Stargate’s writer, producer and director returns to Dial the Gate to reflect on his time on the franchise and take your questions LIVE!

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Greetings, everyone, and welcome to Episode number 410 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. It means a lot to me that you’re here with me for this episode. Peter DeLuise, writer, director, and producer of Stargate is with me for this hour, hour and a half. We’ll see how it goes. If you are in the YouTube live stream, get your questions over to my moderators. They will get it over to me and I will get a few of them over to Peter. It means so much to have you.

Peter DeLuise:
And if you need to, you should pee now because it’s gonna be a nonstop hour and a half of gold Stargate stuff.

David Read:
Gold Stargate stuff. Pee now or forever hold your peace. Very good. I appreciate you coming back around, my friend. How are you?

Peter DeLuise:
It’s my turn in the rotation.

David Read:
It does feel that way, doesn’t it, at this point? I would never have imagined– I only could imagine six years ago that wanting to create the archive of the American television version of Stargate’s ongoing series was actually going to be a thing. And Peter, I have you in large part to thank for making that a reality. And the fact that I’ve had the privilege to know you as well as I have and consider you a friend is so important to me, and it means everything that you’re back. So, thank you for being here.

Peter DeLuise:
Thanks. That’s very, very sweet of you. And thank you for memorializing the project known as Stargate so that everybody in the future can pull the curtain back, and see what was going on behind the scenes.

David Read:
Speaking of future since we last had you on, there’s been a certain update. There is a fourth Stargate series coming, and it’s going to be largely shooting in London, UK. Martin Gero is helming. Joseph Mallozzi and Brad Wright are consulting producers. You’ve even got Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich executive producing this thing. How did you find out? What are your thoughts? Just lay it on me.

Peter DeLuise:
I found out by watching the show, Dial the Gate, when you guys were each in the corner there, and you and Joe and Brad Wright and Martin were all making the announcement. And I went, “This is great, you know? Wonderful news. Mazel tov.” I became Jewish for a second.

David Read:
Did you think that this would happen? Or did you think it was a question of when and who?

Peter DeLuise:
I had hoped. I’m used to disappointment. And it was such a fertile franchise. It just seems strange that shows like Star Wars and Star Trek got to keep going, and wonderful shows like Stargate didn’t get, according to me, their due. I’m glad that they’re revisiting that. Absolutely. As soon as I heard, I fired off an email to Joe Mallozzi and Brad Wright as well, saying, “Hey, how can I contribute?” And they were like, “Well, we’re consulting producers. It’s all Martin’s show.” And I was like, “Yeah, well, of course. I don’t have Martin’s contact, but thanks for letting me know.” We’ll see if something comes of that.

David Read:
I would hope that a piece of it would get involved in Vancouver at some point. It’s all …

Peter DeLuise:
It doesn’t have to. I mean, they have airplanes …

David Read:
That’s true.

Peter DeLuise:
… and everything. I could travel …

David Read:
They do have these flying things.

Peter DeLuise:
I’ve been to England. I’m told I understand most of how they speak the language there.

David Read:
I would be totally down to see your name in that opening title somewhere. That would mean a great deal to me. It’s interesting. You said, “I’ve grown accustomed to disappointment,” and I know that there’s a few hundred people out there either now or at some point in the future who listen to that, who are just going to sigh and go, “Uh-huh.” That’s true. And the fact now that after 15 years, we’re just a few months away from the anniversary of “Gauntlet,” SGU’s final episode. 15 years ago. it’s about time that someone finally got their act together and said, “Look, something is working here.” As far as I’m aware, SG-1 has returned to Netflix and has already cracked the weekly top 10, and that includes new content. So, this is all good news. A bunch of us are over here going, “Uh, yeah.”

Peter DeLuise:
It makes sense. And financially, it makes sense to reeducate the next generation and to get them excited about the show before they introduce the next one, the sequel. And it’s the same universe as per your information and what Martin was putting out. I was glad to hear it was the same universe and not a rewrite or a reinterpretation.

David Read:
That’s right. I think soft reboot would generally apply here. I think of Jurassic Park, where it’s set in the same canon, but it doesn’t require participation of any earlier components. However, much like how Jurassic World, they seem to be doing that now with Brad and Joe, and frankly, Martin Gero. So, he wrote on all three shows. That was number one for me, the most important thing, that when that Zoom flickered on 9, 10 days before everyone else found out, and Martin’s face– I was thrilled to see– I knew that Joe had been the one who invited me and Darren on, and then Brad was there, and it was great to see Brad. And then I saw Martin, and it’s like, “Oh, something’s coming.” But the second thing that put me at ease, and has ever since, is when Brad said, “This feels like Stargate.” And I have loved everything that Brad has produced largely. I can’t think of anything that I’ve seen of his that I didn’t enjoy, including Travelers. And it was like, if he says that, then I believe it, because if it wasn’t the case, I don’t think he would have said it. Now, is it gonna be different? Yeah. Is it gonna have a more modern tone? Yeah. The question is, how much? And I imagine you’re just as curious about it as we are.

Peter DeLuise:
Of course. The only component would be the Stargate. I mean, it’s right there in the title. So, that part, and the mythology behind the Stargate, would probably have to stay intact, if you’re gonna say– The network of Stargates and how you can travel from there, ’cause it’s still the most amazing door into any story. All you need to do is walk through that ring, and anything could be on the other side.

David Read:
That’s exactly right. That and beaming down. I would agree.

Peter DeLuise:
Even beaming down is far more limited, ’cause you always had to be on a Goldilocks planet, or usually had to be on a Goldilocks planet. They did use spacesuits on Star Trek once in a while. But the idea that you had to get close enough with the spaceship and then beam down, so it’s, in a way, a much more imperfect way of telling a story, whereas you’re just completely blind once you turn that Stargate on, and literally anything could be on the other side of that thing.

David Read:
That’s certainly the case, and the advantage here is it’s us, and it’s not some idealized version of us. These are characters that we can aspire to, but not because they’ve achieved some moral perfection, near God perfection in terms of how they examine their universe. It’s The Right Stuff. I think Brad said that at one point, which I’ve not seen, to my detriment.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s a good one. I think you would enjoy that.

David Read:
It’s on my list. I need to bump it up a little bit higher. What do you think– You’re a fan of this. What are you most looking forward to watching, and what do you– I’m curious if there’s anything that they– Because things have to change with every iteration. Every Stargate show introduced its own network of Gates. What are the changes that you would expect, and is there anything that you would be like, “Not only do I hope that this will happen, I think it needs to happen to evolve?” I’m curious, if anything.

Peter DeLuise:
With the advent of visual effects and AI, there’s almost nothing you couldn’t try to achieve, and you have to keep a cutting edge. So, at the time, we had cutting-edge technology and weaponry and drones. Drones were still a new thing, and not everybody knew what a Predator drone was, and yet we were using those on our show, and the M.A.L.P. and all those advancements. So, with the advent of robotics the way they are now, you would have to use something in that regard. And I’m interested in how they set up the team. If you look at Stargate, the team dynamic between the four key members of SG-1, you know, there was a military side and a non-military side. And, of course, to validate the colonel’s leadership, he needed a military underling in Carter, but she also had to be incredibly smart and help us. It fell on the Carter character always to explain, to give us the exposition, and then to dumb it down for O’Neill. And then, if it wasn’t Carter doing it, then of course it was Daniel doing it, and he seemed to be the moral center. That was the function that he seemed to serve. And of course, Teal’c was the brawn and the alien element. You always had to have an alien element on the team, and so Worf comes to mind on Star Trek and stuff like that, and then, of course, Data comes to mind, where you gotta have an Other on the team as well. And then the way that they all deal with each other, the North and South and East and the West was just brilliant, the original inception of that. So, I’m anxious to see how they put the team together and what technology they use at their disposal. I mean, ’cause if you remember from things like Star Trek, they had the tricorder and it would do a bunch of things. So, it was like a portable sensor array. And then also McCoy had the thing he would …

David Read:
The probe, yeah.

Peter DeLuise:
… put near you. Wait, you have a tricorder in your hand, but you need the former saltshaker. You know the story behind that? The saltshaker?

David Read:
I think so, but for those who don’t know, share.

Peter DeLuise:
I believe that in the salt-sucker episode, the props made this really fancy saltshaker, and Roddenberry went, “What is that?” And they went, “It’s a saltshaker.” And he goes, “No, no, no. It can’t be it. People have to recognize it as a saltshaker. It’s gotta be a–” So, he invalidated that part, and they went, “Well, use it for McCoy so he can use it. Put it near your face while he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.” Science said it.

David Read:
So, the original saltshaker was adapted into a medical device.

Peter DeLuise:
If I’m remembering correctly, I think the saltshaker was repurposed as McCoy’s little doohickey thing that he was always holding near potential patients. Why did I tell you all that stuff? Repurposing things.

David Read:
Stuff evolves. Yes, exactly. The technology. They designed stealthy salt and pepper shakers.

Peter DeLuise:
That was my original point, the M.A.L.P. was big and clunky, but it still had its function. You could put weapons on it or you could put claws on it or you could put sensors on it. And we had drones, flying drones to look. At the time, we couldn’t imagine those little quadcopter-style drones that are in use all the time now. I mean, I’ve seen wonderful feature films where they used a swarm of what looks like drones, and they all have explosive devices in them, and they just send them towards the enemy, and they’re helpless to overcome them, ’cause there’s only so many that you can shoot before all the drones overtake you. So, they have an enormous amount of technology and a much more sophisticated audience who’s used to a lot more cool tech. So, they’re gonna have to up their game many times over.

