Stargate’s iconic director returns to Dial the Gate to update us on his creative endeavors and share more insights from his involvement in our favorite franchise.

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Timecodes
0:00:00 Splash Screen
0:00:36 Opening Credits
0:01:02 Welcome and Guest Introduction
0:01:56 Martin’s Dad was a Huge Stargate Fan
0:04:06 Parents Who Love Our Work
0:05:09 USS Akron Used on Kelowna
0:06:36 Don S Davis
0:10:16 Don Knew the Role
0:14:53 A Matter of Time
0:21:12 Midway Shot in “A Matter of Time”
0:22:23 Sheet Rock to Fabric
0:27:55 Divide and Conquer
0:30:26 The Guy Who Killed Me On Stargate
0:31:16 Ryan Robbins in “The Eye”
0:32:29 Cory Monteith
0:33:38 Kirsten Robek in “Divide and Conquer”
0:35:26 Martouf’s Death in “Divide and Conquer”
0:36:24 Anise Kissing O’Neill
0:36:59 Menace
0:39:24 When To Stop Production
0:44:09 Recorded the Morning of September 11, 2001
0:45:25 The Storm and “The Eye”
0:46:44 The Rain “Has to Be Heavy”
0:50:53 Grace Under Pressure and “The Return Part 2”
0:52:54 Green Screen in Rain in “The Eye”
0:54:49 Favorite Sanctuary Moments
0:57:12 Avenger 2.0
0:59:42 Memoirs and Mentoring
1:02:00 Film Club
1:04:01 Martin Changed the Way He Shoots
1:06:05 Martin’s Dad’s Favorite Shows
1:07:32 How Fatherhood Has Impacted Martin
1:11:43 Thank You and Wrap-Up
1:14:55 End Credits

***

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

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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Welcome everyone to Episode 3 — Oh, hi Martin. Let me be right back with you — To episode 338 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, we just keep on going and going. Martin Wood, obviously, is joining us for this episode. You know what? Let’s just bring him in.

Martin Wood:
Surprise!

David Read:
Happy Father’s Day, sir.

Martin Wood:
Thank you.

David Read:
How are you?

Martin Wood:
Thanks so much. I’m great. I’m having a ball.

David Read:
Great. And Happy Father’s Day to my old man, David Arnold Read, sitting 30 paces away from me right now. He’s here today watching pretty much all of my shows live. To all the dads out there who have made not only our lives possible, but our lives something special. Martin, you told me you lost your father in the last couple of years. This day is probably not the easiest for you right now.

Martin Wood:
What’s really interesting, David, is because you’re doing this on that day, it makes it easier, because my dad was such a massive fan. Ever since the very first day that he came in to watch what was going on on set, he was hooked. He started to watch the show and has watched ever since. He watched so many times over and over and over and over again.

David Read:
So, he was a fan.

Martin Wood:
He was a super fan, actually. It is literally the last 15 years of his life, it’s what we talked about all the time. And he came to set, he met the cast, he would love to visit all the time. He’d come in and he’d hang out on set. And SG-1 was… Anytime I called to talk to him, my mom would always say, “He’s watching Stargate.” And we’d both laugh because it’s the only thing that he ever did. And especially when he started getting sicker in the end, he sort of had a special chair where he sat and watched it, and then he had a special place in his bed where it turned on and he watched, and he watched over and over. And I would start each conversation with, “Which episode are you watching right now?”

David Read:
“What were you on?”

Martin Wood:
And he’d go…, but he wouldn’t just… he was one of those fans that could just… And he was way past where I was, ’cause even though I’d done it, it was so many years ago, but he’s seen it five times. He’d ask me something about what Jolinar was wearing on his hip. Why did he have this on? “I don’t know.” You’d have to describe where, and then he’d talk to me and he’d say, “Here, I’ll show you.”

David Read:
Yeah, “I’ll pull it up for you.”

Martin Wood:
And then he’d turn the camera on. And he shows me and I’m like, “OK, now I realize why that was there.” It was funny. It was very funny.

David Read:
Parents who appreciate and respect what we do is one thing. To have parents who love what we do is something else.

Martin Wood:
Yeah, very much.

David Read:
And who get into it more than we do. My father has watched every episode of this show. He doesn’t know Stargate, but he knows Stargate.

Martin Wood:
Seriously? He doesn’t… he knows it through you.

David Read:
He keeps on saying, “We’re gonna sit down and watch…” And I’m like, “Dad, you’re 78.” There’s 17 seasons.

Martin Wood:
I didn’t know that story, Martin. Thank you for sharing that. That’s wonderful.

David Read:
Apropos, when I got your email saying Sunday and I thought, “This is great ’cause my dad would get such a kick out of the fact that I’m talking about him on your show.” That would be one of those things that he would find very, very cool. He used to, when I’d email him from here, every time, he’d point this thing out behind me. Do you recognize that?

David Read:
That is the ship that I believe transports souls from Earth to the afterlife, if I’m not mistaken.

Martin Wood:
Nope.

David Read:
It is not?

Martin Wood:
Nope. No. Actually, this was mounted… My dad gave that to me, by the way. It’s the… what is it? The USS… Hang on for a sec.

David Read:
It looks just like it.

Martin Wood:
The USS Akron. It’s an airship, a blimp, but it was also part of Jonas’ homeworld, the scientists in Jonas’ homeworld. That was on the wall. The Davidsons mounted it for me for that show. And I said, “I’m gonna take that whole mounting and put it in my den.”

David Read:
Absolutely. What a great little memento. Did your dad notice it?

Martin Wood:
Yes, and he told me–

David Read:
Of course he did.

Martin Wood:
He said, “There’s two of them. Where’s the other one? What’s the other one?” I said, “The other one didn’t belong to me.” He goes, “I gave you the other one.” I said, “No, that wasn’t one you gave me.” That wasn’t the print he gave me. He wanted me to have both of them. There was another one that was hanging in the wall.

David Read:
These are the Easter eggs that I love about this and any piece of media that I love to watch. On the subject of fathers, I went back and I checked our conversations on Dial the Gate, and I was like, “This isn’t possible. How have I never asked you about Don in our conversations on this channel?” It’s like, “Seriously?” And I haven’t. I was privileged to know him. We shared an alma mater. It always gave us something to talk about when we met. Pure gentleman. Do you have a memory or two of Don?

Martin Wood:
Don and my dad were great friends. From the first time that my dad came into Don’s office, we were shooting something and the two of them hit it off because they were both artists. My dad taught school. He taught art for so long. And Don, with his art and things like that, he and my dad hit it off in a huge way. They would talk… My dad would call Don, Don would call my dad, and they would talk an awful lot about it. My dad was so proud of the fact that Don liked me as a director. He said, “You know what? He really likes working with you. He thinks that you’re fantastic.” And I’m like, “Great. I hope all of them do.” But he’s like, “No, Don, he likes you a lot.”

David Read:
But Don meant a lot to him.

