Stargate Producer, not to mention director of nearly 80 episodes, Mr. Martin Wood himself, joins David Read once again to discuss his incredible career, get more specific on certain Stargate episodes, and take your questions LIVE.

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
00:38 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:10 – Welcoming Martin Wood, and Current Projects
08:16 – Cliff Simon, Directing Cliff in “Abyss” and Stargate: Continuum
18:18 – Willie Garson, Directing Willie in Wormhole X-Treme and “200”
28:37 – Puddle Discussion
32:21 – Directing “200”
39:42 – “Lost City” and “Rising”
43:44 – Two Weirs: Jessica Steen and Torri Higginson”
53:01 – William Devane as President Henry Hayes
57:25 – Fan Questions, and Sam and Jack Shipping
1:01:34 – Filming Locations Virgin River, Costumes from Continuum, Space Travel, and the Dune Feature Film
1:08:21 – Cameos, Sets, and Sanctuary
1:15:08 – Re-shooting, Issues with Episodes, Martin’s Departure Plan
1:20:50 – Future of the Stargate Franchise
1:23:33 – Atlantis Models
1:26:44 – A Darker Jack O’Neill, Legend and Daniel
1:31:40 – Ad-Libs
1:32:27 – Thanking Martin
1:33:25 – Post interview housekeeping
1:38:14 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Welcome everyone, to 2022 and episode, I believe, 113, of Dial the Gate. We just keep on truckin’. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining us. Director Martin Wood, Producer Martin Wood of Stargate is joining us for this very special episode. I’m always pleased to have him. And before we get started, I just want to invite you to share the show. If you like Stargate, and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click that Like button, it really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm, and will help the show continue to grow. We’re almost at 20,000 subscribers. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. And giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. And clips from this live stream will released over the course of the next few weeks on the GateWorld.net YouTube channels and later on here on Dial the Gate. Now this is a live show, so with these live episodes, what we do is I talk with the guests, we get up to speed with them, we go down the rabbit hole of Stargate memory lane and then what we do is we come back around to the live chat on youtube.com/dialthegate. If you’re there now you can submit questions to the guest for free. We have moderators who are going to curate those questions and then in the second half of the show, we will then ask those questions to the guest. So, here we go. Mr. Martin Wood, director and producer of Stargate. Thank you so much for coming back, sir. It’s always a privilege to have you on.

Martin Wood
You’re welcome. You’re the only person who calls me Mr, so I come back just for that!

David Read
You’ve been busy lately. So, your first feature with Paramount, you said?

Martin Wood
Yeah, it was interesting. CBS had commissioned a movie for me and went to do it and Paramount came in and said “Hey, we’re interested in this.” and so Paramount+ picked up right away and then ran with it, and it did extremely well. I guess it dropped just before Christmas and starred Adam Rodriguez and Jessica Camacho and…

David Read
What’s the project called?

Martin Wood
It was called A Christmas Proposal.

David Read
Okay.

Martin Wood
Which is a little bit of a misnomer because it was actually about — it had nothing to do with marriage, it nothing to do with anything like that — it had to do with Adam needing a girlfriend to fake out his family. And so the story is really about a lie that turns into this beautiful truth and it happens at Christmas time, so it’s why it was called A Christmas Proposal. But it was this whole thing with his Latin family that Adam and Jessica sort of helped guide and it was just, it was so much fun to make, it was so much fun. Those two together made this project wonderful and we made it last summer. I had to truck in 60 truckloads of snow into Whistler.

David Read
Oh, of course!

Martin Wood
So, Whistler never lets you shoot in the town, or in the village, because there’s always too many people there, but COVID had literally shut down the town for so long and they said “Yes, please come up, please come up.” And so we went in there and shot in the village of Whistler and trucked in all this snow and they thought it was hilarious because they spend so much time trying to get rid of it at that time of year and suddenly we had 60 dump trucks full coming in.

David Read
Well, that’s terrific. And so, okay, so that premiered this past Christmas, right?

Martin Wood
Yeah, it’s available on…

David Read
Paramount+?