David Read:
I think that by and large, the audience is more aware now than they were with the advent of all of this technology. So, there’s going to be a greater need for an even greater attention to detail when you utilize a lot of those technologies to tell stories. I imagine drones or some other version of a flying MALP will have to be involved with this new iteration of the show, because if we’re still going to uncharted worlds, you’re going to need to throw something ahead of us that’s going to be able to talk back. And I don’t think it’s going to be a six-wheeled, basically the size of a beetle …

Peter DeLuise:
It was bigger.

David Read:
… that has a couple of car batteries on the back of it …

Peter DeLuise:
It was remote-controlled, so …

David Read:
… that’s got remote controls, so …

Peter DeLuise:
It was almost as big as a Smart car. You’re right.

David Read:
That’s right. It was enormous.

Peter DeLuise:
We’ve had combat soldiers, for the last decade, have had a flying apparatus that they were able to send ahead and look and see what was ahead in the battlefield. Thermal imaging, and there’s all sorts of wonderful things. You know what? How I should have answered your original question is, I’m looking for the heart, the humanity, and the humor. Because that, for me, that’s always the core of what any good show has. Whether it be science fiction or not, you gotta be able to relate to it. So, it’s gotta have a certain humanity to it. You gotta relate to the characters. And if it doesn’t have humor, I’m probably not gonna be that invested in it, because humor happens even in the most dramatic of situations. Even at funerals, people laugh. And if it doesn’t have heart, then there’s no reason to stop your life and give over your attention to this other entertainment, if you’re not rooting for the protagonists. So, it’s three H’s. I’ll go back to those three H’s every time.

David Read:
It makes a lot of sense. We’re putting these people that we are hoping that we can aspire to into extraordinary situations and just watching how they react. That was the thing that I always loved about any of Brad’s stuff. No matter how mundane a situation, you give that man a typewriter or a pencil and paper, and …

Peter DeLuise:
True enough.

David Read:
… it’s the interactions that they have with each other, wherever that space is, either fantastical or mundane, that makes it work. And if you have the right writer to pull it off, it’s like, “This is gonna be entertaining to watch,” because everyone has something to say if you’re listening, and these characters will have something to say. So, it’s something that I’m really looking forward to.

Peter DeLuise:
Me too.

David Read:
ArabianLady wants to know, having written and directed the past series, could you pull a thread from the past that you participated in creating that you would enjoy seeing carried forward in this next iteration? I’m curious as well. That’s an astute point. ‘Cause there were so many. You had Unas, you had Jaffa, there’s all kinds of things that you helped give birth to.

Peter DeLuise:
When the original enemy was the Goa’uld, and we had symbiotes taking over humanoid figures, i.e. humans from Earth and also Unas from other kind of– I immediately thought, you know, the origin story’s always so great. I didn’t introduce this thread, but I don’t know how you would introduce the premise, your ongoing premise of the Stargate system, without also having the original gatekeepers, the people who seeded the gates all throughout the galaxy. I don’t know how you don’t talk about that, or at least touch on that, in terms of a thread. I don’t know what I would’ve introduced that wasn’t already there. I just did deeper dives into stuff that was already there, pretty much. The Genii, I do remember, but that wasn’t my idea. I think I was tasked with that first episode, and the idea that there was another human group that conveniently spoke English, but that also hated the people that we hate. So, the enemy of our enemy is my friend.

David Read:
For sure. And that was a complex culture that I think we really got our mileage out of, and I’m looking forward to talking about them here in the future. Matthewhammond wanted to know, whenever you had a chance to work with a family member on the show, was it equal parts excitement, trepidation? David always talked about you saying, “Don’t screw this up for me,” or “Don’t embarrass me,” tongue in cheek, of course. I mean, obviously Dom, or was it just another day at the office for you when these folks were working there?

Peter DeLuise:
I had worked with …

David Read:
And Michael.

Peter DeLuise:
And Michael as well in “Wormhole X-Treme!” He was so funny in that. I had worked with them on other things, but I was super excited that I got to, ’cause I was living up here in Vancouver and they’re in the States, so it was a great opportunity to spend some time with them. But I always appreciated their humor and thought that they were really insightful. And I know David tells that story, “Don’t embarrass me,” but I knew that because there was relationship-type material with the Carter character, I knew to try to take that a little bit seriously. And he’s my little brother, so naturally I went, “You can’t be silly. You’ve gotta service that story, because that’s the function of your character.” That, and bringing detective work into the fold. And, of course, that was a thankless job, ’cause everybody wanted Carter’s character to be with O’Neill. And so he was this major third wheel. He’s the boyfriend you don’t– So, when David often goes to conventions, he talks about the vitriol where they were like, “Get outta there. We want Carter to be with O’Neill.”

David Read:
You can’t, though, if you’re going to keep the team going the way that it’s going.

Peter DeLuise:
Of course.

David Read:
One of them has to go.

Peter DeLuise:
Have you discussed that …

David Read:
You can’t have direct– With David?

Peter DeLuise:
Have you discussed that a lot? About the …

David Read:
Or in general.

Peter DeLuise:
No, sorry. The whole O’Neill and Carter can never consummate their love for each other because they’re both in the military and the Air Force not having it. That whole thing?

David Read:
Yes.

Peter DeLuise:
And all those inventive ways of trying to, “Ah, here’s my resignation, kiss,” during the Groundhog Day stuff. And, “It’s in the future,” and “Moebius.” And I guess we could kiss now because it’s all over now.

David Read:
Or alternate realities.

Peter DeLuise:
Alternate realities was super fun too, and this is apropos of nothing, but I’m just gonna jump to it. It was on the boat, and they both, the nerd versions of them, had to go and seek him out. And I remembered that I thought they would look even more foolish if they had to wear those life preservers, which was not in the script, by the way. And I went ahead and I just helped myself to the life preservers that were on the boat that we were using. And I said, “Put these on. I want you two guys to look vulnerable and silly.” The boat owner doesn’t have to wear the lifeboats, but you guys …

David Read:
But they do because they’re clients.

Peter DeLuise:
And then the boat was still tied up to the dock, and I made them wear those silly lifeboats. And then, to her credit, you remember Amanda Tapping? When she pulled it off, it messed up her hair, and she allowed herself to. I was like, “That is so funny.” So, the heart of that, and then the idea of– Later they admitted their mutual attraction for each other, and they, “Oh, I usually, I don’t–” But, “Oh, OK. You like, I like you. That’s cool.” And I was like, “Oh, good. We went there. I love that.”

David Read:
So, a certain production designer shared coming down to set with his camera to get a certain photo in the back of the jumper of two love birds making out. Do you remember this story?

Peter DeLuise:
No. Not yet. I don’t remember it yet.

David Read:
James Robbins and I were going through …

Peter DeLuise:
I’m a big fan of James Robbins. Hey, James, if you’re watching. I love you. Mean it.

David Read:
… his images. And he got some great photographs of the sparks flying while the sparks were flying. And I think he said that you asked him to take, someone asked him to take them, and they just kept on churning out the sparks. And so, he captured those tender moments during a take. And they’re great pictures. And fandom hasn’t seen them.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s unfortunate. I even remember thinking, wouldn’t it be funny– I grew up on Love American Style, and it always had the fireworks at the beginning of the show. Most of the watchers probably have never seen it, but if you go on YouTube and you watch the opening credits to Love American Style, it had all the fireworks. And there were many shows where if two people finally kissed, they would be in front of fireworks. And the idea being that it was parallel between the feeling that they were having inside and also they were surrounded by fireworks. So, I was like, “Well, that’s a natural.” And they’re shooting, the Jaffa that are surrounding the ship are shooting the crap out of the– So, we might as well do a lot of sparks when they finally kiss. And of course, it was triggered by that. So, it wasn’t so subtle. But I liked it. And of course, they had to stay lip locked while the …

David Read:
It was good stuff. There were only so many opportunities for things like that to happen, and fandom did enjoy it. And if you do think that you’re about to be taken out by a bunch of aliens with plasma weapons, would you not say, “Hey, I wanna spend this last moment with you?”

Peter DeLuise:
You should’ve. You should’ve kissed her.

David Read:
With you more than just with you?

Peter DeLuise:
Should’ve kissed her.

David Read:
“I should’ve kissed her.” You don’t wanna stand in front of St. Peter saying, “I should’ve kissed her.”

Peter DeLuise:
No.

David Read:
So, absolutely.

Peter DeLuise:
Taylor Swift, Tay-Tay has that, “I shoulda, shoulda kissed him.” It’s a great– You don’t wanna be sitting there thinking, “I shoulda kissed him.” You shoulda just kissed her.

David Read:
That’s right. Consent.

Peter DeLuise:
Just kiss her. Only if you have enthusiastic consent, of course.

David Read:
That’s it. As long as it’s mutual. You can tell.

Peter DeLuise:
And enthusiastic. Don’t forget the enthuse …

David Read:
When someone is …

Peter DeLuise:
That’s my favorite one. Enthusiasm.

David Read:
Absolutely. Otherwise, eh.

Peter DeLuise:
Yes.