Martin Wood:
I find that– I was actually thinking about him a little while ago… We went out for the memorial. All of us got together on Amanda’s boat. And Amanda’s husband took us out into the water so that we could have a memorial.

David Read:
For your father.

Martin Wood:
No, for Don.

David Read:
For Don Davis?

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
I see.

Martin Wood:
After Don died, I remember how that boat trip especially affected people. We were all sort of talking and sharing memories about Don. And for me, Don was always the kindest person on the set. He was always… you could always depend on him to find the humor in whatever was going on. He didn’t contribute to the humor the way that Rick and everybody else sort of had their own sense of humor that they brought to it. Don just laughed at everybody. He just laughed along with everybody. He thought everybody was funny. And it was really easy to make fun of something Don had done, and he would be the first to tell you that he’d done something, and then he’d smile– at you and laugh, and you were laughing along with him, and it’s a wonderful thing to do with an actor, to have them be so self-deprecating that they go, “Oh, I’ve so screwed this up. Do you want me to start again, or do you want me to just keep going? ‘Cause I was such an idiot. Do you want me to do it again?” I’m like, “Yes, Don. We actually have to get it right.” And he’d laugh, but he would laugh at everybody else’s jokes. He would laugh at everything.

David Read:
He didn’t have anything to prove, and he loved being there. That role was made, to my understanding, for him. And he embodied that character, and he spent time in the Army. He knew that role. He had words for Mario Azzopardi about the choices in the pilot, and every pilot has to start somewhere with the characters, and he got us invested in him. He was the central figure for that series for seven seasons. I had Heather Ash on, and she had actually written a story that was gonna heavily feature Don. SG-1 trapped off-world, communicating with Hammond in his dreams. Trying to reach him. And it would have heavily featured Don. Instead, we got “Chain Reaction.” It was before Season Three or Four. But it makes you wonder. It’s one of my regrets as a viewer not getting to see more Hammond-centric stories. But at the same time, being thankful for what we got.

Martin Wood:
Don always commented on the fact that his whole thing was, “I’m support. I am the support for these stories. Everything bounces back off of me into something else, but I’m not a central character here. I am a character that information flows through and comes back out,” and there’s a lot of exposition that he does… to get us on point with things. He asks… He’s the audience asking the question. “What do you mean by that, Colonel? What does that mean to the mission? How is that pertinent to what we need to know?” He was the one asking those questions. So, absolutely essential to the story, and he knew that. He felt that you couldn’t get around his character, and I think that we stumbled a little bit with Rick in that position– until we brought Beau in and… It’s funny ’cause somebody asked me something the other day about when Beau was the President. And I was thinking …

David Read:
Whole different energy.

Martin Wood:
“…Oh, wait a minute, that was a…” That was different… It wasn’t one of my episodes. Pretty sure it wasn’t one of my episodes.

David Read:
“The Road Not Taken.”

Martin Wood:
But it was… It wasn’t one of my episodes. That was the different dimension, that Carter did. Very interesting that we chose Beau Bridges for that.

David Read:
I’m trying to figure out where I read… You chose him because William Devane was unavailable. Andy Mikita directed it. Allen McCullough wrote it. But it was written for President Hayes. But what was so interesting about that was it took a character that we knew and loved and cared for in a certain way and said, “OK, let’s give this one ambition.” And also, a world that is exposed to alien life for the first time and is absolutely on fire. And Beau played that very chillingly, with how comfortable he was with that power. And it was a great episode.

Martin Wood:
He was that… he was the President that said, “This is what we need to do to survive. This is what has to happen.”

David Read:
That’s true.

Martin Wood:
And with none of the empathy that he had as a general.

David Read:
That was the chilling part about it, was you have to make those choices, perhaps even the same choices, maybe not all of them in terms of altering the news, but the chilliness with which he was so comfortable executing that was a compelling story. And Andy Mikita did great.

Martin Wood:
He did. And I thought that Amanda did a fantastic job as well because it necessitated her reacting as the audience would to “I can talk to him. I can get to him.” She goes into his office and can’t get to him the way that she normally would.

David Read:
This is not the man she knows. No, “I won’t help you subvert democracy” is one of my favorite lines from the show. I think about it all the time.

David Read:
I wanna talk about first… These are gonna go chronological only because I wasn’t more creative. “A Matter of Time,” this is a Season Two episode, one of the few episodes that played with relativity from a scientific perspective with the show. We dial a black hole and that energy translates through the Stargate and starts… will eventually suck all of the State of Colorado, everything through it. Great idea. Very expensive episode, I might imagine. Some cutting-edge visual effects. And some of the folks who worked on it said, who am I thinking of here? Craig Van Den Biggeleaar, I believe, he was one of the ones who were responsible for a lot of those shots, was happy with some of the shots and frankly really not happy with others. You had to–

Martin Wood:
I know which ones… pretty much.

David Read:
So, let’s talk about that. How did you pull off that effect, particularly climbing down on a winch- to lower a bomb above the Stargate and you have to move the entire room like this?

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
All of the action.

Martin Wood:
There’s so many different elements to it that… It was one of those things that I didn’t storyboard all of the big pieces that I did through the years in Stargate ’cause some of them would sit in my head and it wasn’t a problem for me. But quite frankly that was one that I had to sit down and really figure out in terms of where I was gonna be with the different angles because I needed to not only be on top of Marshall and Rick and the bomb and be moving with them, and of course they were upright like this so the camera was turned sideways, and the camera’s traveling sideways like this with them. But I also needed to get above them so that I had the perspective from the gate room where Teal’c and Carter are looking down towards the gate with them. So, I had to get high enough above them that we could see the gate below them. So, it’s green screen work. Part of it is a gate room that’s turned sideways. Very little of it, by the way was done in the Gate room. A lot of it was done in another stage and a giant green screen that I had Marshall and Rick suspended from, and so they’re just climbing down like this. They’re jumaring down. So, for Marshall’s fall and all that kinda stuff, I wasn’t in the actual Gate room itself. Because the Gate room, of course, turned sideways, we didn’t have a bottom on it. There was no Gate. There was nothing there. It was green screen. So, in order to get that, I ended up putting elements together of this green screen version, shooting like this, down the line and getting them like this. And there was all these different inserts and stuff like when the piece of glass has to hit the rope that’s gonna drop Marshall. And I just remember Marshall and Rick being so sore from being suspended for so long. Because there’s the whole act and a half of them on those wires. And having to climb up and down, up and down, and we’d raise them up, but they’d just climb down. So, then they’d lock in and we’d raise more rope up, and then they’d climb back down again.

David Read:
There’s a couple of things at play here. One, I think the logistics nightmare of keeping track of everything. Not only do you have the problem of, for instance, the glass breaking. Let’s just take that as a single slice in and of itself. So, you have the glass breaking. Great, that’s fine. But on top of that, it’s moving at different velocities based on where the perspective of the camera is.

Martin Wood:
Where you are.

