he’s like, “Oh, this is not so easy after all.” And Christopher on his own with Obi and another actor who we lost in the last few years, I’ll pull up his name in a second here. This episode was terrific, Peter. It is one of my favorites and it is one of the ones that you penned. What do you remember about “Serpent’s Venom?”

Peter DeLuise:
I remember trying to get really dark with the torture sequence. And I named the torture guy Terok.

David Read:
Terok.

Peter DeLuise:
Because terror was in his name. Everyone who’s a Jaffa has their name with a… at the end. And I remember Martin talking about how this actor, I think, Paul–

David Read:
Paul Koslo.

Peter DeLuise:
— Koslo?

David Read:
You got it.

Peter DeLuise:
He was doing a… I looked it up. I hadn’t remembered.

David Read:
Still got it, Peter.

Peter DeLuise:
But I did remember that it came to light that he was giving his performance in a way that Martin was concerned that the flange, the Goa’uld flange, was going to sound strange. And so, he did a check-in to see, “Can we do this?” ‘Cause he’s doing a lot of stuff with his voice and he’s not just speaking clearly. There were certain limitations when you flanged somebody, which was you would take the original track, and then you would take a second track of the same information and you’d slide it a frame or two this way. And then you would put a lot of bass or something on the one, the loop.

David Read:
There’s these two elements. There’s a bass change, and then there’s a wah-wah. Which is actually, if you listen to it, it’s changing pitch as it goes along.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, clearly, you know more about it than I do.

David Read:
I’ve created the effects on my end before. It’s really cool.

Peter DeLuise:
So, because he was doing that, I think Martin was concerned that it was gonna lack clarity. And then he brought it to our attention. I also remember thinking that Galaxy Quest had come out a short time before that. And so, we were heavily influenced by a minefield in space, which was “Stronghold.” So, that was part of the thing. And then this is also the torture stick. And I think this is an example of Chris being tortured. Now, when you got zapped by this thing, you would hear the director, either me or Martin, saying, “You have to keep your eyes open! Because we have to have the light coming outta your mouth and your eyes. And if your eyes are closed, can’t have the light coming out of your closed eyes.” And I think I’ve caught it here. This is an example of having light out of somebody’s closed eyes.

David Read:
Look, there’s only so much that these things can do. So, you know, I mean, it’s just…

Peter DeLuise:
You’ve got one too. That’ll spice up your marriage. Let me tell you. So, imagine you’re an actor being tasked with experiencing pain, excruciating pain, and you go, “Ah.” And the director goes, “No, no, you have to keep your eyes open.” Go, “Ah. Like that, yes.” That’s what you have to do. So, that was one of the things that was… And also, I remember Brad suggesting that he, that Chris Judge had his arms, his gigantic gun show elevated because he was gonna have the chains. And because he was such a magnificent physique, he wanted to see the arms up. And I remember Brad going, holding his own arms up, and he goes, “Gotta, he’s gotta have his arms up like this.” I said, “OK. OK. Sounds good, Brad.”

David Read:
That scene where he puts the entire face of this thing inside his pouch, that you can only see this portion of it. It is completely in there. And we know how sensitive Teal’c is in that area because his fricking symbiote, his life-sustaining thing is in there. There is some… The imagery in that is really intense. And Obi Ndefo? Obi’s performance was amazing as well. Where there’s a Darth Vader emperor moment there, where he plugs it into the back of his head and the actor turns around, “Who is doing this to me?” And he can’t even take 10 seconds. He’s dead. Great episode. I love the…

Peter DeLuise:
I do remember Obi, I remember having the thought that his emblem would have been burned away, and then giving some backstory about that, so there was an attempt made that he tried to get away from…

David Read:
His father did it to him. His father listened to Teal’c and said, “Son, we’re free now,” and he was caught up by another Goa’uld in the process and lost his dad and holds it against Teal’c. It’s a great story arc, where he has to discover what his father discovered in Teal’c’s opposition. Um, good episode. I love the stuff aboard the cargo ship. You’ve got an arm holding the bomb, the mine. And–

Peter DeLuise:
‘Cause it supposedly levitated, but are you talking about behind the scenes, we did have something holding the entirety of the bomb up, the weight of it? Yeah.

David Read:
— And then underneath it, I’m guessing that that was shot, second unit with the changing of the colors and of everything else? When they were changing the combination at the end with the…

Peter DeLuise:
I wanna say probably. It happened so long ago, I don’t remember.

David Read:
That’s fair.