David Read:
I wanna talk about “Descent.” This was kind of a sleeper episode, as far as I was concerned, because what I mean by that is it’s the first episode after the two-part opener. So, you really don’t know what you’re gonna get other than it’s more than likely gonna be, from an audience perspective, a lower key, let’s save some money now. We’re in the first little financial trench of the season because it does this and then it does this.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s hilarious that you’re teeing this up as let’s save some money. The one where we dunk an entire hallway underwater? OK. All right. Continue.

David Read:
Please wait, Peter, for the dramatic reversal.

Peter DeLuise:
OK, sorry. I’m so sorry. We’ll edit that part out. Just kidding.

David Read:
We’ll edit that part out, everyone.

Peter DeLuise:
I’m so sorry. I ruined your punchline. David, I’m so sorry. I ruined your punchline. Reset. Start over. I won’t say anything.

David Read:
So, there was this episode called “Descent” and it was the third episode in the season. Usually at this point in the season, there is a little bit of a lull in terms of finances because everything has been kind of blown out in the first part, and you kind of go into a trench, as it were. So, with this one, I was kind of surprised when you decided to submerge an entire ship in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, if I’m not mistaken. And whose bright idea was this?

Peter DeLuise:
I don’t remember a lot of things on the show, but I do remember this particular thing. Joe and Paul wanted to know, before they wrote it, ’cause they didn’t wanna waste any time writing something that didn’t have the chance to see the light of day. They said, “Can we flood a chamber on the show?” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah, we can flood it. We can flood the spaceship.” And I remember exactly how I showed it to them. There was a coffee table, which represented the surface of the water, and I took a Kleenex box, turned it on its side, and I said, “What you do is you create a set, a room that you wanna flood, and you lower–” And I lowered the Kleenex box below the level of the edge of the coffee table, and I said, “And that’s how you flood the set.” And they were like, “Oh, OK.” And then they wrote “Descent.” And guess how it ended up being? That simple description– Not that I designed the set. I just did the thing with the Kleenex box. But it turned out to be a piece of hallway that was redressed as two different spaces. And it was on scissor lifts, which were in a pool. I don’t know if it was an Olympic-sized pool. It was a pool that I think was being used for oceanic study of some kind, to study waves and stuff like that. But it was a large, large body of water. It was not meant for swimming, if I remember. But it was freshwater. You could put your face in it. And they built the hall with waterproof materials because they knew it was gonna get wet. And it was essentially a hallway with panels that came off on one side. And it was on a scissor lift, and they lowered the whole thing into the water, and then the water level came up. And then, of course, it had to have a ceiling, ’cause at the end, the good part is where the water gets to the top and you have to be able to see that.

David Read:
“Your dad’s cutting it really close.”

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly.

David Read:
You have to have that scene.

Peter DeLuise:
You totally do. I remember that every– They had the waterproof housing and all that stuff, and they wanted to swim with it, but the buoyancy of the camera housing kept messing with them. And eventually, what Will Waring did, and I’m pretty sure– this is years later, so we’re not gonna get in trouble– is they put the dolly, the normal camera dolly, on the platform that was also holding up the thing, and they just mounted the camera with the housing on the camera dolly. And all Will had to do was sit on the dolly. I think he wrapped his legs around it so he wouldn’t float. And he was just able to photograph it while sitting on the dolly that was not supposed to be submerged underwater. So, when they returned it, I’m sure, to the rental house, they were like, “Why is …”

David Read:
“Why is …”

Peter DeLuise:
.”.. why is there wetness where there’s not usually wetness?”

David Read:
That was a great director’s special created for that episode. I’m curious, that was really done in the heat of it. Did anything in that shoot not come off according to plan? Did pieces of the set drift into the water? Or was it perfectly sealed? Was there anything …

Peter DeLuise:
That’s interesting.

David Read:
Obviously, no one got electrocuted, but was there anything that was like …

Peter DeLuise:
That’s a good point too.

David Read:
Was there anything that you had to work around?

Peter DeLuise:
We created an environment that we were gonna flood, and it redressed, and there was removable panels. The reason why you remove panels is just so you can get away from it. And also ’cause it was too small to have the crew and the cameras inside of it. If you think of it as 4A one of the walls was not there. I mean, it could be there, but one of the walls, we took away so that we could photograph down that way and that way and be able to see more of the stuff. If you’re stuck inside of it, you can’t see enough of it. You’re so close, you can’t see enough of it. So, you have to get away from it to see it.

David Read:
You should do the whole interview like that, Peter. Go back. No.

Peter DeLuise:
I should.

David Read:
So, you could do, basically a shadow box.

Peter DeLuise:
Yes, not unlike a shadow box. But if we needed those panels, once you looked down the side, you needed some of the panels. And then if you were looking down the other way, you could take that panel out and put that panel back in and look down that way. You’re right about electricity, that doesn’t go well with water, but of course, it all had to be made safe. And the edge glass, there was a lot of edge-lit glass, if I recall. Remember all those things that Corin was fooling with when he was holding his breath?

David Read:
The crystals. They were bouncing in the water. They were either too light or something, and there were some interesting …

Peter DeLuise:
I thought they were– I call it edge glass, but I think it was Plexi.

David Read:
OK, plexi.

Peter DeLuise:
It’s quite common, where when you’re making some artsy-fartsy sci-fi stuff is, you take what is essentially a light source, and you take something that doesn’t have the ability to light itself, and you put the Plexi or the glass itself up against it, and it conveys the light through it. Even at a right corner, if you can’t see the flashlight itself, you could at least see how it illuminated the Plexi piece. And a lot of times, that was a standby, a go-to on some of the sets.

David Read:
All of the spaceship sets, basically. All the Earth-based stuff. I mean, if they weren’t using magic markers to draw X’s and O’s, and play tic-tac-toe on the Daedalus, that’s how they did it, so it only made sense. What was this?

Peter DeLuise:
You asked about flooding. It was made porous, and the materials were not painted wood; they were plastic. They were not water-resistant, but actually waterproof, so there wasn’t– To my recollection, it was designed very well. John Smith, who was our producer on the show, had worked tirelessly on a show called Beachcombers. And he was the boat wrangler, so he was used to working in and around water. So, he got super excited when he heard that we were gonna flood a chamber. And I remember that all that footage that we did, the flooding stuff, it was at most four or five pages. We used to do regularly 9, 10 pages a day. But because of the difficulty of that flooding, we only were able to do about four or five pages in an entire day. And because of the humidity– It was an interior space. It wasn’t a proper pool, it was an interior space that had a body of water in it. The humidity was quite– It was like working in Miami the entire time.

David Read:
Did the cameras ever fog up?

Peter DeLuise:
I do not believe the cameras fogged up, because we had the underwater housing on them. I think we were good that way.

David Read:
Were you anticipating a slower pace for those pages, or did you go over?

Peter DeLuise:
We were, yes. We only scheduled four or five pages for the entire dang thing, and we only needed that. Not only was Brad Wright an amazing auteur, and great at entertainment, he was incredibly and still is incredibly production savvy. If you wrote a set piece where you had to go out on location and you only had half a day’s work, he would write another half a day so you had a full day at location to justify the– And because you wouldn’t go to a rock quarry for half a day’s work; you’d have to have a full day’s work. And then, also, it probably wouldn’t be worth going to a rock quarry for just one day, so you’d go three days out. So, you’d write three whole days of material to justify the whole unit going out there and shooting it. And then, every time that happened, if it would schedule differently, you’d go, “OK, well, we need to change these. We need to change the page count in this place to justify why we’re being there.” And that was–especially on a show like Stargate, which had huge overhead with set build–an absolute necessity, a way for not going over budget. And Brad was all over that. He was constantly rejigging, making sure that we had the proper page count to accommodate the schedule.

David Read:
Talk about flexibility. That’s just wild. So, you do what you have to do to optimize.

Peter DeLuise:
Not only that, but another thing which is somewhat relatable to the same topic was our access to Richard Dean Anderson was limited because of his time that he was spending with Wylie, ’cause he didn’t have custody of Wylie, his daughter, the entire time. So, his priority, as it should’ve been, was to be a good dad to his daughter, and so contractually, we had less access to him. So, we had to really pick our moments and not have him be in every scene. And the common phrase, “We gotta split the team,” became a much bigger, more strict thing. So, often what you’ll do is that the team would go out as a foursome, and then we’d split the team, and two would go over here and two would go over there. And then they would do whatever they had to do to gather information and then come back and compare information, splitting the team. And also you could ping-pong back and forth between the two storylines. So, splitting the team was necessary, but you couldn’t always put Richard Dean Anderson with somebody else. Sometimes you had to split the Colonel off, all by himself.

David Read:
We’re gonna talk about that in “Orpheus” in a minute.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, it wasn’t just “Orpheus” that it had to get done. It was many, many, many times where we had limited access to him. And we would just accumulate O’Neill scenes. So, normally you shoot one episode, you shoot it from beginning to end, and then you’re done with it, and then you move on and shoot an entire new episode and all the scenes that are required for that. But because we had limited access to Richard Dean Anderson, we had to schedule scenes that didn’t have Richard Dean Anderson in them, and then when we had access, we would shoot not just one episode, not just two, but sometimes three, four episodes of material that just Richard Dean Anderson was in. And then, of course, the inevitable, “What episode is this? Where is my char– What is my character? How, what, how, what …” But he was the star of the show, and so we were happy to do it.

David Read:
Had to make it work.

Peter DeLuise:
You just make it work.