David Read:
So, the logistics of all of this had to be a nightmare, just absolutely crazy.

Martin Wood:
That’s Brad’s brain though, figuring that stuff out. What I figured out is that regardless of anywhere anybody else is, where the camera is, as Einstein says, “The observer… time runs normally.” For everything we did, time ran normally. The only time when I didn’t do that was when what’s his name was at the gate reporting back, and you could hear–

David Read:
[inaudible]

Martin Wood:
But I had trouble with it ’cause I said to Brad, “I don’t wanna cut to him and see him doing that.” Because it means our observation is that he’s talking slowly. But Brad said, “That’s what it would be. You can’t be at him and have him talking slowly, but you can be at Carter’s POV. And then he can be talking slowly.” So, in the edit, we had to sort of adjust it. Because I wanted him to be talking normally when we were there. But then it sounded too funny to cut back and forth between the slowed down version of it to get to Carter.

David Read:
The audience would get what you were doing, but they would be busy going, “OK, what’s happening here? Why am I hearing this? Oh, oh.” It would pull them out of the story. The bomb, the glass, is one thing. It breaks, and then from Carter and Teal’c, and Tyler’s perspective, it goes slower as it goes further away. If this was actually happening, this gravity field is too intense for anything. This is the conceit of TV. But at the same time, as Jack climbs up the rope, the bomb slows down. The further he gets away, the further he has a chance to get further away.

Martin Wood:
It’s true.

David Read:
How you pulled it off, as good as it was, is just a hell of a thing. And on top of that–

Martin Wood:
I gotta tell you, the one thing I remember about Chris lowering the bombs is he’s going, “What the hell am I doing? Why don’t I just cut the rope here?” I’m like, “You can’t, you have to do…” He goes, “No, I’ll cut the rope. Then I don’t have to do this.” And I’m like, “No, you’re slowing it down.”

David Read:
“I have to set it at a certain height.” He’s slowing down. So, this shot here, is this a rear screen projection?

Martin Wood:
No, that is real. That’s in the gate room.

David Read:
Wow. I always thought it was fake.

Martin Wood:
No, I don’t think so. That to me is one of the ones, because it’s including the wire on the right-hand side. I believe that’s the real room.

David Read:
It just looks so high up.

Martin Wood:
Remember that midway, literally when they’re in a set that’s standing upright, they’re midway. This is a midway shot. This is just as they’re getting into the edge of the kawoosh.

David Read:
Yes. That’s it. For sure. And I have to ask; can you see my mouse?

Martin Wood:
Yep.

David Read:
Richard Hudolin revealed to us that at a certain point when the SGC walls go higher up, they switch from the regular — what’s the material called — sheetrock that’s painted to look like. Something… cement to a fabric. Is this the seam where that fabric begins going up? Is that what that is?

Martin Wood:
I think if that’s the turned sideways one, I think the whole thing is fabric. I think that seam is supposed to be the relief in the wall that is there. But I think the whole thing was fabric because we did not raise plywood up like that. It was all painted walls.

David Read:
I remember at the SGC at the bottom, you could put your hand on the wall there and your brain is expecting concrete and it’s not. But he said at the higher-up parts, at the very least, that was because they didn’t need to spend the money on it. It just needed to look right.

Martin Wood:
No, it’s as high as the bottom of the boardroom window because we were able to put stuff against the wall up to the boardroom window. But anything above the boardroom windows on the sides, we weren’t allowed to touch.

David Read:
That makes absolute sense ’cause it would disappear. It only needs to be as real as it looks. That’s it. I know in certain circumstances, if you were gonna have a fight or have them make contact with a wall, you had to let production, all the people drafting all of the sets and everything, know in advance so that they could make a more secure spot.

Martin Wood:
What we would do is we’d brace the walls where they were gonna hit it. You’d put a jack in behind it and then you’d put weight against it. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that… I’m just trying to look up something and see if I got this right.

David Read:
Be my guest. I’m thinking of Adam Baldwin as Dave Dixon in Heroes Part Two, wiggling the rocks around while they’re fighting the Jaffa. It’s little things like that that it’s like, “Ooh, OK, we’re just gonna move on.”

Martin Wood:
Where is it? And I’m so sorry, I missed “The Other Guys” thing. That would have been a lot of fun.

David Read:
So, backstory there, we had Patrick McKenna and John Billingsley on. And stupid, dopey me was doing the livestream and it’s like, “You know what? You have Martin’s number. Text him and see if he’s free for a Zoom chat for five minutes,” and it didn’t occur to me beforehand to even try, Martin. I’m sorry.

Martin Wood:
I wish I had …

David Read:
Until then.

Martin Wood:
… ’cause I would have loved to talk to those guys. We had so much fun. That was Damian Kindler’s first script. And we had so much fun with it. They just were hysterical. I remember just laughing the entire time.

David Read:
They loved it. They loved it. I hope you’ve had a chance to watch the episode, or I can send you a link ’cause they have fond memories of it. Very good show.

Martin Wood:
Do send me a link of it …

David Read:
I will.

Martin Wood:
… ’cause I would love to see it. Have I told you the Kurt Russell story before? I think I did.

David Read:
When you came to set?

Martin Wood:
At one point.

David Read:
I don’t remember you telling it.

Martin Wood:
I remember walking onto set in the control room and looking around and going, “Why are all these people here? Why have we got all these extra people from the office and things like this standing on the set?” We’re going into something and I’m about to roll, and I turn and there’s a man standing beside me and I didn’t recognize him ’cause I’m just slightly behind him, and he steps back and it was Kurt Russell. And I went…

David Read:
No one told you?

Martin Wood:
“Welcome.” He goes, “I’m so sorry. I should ask if I’m OK on your set.” And I went, “Hell yeah. You own this place, man.” And he goes, “I’m so sorry. I should’ve asked. I asked your first AD if it was OK if I just sort of sit and watch.” I said, “What do you think?” He goes, “It’s smaller than mine. But you got way more lights. Way more blinky lights.”

David Read:
Wow. What a memory.

Martin Wood:
I don’t know if anybody told you that Brad and Rick were really trying to get him to do the elevator gag. Did you hear about that?

David Read:
Tell me.

Martin Wood:
That they were gonna ask Kurt… Because he was shooting in the studio next door, shooting on the lot. He wasn’t next door but he was on the lot. What we really wanted to do was a quick shot of Rick in the elevator and the doors open and Rick walks out and Kurt walks in, in uniform, and turns around and Rick goes, “Jack?” He goes, “Colonel.” And they walk away from each other and the doors close on Kurt. That would have been hilarious.

David Read:
What did Kurt say?

Martin Wood:
I don’t remember. I have vague memory of the fact that it would have meant he had to change out of what he was in. He would have had to change his costume, and he couldn’t do that on the day that he was available for it or whatever. It would have been weird to have him in an Elvis costume coming into this thing. Something fell apart with it, but it would have been so fantastic to do that.