Martin Wood
Still, yeah, and CBS streaming has it as well. It’s a fun movie and it doesn’t need to be seen at Christmas time because it’s really not a Christmas theme. It looks like Christmas because they wanted to [inaudible]. Honestly, it’s a good movie anytime of year and it was a blast to do. I did that and then on both sides of that I’d been doing Virgin River for Netflix. I’ve done 16 episodes for them or something it’s… and Mikita came back in, Mikita came back this year to direct a couple of them. And so we finished season four, I can’t tell you when it’s going to drop, and then there’ll be picking up a season five too, so, again, just sort of rolling in romantic drama for me. Very strange.

David Read
You also mentioned before we started the show, there was a bit of an on-set Stargate reunion with a few other cast members and a burgeoning new cast member.

Martin Wood
I do a murder mystery series called Aurora Teagarden for Hallmark. I started the series, I’ve done, like, nine of 18 of them, or something like this, and Lexa stars in it as the friend of Candace Cameron Bure as they solve all these murder mysteries. And a couple of times now I’ve brought Michael in to guest star in the background, he actually played a background player once just telling Lexa to get off his property. And in that one, that was the first one I actually brought Sam and Mia, his son and daughter, in with my son and daughter, Syrian and Connor, to be the kids that were disrupting this investigation of the murder. And they were literally background players, with Robin Dunne.

David Read
Okay, from Sanctuary?

David Read
[inaudible] Yeah, and Ellie Harvie plays in it as well, and Niall Matter is number three on it, or number two on it, he comes in and he’s now married to Candace. So there’s a lot of people that we had on Stargate come into it, but on this last one I needed a young Lexa, a teenage Lexa, and I’ve known her daughter since she was born and they look very, very much the same. So I asked if Mia could play a young Lexa. And I think with much cajoling from Mom and Dad she did, and so they were there. Candace Cameron Bure’s daughter, Natasha, actually plays the young Candace in this thing as well. So we have two daughters playing the two young teenage versions of this. And it was hysterical because on one of the days that Lexa and Mia were both working, Michael had to come, because as a minor she has to have a parent on set that’s not working. So Michael had to come and sit on set and made himself look incredibly boring. He wasn’t, he was fascinated by the process.

David Read
That’s Michael, he’s got to get in a mental jab.

Martin Wood
Yeah. Well, it was pouring rain, too. We were outside and Michael and Lexa, were sitting inside going, “Man, am I ever glad I don’t have a scene outside right now.”

David Read
Jeez, absolutely.

Martin Wood
Yeah, that was a lot of fun getting them together.

David Read
We lost a couple of people in the Stargate family since we last talked. The first — this was just devastating — was Cliff Simon.

Martin Wood
Cliff, yeah.

David Read
Yeah, I’m still getting over that one.

Martin Wood
That one rolled through us very, very suddenly, too. All of us were on social media that day, when we heard, and it was really hard to talk to everybody about too, because everybody was… he was such a good guy to everybody and everybody considered him a friend. And Michael Greenburg actually texted us with the information and it went out from there and then it was… that was a tough one because he was in such amazing shape and he was such an outdoorsman. Yeah.

David Read
Yeah. It’s… you never know when life is going to come in with your number and say, “You know what?” But everyone that I have talked to, who knew him, the beach was his temple. And I don’t think he would have wanted to be anywhere else, you know?

Martin Wood
He couldn’t have chosen a better place, that’s for sure. But yeah.

David Read
You directed him…

Martin Wood
I did.

David Read
In what was, for a long time, my favorite Stargate two parter, Summit and Last Stand, and also a great episode, Abyss, which had its own onset technical challenges, with like the… I’d like to get into that in a little bit and come back around to Mr. Garson a little bit further down the show here. But Cliff was a friend of Michael Greenburg and you directed his first appearance, in Summit — Goa’uld Mardi Gras — and this is an episode where when you read between the lines, the writers and everyone involved are really trying out future villains.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
I mean, there wasn’t supposed to be a season six, but, at the same time, you know, they could have been anything.