David Read:
Rob Cooper talks about “Heroes.” There’s one shot– “Heroes” was shot almost completely second unit, and Rick leaves, I forget where it is. It’s somewhere in SGC. He leaves one scene with longer hair and enters the next scene with shorter hair. And Cooper was like …

Peter DeLuise:
That sounds about right.

David Read:
“He got a haircut. Did anyone notice? Yep, He got a haircut. So, you know, we’re just gonna do it. We’re gonna roll with it.” That’s what you do. You make it work because …

Peter DeLuise:
You make it work.

David Read:
… he’s providing something that’s so good that you wouldn’t have it any other way. You wouldn’t want to do it without him. And that was I think the thing that we, as fans, were so lucky about was, as far as I know, any chance that he could come and play back for “200” and a two-parter on Atlantis where he did a dive once again to save Atlantis in that situation with some dead-man switches. It was golden, and it was great to watch. Ninja Jaffa were in this episode, Peter. And they pull out their katana, or whatever it is, and then we cut and then obligatory dead scientist on the floor and we never see them again. I thought there was so much potential with this, and it’s just one of– You didn’t write it. I’m not chewing on you about that, but, when you have someone with swords …

Peter DeLuise:
Well– Go ahead. I’ll wait for the question.

David Read:
… don’t you wanna see a limb severed?

Peter DeLuise:
A sword fight?

David Read:
Or a sword fight.

Peter DeLuise:
I guess you did. We didn’t really– Did we ever sever a limb on the show? I don’t think we were that graphic on the show, were we?

David Read:
No. You cut into …

Peter DeLuise:
Anybody ever get severed?

David Read:
… one in Season One, but yeah, I don’t think a limb was ever severed.

Peter DeLuise:
That’s probably too graphic, but if you can have a guy with a sword, you might as well have a sword fight. So, I remember …

David Read:
Well, sword against scientific notebook, I suppose.

Peter DeLuise:
I did a little bit of research on this, ’cause it’s been a long time, and I do remember that invariably sneaking around motherships involved big clunky Jaffa marching down the way. You’d tuck into the thing and they would go by. They just didn’t seem very smart, right? But the ninja Jaffa were stealthy, and they didn’t have the big clunky armor on. They were able to bend. They could shrug their shoulders. It was awesome. And also, I think, I had forgotten this, but I looked it up, and they were able to beat the sensors because they went into Kelno’reem so their life signs were minimal, right? So, they were super stealthy, and I was like, “Oh, great. We got a different, a new kind of Jaffa.” And you’re right. Maybe we should’ve investigated that a little bit more.

David Read:
It would’ve been cool as an audience member because they came out and it’s like, “These guys are badass.”

Peter DeLuise:
They were badass, and I wish that we had used them some more. Too bad.

David Read:
Going back underwater for a beat. My Stargate is dialing. Please, please hold.

Peter DeLuise:
Is it on a timer?

David Read:
When it gets low on battery it starts rebooting. And I have to shut it off, so, sorry about that.

Peter DeLuise:
Well, I hate when that happens. My Stargate almost never does.

David Read:
Those Stargates, man. They’ll get ya. How much prep do you recall Corin having with you in terms of this conversation? I know he had worked, he had planned for this, not intentionally. But he had always been working on holding his breath underwater, so this is something that he told us a few months ago, he felt that he had kind of gotten ready for all his life, and then they had to cut the take because I guess a piece of Plexi shifted in the housing, and you had to cut the shot. That’s how he remembers it. I’m curious to ask you.

Peter DeLuise:
Corin Nemec was a champ, and I remember watching before we did the big, long take. He was pre-breathing. He was oxygenating his blood. He was ready to stay under for a really long time. Now, the shot would’ve been as long as he held his breath. He created that business to time out with his ability to hold his breath. So, he swam over to the thing. He, if you remember, did a little bit of an aileron roll there, and then he started manipulating the thing. And there was no rhyme or reason to it. He just had to move them around. It could’ve been 30 seconds. He didn’t have to do it for a minute and a half, but that guy, to his credit, held his breath well past anything that we ever expected. And you’re right. I think one of the things fell. He wasn’t wearing goggles. He was just dealing with his eyes, as anyone knows who’s been in a pool who’s opened their eyes, it’s blurry. So, he had to grab a piece of Plexi, I believe it was and shove it into a slot and move it this way and that way, and one of them fell, or fell out of the way, and it looked like a mistake. It didn’t look like it’s something that we could keep in the movie, so we did in fact have to cut around that one thing. But that guy, I was a witness, held his breath forever, and it was very impressive to see that.

David Read:
That is so cool. One of my favorite effects in the entire franchise was the rings moving that body of water from one part of the ship …

Peter DeLuise:
The dump.

David Read:
… to the other with Jonas inside.

Peter DeLuise:
The water dump. That was cool. Because it doesn’t just transport the human beings in there. It doesn’t separate them from their– ‘Cause why wouldn’t it– If you transported in the rings, why wouldn’t just a naked body show up and your clothes would be left behind? Anything that was inorganic. It was just everything that was in the rings was gonna come with you.

David Read:
They established that in the movie, yeah.

Peter DeLuise:
So, that was gonna be pretty cool. And they did the water dump. I think we had a dump tank. Is that how it went? We filled it with oil and then we used a dump tank that was triggered and went whoosh and everyone, “Whoa. Oh my God.” And water, CG water, I think it was enhanced, but any CG water element was gonna have trouble because CG water back then was not an easy thing. So, it had to be real water, and it had to interact with their bodies, and it had to spill everywhere.

David Read:
So, was Corin …

Peter DeLuise:
That was fun.

David Read:
So, he was underneath that deluge, I’m guessing? Or was he …

Peter DeLuise:
I believe so, yeah.

David Read:
… inserted later?

Peter DeLuise:
If memory serves, they had to be, and then they dumped the water. Isn’t that how that worked?

David Read:
Yes. It was absolutely mind-boggling.

Peter DeLuise:
Didn’t we do that twice? I’m sorry about this.

David Read:
Oh, no, only one for that. The Kull warriors were … A Kull was dumped out of the underside of the cargo ship in “Evolution 2.” That was a cool effect. And then the rings just flew away. So, but that was the only similar time that that was the case.

Peter DeLuise:
Wasn’t it all three of them with the water?

David Read:
Just him.

Peter DeLuise:
It was just Corin?

David Read:
Yeah, that was …

Peter DeLuise:
He came in as kind of a …

David Read:
… his heroic moment to make up for what happened with Daniel in “Meridian.” That was his turn. He had been lamenting with Teal’c the fact that he was only able to illustrate that he had done something intellectual, with helping out the team in terms of getting the Stargate out of Cheyenne Mountain. He was always having an issue with knowing what to do in the heat of the moment and doing it. And that was his moment to shine. And it was a great sequence in the show. I remember finishing that and thinking, “How did they do that?” I thought that water had to have been digital. And the fact that I found out later that it wasn’t, that it was at least very much in part a dump tank that had achieved that effect, ’cause the way that the water expands, hits the back wall and then comes, and the sides, and then comes forward again was just cool. And it holds up to this day.

Peter DeLuise:
Nothing like a good old dump tank.

David Read:
That’s it.

Peter DeLuise:
It’s a good visual.

David Read:
And a good nod to Dagwood as well. That was very nice.

Peter DeLuise:
So, we did that one.

David Read:
I appreciated that and caught it.

Peter DeLuise:
That was an interesting little Easter egg, the Dagwood that– It was a character I played on seaQuest, so we had to reference that, and also it was water-related. So, seaQuest was in the ocean, and this was– So, it seemed like a natural tie-in for an Easter egg cameo.

David Read:
That’s it. Any words for Colin Cunningham? I was always excited when they found a way to get the Pentagon involved, and I think that was his one-off, off-world mission. I think it was, “This is great to bring that character back.”

Peter DeLuise:
Was it off-world or was it just on world?

David Read:
In orbit. Off Earth.

Peter DeLuise:
I always liked Colin. I’ll tell you what, Colin’s career is very interesting. He’s gone and he’s– All the different looks, he’s quite the chameleon. I don’t know. Didn’t he do Kevin Costner’s movie, The …

David Read:
Dead?

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah. He looks almost unrecognizable in that. And also Falling Skies. He was great in Falling Skies. And you wouldn’t recognize him either ’cause he’s not well-groomed. He doesn’t have a high and tight haircut like he does sometimes. I always thought that he was a top-notch actor, and he was ready to play and ready to give ‘er. And I don’t remember exactly … he heard the voices and he heard the weird sound and he goes, “That sounds like distorted voices.” Didn’t he start– They gave him a seed of an idea and then Carter said, “Alright, I’ll check it out.”

David Read:
It’s entirely possible that that’s the case.

Peter DeLuise:
For something like that.

David Read:
I didn’t actually re-watch the episode in prep for this. I’m sorry.

Peter DeLuise:
No, that’s OK. You can figure it out.

David Read:
I just went through my memory.

Peter DeLuise:
I’m surprised you’re able to get underwear and pants on with all you do.

David Read:
Barely.

Peter DeLuise:
You are wearing underwear and pants as we speak?

David Read:
Yes.

Peter DeLuise:
Calvin Kleins? OK.

David Read:
No. Too expensive.

Peter DeLuise:
No? No, OK.

David Read:
No.

