The last time that I spoke to Lost co-creator, Damon Lindelof, it was at the end of the first season. The show was a North American phenomenon and revolutionized the concept of serialized programming as we know it. The interview was and is still my personal favorite and it was great getting to talk to one of television’s brightest minds again. Lindelof is very witty and this is evident through the interview. There is a lot hype about tonight’s Lost finale. I have heard from many of my sources that it will be one of the greatest television events of all-time and there is no better time to hear from the show’s creator himself. I present… Damon Lindelof.
Murtz Jaffer: Hey Damon, it’s Murtz.
Damon Lindelof: Hey man, how are you?
MJ: Not too bad, how are you?
DL: Oh, a little bit slammed, but you know how it is.
MJ: I think you’re the J-Lo of TV producers.
DL: I am going to go ahead and take that as a compliment… even though you probably didn’t mean it as such.
MJ: (Laughs). So, killer episode last night (The Brig).
DL: Aw, thanks man.
MJ: It was awesome.
DL: Thank you.
MJ: A lot has changed since the last time we talked, which was at the end of the first season. Can you tell me went in the second season and where it is going in the third season?
DL: That is an interesting question.
MJ: I just mean thematically. I think the first season was more of an introduction. The second season, it kind of focused on the hatch. So in the third, was there a big long-term kind of theme you are going for in each season?
DL: You know, I think the overarching theme of the show is one of redemption. The idea that these people are lost figuratively and literally at the same time and that has always been the sort of uber-goal of the show. You know, the first season was really about understanding what they were all doing in Australia. Why they were flying from Sydney to Los Angeles. Then in the second season, in terms of what they were doing on the island. Beginning to explore and discovering the hatch. Learning what the conditions of the hatch were but also sort of going deeper into them as characters. It went deeper into… it wasn’t just about why they went to Australia but sort of exploring their relationships. Finding out what Kate did. Looking at Jack’s marriage. Getting a closer understanding of how Sayid became a torturer. Really exploring origin stories. And I think the third season has really been sort of life during war time. It’s opened up the show in a way in terms of exploring who are these Other people on the island. What are they doing here? Why have they been preying upon our people and starting to hint at sort of what, if any, is there any sort of global significance and meaning to all of these people being here on this island. Why were they brought here?
MJ: Right, right. As a plot device, the hatch served many purposes including how it examined science and faith and how it served to really introduce Ben and Desmond. What was its primary intent because I am sure when you thought of the hatch, it had a primary purpose?
DL: Yeah, I mean the primary reason was that this was going to be the first discovery of the Dharma Initiative which was going to be a huge and significant ongoing excavation on the island in terms of… we’ve always talked about when we first got there that the show is very much an archeological dig. The cool thing about the city of Rome is that it is actually built on the ruins of the old city of Rome and so on and so forth. So as our characters begin to explore the island, the first thing that they would find is sort of the freshest taste of civilization and that’s the Dharma Initiative who was there. We know from the hatch that they were there as early as the 1980s and as a result of Calvin being down there all that time, Desmond obviously arrives in the late 90’s so they might have even been up and running for as long as 15 years. As the show goes on, we’re beginning to excavate further and starting to see things like the Black Rock which is an 18th century slaving vessel or the Foot (the four-toed statue, which god knows how long that’s been there for). So the history of the show is sort of being expanded as the characters’ own personal history is being expanded.
MJ: Now I think the question that the fans want answered the most is whether we are going to find out what Penny Widmore and Portuguese research team were looking for in the Season 2 finale. So do you think that is going to be answered this season or is it still one of those broader questions.
DL: Well, I think we have gotten a flavor for it.
MJ: Right, we have gotten a taste.
DL: It’s safe to assume that she was looking for Desmond. And how she came to be specifically looking for this island (if that’s what indeed she was looking for), now we have had this woman Naomi tell us that she works for Penny and Penny commissioned her to find this place. I think it’s just a matter of connecting A to B to C and more specifics on that issue will probably be coming in Season 4 but I think we have gotten a fair chunk of it. Naomi’s arrival is the literal payoff of the Season 2 finale.
MJ: I have read a lot of your interviews and chats where you have said that Lost is still a character-driven show and that all of the mythology just compliments the relationships of the actors. Do you still feel this way? The reason that I ask is because on Thursday, everybody is talking about Desmond seeing the future than Hurley and Sawyer playing ping pong.
DL: Well, what they talk about is the mythology because I think the mythology is more of a talking point. It’s more engaging to say ‘this happened’ as opposed to ‘oh, Kate & Sawyer were rolling around in the tent last night.’ But I think what keeps viewers coming back and certainly what keeps the show as a widely-viewed show (as opposed to a cult show) is the idea that we approach it as a character-study. And I think that if the show was just purely plot, I don’t think people would be as able to engage in it. I think if you look at an episode like ‘The Brig’ last night, it feels like it’s mythological but it’s completely driven by character. The idea that Locke and Sawyer were both essentially created by the same guy. Locke would never have ended up in the wheelchair if not for this bastard, and Sawyer never would have become a con man if not for this guy. And now, all sort of angles are intersecting here on the island. Those are completely character stories.