Martin Wood
It was the cornucopia of lords, of these Goa’uld that would come in and it was like, “Okay, how far can we push this, culturally? And how much can we do with…?” And honestly, I think that part of the fun in that was building the costumes for them. Our costume designer came in with these gorgeous, gorgeous things. My favorite was Yu’s costume, I have to say, but Cliff had this breastplate that was just… I mean, it was built for Cliff’s body, and that’s the body he sported. He was a dancer, he was… you know? And he just had this… there was a regalness to him that, when you’re looking at the people who would control the kind of legions that they would control, Cliff was probably one of the easiest to believe that he had that control. I always felt that Apophis — Peter’s Apophis — was angry. And Cliff’s Ba’al never had to be angry. He could do it all with a smile. And you thought “That’s the most dangerous, that’s where it’s dangerous.” You know?

David Read
He’s not wearing it all on the surface. You don’t know how deep that rabbit hole goes.

Martin Wood
No. And Suanne was always… For me, Suanne was one of the people you could look at and you could say, “Oh yeah, she’s evil.” Cliff, even though he had that visage, he had the little mustache and the angular face, things like this, he had an easy smile to him and you thought, “Is he really a bad guy?” And then you realize, “No, he’s seriously a bad guy.”

David Read
What was it like directing him in Abyss? Particularly with the fact that Rick was no longer on set all the time? His contract was so that he had some more flexibility, to have some time off with his family, and you spent more time with Dan Shea, as a consequence.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and that was a particularly physical episode, too, because of the tilting set and because of all those kind of things, and Cliff came into that and he said, “I came up with this?” and it’s like, “Yeah, you came up with this.” He goes “Good. I’m gonna have fun with it.” And it’s one of those Ba’al inventions that you sit there going “Okay, this is where he shines.” Because as soon as he shows up, and you realize, “Oh, it’s Ba’al that’s doing this.” It opens up, again, it opens up more venues, more corridors that can happen. Because you’re never sure. With the System Lords it’s like, “Okay, who’s got control of this? Is it just Jaffa? What are you going to see when you do this?” And suddenly when a System Lord shows up, it’s like, “Okay, it gets exponentially worse now.” And when it was Ba’al. it got seriously worse.

David Read
If I may insert into this, because I don’t want to stop your train of thought, that the Goa’uld System Lords, the Goa’uld themselves, have always been in very much the vein of comic book villains. And part of that is because of Rick’s response to all of them, to keep it light and fun and to keep a door open to the fourth wall to say, “Part of us, come on, come on.” Ba’al walks in, in that scene, Joel Goldsmith’s music is playing, the low camera angle, the lighting. We haven’t seen this guy for half a year, we don’t know what he’s capable of. I, as an audience member, for the first time, was genuinely scared for O’Neill. Genuinely scared for that character, I was like, “I don’t…” He’s in a place where he’s not going to get out of this anytime soon. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. That was Ba’al. That was Cliff Simon all the way.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and truthfully, what was funny is, Rick used to always make fun of Cliff, because he’d go, “You have the mustache, you should be doing a little bit more of this.” And what’s interesting to me is Cliff, would constantly do this, he would constantly smooth his mustache. And I’d say, “Are you doing that because Rick told you to twist your mustache?” And he goes, “No, I just do that.” It’s one of the things he does and I said, “Maybe stop doing it, because it does look like a nervous twitch to me. It looks like it.” He goes, “Really?” And it was one of those things that he had… At one point he had come in with a much spikier sort of goatee and it was like, “I don’t think so it just looks too much like you’re trying too hard. And it looks like what Yu is doing with his facial hair.” And he said, “Okay, good to know.” And then he sort of just went to stubble a little bit more with it. You know the other time, I gotta say, that you get that reaction — I know, as a director, I’m trying to elicit that same reaction — that when he comes around the corner in Abyss, and you sort of see him for the first time, and it’s like, “There he is.” And it’s just the angle that we’re looking at him too is so…

David Read
Slow motion, and yeah, almost.

Martin Wood
The other time is in Continuum, of course, where you don’t know that Ba’al is involved in this until he comes in, and it’s like, “Oh, rats!” Because he’s got the brains to be able to pull it off. Because he has that malice about him to pull it off. And it’s so funny, because if you knew Cliff in real life, that was 100% acting. That man did not exist in Mr. Simon.