Peter DeLuise:
I do remember a lot of the times we didn’t wanna waste, while we had Richard Dean Anderson on the set, we wouldn’t wanna waste a lot of time with inserts, so that might have been something that we delayed and then did later as an insert unit or a second unit. Which happened often. We would try to make the most of his time and then shoot the inserts later.

David Read:
I’m not sure if it was you who told me or someone else who told me that they would actually bring an ADR, a trailer to Bridge so that he could…

Peter DeLuise:
No, I didn’t, I did not tell you that, but I was aware of that as well. So, that was a way to maximize his time is that he would step off the set and then go into the truck and do his ADR where everyone else had to go to the studio

David Read:
I’m curious if you remember if this was you or someone else who added this to the script. Um, “Inventing technology with this level of sophistication would require a zero.” I thought that was such a great observation, a cool idea. ‘Cause the Phoenician system didn’t have zeros. They had one through nine.

Peter DeLuise:
That definitely sounds like something Brad would come up with. And I wish I had come up with that, but I did not. I came up with the super simple, “Terok is the terrifying torturer.” He came up with the zeroes. That definitely sounds like something Brad would come up with. And then the thing that was interesting for me was that the cargo ship/scout ship, we use those interchangeably, the bottom of that ship was just the studio floor just painted. And I always found that amusing because if you were imagining a spaceship in outer space, you think of it having, it’s fully contained. But here we are with this structure that is just on the floor, and they just painted the pattern into the floor. And I always felt like, “Oh, we’ve really gotta make it feel like this thing is inside of here. And it’s going back and forth and getting close to the wall.” That was the fun part where it started to get close to the wall and they were like, “Oh, no, we gotta move over.”

David Read:
Exactly. “Jacob!”

Peter DeLuise:
Which also, now that I think of it that also is very close to what they had in Galaxy Quest when they were first pulling out of the hanger they were going like this cause they were trying to coax the ship over ’cause he starts scraping the sides —

David Read:
Scraping the side of the base.

Peter DeLuise:
— a wonderful, wonderful moment in that movie.

David Read:
It’s the best Star Trek movie ever made.

Peter DeLuise:
Sure is.

David Read:
Even better than the Star Trek mov… I forgot who said it, Wil Wheaton or someone said that. James Robbins was talking about… I was trying to figure out why was the ring transporter sometimes a stencil on the floor and sometimes a raised device. And he said, “If we had to access it, it was raised. And if we didn’t, it was a stencil, and that was all there was to it.” It’s like, “Oh, that makes sense.” OK.

Peter DeLuise:
So, it’s pretty simple. And it was also inconvenient to have it if it was a 3D version of it, it was inconvenient ’cause you wanted to be able to move around and move your dollies across the floor and stuff like that.

David Read:
And the effect of dropping it in and splitting it up and then the rings coming up was so much better than, you know, taking… That you would have to remove the one that was on the floor and replace it with the visual effect if you were going to have it done that way. Just a little sleight of hand.

Peter DeLuise:
My God. You just made me think of something. You remember at the end of “Tangent” where they opened the canopy and they went out so that they could be ringed up into the…

David Read:
What? By Scotty?

Peter DeLuise:
Well, do you remember. I think it was a huge amount of backlash because everyone had seen —

David Read:
Was it Event Horizon?

Peter DeLuise:
— Mission to Mars. Well, as Tim Robbins takes his helmet off and his head freeze-dried and Brad was like, “That is not what would happen.” And didn’t he say, “Breathe out ’cause then you vacuum.”

David Read:
Yeah, you wanna completely exhale so that you have no air inside of you. And as long as you’re out there for a few moments, you should be OK. But still there.

Peter DeLuise:
Brad correctly asked all the right people. And he was absolutely sure that this was a viable solution to the problem. And it wasn’t gonna be… Do you remember Mission to Mars?

David Read:
I haven’t seen it, but yeah.

Peter DeLuise:
I think Tim Robbins takes his helmet off and his head just goes whoosh, and it looks like it’s freeze-dried–

David Read:
It’s not gonna happen that way.

Peter DeLuise:
— coffee. And Brad was like, “No, no.” And everyone was like, “Uh, are you sure?” And Brad went, “Yeah, I’m sure.” So, that was the solution to their dilemma. And I was, “OK, let’s do it.”

David Read:
How would you know, Brad? I had a real quick 15-second story. I had a roommate named Stephanie who was 20 years older than me, and we were watching Apollo 13 for the first time. And she said, “Why are they weightless?” I said, “Because they’re in space.” She’s like, “Why?” I said, “Stephanie, you don’t know that there’s no weight in space?” She said, she always called me Read, she said, “I don’t know, Read. I’ve never been.”