Peter DeLuise:
I appreciate the extra support.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Peter DeLuise:
But Colin, Colin Cunningham. I would work with that guy any day of the week. He was always awesome. He always came to play, and he knew his lines. God bless him. He knew his lines. And he executed. He always executed. He’s a good director’s actor because he brings something instead of you having to pull something out of him, which I don’t always have time for. And every director go, “Oh my God, we’re gonna have to work on that.” But you come to play, you know your lines, and you are ready to contribute, and he always did. So, I always liked him for that. And then the proof of the fact that he’s still working, and he’s doing parts that are completely unrelated on recognizable stuff he’s done before. Good for him.

David Read:
That’s the thing. Chameleon is very good. I’ve just seen him in the Pendragon Chronicles, and he is this old king. He is completely unrecognizable. It’s just an extraordinary transformation. The man can pull anything off.

Peter DeLuise:
And he’s an excellent close-up magician. Have you ever seen him do some magic?

David Read:
Yes. I helped one trick once.

Peter DeLuise:
That guy’s a renaissance man. Neat.

David Read:
He’s a friend. He’s something else, for sure. Let’s take an aside for a moment here, because you said something that’s very interesting that is something actually that I have always wanted to talk about with you. But I always line up these episodes, and they’re not going anywhere. We’ll have you back. I saw you do another interview once that specifically talked about working, trying to get something out of actors. And you’re in the perfect position to talk about this, because you’ve been on both sides of that camera and in that situation. You only have so many hours in a day. You only have so many takes. You only have so many excuses to get another take before you have to move on. What do you do if you’re–stuck is not the right word–but what do you do if you’re stuck with an actor who is not arriving at the performance that you either know that they can pull off, or just, please God, casting director, did we pick the right person that you hope can pull something off? Do you have to just sometimes shoot around someone? It’s like, “Look, I had them on this other day. It was a nightmare. I can’t feed this many quarters into the machine.” They have to perform. They have to arrive at what it is that the scene is asking of them, not just the dialogue, but a certain emotional state. What do you do if a performer is not achieving that level of quality?

Peter DeLuise:
Every situation’s different, of course. If you’re dealing with a child who doesn’t understand the words that are coming out of their mouth, you can’t suddenly ask them to be smarter, ’cause they don’t understand the material. Sometimes you do have to defer to, “Just say it like this.” And then, “Just mimic me.” And that’s one way of getting a performance out of a kid. That’s not what you’re asking though. You’re asking about getting to an emotional state that services the story properly. So, the first …

David Read:
In this case, yeah.

Peter DeLuise:
… thing I do is I try to identify the problem. Actually, the first thing I do is I try to identify the story point that we’re trying to get across, ’cause it’s all about the story ultimately. And then I say, “Can you help me tell this story? This is what this scene is to me.” And it’s not hard to figure out what the story is about. Sometimes it’s right there on the call sheet. It actually says what the scene is about. And sometimes it’s in the original outline. Because inevitably every scene is a story point, hopefully, according to the Brad Wright rules of screenwriting, every scene should have a point to it. It should forward the story somehow. And if the point of the story is, character X starts to have an emotional breakdown and character Y encourages them, or gives them hope. If that is in fact what the story is about, character X is obligated to break down so that character Y can support them and motivate them. But if character X is not breaking down, character Y has no function. He cannot say, “Hey man, keep it together,” if they are in fact already kept together. So, I have to, “Can you help motivate this moment?” So, I’m eliciting their help in telling the story. That’s how I’m gonna communicate that with them. Now I have to figure out, some actors are, “louder and faster,” they respond to that. Or they need an as if, “Can you do it as if your life depended on it? Can you do it as if the stakes are higher?” So, do you speak actor. Do you speak their language? And now presumably all of that has failed, in your question. I’m creating a foundation for your question. And all of that has failed, and now I need this actor to lose themselves so that the audience can go, “Oh, there, they’re really wrecked.” And I’ve determined after many, many trials, you say quarters, they’re actually takes. Takes take time. Time is money. Sometimes we don’t have that. And at the end of the day, I go to the how-come room, “How come you didn’t get your day?” And I can’t throw the actor under the bus and say, “‘Cause buddy couldn’t …”

David Read:
You could.

Peter DeLuise:
.”.. emote.” Well, I could say that, but that would be a …

David Read:
Not gonna be any good.

Peter DeLuise:
But then I wasn’t doing my job as a director. So, I’ll tell you what. There are wonderful tricks. We do have music, we can do something with the camera. If somebody’s supposed to be devastated, and the best they can come up with is … Well, there’s some things that I can do. I can do a slow push. I can have the music crescendo. I can create a feeling that wasn’t there on the day. I can cut away to the other actor who’s emoting their ass off, and they can go, “Hey man, keep it together.” And then they’ll say, “Oh, that person recognizes that the other person is losing their shit, even though they’re not losing their shit.” But because I did a slight push-in, the other actor can tell me, “Oh, that guy’s losing their shit.” So, there are various tricks. And at the end of the day, maybe I can avoid the how-come room, and– I mean, this is that question you asked me about when Ba’al was in a spaceship and he was gonna get blown up, and I wanted him to have a rich reaction ’cause we were gonna be– And he was like, “Ah, I wouldn’t, I’m too cool for that.” And you called me on that, and I was like, “Clearly I don’t remember the incident, but I would have asked him to give me a …” And he said, “That’s just not the way I roll, even if I am about to die.” And I was like, “OK.” And maybe we did a push-in. Maybe we had a crescendo, but at the end of the day, and I think Amanda Tapping used to talk about this all the time, is how many times can you go, “Oh,” before you go, “It’s getting old?” How many times is the world about to explode before you go, “I’m pretty sure I’ve already done this look?”

David Read:
They’re gonna make it. We know they’re gonna make it, but how they make it is what we tune in for. And sometimes they don’t all make it.

Peter DeLuise:
I hope that answers your question.

David Read:
It does, very thoroughly. Thank you.

Peter DeLuise:
I have to use trickery, or I’d use all the tricks in the bag, and if that doesn’t work, we’re going to post. And sometimes you re-shoot. We almost never re-shot anything on Stargate. I think the only thing we ever re-shot on Stargate was, there was a monitor that had a dead pixel and it was unacceptable, so we had to go back and shoot the– But that, and I wouldn’t call it a re-shoot, but the Saul Rubinek episode that started as one episode and became two episodes, that was an Andy …

David Read:
Andy Mikita special.

Peter DeLuise:
Andy Mikita had to deal with that.

David Read:
Oh, absolutely. And he did with aplomb. Are you aware of any instance where digital tears have ever been used? Not in your work, but have you ever heard of any instances where that was done as well?

Peter DeLuise:
Well, I know that they have. I know that digital tears have been added. But there are other tricks that you can do. There’s menthol. There was a device that the makeup department had where you would take menthol crystals. And they would load it into a chamber, and it had a place to blow on one side and a way to outlet mentholated air through a filter. So, you weren’t getting your breath, your spit, or the moisture from your breath wasn’t able to go through, just the air pressure that you created was able to go through. And you would blow, and the menthol, if you’ve ever had menthol, you know how you rub it on your chest and ventilate them …

David Read:
VapoRub. Vicks.

Peter DeLuise:
Vapor … Yes. If you put that close to your eyes, or if you took a tiny bit, and some people did. I know that George Clooney early in his career used to take a little bit of that. And also makes your eyes red, so it makes you seem upset, so your eyes get sort of watery. And if you do it just right, you can let the tears collect and then you can dump them. And then so that’s for people who cannot manifest a tear through emotional means. They can’t have a physiological reaction to menthol air being blown into their eye. But why would you ask me about CGI tears? Why would you do that?

David Read:
Because I’ve always been curious. There’s a list of things that I’ve always wanted to ask that are too mundane to bring up on this show, even though I get to talk with actors and directors. How does someone sit around dead for 20 minutes, you know, in a certain shot? And I’ve gone on YouTube to answer that. I don’t want that answered in this episode. But, you know, there’s certain things that have to be done, and sometimes you have to …

Peter DeLuise:
Do you see how the light is hitting me here?

David Read:
Yes.

Peter DeLuise:
On this side? So, if I cry, hopefully it’s on the lit side so you can actually see it. If I drop a tear on this side and it’s in the dark, you might not see it. So, even though the actor’s doing what the scene calls for, if they’re crying on camera, maybe you just don’t see it, because it doesn’t catch the light, and then now it’s, “Ah, too bad, we didn’t see the tear,” and they actually did all the work. Also, you’ve got multiple takes. So, you wanna, do we do the close-up? Are you ready to cry? Are you all cried out? ‘Cause you’ve cried in the master, and then you cried on the coverage of the other character, and now your tear ducts are dry and you’ve got no more water left. There’s a whole bunch of– It’s a problem getting tears to– And then, of course, if you’re using multiple takes, they drop a tear and then you cut back and then the tear is gone, and you go, “Oh, where’s the tear now?”

David Read:
Exactly. That’s the thing. It’s gone, it’s gone away. Now, Christopher and Amanda talked about not being able to get through “Revelations” at the end of Season Five. You know, that long scene aboard the cargo ship where half of it’s just silence, half of it is just them sitting with the– It’s in their mouth like a sock, that they can’t get out, that Daniel is gone.

Peter DeLuise:
Which is an anomaly. You most, almost never have Stargate material where somebody’s not actually talking.

David Read:
An extraordinary scene that’s …

Peter DeLuise:
So, that’s why it really stands out.