David Read
But that’s a great performer right there. Yeah. When he comes through that gate in Continuum, that shot that you complained about, “You know, it just didn’t look quite right. Didn’t look quite right.” But with Cliff, it’s like, “Oh, here we go. We’re in for something.” And it was so cool to be able to have him back for that and really have resolution to that character. We can all stand back and go, “You know what? We unfortunately, may never, will never get another performance out of him, but man, that man left a legacy, not just on Stargate, but all of us, and all of us who were privileged to get to meet him.”

Martin Wood
Yeah. And then how about the duplicating Ba’al?

David Read
Oh, my God.

Martin Wood
I mean, that was more Ba’al that anybody needed.

David Read
That’s certainly true. Yeah, he talked about setting up those shots. Did you do any of those episodes where there were multiple…?

Martin Wood
I didn’t, no, none of those were mine.

David Read
Yeah, that was quite the… that was quite clever of him, and you know, just seeing something different.

Martin Wood
Yes.

David Read
We also lost Mr. Willie Garson.

Martin Wood
Yes.

David Read
This one also just absolutely came out of left field. I had just interviewed him for the show, months before, and I had never met him before. And I was so privileged to have time with him, to get his… because I don’t think he’d ever really done an interview for that character…

Martin Wood
Really?

David Read
I don’t… I haven’t been able to find one anywhere. And Martin is so central to so many aspects of that show. You worked with him, I believe, in 200?

Martin Wood
200 is a show about him.

David Read
Exactly. Tell us about working with Willie.

Martin Wood
What was really interesting about Willie was that he worked the humor.

David Read
Yes.

Martin Wood
He continually worked the humor. Working with Richard Kind, Richard liked the humor written for him. When Richard did…

David Read
Lucius.

Martin Wood
Yeah! When he came in to do all of his stuff — Richard is hysterical, but he likes it there, he likes to be able to make what’s written hysterical — Willie likes to make it hysterical whether it’s there or not, you know? And one of my favorite things is when he fakes the phone call. He just turns away, and when you’re sitting there on set, and he just does something like that, you know…

David Read
Was that not written in the script?

Martin Wood
Not like that, no.

David Read
Oh, Okay. “I didn’t hear it ring, it was on vibrate, get me out of here.”

Martin Wood
There was a line, but it’s the way he picks it up and just turns and just to ad lib after he walks away. And when he does stuff like that, I have my headset on, but I also, I hear the crew around me start to laugh, because you can’t help it, you know? It’s just funny. And he kept doing it all the time, and he’s sitting at the boardroom table, and he’s pitching out these ideas which are so ludicrous, and what’s funny is, the one person who is not supposed to crack a smile is Judge, and Chris is killing himself. I’m like “Chris, you’re in every shot, come on, I can’t hold an over of Willie.” And he goes, “Dude, he’s making me laugh! I’m not doing it!” And I’m like, “Chris, come on, you gotta, you have to be that that straight-faced with it because the the humor comes out of you not finding it funny.” He was just… he was hysterical.

David Read
His chemistry with Rick was just like nothing else. I mean, there was there was a similar thing with Tom McBeath, but it was just, you could tell…

Martin Wood
Yeah, Tom… Interestingly, Tom kept reaching for the character all the time. He was like, “Where am I? Am I bad? Am I good? Am I…? Where am…?” It’s like, “Well, you’re bad, but you’re trying to do something that you think is good.” And Rick would sit there going, “No, you’re 100% bad. You’re just, you’re the worst.” With Willie, even though Willie was doing stuff that was bad, he was… you couldn’t be mad at him, you couldn’t say he was 100% bad because he never knew what he was doing. And, truthfully, that whole plausible deniability thing is a great storyline. I love that storyline.

David Read
No, it’s terrific. And the lizard people, and the cover up at such and such. No, there was… no, that’s the first appearance of his… No, the genius of the 100th episode is that conceit that he lost his memory and so he’s just going out and saying anything, and they’re like, “Well, you know, if this ever comes out, the Air Force can use this as leverage.”

Martin Wood
I mean, nobody thought we would get to 200, right? So…

David Read
Oh, my gosh.