Peter DeLuise:
I’ve never been.

David Read:
Brad, how would you know for sure?

Peter DeLuise:
Dude, those guys built the set in the Vomit Comet so they could get those shots.

David Read:
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Peter DeLuise:
That seems like a lot of trouble just to get some weightless shots–

David Read:
That’s it.

Peter DeLuise:
— but a lot of fun.

David Read:
Absolutely. I’ve got some fan questions. Do you have a little bit of time for that?

Peter DeLuise:
Heck, yeah.

David Read:
OK. For the show when–

Peter DeLuise:
Wait, wait, wait. Sorry. You told me at one point you were gonna ask me some questions about “Menace,” and I think I need to address something.

David Read:
If you’ve got time to discuss “Menace” I would love to.

Peter DeLuise:
First of all, I wanna say I’ve made a terrible error in telling you that I directed “Menace.” I did not direct “Menace.” When you asked me the last time about “Menace,” I thought because I had memories of being on that set and being around Danielle Nicolet, I thought I had, for some reason, substituted for Martin on the day of September 11th. That was not the case. What was the case, and I’ll tell you who figured this out for me, it was you who figured this out for me ’cause I watched the episode of Dial the Gate with Christina Cox, and then I guess it was Martin Wood as well.

David Read:
Yeah, ’cause there were two episodes filming that day.

Peter DeLuise:
We were both at Norco Studios and Norco was named for the bike company that used to create bicycles in that building. And later it was used for the series Sanctuary. So, we were two adjacent sets filming, and because Danielle Nicolet was a co-castmate, I had a connection to her through my brother David because they were both on the series 3rd Rock from the Sun. So, my memory was I went over there and I saw her laying on the plinth, the cement thing. And I said hello, and we had exchanged some niceties, and because I had a memory of being on the set and seeing her in her George Jetson outfit I went, “Oh, I was there.” And then I couldn’t remember why I was there. Now all I could come up with was I must’ve substitute directed. And because when you asked me, you went, “Well, you didn’t direct that, that was Martin Wood directing it.” And I was like “I don’t know why I was on that set then.” And then I saw you talking to Christina Cox and I went, “Oh, I was shooting “Sentinel” right next door.” And we had Frank Cassini and Christina Cox ’cause we were shooting, they were supposed to be the Dirty Dozen guys. But we couldn’t afford —

David Read:
Maybourne’s…

Peter DeLuise:
— a dozen people, so we just had two. So, it was the Dirty Duo.

David Read:
And Christian Bocher and Claire Tobias, the actress who played her, I’m guessing, weren’t available, so they completely recast that team. And I think it’s the one and only time you back-sold the previously on by creating new material for the previously on.

Peter DeLuise:
With a cutaway of them —

David Read:
Brilliant.

Peter DeLuise:
— also being directed. I don’t think I came up with that, but I’m sure Brad or Robert came up with that as a viable solution to, “You don’t remember this.”

David Read:
That’s exactly right.

Peter DeLuise:
Of course you didn’t.

David Read:
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” So, I’ve asked you about 9/11? I’ve asked you about that?

Peter DeLuise:
You asked me about “Menace” and 9/11 and I had a memory of it.

David Read:
I missed it.

Peter DeLuise:
And then you… And I said I directed that. And you made a face and you looked it up and you went “Martin Wood directed it.” And I was, “Oh, why do I remember?”

David Read:
Why do I have that memory?

Peter DeLuise:
It was because I walked over and said, “Hey, Nicolet, it’s good to see you. You remember me? I’m David’s brother, blah, blah, blah.” “Oh.” And that’s why I had a memory of Nicolet and being there on it. But I was actually on the other set with Christina Cox.

David Read:
That’s right. Martin was so amazing about showing us, if you haven’t seen Martin Wood Part Three, folks, go and check it out. He shows us the one shot that was shot on 9/11.

Peter DeLuise:
The silhouette of them coming in.

David Read:
Into where she’s being stored, and the rest of it was shot later. And I was, “Wow.” It was very vivid for all of us that day.

Peter DeLuise:
That was not uncommon for two shows to be shooting at the same time.

David Read:
Really?

Peter DeLuise:
Especially when we had limited access to Richard Dean Anderson sometimes.

David Read:
Even in Season Five? OK.

Peter DeLuise:
My recollection was if we, if there was a scene owing or we weren’t gonna move the unit all the way over to Norco just to shoot one thing. So, we would wait until the unit was there and then we would shoot it.

David Read:
That makes a lot of sense.