MJ: In terms of scripting the episodes, how much time does it take to sort of draft what Jack’s flashback is going to look like compared to how long it takes to figure out who Hanso really is? Does it take a longer time to draw out the mythology and the more complicated storylines or is it just as easy to write about Jack and his dad?
DL: The flashbacks are a lot easier because they are self-contained. As Carleton (Cuse) was saying, they are these little New Yorker short stories. They actually have a beginning, middle and an end. This was the time Jack went to Thailand. He met a girl. She had a secret from him. He needed to find out what the secret was. She was actually a tattoo artist. He demanded she tattoo him and that got him banished from Thailand. Unlike anything else on Lost, it actually has a beginning, middle and end. Our mythology is a long and sprawling story, not unlike The Wizard of Oz series or the Harry Potter series or The Lord of The Rings or Stephen King’s Dark Tower. The idea of telling more self-contained, character-driven, smaller stories where the events are smaller. Here is this woman who captured Sayid in Paris because she recognized him as someone who tortured her. Those are easy stories to break whereas the overarching mythology stories are a lot trickier because it is that tenuous balance between frustrating the fans by not giving them enough and overloading them to the point where they go ‘I am not going to watch the show anymore because it is too confusing.’
MJ: Right, and I think that is what happening with Heroes right now.
DL: Is it?
MJ: Well, I think to a degree. I feel like you need a notepad and a tape recorder and VCR and all sorts of equipment to fully grasp that show.
DL: Well, you know, despite Tim (Kring’s) sort of protestations to the opposite in terms of saying that he was going to make the show and that he was going to give answers upfront I think the problem when you do all that stuff is once you have answered questions, what are you left with? The audience has to keep up with the layers of plot that you sort of dropped eons ago. Serialized shows require a tremendous amount of think-forwardness. 24 is not burdened by the same thing that we, and Heroes and Jericho are, which are that every season it resets. Jack has got a new bad guy to go stop, so there are certain character relationships that carry over from season to season but you can start watching 24 any season and understand what the plot is. I am not so sure that Heroes will be able to do that in its second season.
MJ: I have read a lot of your opinions about serialized shows. Programs like Smith, The Nine and Vanished never really picked up. Is it the same sort of thing where people really don’t have time to commit?
DL: I think that’s the primary issue and I also think it’s an issue of a show, who knows what people want to watch? Nobody ever knows and everybody prognosticates at the beginning of the year about what the hits are going to be and very rarely do they actually guess. Nobody was saying Heroes was going to be the breakout hit of the year and lo and behold, it was. In the wake of all these other serialized shows, what’s the difference between Heroes and Invasion? It’s all execution and imagination and premise and casting and all those things have to come together and work. For me, a show like Kidnapped, it’s like do I really want to watch a show about a kid that’s been kidnapped? Do I want to put that in my living room or do I want to watch a show about people who survived a hostage crisis in a bank? Do I want to watch that? Or do I want to watch a show about people flying through the sky or people living on a beautiful desert island? I think there’s the ‘what is the show about?’ factor.
MJ: Which characters do you think have grown the most this season on Lost? I have to tell you that my favorite episode undoubtedly was Nikki and Paulo.
DL: Oh, really?
MJ: I thought that was a gold episode because I thought that it really highlighted the strength of Lost, which is picking up and planning in advance because obviously you had that plan in motion as soon as you introduced them.
DL: Obviously, I think that our plan for Nikki and Paulo was for it to go a little bit longer before we eventually buried them alive. I think we pushed up the end date, we suddenly realized that the milk was about to expire.
MJ: (Laughs).
DL: I think if we had run straight, Nikki and Paulo, the audience would have been a little more patient with them but because they were so prevalent in those first six, the fans literally had like four months to kind of say ‘well, who the hell are they? What are they doing on our show? Why are they taking screentime away from Hurley and Sayid, the characters that I really care about?’ We had a really cool plan for Nikki and Paulo. We ended up executing it (no pun intended) and Adam Hurowitz and Eddie Kitsis just wrote a beautiful script with ‘Expose’ and it was really cool to kind of do the Forrest Gumpian flashbacks and basically insert those two characters into the first two seasons of the show and just say as if we had had those actors on the island at the time.
MJ: Are there other characters that you feel have made significant strides this season?
DL: I think by season’s end, Rousseau will have made more of an impression than she sort of has in seasons past. Sort of the mysterious jungle lurker. I think she’s going to get an opportunity to play a lot more emotion. And I think by season’s end, you’ll know a lot more about Ben and Juliet. I think Juliet, Elizabeth Mitchell, has been fantastic. Considering she just appeared in the show for the first time in the Season 3 premiere, it’s amazing how much that character has sort of powered the events of Season 3. And how audiences are still really split as to whether or not a) they like her or hate her or b) think that she’s a good guy or a bad guy and I think that’s really a testament to Elizabeth’s performance.