David Read:
It’s the little things. He got to see the set. He got to appreciate what you guys had created with the raw material that he and their team had started off with. And that in itself is really special. Very cool, man. “Divide and Conquer,” Season Four. This is an episode that polarized fandom more than any.

Martin Wood:
Because of Martouf or because of Jack and Sam?

David Read:
Because of Martouf’s death.

Martin Wood:
Not because of Jack and Sam …

David Read:
No, they loved it. They loved it.

Martin Wood:
… said that they liked each other.

David Read:
The huge majority of fandom, 90-plus percent, loved it. The fact was, this was the first major death of an ally in the show. The show had never really done this before for a recurring satellite character. And I’ve had Vanessa Angel on this season, and I’ve had Andrew Jackson on this season. Not the President but the Tok’ra President. And Andrew actually mentioned to me how he remembered there being a little bit of a tenseness on set because it was JR’s last day and you were shooting him out of the show. What can you remember of that? Or was it just another day from your perspective?

Martin Wood:
Something like that wouldn’t have been just another day. It would have been… I’m trying to see.

David Read:
This divided fandom in the poll — the GateWorld poll was a real good bearing on an episode — and for the first six or seven seasons of the show, there was never a polarizing poll like this one, where half of the audience loved the show and half of the audience hated the show. And we went into the forums and read the feedback afterwards and it’s because, “It was amazing because they killed Martouf. They went there.” And, “I hated it because they killed Martouf. I can’t believe they went there.” And I forget who said it, if art makes you feel something, it’s done its job.

Martin Wood:
It’s interesting. I was never a Za’tarc fan.

David Read:
Oh, boy.

Martin Wood:
I think that doing one of these, there’s so much involved with it. Vanessa coming in and JR going out. And it’s really funny. I met JR a couple of years ago. ‘Cause it’s not the only show I’ve killed him on. I think I killed him on… I may have killed him on Sanctuary as well. He was with a nephew or something like that. And he introduced me as the guy who killed me on Stargate. And I thought, “Wow, that’s what you remember of that whole thing, JR?” And we were laughing about it, but it was very funny. That was how he introduced me to his nephew.

David Read:
It’s not often that you can say that kind of thing with cheeky humor at the same time. He did kinda do that. That’s great stuff.

Martin Wood:
Believe me, I meet stunt guys every day and their whole thing is, “He killed me nine times. Nine times in 10 years.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s the job.”

David Read:
“You got paid for it, didn’t ya? You’re here, aren’t ya?”

Martin Wood:
Exactly.

David Read:
“But did you die?”

Martin Wood:
And then there’s guys like Ryan Robbins …

David Read:
Ryan Robbins.

Martin Wood:
… that it’s like, “Thank you so much for not killing me.” I told you that story about Atlantis with… It was literally a call upstairs to the guys saying, “I don’t think we should kill this guy. I think he’s fantastic. We gotta hang onto him.” I’m sure I told you this story, but he’s supposed to go through the gate and get–

David Read:
I don’t think so. Go ahead.

Martin Wood:
OK, he was supposed to be running away. They’re all running away. Just before they get to the gate, he was supposed to be shot and killed, and he falls through the gate and is now gone. We ended up killing him. But on the day we were shooting it, I said to him, “Man, I wanna keep you around.” He goes, “Don’t kill me. Make it so that the shot goes through the gate.” And I said, “Doesn’t work like that.” I needed to sort of be definitive about it. I called upstairs and said, “Guys, I really think that he would be a really good ongoing bad guy, ’cause he did such a great job at this.” And they’re like, “OK, I don’t know. What do you think?” I said, “I can make it work so that it looks like we’re shooting at him but just have one of the background guys cross in front.”

David Read:
He was grazed. Ryan Robbins, Ladon got hit. But it wasn’t a fatal shot.

Martin Wood:
The other person that got killed on that, though, instead of Ryan… Do you know who it is?

David Read:
No, because he didn’t come back. And it wasn’t Cory Monteith. I can’t see Cory in any of those shots.

Martin Wood:
It was Cory.

David Read:
Did you kill Cory?

Martin Wood:
Yeah, ’cause he didn’t… He wasn’t Cory Monteith at the time. He was just Cory.

David Read:
He’s in that retreat and he’s the one who gets hit?

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
Oh my God. Wow. I did not know that, Martin.

Martin Wood:
Cory doesn’t come back.

David Read:
Only in “200” as a kid Cam.

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
Cory took one for the team.

Martin Wood:
But nobody knew.

David Read:
I’m gonna have to go back and look.

Martin Wood:
“Divide and Conquer,” I really don’t remember too much about JR’s death. Although I do remember that–

David Read:
Where’s the damn staff weapon …

Martin Wood:
I have to remember her name.

David Read:
… when you need one.

Martin Wood:
Kirsten. She played one of the assassins, the first one that got…

David Read:
She offs herself. It’s not Parker. What’s her name? Great, great scene though.

Martin Wood:
Kirsten. I’ve used her a lot. I actually used her in a movie four years ago.

David Read:
I would look it up, but my hot keys have taken over and every time I start typing, the screen changes. Oh, phone. Hello. Yes, who was it? Killed in “Divide and Conquer,” SG-1. Who was it? Louise Astor, played by… And of course… Louise Astor is her last name in beta canon. Kirsten Robek.

Martin Wood:
Kirsten Robek.

David Read:
That’s it.

Martin Wood:
Who’s now changed her name. She’s now Lauren Robek. But Kirsten Robek, she was fantastic. We loved her. She scared the crap outta everybody in that scene.

David Read:
She went berserk. It’s little things like that that sell the episode, where you realize they’re not messing around. This thing is intense and all it takes is that extra 20% from a guest performer for us to go, “Whoa. Good stuff, man.” Martin, I’m gonna go even–

David Read:
Go ahead.

Martin Wood:
Go ahead. I was gonna say, the scene between Martouf and Carter, I remember being very, very emotional, and for everybody. And I think that it was one of those ones where I had lots of extra crew sitting in watching it too just because everybody liked working with JR so much.

David Read:
Almost like a goodbye. Is there any truth to the story with Rick and his kissing scene with Vanessa Angel, where afterwards he was like, “I don’t wanna do anything like that again?” Was there any truth to that? Because Jack didn’t really have romantic scenes with the aliens anymore after that?

Martin Wood:
No, I’m pretty sure that’s true. I’m really telling stories out of school here.

David Read:
It’s 30 years. Live a little. A little bit. You don’t have to tell us everything.

Martin Wood:
It’s funny because I went up to Rick afterwards, and I went, “How was it?” He goes, “Pillows. Her lips are pillows.” I remember him saying that. So, Rick enjoyed kissing Vanessa. I don’t think that Colonel O’Neill liked kissing…

David Read:
That I understand. That’s a legitimate distinction. Good on him. Her lips are pillows. Another one that I was surprised that we hadn’t talked about before, and I’ve gotten everyone’s take on this day, “Menace” in Season Five. Danielle Nicolet is on set. You are filming on September 11th, 2001. Tell me about that morning.