David Read:
For sure. And they went …

Peter DeLuise:
So, that’s the humanity.

David Read:
… through several takes where they just couldn’t get through it dry, and they just said, “OK, this is not usable footage.” They’re in pieces, especially Teal’c, who’s supposed to be more stoic. Chris to this day is very sensitive. And so, you have to strike the balance between the actor and the Jaffa.

Peter DeLuise:
Also, there is a balance and, you know, it’s like, you want them to cry a certain amount, but you don’t want them to ugly cry ’cause now you’re getting snot involved and then the snot’s going into their mouth and you’re like, “This lacks the entertainment impact that I had hoped for, the snot in the mouth is not …”

David Read:
Not like a classic episode.

Peter DeLuise:
Dude, I’m talking about reality, some people wanna just go there, and they turn it all up to 11 and you go, …”

David Read:
I have on this show twice.

Peter DeLuise:
” … that was really heavy.” But I need another one as a safety tape ’cause I don’t know if we can have the snot running out of your nose and going into your mouth and not have people go, “Ew,” instead of, “Oh, he’s really upset.”

David Read:
No, there are raw places where I’ve gone. We had a Remembering Don S. Davis episode, and I got through two and a half hours or two hours or something, and I was down to the last two minutes and I lost it. And then the episode where, but what wasn’t an episode, it was a clip where I announced Cliff’s death and …

Peter DeLuise:
I remember seeing you announcing Cliff’s death.

David Read:
God. Man, but anyway …

Peter DeLuise:
Cliff was so cool. Don was a prince, man. I loved that guy.

David Read:
Were you on the boat, when they went and spread his ashes? Amanda’s boat.

Peter DeLuise:
Yeah, and his hat, they put the ashes in his hat, for good measure. I was there. John Smith, it was off of John Smith’s boat that they …

David Read:
Oh, John Smith’s boat, OK.

Peter DeLuise:
… spread his– So, they were in Gibsons.

David Read:
Yes.

Peter DeLuise:
Where the original Beachcombers was. Everyone, they had a bit of a ceremony, and then John took the boat out with Don’s family and the urn with the ashes. He took it out into the water, and then that’s when they cast his ashes into the sea along with his– He had this kind of cool hat that he used to wear, and the hat ended up in the water as well.

David Read:
Ah, and a bottle of RC, I think is what Ruby said, ’cause it’s what he– or no, Royal Crown, not RC, which is what he liked to drink. I wanted to talk to you about “Orpheus.”

Peter DeLuise:
Sure.

David Read:
This is a Teal’c episode, and it very much feeds from the fact that his symbiote is gone now and what do you do when you have lost that which gave you strength? For better or for worse. Resents his Goa’uld, but he no longer has it now. He’s on tretonin, and he gets shot where the symbiote would have been and sustained a pretty severe injury from a staff wound. Tell us about shooting “Orpheus” and creating Erebus, this labor camp in another gravel pit in Vancouver. How did you find these things? I guess that’s just location, doing its job.

Peter DeLuise:
Locations, man, yeah. One gravel pit after another. Orpheus is a reference to going into the underworld, or Hell, and trying to come back out. And that’s why I named it that. In high school, I had some experience with Orpheus and Eurydice and Orpheus Descending and Orpheus in the Underworld, so I was programmed to remember that, so I was, “Oh, this feels like Teal’c’s version of Hell, and he’s going in with the tretonin as a lifeline, and they need to go through their version of the underworld and then come back out.” And I created the camp, the commandant, the head guy, if you remember, with the one dead eye.

David Read:
Exactly.

Peter DeLuise:
That was ill-conceived because I’m sure the symbiote could have healed it, but I wanted him to look unique. And if you recall, he said, “If you do not work, you will die.” And that was supposed to be the never-ending message: you just keep working until you die, which is basically what the camp was. So, it was a work camp/death camp, and that saying was triggered, or an homage or a tip of the hat to Cool Hand Luke, if you recall: “What we have here is failure to communicate.” He would just keep hitting them with that line, and then he would punish them. And so that, to me, that was the motto, the saying, and that was the never-ending, “You’re all doomed.” If you stop working, you’re doomed. And so that’s why I gave him that line, and I wanted this labor camp to be the most horrible, grotesque– The idea that because they were, because Jaffa, for the most part, were arguably semi-mortal ’cause they had this healing property, you could work them even harder than you could normal human beings. And so their work camp had to be even more intense and more unforgiving.

David Read:
It was Mordor. You created Mordor, just no volcano.

Peter DeLuise:
That reference was not clear to me at the time, but yeah, I guess that would’ve been a good one. And I also love the idea that Bra’tac– And if you recall that one moment where he says to Teal’c’s son, “Don’t look away. What better way to die than to look on his son’s face?”

David Read:
Eyes of your son.

Peter DeLuise:
And I got choked up on it ’cause my dad’s health was not always great, and I always thought that I was envisioning my own father’s mortality in that moment when I wrote that line. And I was like, “Yeah, it’s hard, but you have to be there for him, ’cause this is in that moment.” Yeah, so making it as horrible as possible. Also, dealing with Richard Dean Anderson’s lack of availability. So, naturally, we put him in a sniper’s nest, way, way up at the top. That was a difficult shoot ’cause we had to do a crowd duplication where it had all of our 40 or 50 extras here, and then we put them over here, and then we put them over here, and then over there. So, it looked like we had 200 extras, but there was just the same grouping all throughout the camp, and we just put them all together. And having to ask them, ’cause we were so far away, at the best all I could do was shout at them and say– And Bill Mizel, our AD, God bless him, he had a walkie-talkie, but of course I just kept screaming.

David Read:
Bullhorn, Peter, bullhorn.

Peter DeLuise:
And then, of course, he’s got the rifles, he got the sniper scope, and they’re watching from afar, which was an easy way to separate Richard Dean Anderson’s contribution. And if you recall, at one point, I had him identify two of the airmen that were near him as Hanson and Penhall. Which were the character that Johnny Depp and myself played on 21 Jump Street. That was a little Easter egg in there.

David Read:
Little nods.

Peter DeLuise:
I also remember this. And I said, “Why don’t you say, ‘Fire at will’?” And he said, “Peter, I will never say, ‘Fire at will’ on camera.” And I was like, “OK. What do you wanna say?” And he said, “I’ll come up with something.” I was like, “OK, Richard. That’s cool.” He’s like, “Eh,” and he goes, “Don’t fire, fire when I say so.” And he takes the first shot, if you recall. Then he said, “Have at her, boys.” And I went, “OK. Have at her, boys. Sure.”

David Read:
Did that make it into the cut? I don’t remember.

Peter DeLuise:
Probably not because ultimately, upon closer scrutiny, that wasn’t very good. “Shoot them, shoot them to your heart’s content.” It’s just not …

David Read:
Oh, God.

Peter DeLuise:
It just doesn’t sound very combat macho.

David Read:
Look, when he’s going after the replicators the next season, he says, “Who’s your daddy?” It’s perfect. But those are replicators. It’s a video game in many ways.

Peter DeLuise:
Do you remember Alien? “Oh, you want some of this? Oh, you got, I got some here for you.”

David Read:
He said, “You want, you want some over here? Huh? Huh?”

Peter DeLuise:
That was …

David Read:
“Hudson, run a bypass.” Oh, man. Good stuff. I would imagine– No, you know what? I’m not gonna retread that. We already covered that. Let me go back here to this. This is just a great episode for Christopher because he really got to dig deep into that character even more. Bringing Neil back for that and then having Tony back, it was just– You had grandfather, father, and son, and it …

Peter DeLuise:
That was on purpose …

David Read:
It all worked.

Peter DeLuise:
… so all the people that he cares about.

David Read:
That’s right.

Peter DeLuise:
It was a big episode for Chris.

David Read:
I lost my email, my friend. Let me pull this up.

Peter DeLuise:
Did you wanna talk about “Lifeboat,” or did you …

David Read:
I did. I’m trying to get back to it here. OK, very good. Yes. All right, perfect. Yes, “Lifeboat.” Thank you. Michael’s back on the show, and Brad created this tour de force script for him where …

Peter DeLuise:
He did.

David Read:
… it was something that really could exercise his range, and he went and did it. And we got to see four or five different personalities including a child who he duplicated his mannerisms perfectly.

Peter DeLuise:
He was so good at that. A lot of your viewers probably aren’t familiar with this, but there’s a Sally Field movie for television called Sybil in which she has multiple personalities, and she won an Emmy for it. It was an amazing acting …

David Read:
“You really like me.”

Peter DeLuise:
And I don’t know if that inspired Brad, or there was some sort of a trigger in that, but Michael had great acting chops, and– I think this is before Brad saw him play … I think he played Macbeth. He’s one of the …

David Read:
He did Hamlet between Seasons Two and Three.

Peter DeLuise:
Hamlet. Thank you for …

David Read:
This was four years later.

Peter DeLuise:
… reminding me. Brad had seen him play Hamlet, and Brad knew that Michael had enormous capabilities that had not been really sort of tasked. Downloading a bunch of personalities into– For the viewers who have forgotten, the premise of the show is that there’s this sleeper ship and all the person– There’s quite a lot of personalities that have been– Pharrin, the keeper of the ship, has downloaded– He grabs the body of Daniel and uses his brain as a way to capture the memories and to save the life and the personalities of the people that he’s put into Daniel’s head.