Martin Wood
[inaudible] idea for 200. And I remember when I first picked up the first beat sheet on the on the script to look at it, I’m going, “Oh my god. Are you serious? Are you serious?” And then all the different things that we ended up doing with it, and I mean, obviously, the puppets were — for me — one of the most fun things to do, just because it was so different. And Peter Weston — I think I’ve told this story a number of times — where we went to Los Angeles to shoot with the…

David Read
That footage was shot down there.

Martin Wood
Yeah, the Chiodo brothers who actually did… who did…

David Read
Team America.

Martin Wood
Team America. And I don’t know if I’ve ever… Have you and I had a conversation about it before?

David Read
I have always wanted to talk to you about 200, for all different reasons.

Martin Wood
I’m going to show you something that most people have never seen. I have my own pictures from that time, from when we were there. And these aren’t going to translate very well, but I can show you some very interesting things that happened there, working with the Chiodo brothers. And the puppets that they used, some of them came from Team America.

David Read
Right, I always wondered about the background scientists characters, you have you have a lot of puppets to get one shot of screentime, I was like “That… I can’t imagine the tens of thousands of dollars per puppet.” You know?

Martin Wood
So I mean, this is… [shows photo of Jackson, Carter and O’Neill puppets]

David Read
There they are!

Martin Wood
[inaudible] right there.

David Read
Wow.

Martin Wood
But I’ll show you some of the fun parts about that, that… I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about this, but I don’t know if I’ve ever shown the pictures.

David Read
I’ve never seen that.

Martin Wood
So, this is actually how you set it up [shows picture]. Now, what’s interesting is, Peter and I shot the footage live action. So, what we did is we had the characters coming in, had the actors come in, and they were just dressed in street clothes. They came into the sets, we’d set the shot up, the actors would act it, so that we got the voices for it, and now those voices went down to the puppeteers — they feed into a machine that will make the mouth move. So…

David Read
Like the Gilderfluke?

Martin Wood
Yes, it is. And then we go in and they start, they’ve looked at the footage, they’ve seen what the actors did, and so now they’re mimicking it. Now, here, this is an anomaly because, you see me looking at the puppets, right?

David Read
Yes.

Martin Wood
What happens is, you never talk to the puppeteers. You talk to the puppets when you’re directing them. So I’m sitting there talking to the puppets saying, “I need you to turn your head a little bit more like this. And just…”

David Read
You’re just doing that? You’re not told to do that, it’s just what’s happening?

Martin Wood
No, it’s just, you don’t even think about because you’d be standing there staring straight up the whole time.

David Read
Yeah, but you’re buying it. You’re buying the performance.

Martin Wood
And truthfully, they nod, they look for you. It’s hysterical.

David Read
That’s funny.

Martin Wood
Now, here’s a couple of shots. Again, I don’t know if I ever said this to anybody before, but do you know who the stand-ins were?

David Read
No.

Martin Wood
[shows photo] Alec Baldwin was one of our stand-ins. And the other one… [shows photo] was Matt Damon.

David Read
Oh my god… that’s great, man!

Martin Wood
So when we were setting up shots, we’d have Matt Damon and and Alec Baldwin there with us. It was so much fun to do and it was just… You were setting up shots [shows photo] like you were setting up shots for a shot, for [inaudible]

David Read
Right!

Martin Wood
I don’t know why that brightness is so weird, but…

David Read
Yeah, it works. There we go, yeah.

Martin Wood
Anyway, it was so much fun to do, and just being down there with these guys for the time that we spent down there, and directing these actors and coming back, and then, of course, everybody wanted to see all the footage. All the actors wanted to see how they looked. I sent Amanda a couple of pictures from there, just to show her who her character looked like and it was hysterical. It was just so much fun.

David Read
Now, did you shoot the puppet footage before 200 principal photography or after?

Martin Wood
No, it was well after, because what we did is we shot the actual scenes during the shooting…

David Read
During the shooting.

Martin Wood
And then what I’d do is, I’d just leave the camera locked off, take the actors out of it, and run it for the duration of time that we needed to do that.

David Read
So you have a, like… yeah.