Martin Wood:
I remember exactly sorta that morning. We were shooting in the Norco stages. And we were in the pyramid, in a small room. And I was just setting up shot. And I remember walking past, I think it was the genny op, who had a small TV monitor. And I hadn’t seen or heard anything about it, and I looked down and he had a picture on it. I went, “What’s that?” He goes, “Haven’t you heard?” And that’s when it started to happen. From that point on, everybody was talking about it. And I remember we had decided to keep going, although Chris was very, very upset, to the point of being very emotional. It was a very quiet morning. And what we did is we brought in a couple of other monitors so we could keep an eye on things that were going on. And at one point, I remember when the second tower got hit, I looked down past the cameras, and I saw them in a silhouette. I don’t know if the shot was a silhouette or whether from my perspective it was a silhouette in the small room in the pyramid, and I thought, “That’s so interesting,” that I remember that exact frame as the second tower got hit, and having to go down and talk to them about it, and sitting down with all of them and saying, “This is what’s going on. Do we wanna continue?”

David Read:
So, you had already started filming?

Martin Wood:
So, it was first thing in the morning. It was very early in the morning for us and we’d started to shoot. And then I think we all wrapped it up at some point. I believe we stopped shooting then ’cause Chris just… he was a bag of hammers.

David Read:
You guys called it and took the day.

Martin Wood:
What’s interesting is… I’m trying to think about what else I remember about the show itself.

David Read:
Can I ask you something while you’re noodling that?

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
Is it your purview to call it? Or is that something that has to go upstairs and say, “What do you guys think?”

Martin Wood:
I was in touch immediately with John Smith and probably with Brad, and we were talking about what the ramifications of it were and whether we shouldn’t, and I think that it was one of those things where, out of deference to the world we stopped. I think there were too many Americans on our set and too many people in Canada that were affected by it that it was not something that you could work through.

David Read:
And I didn’t know until last year when I had Christina Cox on that the “Sentinel” was also filming simultaneously. This is one of the days where they were shooting the cave sequences where the sentinel device was also on this day. And I didn’t know that that sometimes happened where there was some overlap, and I wonder if that has something to do with the earlier call time.

Martin Wood:
Quite possibly. We would often share people on the same day. There would be a time when I’d have to get somebody off of my set over to another set. That happened a good deal of the time.

David Read:
That pyramid that you’re describing is the vault where Reese is discovered on her planet.

Martin Wood:
That’s where it was.

David Read:
Was that near the end of that shoot or were you just getting started?

Martin Wood:
That I don’t remember. I think I should probably… let me see if I call it up there, if I can see it.

David Read:
Danielle Nicolet is one that I’ve wanted to have on for years. I can’t get her to sit down and it’s not necessarily hard to imagine why. But she kicked ass in that role. She was so good.

Martin Wood:
I think… where are we? What season was that? Sorry.

David Read:
Five, near the end of Five. Daniel was dead in two weeks from your perspective in terms of shoots. You’re okay, man.

Martin Wood:
Sorry. I should have done my homework beforehand.

David Read:
No, you’re all right. It’s only Father’s Day, Martin. You’re talking to someone who currently works 70 hours a week and goes to school and does two YouTube channels.

Martin Wood:
Yikes.

David Read:
So, I get it, my friend.

Martin Wood:
There we go. OK. I was kinda hoping I could actually scroll up to the scene.

David Read:
‘Cause they go back. They return later. A team does. I forget what they do. They go back and they find the pieces of the replicators on the floor, I think, in a different scene. But the first scene is, “Oh, android.” So, that’s the main movement of that. And then they take her body back. That’s one of the most amazing effects in the show up to that point, is the seamlessness of her neck when it opens up and the power pack that comes out, the disc, and then it goes in and the morph back into her skin was perfect. Some of those shots were just perfect. They’re flawless. That’s a movie-quality shot.

Martin Wood:
This is… Thank you. This is really interesting to me ’cause it is–

David Read:
Do you have the raw script?

Martin Wood:
It’s the wide shot. No, I’m looking at the footage, actually.

David Read:
I see. You’re looking for the frame. I will pull up the episode myself and if you have–

Martin Wood:
It’s right at the very beginning.

David Read:
Let me pull it here. I can’t do a lot of footage on the livestream, but I can do some, and I would like to have this, so uno momento please. All right. I was on the wrong drive.

Martin Wood:
It’s almost one of the first frames in the whole thing.

David Read:
OK, let’s get this for “The Sentinel.” “Menace.” There it is. OK. So, “Menace” had to have been wrapping up because “The Sentinel” was next on the timeline, and you guys pretty much shot in order. Nearly one of the first up?

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
So, you got the overhead shot of the exterior. Walking, walking, walking.

Martin Wood:
I think it’s actually the next shot. From where I was standing, I was looking down at their silhouettes, and I believe that’s why you don’t see Chris come forward with them. He hangs back. This is it. This is the shot. This is the frame.

David Read:
So, this frame was being recorded while the first tower was burning?

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
Oh my God. I did not know that. So, this one shot was the one that was done on that first day?

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
And this is Daniel in the front here?

Martin Wood:
It starts with Chris and then–

David Read:
So, he doesn’t know yet …

Martin Wood:
Yeah.

David Read:
… what’s going on?

Martin Wood:
At this point, he doesn’t ’cause this was the frame when I was doing it. So, I believe that what happens, they bring them forward in this. He knows about the first one, and then as the wide shot stops, as it drops down behind her body, that’s when we stopped filming, was when I finished the take on that. I may have even done a second take on it.

David Read:
Wild, man. Those are the moments that you never…

Martin Wood:
I haven’t looked back at this for a long time.

David Read:
You never forget.

Martin Wood:
No.

David Read:
I remember that whole day. The whole day.

Martin Wood:
I can imagine.

David Read:
I was a senior in high school. Let’s move on. Thank you for sharing that. I didn’t know that.

Martin Wood:
Not a problem.

David Read:
“The Storm” and “The Eye” in Atlantis.

Martin Wood:
I love those two.

David Read:
This is an amazing two hours where everyone is on their A game. You have amazing guest stars. You have amazing acting from your folks. I think that Joe’s best line is in this show, in my opinion, where Kolya says something like, “Shepherd, how’s this for sincerity? Dr. Weir is dead.” And the storm is pouring all over him and he’s committed, focusing all of his anger into this microphone, “I am going to kill you.” And it’s like, “I believe that.” And he gets a shot off at him, which sends his ass through the gates. But Tory told me that so many of the cast got sick from being in the rain. And this was right before their break. And someone gave them all bottles of wine or champagne or something as a thank you. What do you remember from that?

Martin Wood:
One of the things that I had said when we first started setting this up with Ray, I said, “Ray, it has to be heavy.”

David Read:
Ray Douglas?