David Read:
‘Cause their bodies are already dead.

Peter DeLuise:
Daniel’s got more than one person in his brain and he has to deal with that. You were gonna ask me about working with Teryl Rothery as well, she was the perfect anchor/scene partner for Michael there. I remember thinking, “There’s no lasers, there’s no spaceships in there.” It’s just them in this empty room. I think I said, “Why don’t you guys move around? Why don’t you play with this and go where you wanna go? Be as physical as you wanna be?” Which normally we wouldn’t do, because every time you look this way, we have to set up a close-up. Then you look this way, and we gotta put the camera over there and shoot this way. I said, “Just go.” I said, “We’re gonna try something different.”

David Read:
It’s a concrete box and one pane of glass, and that’s it.

Peter DeLuise:
I wanted it to feel not stable. And of course they did the heck out of it, ’cause they couldn’t depend on bells and whistles and tricks this time, it was all in his head, literally.

David Read:
His head. And Michael wasn’t the only one. We had James Parks, playing …

Peter DeLuise:
Yes, as Pharrin.

David Read:
… Officer Pharrin. And it was just magnificent. And I don’t wanna– And everyone had recently been exposed to Andy Serkis as Gollum fairly recently. And so that was very active in my mind, going back to that. So, going in, I’m thinking, “I’ve seen this kinda thing before.” But he did such an original approach to it, scrunching down and having this war with himself as these personalities were taking the front seat, one after the other. It was brilliant acting. And it’s an effective episode. And it just shows Brad can put two people in a concrete room and make fireworks.

Peter DeLuise:
There’s a lot of trust there. Brad had to be, one, convinced that Michael could pull it off, and two, that the audience would stay for that. To his credit, he knew what he had, he had the tools, and he was able to make that work.

David Read:
He executed it.

Peter DeLuise:
That was not a normal episode, and you’re right to point that out. And then of course, Parks and Teryl and Daniel, Michael Shanks, they all rose to the occasion and kicked it outta the– What do you call it?

David Read:
Kick it into the end zone.

Peter DeLuise:
I’m mixing all my metaphors now. Kicked it into the end zone. They hit it out of the park.

David Read:
He hit it out of the park.

Peter DeLuise:
They hit it out of the park.

David Read:
Did you watch the Olympics?

Peter DeLuise:
They got a bullseye. It was awesome.

David Read:
That’s it. Eastlynburkholder, apologies. What do you think Urgo is up to now?

Peter DeLuise:
I’m sure he’s eating pie and tormenting other communities and trying to get some insight into what they’re all about.

David Read:
No. No. No. You don’t know what you’re missing. No. What an episode with Dom. That was so good.

Peter DeLuise:
That was a good one.

David Read:
I can’t see him lasting in Togar for too long, but I really hope that he put him in some kind of a something or other to at least allow him to persist, because it was such a sincere character. You have an incredible actor in– And this is my opinion, this is just my opinion. You had an incredible actor come in to play Vala’s father near the end of the series. And it was a great actor who has passed now. And in my opinion, it didn’t work. It was a perfectly serviceable episode, but in my opinion, it didn’t work.

Peter DeLuise:
You mean ’cause he was a con man? Is that what you’re talking about?

David Read:
I didn’t think that the actor worked well with the character. Those kinds of things happen where–but there are plenty of people who are like that, that, “He was fantastic at that.” There are a couple of roles out there where anyone who has watched enough entertainment will say, “I like that actor, but I didn’t like them as that character.” And I have the same reaction with the new Dr. Smith in Lost in Space. I’m a huge fan of the actress. But when Dom came in to play this character, it’s either gonna work or it’s not. And it was brilliant. And “Urgo” is regularly …

Peter DeLuise:
You’re talking about Fred Willard.

David Read:
… in my top five. Fred Willard, that’s right. As Jacek, yes. And so that’s the gamble that you take when you bring in an actor, and hope that it meshes with the character because a great actor– I forget who said it, but a great actor can elevate a bad script a little bit. But when the character is so sincerely written, and when you had Dom chewing on every single scene, not to mention the fact that he was just trying to make Christopher laugh as much as possible, and film as much– Let’s get as much footage as we can. One of these days I hope to go through that B-roll. The fact of the matter is, your dad was so sincere with that performance that it couldn’t have been anything but gold, in my opinion. And I have come across the occasional person who has said, “I wasn’t crazy about the episode,” and frankly, they’re wrong.

Peter DeLuise:
I love that you automatically are the arbiter of what’s wrong and right.

David Read:
When it comes to “Urgo,” I am.

Peter DeLuise:
I think once my dad understood the assignment, that he is the personification of everything that they love about life, and he went, “I can totally do that.” And my dad had some very interesting takes on some really cool, highly unlikely exotic characters over his career. And when it came to him what he was being asked to do, he was like, “I can do that.” Also, the amount of latitude that he was given, you don’t give all actors that kind of latitude. But the amount of latitude that he was given, to Brad’s credit, my dad serviced the story as Brad intended, but he was also given permission to expand on that and improvise. And Brad, not only did Brad write it, but Brad had to go through that enormous amount of material at the end and cobble together this, ’cause there were 10 versions of this really great moment, and Brad had to pick which one best was the funniest and will also service that moment in the story.

David Read:
That’s it. They have to do those things.

Peter DeLuise:
The way I shot it is I would shoot a two-shot of my dad and the person next to him that he was dealing with, and then, at the same time, I would shoot my father’s closeup. And then when I would shoot the other person’s closeup, I’d keep the two-shot alive so that my dad could keep riffing. My dad got several goes at it, whereas most actors would have the one opportunity to contribute to the scene and then we would move on. I love how touched you are by that. And of course, the fact that if the experiment of what is a life form, i.e., we’ve heard of this, that Data was a sentient being, so therefore he was self-aware, and because of that, he was officially a life form even though he was not organic, he was synthetic. If you took that to its ultimate conclusion, my dad’s character was a fully realized, sentient being because he was self-aware, but he also included all the traits of all the core characters of SG-1 and all their likes and dislikes and their passions. He was essentially their inner child, all four of their inner child, if you will.

David Read:
No, it worked.

Peter DeLuise:
My dad, I know his humor came across, but his humanity also came across, and then it turned all the knobs up.

David Read:
That’s it. One can say, “That episode was funny.” It’s a funny show. It doesn’t necessarily mean people are gonna remember it 20, 30 years later. It’s not that it was funny. It is that it was funny, but it’s not that it was funny; it’s that it was sincere, and that’s what makes it funny.

Peter DeLuise:
It helps. I’ll tell you, there are …

David Read:
As sincere as what’s-his-face is with Elf. It’s a sincere performance.

Peter DeLuise:
I think you’ve hit it exactly on the head there, is that Will Ferrell’s commitment to the sincerity of it and the humanity of it, and not being afraid to be foolish and vulnerable, of which he did. Foolish and vulnerable are human traits. And so, you have no choice as a human being not to empathize and not to be drawn into that. And I’m leaning forward at you, saying, “Oh, this is imperfect, but I recognize that. I recognize that childlike behavior. I recognize that desire to be loved, to love and be loved.” There’s certain things that all humans share in common. If you can tap into those, then people are gonna respond to your character, for sure.

David Read:
I wanna talk a little bit about being sincere with actors on set. I wasn’t gonna ask this question that ElihuWho, E-L-I-H-U-W-H-O, asked, but I will ask you to open up the hood a little bit for this, and it kinda goes back to getting back to becoming accessible with actors. We recently had Simone Bailly and Mike Dopud and Sharon Taylor on. We recorded it in December, and it was a roundtable discussion. And Simone brought up the Jaffa Council scenes in the later seasons of the show and how you would communicate with the actors for some of the shots of people in the council room looking at each other and communicating, or with their eyes and everything else. And she took us through a sequence of how you would do it, and you would be, “OK, someone has now farted, and now you must look around …”

Peter DeLuise:
Yes.

David Read:
“Who? Who done it? And now please do me a favor, and instead of thinking who, now please rate the fart.” Now, what is …

Peter DeLuise:
Simone’s given away all my tricks.

David Read:
Is that a three, a four?

Peter DeLuise:
Is that a four?

David Read:
I know, and that’s why I’m asking you to open up the hood a little bit onto this.

Peter DeLuise:
Oh my God.

David Read:
There is a certain amount of mundanity that you cancel out just by being there, Peter. And I think that that’s probably part of the answer that I’m anticipating. And the other part of it is, dude, don’t take yourself too seriously. We’re here to have a good time.

Peter DeLuise:
Fair enough.

David Read:
In the scheme of things, we’re making ridiculous money and not eating burgers. Which would you rather do?

Peter DeLuise:
We’re not curing cancer.

David Read:
You’re entertaining the people who are curing cancer.

Peter DeLuise:
It’s a gift. We get to make movies, we get to entertain, we get to make people laugh. It is absolutely a gift. And there’s only so many different ways you can get that suspicious, those shots. And why not have a little bit of fun? We worked some pretty long hours. Did you see that outfit that Simone had to put on? It goes on in every direction forever, and with the hair and the thing and the outfit, oh my God. So, why not keep it light? If an actor didn’t appreciate that, if they were like, “Can we try to stay on target here and not get too silly?” I would absolutely say, “OK, sure.” But as you pointed out, sometimes you don’t wanna take yourself too seriously, and the who farted direction is gold. It never fails. Why not …

David Read:
So, you can keep a straight face.