Peter DeLuise:
So, all different things, I think John Smith at one point said, “Our show has become too big, so that two-handers,” which is slang for scenes with only two people in them, “have become the domain of second unit.” And I was like, “What? That’s… Maybe the unit’s too big if we can’t shoot two-handers as a normal thing.”

David Read:
It was an embarrassment of riches, that show. 17 seasons of a franchise. How many get that? It’s wild. Lockwatcher…

Peter DeLuise:
I’m sorry. I wanna go on record as saying I am sorry I thought I directed “Menace.” I had a fleeting memory of something that happened a long time ago. And now I know because of your investigation that I was actually shooting “Sentinel” in the same studio. I was physically in the building as well when 9/11 was happening, and that’s what I remember.

David Read:
Understood. I appreciate the clarification always for historical accuracy as these go into the long-term archive. Lockwatcher, “For When Calls the Heart, there are so many Stargate actors in the series, including a lead with Kevan Smith, and Martin Wood directing 15 episodes. Is this fate? What was it like working on this series?”

Peter DeLuise:
Are you asking me about When Calls the Heart?

David Read:
Yep. Lockwatcher is, but yes.

Peter DeLuise:
Lockwatcher. First of all, what’s with that name?

David Read:
I don’t know. I know his real name, but he doesn’t use it.

Peter DeLuise:
OK, Lockwatcher. So, the question, if I understand, is how is it that Martin and myself both came to be directing When Calls the Heart?

David Read:
What was it like working on this series and having so many Stargate veterans with you there? If I was to summarize what he was asking. There were so many Stargate actors in it, which was the case. Vancouver was very small, not so much anymore. But what was your experience like working on When Calls the Heart?

Peter DeLuise:
Except for Martin. And how many, no honestly, how many Stargate alumni were on When Calls the Heart?

David Read:
There are many Stargate actors in the series. ChatGPT would give me an incorrect answer, but I could give you…

Peter DeLuise:
I worked with Pascale Hutton on Sanctuary.

David Read:
But she was in Stargate Atlantis.

Peter DeLuise:
But I hadn’t worked with her on that.

David Read:
Fair point.

Peter DeLuise:
I wasn’t even aware that she was on Stargate Atlantis. Maybe I should ask her about that. See, I was only on When Calls the Heart because I had been shooting long-form mysteries called Garage Sale Mysteries with Lori Loughlin. And she liked the way I directed and she asked for them to hire me on that other show.

David Read:
Ah. Absolutely. No, great. That’s a great piece of knowledge to know. Let me see here.

Peter DeLuise:
So, the short answer is I didn’t know there was a bunch of people from Stargate on When Calls the Heart. But I would just have to take your word for it. But they were… Was it actors predominantly that he’s talking about?

David Read:
Evidently that’s what he’s referring to. Lockwatcher, you’re the…

Peter DeLuise:
You completely figured it out. The amount of… The cream rises to the top and if you work on 10 seasons or 65 episodes of the Stargate franchise, you’re gonna end up working with the same wonderful actors ’cause they’re in this town.

David Read:
Well, I mean, if you know someone who can not only do the job, but be really good at it, why not? Why fix something that isn’t broken?

Peter DeLuise:
So, Lockwatcher. Lockwatcher?

David Read:
Lockwatcher.

Peter DeLuise:
So, he’s saying, “Here’s a lock and I’m watching it.”

David Read:
Or like a lock in, like that holds in water, you know?

Peter DeLuise:
That kind of lock.

David Read:
To make sure that the water doesn’t go out, you know?

Peter DeLuise:
So, he’s retaining water.

David Read:
Perhaps. But it is spelled differently.

Peter DeLuise:
So, what, the other thing is–

David Read:
Oh, God, what are we talking about?

Peter DeLuise:
What happens is if you have a history with a bunch of wonderful actors and you see a character description and you go, “I know somebody who would be great for this role.” I.e. Steven Williams as one of our generals. He’d be awesome. He played a captain on our show. And, of course, John Smith knew Steven Williams very well because John Smith was a producer on 21 Jump Street as well.

David Read:
The dude is so cool. I would love to get him on. I’m gonna have to ask you to reach out to him for me. JW: “Which did you enjoy more with SG-1, writing or directing?” I would imagine they were very different kinds of things.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, the directing is very much a group activity ’cause you’re in charge of a lot of people and you’re on what we call the floor which is the studio floor. And you’re taking words off of paper and you’re fleshing it out, and it’s very performance-oriented. Whereas writing, as attractive as it is to make up things from whole cloth and to be around such talented writers as Joe and Paul and Rob and Brad who gave me an enormous amount of–

David Read:
Creative freedom.