Martin Wood
Yeah. And then what we ended up doing was, we had all the measurements and everything like that and I remember it was Michelle Comens was giving us all this, feeding us all this stuff, and we got down there and Peter and I are looking at the shots going, “We can’t do it with these measurements. We literally can’t do it with the measurements, we have to do it by eye.” Because we’d play the footage back, I’d be looking at it and we’d key the green screen out, and I’m going, “It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t look right.” So, we ended up, literally, doing it by eye and giving that to them instead of using the distance inside, because the scale didn’t work properly for us. And it really… in order to make it work, we just went, “Okay, hope this works when we get back.” And it did, it worked beautifully.

David Read
I was always surprised at how, as artists, it’s sometimes more important to feel things through than to measure things through.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
My argument with Bruce Woloshyn — and it’s gone on for years now — was, why didn’t you just have a laser at the puddle so that you could scan in to the computer the point at which the object dematerializes? Because he’s always done it by hand.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
Every one of those shots, and I think every one of those shots has always cost, like, $50,000, if I’m not mistaken?

Martin Wood
They were, at the beginning, very, very expensive.

David Read
But, Bruce said that they always cost the same amount. And Brad Wright has always said that as well, and Brad was always like, “Why is this always a cost?” Because the advancement in technology, and it’s always the same, it’s always was fixed. But Bruce would argue, he had to paint it by hand because of the the weight of clothing of… it’s not just going through the puddle, it’s meeting a resistant surface.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
And it doesn’t just let stuff through.

Martin Wood
It would take time to go across your body like this, rather than just be gone when you step through. So, as soon as you hit the event horizon, it didn’t just, it wasn’t like you were clearing a pane of glass, because it would come off of you, like this. And it would seep off of you like that, with a hard line on your shoulder, but then folded in behind you as well.

David Read
It’s reacting to you. And the scripts, the inner canon of the show backs this up. So, it’s just brilliant.

Martin Wood
When I started shooting on the side of the gate, which was sort of that invention of sort of sitting there and watching from one side to another and where we got rid of the wormhole part of it, so I could look at both sides of the gate at the same time.

David Read
Yes.

Martin Wood
It didn’t happen very often, and it didn’t happen very often because what James and what Bruce would always talk about, what everybody would talk about, is that it isn’t an instantaneous thing.

David Read
No, it’s a few seconds.

Martin Wood
You’re making it look instantaneous.

David Read
Yep.

Martin Wood
And I said, “Well, yeah, but it’s so cool.” And they’re like, “It doesn’t really work like that. And what you would probably do is have a bit of a trail coming off of them too.” And I’m saying, “Well, I’m not worried about that. Because of the gate itself, you can’t see the horizon. If I’m directly at the side of the gate, you can’t see the event horizon.”

David Read
Correct, no, the gate’s too wide.

Martin Wood
Because the gate is wide enough to do it. And I said, “So let’s try and make it so that the time it takes to go through here is delayed just enough before they come out here.”

David Read
Yeah. There was the one shot that I can think of, David Warry-Smith directed A Hundred Days, and it’s the only time that — I’m pretty sure the only time that Stargate did this was — Rick goes in, in Stargate Command, and then comes out on Edora, and it’s delayed by just a few moments. At the beginning of the show, it was several seconds to get to the other destination, but later on, we learned that it was just a few microseconds. As you evolve the series, there’s a few changes like that that have to get made, but the artistry that goes into the shots and the composition like that, you stand back and just go, “Wow, that was cool.”

Martin Wood
Yeah, and holds up today, as far as I’m concerned.

David Read
Absolutely holds up today. 100%. With 200 — and Christopher Judge and I talked about this in a fair bit of detail, and I’m really interested in your thoughts — and you alluded to this just at the beginning where it was, “How’re we going to do this?” I mean, the number of sequences that are in this thing, and what Chris said was that — and maybe you can piggyback off of this — was that every department just brought their A-game.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
They knew what they were getting into. What they were getting into was a gift anyway, because the show has lasted for 10 seasons, so this is a chance to send a love letter back to the fans, thanking them for allowing you guys to still be on the air for that long.