Peter DeLuise:
… use it? OK.

David Read:
‘Cause that’s the other thing that you’re risking is, you’re taking a chance that everyone in front of you is going to stay professional and not screw up the takes. Because I’m sure that’s happened as a consequence of you getting someone, “No, do back flips and laugh up here. And laugh after the camera is done. But until then, please God, hold it together.”

Peter DeLuise:
And then being told not to laugh is a recipe for disaster, ’cause when you’re trying to suppress it.

David Read:
There are certain things that you and I will never speak about on camera that we have spoken on offline. And I will say that anyone who is paying any attention to your Stargate resume can see the holes. And it’s like, I can only gather and assume that that’s because sometimes not everyone appreciates that approach as a director. And that’s a shame. That’s a true shame. Because on set, you have to have levity. Otherwise, why show up if you’re just gonna be miserable?

Peter DeLuise:
Your point is not lost on me, and I’m flattered for you saying that. But there’s a time and a place for everything. So, if the scene called for Amanda and Chris to be crying over Michael Shanks’s character dying, then maybe that’s not the exact right time to be flip and silly and shallow. There’s, as I said, a time and a place for everything. And knowing when those times are, and what you were describing in Jaffa Council, that’s pretty dry stuff.

David Read:
Exactly.

Peter DeLuise:
So, if the stakes are what they are and you wanna reinvest your actors after 10 hours of sitting there under the lights, and give them something, a freshen-up way to look at the scene, why not? And I love that Simone shared that with you. I’m still gonna use that direction in the future. It works with under 10-year-old actors and over 10-year-old actors.

David Read:
To varying degrees of success in holding it together, I would suspect. Here’s a one out of left field, and it’s one that I don’t think that I’ve asked before. 95% of your work is prep. When it’s a more visual effects-heavy episode, is there a square root formula where you, “OK, so it’s gonna have this many pages with visual effects shots, and then I’m gonna add this number of days into my prep work?” Or do you find it …

Peter DeLuise:
Interesting.

David Read:
… relatively the same?

Peter DeLuise:
Some directors use shot lists and storyboards, and I don’t. For the most part, I don’t do that. I edit in my head, and if somebody wants a shot list or they need some references, I will absolutely go through the exercise. But specifically, for visual effects, you can’t just wing it because there’s budgets involved. Every shot has a monetary price attached to it. So, when we are gonna show a spaceship, or if we’re gonna show a CG creature, we have to count the amount of times that we’re gonna see it, so you have to say, “Well, how are we gonna do this?” So, one way to do a sequence where you have a CG element, let’s say a creature in this anecdote. So, you start a scene, you see a CG creature, and then the human being comes in the room and they look at the CG creature and they react to it. Then you go back to the CG creature, the second shot now, and the CG creature responds to the human being that’s now in the room. Now, the human being has to finish their response, and then the CG creature either attacks them or leaves the room. Let’s say that’s three shots. So, that is three times we have to pay for that shot. Now, knowing that and knowing that we have a budget, one of the ways that we try to be frugal is we don’t establish the creature in the room ahead of time. We have the person come in the space and react to something, OK? So, that means we don’t have to establish the creature. We’ve saved the shot. We’ve saved a third of the fees. But we wouldn’t know that unless I conveyed that to the visual effects people. And they wanna know where in the room and how close. How close are we? What level of detail are we gonna have? Same thing with the spaceship. This is a spaceship. The closer the spaceship gets, the more detailed it gets. So, then that becomes more and more expensive. And so, it goes up.

David Read:
The last time you were on, you talked about using Prometheus and flipping the shot, and have it come this way and then coming the other way and being able to — And then Daedalus comes along and it’s off center.

Peter DeLuise:
And the Daedalus has an aircraft-carrier tower on the one side.

David Read:
You can’t flip it.

Peter DeLuise:
So, just to quickly go over it. So, here’s a spaceship. It goes by the camera and the camera pans with it, right? So, that’s one shot. You use the same exact shot and you get the spaceship to go there and you cut. But it’s the same shot, so it’s not a secondary amount of money. And then you start the shot from that moment to the pan. That’s a third use of that same shot, right? Now, what you do is you flip it, so left is right and right is left, and you get three more uses of the shot. Except if you have …

David Read:
The comm tower.

Peter DeLuise:
… the comm tower on one side of the ship, you can’t just flip that, ’cause that– You can’t re-render it. You can’t say that the thing on this side was there on this side. Now you flip the image, and now the comm tower is on this side. So, that doesn’t work. So, you’ve limited your amount of usage. If you’re trying to be frugal, that was one way of doing it. So, I always went, “Oh, why? Shouldn’t it be symmetrical?” And Brad was really on board with wanting it to look like an aircraft carrier, so I thought, “Oh, OK.”

David Read:
You do what you can with the approach that the creator wants.

Peter DeLuise:
And we used– If you look at the puddle pass-through from “1969,” I ended up using that several times, so we didn’t have to create it and re-render it. So, in “1969,” Michael Shanks had a zat on his hip and also a big floppy hat. And he hated both of those things immensely. And I would say to him, “Well, I just need you to do it going up, on the way, going up to the shot preceding that shot. And then as soon as we get to the other side, you can drop it, you can get rid of that.” And he was like, “Ugh, OK.” I said, “So, it saves a lot of money and all the time it takes to create the shot of you guys walking up to the puddle.” So, it was rare, but it was a way to, again, be frugal and spend money on stuff they hadn’t seen. They’ve already seen the team walking into the Stargate. And then sometimes there was a very unsatisfying way to get to the Stargate is, you’d show the puddle without any tie-ins to the actors, and then you’d show the group at the bottom of the ramp, looking at it, and then they would start to walk up, out of the frame, and we would do a wormhole transition to the planet. And I go, “This is not satisfying.” And we’re avoiding the namesake of the show, the Stargate. It feels like we should see the Stargate. We should be able to …

David Read:
That was my frustration with Atlantis a lot of the time.

Peter DeLuise:
… deliberately avoid the Stargate.

David Read:
Because they never had a full location Atlantis gate, and so you couldn’t do things like blur it in the background with lights on it like you do beautifully in “Redemption.” Like you see it out of focus in the background there, it’s always a presence. And that was one of the things that I had issue with in Atlantis was that anytime you saw it, it cost money because it was a CG element. And it was buried in the ground because there was no pedestal. And the thing that I loved that they did was they managed to recycle more than once shots of coming through the puddle. There’s a shot in “The Fifth Race” where they come out and I think Daniel’s wearing his hat at that time, and before Jack gets his head sucked, and that was used again in “Urgo.” The second time they go to his planet, they have them, and then they get beamed away to Togar’s lab, and it’s the same shot from “The Fifth Race,” and they’re reusing it. They’re cutting to earlier in the take when they weren’t standing on the pedestal. It just works. You find ways to save money and put it into new stuff, like little frog creatures …

Peter DeLuise:
And spend it …

David Read:
… under glass. And later on, taking their things out of their brains.

Peter DeLuise:
Exactly. Spend it in different ways.

David Read:
We’re gonna wrap up here at Caironiancanuck482, “I admire how Peter takes time to thoroughly explain things and enjoys interacting with us fans. Clever, humble, a Vancouverite, which is a plus, and overall a good man. One of my favorite interviewees.” Peter DeLuise, always a pleasure to have you. This is …

Peter DeLuise:
That wasn’t a question; that was a straight-out compliment. Thanks, dude.

David Read:
This is my way of working our way toward the end here. It’s always a pleasure to have you, and gonna be back at least once more in Vancouver this year. I hope that you’ll be free and available then so that we can hook up again. It’s always good to see you, man.

Peter DeLuise:
You too.

David Read:
It’s a pleasure to hear these stories.

Peter DeLuise:
You’re more attractive than ever, so we should definitely get together.

David Read:
You know how to butter a man up, for sure. Peter, thank you.

Peter DeLuise:
Thanks for having me, and thank you again for your continuing work on documenting the behind-the-scenes of Stargate.

David Read:
It is my privilege.

Peter DeLuise:
It was a really good show, and it deserves the kind of respect and dignity that you’re giving it, and I appreciate that.

David Read:
Absolutely. It deserves a fourth iteration. You feel me?

Peter DeLuise:
Hell yeah, I feel you.

David Read:
Let’s do it. Let’s go.

Peter DeLuise:
All right.

David Read:
Let’s not ask. Let’s turn up. I’ll see you in London. Peter, thank you.

Peter DeLuise:
Thank you.

David Read:
You be well, sir.

Peter DeLuise:
Cheers.

David Read:
Bye-bye. Peter DeLuise, everyone, writer, producer, director, Stargate. My name is David Read, you’re watching The Stargate Oral History Project. If you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, please click the Like button. It does make a difference and will help the show continue to grow its audience. And consider sharing the video with a Stargate friend. And if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. And if you give the Bell icon a tick, we’ll notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. And clips from this livestream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. Tremendous thanks to my moderating team who just pulled out all the stops for this episode. I cannot get through these shows without them. Antony, Raj, Enigma, I really appreciate you guys. Marcia and Antony are gonna be coming up with Gildart Jackson, who’s gonna be joining us in about 10 minutes to take us back to “Before I Sleep,” and Janus, and bringing us up to speed on what’s going on with him. And we have a whole host of new shows heading your way later on this week and into next week. DialtheGate.com has all of those details. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the other side.