Peter DeLuise:
I wasn’t gonna say creative freedom. I was gonna say knowledge. ‘Cause they really were incredible mentors to me. And because I had, at the time, an encyclopedic knowledge of… I watched every single movie that came out no matter how crappy it was. And so, I would throw out as many suggestions as I could in my longstanding understanding of the movies that I had seen and see whatever would stick to the wall. And sometimes they took my suggestion, but, I think Brad very early on recognized my enthusiasm, and he was very gracious with his time with me, because I had just come off of… I’m getting in the weeds here, but I would just quickly tell you that I think the way I transitioned from directing to being invited into the writing room was I had directed “Demons” and I was enamored with the origin story of the Unas. And I came in and I knew that race of beings had been referred to as the first ones in “Thor’s Hammer.” And so, I said, “I have an idea. I wanna pick…”

David Read:
The first one, but yeah, it was only then in “Demons” that they were now a species, and so now you had freedom to create their tapestry.

Peter DeLuise:
OK, and then James Earl Jones was the voice of the original. He was amazing.

David Read:
That’s right.

Peter DeLuise:
And they put all those wonderful animal noises underneath. And I said, “I think an origin story would be kind of cool, where you have the Unas and the thing.” I was highly influenced by an Australian movie called Walkabout which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s amazing. It’s quite old, but I think it still holds up. It’s amazing. And I pitched to him, I said, “What if we go back to the planet and we see the Unas that are not taken over by the Goa’uld?” And I think he was intrigued, but more than just intrigued by my idea, I think he recognized my enthusiasm, and so he mentored me, for lack of a better word. And I learned so much from him, and I’m still so grateful that he let me in the room. But I don’t think I’m a… I never thought I was a better writer than I was a director. That is a skill that I’m quite proud of, and it all came from my love of acting and performing. And so, I think a lot of really, really outstanding directors have themselves been performers or have a performing background of some kind.

David Read:
There’s a lot that. I have routinely received compliments about you on this show, where people come on and say, “This guy, he acted and he really knows how to take care of his actors and to direct with their sensibilities.” There is just something about… You don’t have to be an actor to direct, obviously. You could —

Peter DeLuise:
No, of course not.

David Read:
— read people, but there is something about someone who has been in those shoes and knows where they’re coming from, that, endears is not the right word, but there’s a…

Peter DeLuise:
There’s an empathy that comes.

David Read:
I know where you’re coming from.

Peter DeLuise:
I did it. I did it before, so if I was having to do this role, this is what I would be concerned about. So, if you’re an editor, and you have a relatively solo existence and you apply your craft in a cubicle without barely any interaction except for an assistant editor, you’re not going to immediately connect with a whole host of people. You know, there’s 60 people that you have to tell what to do and get excited about, and be the mascot and say, “Let’s do this. Let’s push this giant boulder up the hill. Come on, everybody, let’s go this way.”

David Read:
Absolutely. Susan McEwen, “Sugar glass is often used when you have to break glass. Have you ever had to use that as a director or come across it?” There were a couple of instances where it was definitely used in Atlantis with the ZPM, and with the, when Rodney drops one and the glass when it explodes in Weir’s face in Season Three. Have you ever had any experience with it as a director?

Peter DeLuise:
One of my first credits as an adult was with sugar glass. I got shot in the chest, and I threw myself back into a glass door for the movie Happy. My dad was directing that and then I got shot and I went, “Oh.” And even though it was sugar glass, I ended up cutting the side of my hand a little bit on the frame.

David Read:
So, it’s not foolproof. Wow.

Peter DeLuise:
No, it’s not exactly foolproof, but sugar glass actually tastes like sugar, and in fact, I’m intrigued by this person’s curiosity about sugar glass itself.

David Read:
It’s a left-field one. I like those. “OK, let’s go over here,” because we’ve been talking about effects, so that’s a good one to crack open.

Peter DeLuise:
Breaking Bad has this wonderful interview detail about Bryan Cranston and who plays the character Jesse?

David Read:
Aaron Paul?

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah, it was an 18-hour day, they were super tired, it was going on and on and on, and the methamphetamine was sugar. It was cotton candy flavored rock candy.

David Read:
Blue Sky.

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah, cotton candy flavored rock candy, and they were just eating it. So, rock candy, if you need to eat glass. Or you could do sugar glass, which if you need it to break really easily. And then also, once you have an actor fall on it, you want it to be rubber bits. So, they use the rubberized version of that. Otherwise, you get… I remember a scene.

David Read:
Tell me.