Martin Wood:
Yeah, it can’t just be rain. It has to be heavy. He said, “Heavy means a lot of water, and a lot of water means containment and weight.” And I went, “Yeah, we need it to be battering them down.” And he goes, “That’s really hard to take if you’re an actor ’cause it’s one thing to wet an actor down and then stand them in rain…” Because I can almost always put rain in front of them and have a little bit falling on them. But in this case, I needed a lot coming down so that it was hair and eyes, so that it was… so that they couldn’t see, so they couldn’t move quickly.

David Read:
It soaked.

Martin Wood:
And a lot of that needed to be happening, and continuously. It needed the takes in there… If you start watching it, you go, “This take is a long take,” and you’re not even seeing some of the length that we did with some of them, because the other thing I wanted to do when I planned to do it was “Get them in there, shoot it, and get them out.” It wasn’t “Take two, take three, take four.” You wanted to get it in that one take. And I have cameras in the rain. I have cameras shooting through the rain just so that I’ve got different angles, so I’m covering everything as much as I can.

David Read:
So, you’re trying to get all the coverage …

Martin Wood:
As quickly as I can.

David Read:
… simultaneously in one of these?

Martin Wood:
Yeah, so that they’re not having to be out there all the time. I remember on a couple of things… I think David was the one that held up the best ’cause he had to be out there the longest. He and Joe had to be out there so long. And Joe is funny ’cause there are certain times when he’s like, “Nah, I don’t wanna do that.” And you’re like, “We have to.”

David Read:
“You got a paycheck, buddy. There’s the line. You stand on that, even if it’s raining on you.” Did they have wetsuits underneath?

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
OK, so that’s something.

Martin Wood:
Except for the fact that the rain comes from the top. And that means it goes down into the wetsuit. It’s not like you’re being sprayed with water.

David Read:
You can’t keep the water really warm necessarily like they’re bathing in a bath.

Martin Wood:
No.

David Read:
You would get steam. All the cameras would fog up.

Martin Wood:
The other problem with it is it’s very hard to keep the water warm when you’re recycling it that much. When there’s that much water going through the thing, it’s really hard to keep it going. And I think that for me, what happened is that we had to make certain promises to them. And just so you know, anybody that works with me, any of the actors that work with me know that I do this all the time. If I’m gonna ask you to be there, I’m gonna be there too. So, I’m standing in the rain the entire time.

David Read:
In your shorts, I’m sure.

Martin Wood:
Yeah, I did. I’ll call action and cut standing there with you, this far away from you, so that when it comes down to, I cannot take this anymore, they know that I’m standing there.

David Read:
Not only are you a team player, but you’re experiencing it exactly the same amount.

Martin Wood:
I think it’s important to them. It certainly would be if I was an actor. I think it would be important to me to know that it’s not just somebody who’s warm and dry calling action and cut over there. In Sanctuary, when we did “Next Tuesday,” it was me being in the tank with Amanda and Robin for five days. Not ever getting out of it. So, again, that we experienced it. In “Grace Under Pressure,” same thing. I was in there with David and Amanda the whole time. With Rick swimming underwater, which is fantastic. I had air, he did not. And he swims over, and he flips the switch. And I’m like, “OK, Rick, go up for air. Go up for air.” He’s like, “Ah, swim back,” and he swims back. And I remember the cameraman, Nathaniel, and I, we’re both under and we both have air, and we’re both sitting there going, “He’s not going up.” ‘Cause I expected to do it in cuts. And he goes, “Nah, let’s do it in one.” And he did it in one. The whole swing was in one.

David Read:
He’s got the lung capacity for it. Corin Nemec did the same thing, activating the rings and switching the crystals around in “Descent.” He was very proud of that. There was a jiggle in the crystals, the plexiglass or whatever it was, and they had to cut away from it. And it was like, “Oh my God, he actually did the take?” “Visual effects, fix it, fix it.” You have to give honor to that. But what an extraordinary sequence when that water drops from the ceiling. Man. These are amazing sequences and you have to–

Martin Wood:
These are some of my favorites, especially getting to do it at the level that we were able to do it in the earlier days of Atlantis, where we were playing around with how much we could do. This was one of those all-out kind of sequences.

David Read:
Built on years of figuring it out on SG-1 and what that team was capable of doing.

Martin Wood:
Very much so.

David Read:
Which built a lot on MacGyver. How much time do you have, Martin?

Martin Wood:
Probably another 15 minutes.

David Read:
15 minutes. All right. The other thing– How do you green screen those shots? When Kolya’s got Rodney by the scruff of his outfit, and this green screen behind with all the pouring rain, how do you key that to replace the background with ocean?

Martin Wood:
Let me see if I can find it.

David Read:
When you say, “You still need me,” this would be the beginning of Part Two, I’m pretty sure.

Martin Wood:
I’ve got it here. I’m looking at the sequence right now with the three of them out there.

David Read:
Waterproof walkie-talkies.

Martin Wood:
They were all destroyed. Everything that was out in the rain was destroyed.

David Read:
I’ve got a Genii walkie-talkie right here. Genii baby mom bear walkie-talkie.

Martin Wood:
I’m trying to get to… there it is. OK. The shots of David don’t have any rain in the foreground.

David Read:
I see.

Martin Wood:
They don’t have any rain, foreground or background. So, I can put him on green screen. I can have rain on him, but there’s no rain in between. So, what I’m doing is we have a clean green screen. And he’s got rain coming down on him in his little bit there. But the heavy rain foreground and background is all viz effect.

David Read:
A clean plate.

Martin Wood:
The only reason you would have rain on him is so that the rain was dripping down his face still. So, you have something very close to him putting water on top of him.

David Read:
Chantal Leo wants to know, “Martin, what is a favorite single scene from Sanctuary?” She says, “Mine is the Magnus/Druitt scene,” stick tongue out face.

Martin Wood:
When Druitt is dying?

David Read:
I’m not sure. She says, yeah. Chantal Leo, can you clarify?

Martin Wood:
I gotta tell you that one of my favorite Magnus/Druitt scenes is the fight in London. In the rain. That was another one in the rain. Amanda, if you ever ask Amanda, it’s like, “Yeah, Martin can’t stop from putting me in soaking wet period stuff.”

David Read:
He knows you can act.

Martin Wood:
That fight was one of my favorites in Sanctuary because it was such a brutal fight.

Martin Wood:
Amanda does a lot of it and Chris does a lot of it. There’s so many scenes that I loved in Sanctuary. I think the whole idea of having Amanda twin herself with some of that twinning that I did when she went back into old London.

David Read:
Magnus was alive.

Martin Wood:
Ian Tracey had to twin himself as well. Some of that stuff is some of the best times on Sanctuary. I have trouble differentiating between the dramatic scenes that I loved, the writing and the acting in, and the scenes where I just had so much fun doing them. I think “Next Tuesday” was one of the ones that I had so much fun doing. “Kush” was another one. I really enjoyed “Kush” because it was so truncated. It was five days that it was in a plane. It was nice to work with actors that close, and it was very tactile, it was very much like we were all on top of each other and the cameras were in there and we were all shooting very tight. It was one of those very tight things. I had a good time with them.