MJ: I think that one of the best features on the Season 2 DVD was the ‘Anatomy Of An Episode’ featurette that highlighted just how much goes into every episode. I know that you ultimately control everything that happens in a given episode, but how much trust do you have to have for the other members of your team?
DL: You know, a tremendous amount. The reality is that it is a collaborative effort. The writers are all based here in LA. We break the stories, write the shows. It’s literally like sending the blueprints for a car down to Kuala Lampur and it is built in a factory down there. We never really go to the factory. The actors and the directors and specifically Jack Bender down in Hawaii really execute these scripts so beautifully. And then we get the cuts back and then edit them. We sort of got the R & D and then the sort of packaging aspect of the job, but the actual production down in Hawaii is completely sailing off and becomes its own sort of creative being when it comes back to us. That’s where it lives and breathes which is really exciting.
MJ: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask the questions that fans want me to ask (even though I know you aren’t going to answer). I think in the first season we heard this whole Purgatory theory and it got shot down. And then last night in ‘The Brig’ you introduced the whole ‘maybe it’s Hell’ idea. Are we going to get an answer to that or is it more of an end goal?
DL: Look, we have always publicly stated that…
MJ: It’s not Purgatory?
DL: They are not in any after-life. They are not in Purgatory, they are not in Heaven, they are not in Hell. They are still alive by all the laws of life that we live by on this planet. They are on an island somewhere in space-time that we are familiar with and the possibility of rescue and/or assuming that the lives that they left have to be in play or else there would be no stakes on the show.
MJ: How big is this finale going to be? There’s no doubt that this finale is bigger than the other two combined.
DL: Well, I don’t know. I think it’s a curse and a blessing to say obviously that the episodes sort of running up to the finale have all been sort of big and impactful. I don’t want to get expectations too high but I think that the stakes in the finale this year are higher than they have ever been before and whereas in Season 1 like the raft launch and Rousseau saying that the Others kind of happened on a smaller scale. The battle for the hatch and the trek across the island, Michael’s trap, we kind of knew what was going to be happening there. I think everything is up for grabs in the finale this year and you know, we have a real opportunity at rescue here with this woman Naomi and her satellite phone. I think to again the blow up the proverbial submarine or burn the raft, I think we’re beyond that now. It will be really interesting to see kind of what happens as we move forward.
MJ: Are we still going to get a Batman-esque cliffhanger?
DL: What kind of cliffhanger?
MJ: Like on Batman. The big cliffhanger. Find out what happens next time. Same Bat time. Same Bat channel. Is it going to be blown-up cliffhanger where everybody is just going to be like ‘oh my god, when’s Lost coming back???’
DL: Yeah, Jack and Locke suspended over a vat of boiling acid.
MJ: Nice (laughs).
DL: I think that the immediate situation, I think that we are probably going to be coming back in the Spring next year so that means that the audience is going to have to wait 7 and a half months before they get a new Lost.
MJ: But then you’re just going to be pounding the new episodes?
DL: Yeah. So the idea that we are going to leave people…. what we’re not going to do is have Locke and Jack looking down into a dark chasm and frustrate people. We’re going to give them both a sense of closure and I think a new beginning.
MJ: My last question is that there are always rumors that you guys are trying to lock down an end-date for the program (which has since been announced to be after 3 more seasons). Was this always your intent? To have the show finish at its pique instead of something like The X-Files like you have said before?
DL: Yeah. The idea is that Lost is a story and I think that the audience deserves to know when that story is going to end. I think that there is a big difference between reading the next Harry Potter book and reading the fourth Harry Potter book and knowing that there are only 3 left. So we have always wanted to set an end date and tell the audience what that end date is so that they kind of know where they are in the story.
MJ: What’s next for you Damon?
DL: I am going to go and produce Trek and keep my head down and keep working on Lost.
MJ: Man, I have to tell you that I think this season has been flawless.
DL: Oh, well you are very kind sir. I really appreciate it.
MJ: You know I have interviewed a lot of people for Inside Pulse, but nothing has been more popular than the first interview that I did with you.
DL: Well, hopefully it will get many hits again. Will you send me the link when you post it?
MJ: Absolutely. It will be on the day of the finale. We are running a big Lost Week feature that we are going to countdown to the finale with and this will be the big payoff. Seven days of Lost.
DL: Excellent. Thank you very much for your time.
MJ: Thank you so much Damon.
DL: Take it easy Murtz.
– Lost airs on ABC on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT with the third season finale airing on May 23.
– Lost airs on the CTV network in Canada on Wednesday nights….
Please credit Murtz Jaffer & PrimeTimePulse.com when using this interview. If reposting, please post just an excerpt and link back to the rest of the piece.