Peter DeLuise:
Melissa Stubbs is a wonderful stunt choreographer/stunt person who lives in town, or got her start in town here. She was doing a stunt on 21 Jump Street and she was in a barely-there cocktail dress and she got pushed through a plate glass window and she went through the glass, and Mario Van Peebles was directing, and he came out, he had a low angle and he did one over there and they pushed her through the glass and I was like, “Holy cow.” And then she got up and she had blood all over her bare skin where she had landed on top of it, and I was like, “Was this planned?” And she was like, “Ah, you’re gonna get cut a little bit.” I was like, “Holy crap.” And then she couldn’t wear any pads because she was wearing a tiny little cocktail dress because it was just supposed to be at a party. I was like, “That lady’s tough.”

David Read:
She’s tough as nails.

Peter DeLuise:
Melissa Stubbs is tough.

David Read:
That’s Dan Payne. Guys, how do we ever possibly know when you’re really in trouble because everything is always A-OK? You just have to trust your stunt performers that when they’re in serious jeopardy that they’ll tell you, but they don’t always necessarily know. Dan Payne was overheating in the Kull Warrior suit at one point, he was passing out. And people were like, “Dan, we gotta get you out of that thing. You’re, you’re dying. Not right at this moment, but…”

Peter DeLuise:
Dude, the original performer in “Demons” had to be replaced because he couldn’t take the… He was in an almost completely rubber suit that allowed his skin not to breathe at all. And he didn’t last. He was like, “It’s too much. I can’t take it.”

David Read:
No, absolutely. He called it out, good.

Peter DeLuise:
I think the lesson was you have to have more open spots. You can’t just cover the entirety of the person.

David Read:
Which is when you guys went back to them in “Beast of Burden,” when we finally saw them again, there were much more clothes involved.

Peter DeLuise:
And the most important, the zipper with the chain with the thing so you could put the giant claw through there. That was one of… I made sure of that ’cause I was like, “Dion, dude, you gotta be able to pee.” That’s one of the things that I would’ve come up with ’cause I have empathy for performers.

David Read:
The first runs. I missed that one. That came in previously. And Alex Zahara always talked about the Unas and being the female Unas and everything else and just having that flexibility as an actor.

Peter DeLuise:
That information, sorry to interrupt your question…

David Read:
Don’t. Keep going.

Peter DeLuise:
The reason I knew that peeing was optional, or not optional, was because my good friend, Dustin Nguyen, and I drove to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set, and we were visiting some friends of his. And I was told by one of the turtle performers, “We don’t poop and we don’t pee, and we have to take very little fluids in this thing.”

David Read:
For the ’90s ones?

Peter DeLuise:
The way back ones.

David Read:
The OGs.

Peter DeLuise:
And they said, “Why?” And they said, “Because from here down, I’m all turtle. And when I do a high kick, there can be no seams, there can be no zippers. It’s all turtle down there.” I went, “Oh my god. That’s terrible.”

David Read:
With diapers?

Peter DeLuise:
Maybe a diaper.

David Read:
A cord that runs to the floor and when they hook you up to the thing, they just suck it outta you?

Peter DeLuise:
He just said they sucked it up for them. And I went, “That seems inhuman.”

David Read:
Just don’t drink it out of the cord.

Peter DeLuise:
Even astronauts and pilots have something to pee in.

David Read:
And still they’re sweating. And Dustin Nguyen who played Mr. Chan in a couple of the last episodes of Season One of seaQuest before you joined, I loved his performance of that. Cool guy.

Peter DeLuise:
He is the coolest. So, because I had that inside information, I knew that we needed to make arrangements because it was just Dion for most of the screen time. It was Dion. We had to make an arrangement for him to be able to pee.

David Read:
And his physicality is just extraordinary. There’s no one else that could’ve pulled that off. Patrick Currie does a great job in Season Seven and he’s kind of domesticated at that point, so it’s a little bit… He’s standing upright now. I buy it. I really wish it was a different character though, to be perfectly honest with you, ’cause Dion’s physicality was so specific.

Peter DeLuise:
He absolutely was specific, and we talked about that quite a lot. We had a really nice sit-down ahead of time, and I told him what all the words mean, I told him what the culture was and that I told him about Walkabout and why he was out there. He was transitioning to an adult, and he was doing this as… Walkabout is when an Aboriginal goes and fends for themselves to prove that they are a viable member of the tribe so that, when they come back and they say, “I survived all by myself. I can…”

David Read:
See what they’re made of. Amazing. Last question for you. My name — that’s their name is My Name — “How normal was it to film two episodes simultaneously?” ‘Cause I remember the board that you guys had in the office and all of the sticky notes so you could move stuff around. And there was some crossover ’cause every episode had six, I think, days, six or seven production days, and there was some crisscross, but I don’t remember a lot other than for SG-1 and Atlantis.