David Read:
Admiral Minell, we’ve heard epic tales of the cut scenes and outtakes from the “Avenger 2.0″ action sequence, the second episode that featured Jay. Do you remember anything about that? About what was cut? This is one that was dropped into my lap. So, Jay shuts down the Stargate network and he and Amanda have to go off world under fire from Baal’s Jaffa to try and fix the DHD that’s propped open.

Martin Wood:
Which episode is that?

David Read:
It’s Season Seven. So, it’s, “Avenger 2.0.”

Martin Wood:
“Avenger 2.0?”

Martin Wood:
I’m trying to think.

David Read:
Let me see here. The early half of Season Seven, and that was the second and last appearance of Jay Felger. That was obviously Patrick McKenna.

Martin Wood:
Who was hysterical.

David Read:
So, that’s this one here. Thank you, GateWorld. And Carter with her Carter special.

Martin Wood:
This is the one where there was something about ejecting shells out of that.

David Read:
Yes.

Martin Wood:
That shut us down ’cause they were blasting off into– Were they hitting Patrick?

David Read:
That sounds very likely.

Martin Wood:
I can’t remember. I think it was something like that. Let me quickly scroll into it.

David Read:
I have a quick question.

Martin Wood:
Yes?

David Read:
So, when the Stargate’s on location like this, is there always a wire on top securing it from falling over that’s always painted out?

Martin Wood:
No.

David Read:
But the Universe Gate in “Air” was on location, definitely.

Martin Wood:
It’s very much a solid structure. ‘Cause there would be no way we could secure it, ’cause sometimes it’s in the middle of a desert.

David Read:
That’s true.

Martin Wood:
I’m letting you down on this one ’cause I can’t get it to come up.

David Read:
This one came in for us there, but there’s so many stories, man.

Martin Wood:
Yes, there are.

David Read:
That’s the thing.

Martin Wood:
I think if I do my homework a little bit better, I’ll have more for you.

David Read:
You know what? There’s always next time.

Martin Wood:
I appreciate that very much.

David Read:
I appreciate you doing this.

Martin Wood:
I appreciate you keep calling.

David Read:
Can I move forward? We only have 10 minutes left.

Martin Wood:
Yes.

David Read:
Or nine minutes. Jim Donaldson, “Have you ever considered sitting down and writing a memoir on directing? Would love to read one.” Has it crossed your mind?

Martin Wood:
No. I think maybe at some point, when I stop, I might think about it, but it feels like I’m in the middle of it right now, so I’m not sure what I would write about. I have a billion stories, but honestly, I think I’ll wait till I’m done and then look back at it and say, “OK.” What I’m doing now is I’m mentoring a bunch of directors from the Director’s Guild and things like that. I do a bunch of different things and had a couple shadow me, and are now directing… A friend of mine is directing her twentieth movie.

Martin Wood:
She shadowed me for a bunch of time. Peter Benson, the actor?

David Read:
Name rings a bell.

Martin Wood:
Peter did the same thing. He shadowed me. Paula MacArthur, who goes by Paula L., is the one that’s just finishing her 20th thing. Robin Dunne today started shooting a movie in Kelowna. And Robin and I have been writing partners. He writes, I direct a bunch of his stuff. Lately we’ve been doing a lot of it.

David Read:
The Dunner, you’re making an appearance in his upcoming movie. The Dunner. So, I’d pull it up, except they changed the keys around. But that’s really cool, man.

Martin Wood:
Robin and I have been together ever since we did a really, really bad horror movie in Romania in 1997. I took him to Romania with me. And we became best friends then. And we have been there ever since. Even on Sanctuary, we didn’t cast him. I cast him without seeing an audition. I brought him in, convinced Amanda and Damian that he was the guy. And, of course, he became Will instantly. And now he’s–

David Read:
He has this Tom Hanks level of charm.

Martin Wood:
And he’s directing and acting and writing, and he does it all. He’s a real renaissance guy.

David Read:
Good for him. That’s great.

Martin Wood:
And we have a film club. We’re in our third year of film club. I don’t know if I told you about this before.

David Read:
No.

Martin Wood:
Every Sunday night at six o’clock, Robin Dunne, his wife Farrah, myself, my wife Diane, Paula L. and her husband Tim MacArthur, and when we started, it was Lucy Guest, another director. We started a film club where at the beginning of the season we all put in eight movies that we wanna watch, and then we watch. And every Sunday, no matter where we are in the world, we really try and get together. Robin is shooting today, so we moved it to Tuesday, when his day off. We have done this now for three years, and it’s really fascinating. It’s fascinating because it’s a group of friends, but there’s three directors on it, and we all have different perspectives on it. And Farrah is an actor and my wife is a screenwriter, and Tim has worked in the industry since he started work. And we all have such varying ways of looking at things. It’s a fascinating thing to get to know people like that as directors and in what they see when they’re watching a film. We’ve talked about wanting to watch each other’s films. We all see each other’s films all the time. But watch as a film club film, Continuum or an episode of Sanctuary or an episode of Travelers or something like that, where we can show the other directors what we’ve done and then have commentary about that. But I think we’re all afraid of what others are gonna say about it.

David Read:
You did what you could with what you had and anything that you were given, but y’all have a creative drip that won’t shut off. So, you’re consuming this media: “Ooh, I like that,” or “That was cool,” or “I wouldn’t go near that.” And what it does is you’re logging this away, and when you go to sleep you’re assimilating it into your subconscious and it becomes new ideas because this is your field.

Martin Wood:
So much. I actually changed the way I shoot this one murder mystery series I’m doing right now. I changed the way I shot it after the first one because on a film club film, I’d seen a certain way of blocking and thought, “Oh, I’m gonna use that from now on.” And I’ve done two more films since then, and it really shows up on the screen that–

David Read:
The voices that you let in are the voices that come out. It’s all the same thing. Wow. Hopefully those are good traits.

Martin Wood:
Very much. I hope so ’cause there’s… We notice that it’s so easy to say, “I don’t like that. I don’t like that.” But for the most part, when you have a bunch of, I hate to use this word, artists together–

David Read:
Creatives.

Martin Wood:
I never call us filmmakers. I never call us that. I call us the directors, even though we all write and we all direct and we all do everything. But when you have us all together, we see the same things. We just see them a different way. We see them: “OK, I’m gonna forgive that. I’m not gonna forgive this. I’m gonna use that. I can’t use this. How could you talk about using that because it’s so difficult to do this?” And it’s fun to watch. It’s like watching… when I go back to watch Stargates, and they’re so long ago and they’re the beginning of me learning how to do this, I watch and I just cringe at some stuff that I go, “Oh, man, I really did that well.” I forgot I used to do that. And if anybody’s watching any of the stuff that I’m shooting these days, the Virgin Rivers and that kinda stuff, they’ll see that I almost never do singles. I almost never do a type of single like this. And watching some of the stuff from Season Three, I’m like, “Wow, all I did were singles. I hardly did any overs at all. I just did these things.”