Peter DeLuise:
When I first came on the show, there was a seven-and-a-half-day schedule. And there was a handoff midday.

David Read:
Got it.

Peter DeLuise:
Often what would happen was that, because Martin and myself rotated quite a lot, I would often take a handoff from him and vice versa. And on the seventh day, it would say 7.5 in the schedule. So, it was day one of 7.5, day two of 7.5, and on the last day, it would say point… So, on the last day, on one call sheet it would say…

David Read:
Like .0?

Peter DeLuise:
Or .5 of 7.5 or 7.5 of 7.5, and then it would be .5 of 7.5. It was that–

David Read:
.5, OK.

Peter DeLuise:
— imagine the schedule lining up and then on that last day there would be a handoff, and it supposedly happened at lunch. But it was not uncommon for Martin to say, “I need the crew for maybe an extra hour or two, too. I’m sorry, we didn’t get all the shots.” OK.

David Read:
In a circumstance where you had “The Sentinel” running at Norco and you also had “Menace” running at Norco.

Peter DeLuise:
Sorry, that was a different situation. I was telling you about how it first started, what then happened was… Part of playing the game as it was me trying to figure out how I could get some extra time to shoot some extra shots or some battle sequences that I felt that I needed to really fill out the sequence. And I would often go to John Smith and say, “If you can, can I trade one day of main unit for two days of second unit? On the battle sequence.” So, we’d go out to the sand dunes, the Richmond sand dunes, and I would get a whole bunch of Jaffa background. And I could shoot the other side of the battle unmolested by the supervising, by the muckey-murks. And–

David Read:
The John Lennox of the world?

Peter DeLuise:
No. Actually, John Lennox was really cool. It was Michael Greenburg making sure that everything was in support of Richard Dean Anderson.

David Read:
I see.

Peter DeLuise:
As was his job.

David Read:
That was his job.

Peter DeLuise:
We would never shoot a second-unit sequence with actual Richard Dean Anderson. He’d be on main unit.

David Read:
Sure, absolutely.

Peter DeLuise:
But then I would have free rein to do whatever I wanted on those, which made sense to me, and it was a win-win for everybody. And what does that do? If you do six days instead of seven days of main unit, the entirety of the season goes down by one day. So, ultimately, what would happen was that all the rentals and all the hard costs of the lights, the pre-planned lights that were in the studio and all that stuff, those things that eventually had to come down, there was less a day. And you’d wrap everyone out one day earlier. So, if you did that enough, you could claw back a handful of days over the course of a 20-episode season. So, that made sense to John Smith. That was a reason why two shows would be shooting at the same time, sometimes not in the same exact spot. OK? So, then in the case of 9/11, we were shooting at Norco Studios, formerly the bike factory, Norco. And, I don’t… Maybe not a lot of Americans who watch this show aren’t familiar with Norco, but if I had said Schwinn, that would make sense. But Norco was a very viable Canadian bicycle company, and it was shot in this giant, oversized building that made sense to assemble bicycles, and then ultimately made sense as a sound stage, a conversion to a sound stage. So, when we were shooting that, because “Menace” was first and “Sentinel” was afterward in the lineup, that would have been the last day of “Menace” and the first, probably first shooting day of “Sentinel.” I’m just guessing that’s how it worked.

David Read:
Probably right.

Peter DeLuise:
And so, either Martin was shooting second unit on the last day of his show, or I was shooting second unit as the first day of my show. And the reason would have been because we were now, the unit had moved to Norco, which was our miscellaneous sets. All the other sets that we didn’t have access to. And then…

David Read:
Most of the Goa’uld stuff was over there.

Peter DeLuise:
A lot of spaceships.

David Read:
The spaceship was there. The Earth ship was there for a while.

Peter DeLuise:
The scout ship was over there. And then…

David Read:
The temples.

Peter DeLuise:
Anytime we needed a lot of floor space… The “Window of Opportunity,” calliope was there.

David Read:
Really? OK.

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah.

David Read:
Very good. You look at the ebb and flow of a season, you spend a lot of money at the beginning, then some more bottle episodes, then a lot of money at the middle, more bottle episodes, a lot of money at the end. As you’ve approached the end of the season, did you ever get the feeling from above of, “We need to tighten our belt a little bit more?” Or was it all pretty well evened out so that you didn’t really get, depending on the time of the year, more of a pushback at all? Or was it normal that near the end of a typical season, you wouldn’t have access to as much time and resources as you would have liked, and we’re nearing the end of our season and this is just normal?

Peter DeLuise:
It was quite common for the producers to request that we be frugal. Which is a difficult situation to be put in because you wanna do whatever you can to help the cause. And so, yeah, I often would shoot as frugally as possible. One of the techniques I used was, very early on, I would print more than one take, which was something that I learned as a child watching my dad and Burt Reynolds shooting Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run. They would just leave it, often they would leave it running, and that’s why we have the bloopers. It’s ’cause they would just leave it running and wait until they got the line right. And so, normally, if somebody messes up, they cut and they would start again. And one of the other things they would do is they would pretty much print — Hal Needham, who was the director of those wonderful, joyful moments — I think he would just print everything. And so, the lesson that I was learning was, you don’t need one perfect take ’cause you’re gonna cut this together anyway. So, I do not need to do seven takes until they get the one take correctly on the seventh take, and then I’ll only print take seven. They did it mostly right in take one, and then the lines that they messed up in take one, they got right in take two. And between that and all the other coverage that we’re shooting, that’s fine. So, I’ll shoot a complete… And if the actor asks, “Well, I’m used to getting seven takes. I’d like another take.” “OK, we’ll have three takes.” So, we’ll print all three takes and move on. And I get a tap on the shoulder — this is me explaining how I was being frugal, ultimately — I got a tap on the shoulder from John Smith. He said, “You’re printing too much material.” Because in the printed material column, there was a number that was much bigger than usual. Usually, you only print one take. And I said, “Well, you remember yesterday when you complimented me on getting that boardroom scene? There were seven characters there.” And if you do the math very quickly in your head, if everyone gets… If you do a master one take, plus seven takes to get it right on all the other characters, that’s 50 shots to get eight good angles, right? And I said, “You complimented me on getting us out early on the boardroom scene, which you had also confided in me that you had not been able to achieve in a normal way prior to this.” And I said, “So, I think if you go back and you crunch the numbers and you see that printing two takes or three takes is not worse than having 60 people on the clock in overtime.” And he… I saw his eyes light, and they went back, and I think between him and John Lenic, they went, “This does make sense. OK, let’s do that.” And then, naturally, when we went digital of course, you’re just gonna print it all. It’s just memory space at that point, right? It wasn’t printed film. So, that became the standard. But I wasn’t doing it for that reason. It’s just better. This is the first couple times they did it.

David Read:
They’re fresh still.

Peter DeLuise:
They’re fresh. It’s good. And then you can easily burn out an actor by asking them to do a three-page performance seven times. Times the seven other actors that are in the scene.

David Read:
It’s wild. Peter, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking so much time with us. I love the technical conversation. We started off with 30 people, we ended with 80. So, I think they appreciated it–

Peter DeLuise:
80 people?

David Read:
— as well, live watching. So, it means a lot to me that you were so thoughtful and detailed about the process that you go through to compose one of our favorite shows. So, franchises. And it always means the world to me to have you back.

Peter DeLuise:
I’m thrilled to be asked back. I like when people are interested in what I have to say. And of course, I love the sound of my own voice. So, if you wanna do this again, I’d be happy to come back.

David Read:
I’d love to have you back before the… We usually wrap in October or November. I’ll ask you back. But please give Rowdy big hugs for me.

Peter DeLuise:
Will do.

David Read:
I’m gonna go ahead and wrap up the show on this side, sir.

Peter DeLuise:
Sounds good.

David Read:
Thank you, sir.

Peter DeLuise:
Cheers.

David Read:
Peter DeLuise, everyone. Writer, producer, director, Stargate. My name is David Read. You’re watching Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. Thanks so much to my team for making this episode possible. Thank you to Antony, to Raj, to Jeremy, Kevin, Lockwatcher, Marcia, and Jakub. You guys make this show possible week after week. And if you enjoy the episode, click that Like button. It really does make a difference with the show and will help us grow our audience. Kira Clavell, who played Amaterasu in SG-1, is joining us, let me see here, she is joining us tomorrow at 3:00 PM to discuss her appearance on the show. And then Tahmoh Penikett, who played Third in SG-1 in “Unnatural Selection” in Season Six, he is joining us, I believe, on Monday, and I still have to update the website for that as well. He’s joining us on Tuesday the 15th at 11:00 AM Pacific Time to discuss his new show, Carrie, that’s coming out. Maybe we’ll talk about a little bit more Stargate and Battlestar Galactica. So, I appreciate you all tuning in. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, and I will see you on the other side.