David Read:
You were getting started, man. You can only kick yourself around so much. Martin then is not the Martin that you are today.

Martin Wood:
No, I wish there was …

David Read:
And not the Martin that was influenced by …

Martin Wood:
… some of the stuff. If I had a chance to do it again.

David Read:
… Amanda and Damian, and all the people who weave through your life.

Martin Wood:
It’s very true.

David Read:
I have two questions that dovetail into one another. One is from a fan and then one is mine, and then we’re done. “Martin, I thought the story about your dad was very heartwarming.” Jeremy Heiner says, “My dad was the person who got me into Stargate and we bonded over Sci-Fi Fridays when we watched SG-1, Atlantis, and Battlestar together. What was your dad’s favorite episode of Stargate?”

Martin Wood:
Oddly, we mentioned it today, “A Matter of Time” was his favorite.

David Read:
Started with it. Isn’t that weird?

Martin Wood:
His second favorite is my favorite, which is “Small Victories.”

David Read:
The sub.

Martin Wood:
“Small Victories,” he always loved the beginning and the end. “Lost City” was one of his favorites, and the Atlantis pilot was one of his favorites. But I think in terms of SG-1, “Matter of Time” was one of the ones that he talked about a lot. “Small Victories,” he asked me once, he said, “What’s your favorite?” I said, “Small Victories.” He said, “That’s my second favorite.”

David Read:
“Do you know what I had to do with that torpedo tube? They locked me in there like a vault.”

Martin Wood:
I think that’s why he liked it ’cause I had that story of having to get the shot myself.

David Read:
“Well, I guess I’m going in.”

Martin Wood:
“In the Line of Duty” was another one for him.

David Read:
Great episode with Amanda. She was fantastic. And then finally, tell me how fatherhood has made you a better man.

Martin Wood:
A better man? It gave me a sense of responsibility that I didn’t know you needed, and you absolutely need it to be grounded. It’s something– I’ve been looking at pictures lately of my son, who I used to take to set, and there are pictures of him sort of sitting there with headphones on while there’s guns going off, and he’d sit on my lap, and today, he took me for brunch with my two daughters, and he’s 6’5″ and a monster. He’s a monster. He was a rower for a number of years, and he’s so strong right now. And the reason I’m bringing that up is, A, I’m proud of him, but I also see the difference between the little tiny guy that I used to carry around and this guy that can literally lift me up and carry me around. There is a thing that goes along with fatherhood, which is it’s all about responsibility. You have responsibility for these people, and then you get to see sort of what that… It’s like teaching somebody for their whole life. I taught school for 11 years. I watched 400 students go out into the world, and I work with some of them sometimes now. And they come up and say the most beautiful things about what they learned from me, and I have a family that does the same thing all the time. They just go, “What I learned from you,” without saying that ’cause they’re too proud to say, “I learned this from you, Dad.” But what’s really interesting, and again, this may be in the weeds for your audience, David, but my son went out to work on his first movie set two weeks ago. He really wants to be an assistant director. He’s so creative, he’s writing his own scripts, he’s shooting his own stuff, but he really wanted to be on an actual set so he could actually watch what was going on with it, not from the perspective of my son. So, he wasn’t on one of my sets, he was on Paula L’s set. And what happened was at the end of the two weeks, he called me on their wrap, and he said, “Dad, I wanna tell you something, and this may or may not make sense to you, but I had no idea you worked this hard.” And I went, “Oh.” He said, “I can’t believe. I worked my butt off for two weeks, and I have a job that I just move stuff around and I stop and I wait until the rest of it goes on,” but he watches Paula, and he watches the director work. He said, “You never stop. You’re on it from before you start ’til an hour afterwards, you’re on.” And what was interesting to me was that he’d never seen that, but for his life, for 19 years, he’s seen me come and go at the opposite ends of it, like going to work now, coming home from work, but didn’t have an appreciation for what that was. It was really interesting to hear him say that ’cause you don’t think about that as a dad. You think about the time when you land at home, and now I’m a dad again.

David Read:
I had similar conversations with my father, who was an EMS helicopter pilot for 30 years and flew for nearly 17,000 flight hours, and there are just certain depths that you go through that your kids don’t ever know unless they get near enough to be put into your shoes, and he’s experiencing that for himself. Thank you for sharing that story.

Martin Wood:
David, go give him a big hug from me and for everybody else.

David Read:
Yes.

Martin Wood:
It’s one of those things where I wish I could hug my dad a lot more than I ever did. I was a big hugger. But you saw in those pictures, that’s what we did. We mugged and all that kind of stuff. But I would say hug your dad.

David Read:
Yep. I appreciate you taking the time with me today and happy Father’s Day, Martin.

Martin Wood:
Thank you. And to you and …

David Read:
For real.

Martin Wood:
… everybody out there.

David Read:
You have always been wonderful for coming on. So, you get going, and I’ll text you soon.

Martin Wood:
David, thank you so much.

David Read:
Bye.

Martin Wood:
Take care. Bye-bye.

David Read:
That’s Martin Wood, producer and director of Stargate. I really love what I do. I love sharing people’s stories and uncovering aspects of them, people that I’ve known for 20 years, parts of them that I didn’t know were there. And the fact that they trust me enough with their energy and their time to come on and share these stories with you means all the world to me. Thank you, Martin. My name is David Read. You’re watching the Stargate Oral History Project Dial the Gate. If you enjoy this content and you wanna see more of it on YouTube, click that Like button. It does make a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. And if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. And clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. One of these days, I will get through that without slipping up in some way. Thanks to my producers Antony Rawling, Kevin Weaver, and Linda “GateGabber” Furey. My moderating team Antony, Jeremy, Kevin, Lockwatcher, Marcia, Raj, and Jakub. I can’t do this show without you guys. You guys really pinch hitted me for this one at the last minute. Is that what that means? Martin’s schedule is very chaotic, so generally, he can only give me a few days’ notice. So, yesterday at five o’clock he was like, “I’ll be there tomorrow,” and it’s like, “Mods, what can you do?” And we made it work. And you guys are amazing, and Martin is amazing for sharing all these stories. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb who keeps DialtheGate.com up and running. A number of shows are gonna be heading your way for the rest of this season as we continue to move forward. I am waiting to hear back from two right now that haven’t locked in dates yet. A certain replicator that hasn’t been on the show before, and a certain terraforming ship copy of another civilization in their image that hasn’t been on the show before. But once we can nail this down, I’ll publish the dates, because I realize that putting their names out, even though they’ve agreed to come on, before we’ve got dates is bad mojo. So, we’re gonna keep it at that. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in, and I’ll see you on the other side.