Martin Wood
Yeah, very much. And here’s the extent that it actually shows you that everybody brought their A-game. Rick showed up for scenes that he was invisible in.

David Read
That’s right, he had a green, like, skin on!

Martin Wood
He had the green suit on. He was there for the shower scene.

David Read
And he just says “Nope.”

David Read
And I’m going, “We don’t need to see where you are!” He’s like, “I’m here.”

David Read
That’s funny.

Martin Wood
And he wanted to be there for the chair turning scene right at the beginning. And I’m like, “You don’t have to, Rick.” And then he insisted on being in the walking down the hall. He was “I got a coffee cup, I guess.” That was such a pain in the butt for the guys, because they actually ended up making a new coffee cup. The one that he had they couldn’t use. But yeah, he’s walking down the hall and I have pictures of him walking down the hall with Chris, and it’s a hysterical scene, because he was there.

David Read
What was your… would that have been your favorite, besides the puppets? Or were some of… I think the teen one is hysterical. I think that that’s so funny.

Martin Wood
Yeah, that one was funny. I wasn’t as familiar with One Tree Hill at the time, and that’s sort of what it was based on, was that kind of feeling, and so I didn’t embrace that one the way that I did with sort of the… I loved, loved the planet exploding.

David Read
With the Furlings! You introduce them and then you kill ’em!

Martin Wood
The Furlings, to me, were hysterical, because it was a husband and wife team that played them and they just… they were so funny. And again, and the other one was the Farscape one that I had so much fun with, because we had Ben there, and Claudia, and just being able to do the Farscape bit was very funny.

David Read
Whose idea was it to reverse Michael and Ben, so that Ben was no longer playing Crichton? I think that Ben was originally supposed to play Crichton because Vala plays Aeryn.

Martin Wood
I’m not sure whose idea it was. I would give it to Brad, but it could have been any one of them in the room, I think. They sort of went, “Oh, this is gonna be hilarious.” And Brad, playing the engineer.

David Read
Because Paul McGillion wasn’t available.

Martin Wood
And that was, on the day, it was me looking at Brad going [shrugs] and him going, “Oh, I can’t, I can’t again.” It’s like, “Come on!” And he goes, “I’ll do it.” It was very funny, very, very funny. And I mean, all of that stuff, everything we did was just so much fun to do, and knowing that it was being made for the audience that loved the show, you know? Every time you do a show, you say, “We don’t want to alienate anybody,” you want new viewers to come in and watch it.

David Read
Of course.

Martin Wood
On 200, it was like, the only people that are going to really get this, that are going to understand the depth of this humor, are the fans that really love this show. And the reaction I’ve had so many times from people who knew the show, all your fans, has always been this very positive energy coming from it. And people that didn’t know the show, when I say, “Oh, you gotta watch 200,” they go, “Really? What was that all about? I didn’t understand,” then you go, “You wouldn’t understand, unless you saw 100, unless you saw, unless you knew the backstory with the Furlings and things that… you wouldn’t get half the jokes that were in there.”

David Read
Jack and Sam getting married, and perhaps Jack and Daniel, instead, getting married, with the shippers and the slashers.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and that scene again, where we were able to bring all the people that had been in… all the audience for it was all the people who had been with the show from the beginning, and you start looking at everybody, “Wow, we’ve spent, you know, 10 years together.” It was pretty cool.

David Read
What about the Wizard of Oz sequence?

Martin Wood
That was funny. There’s a place in Burnaby, called Central Park, and when we were sort of location scouting for a number of different things, I was looking for the sort of yellow brick road kind of feeling to it. And I also needed to shoot a bunch of other things, that whole chase with the replicators.

Martin Wood
A giant crane shot that sweeps across the ground and chases our guys. And I shot Teal’c at the gate, when they come through and their strings are cut.

David Read
The replicators, yeah.

David Read
Puppets? Oh, so you’re doing all those elements at the, okay, yeah.

Martin Wood
I’m shooting all those elements at one time. And so… and the One Tree Hill stuff too, they…

David Read
That’s right.

Martin Wood
…version, a lot of it was shot there. But, when I came around the corner and and looked and there’s this little windy road, this little windy path, I thought, “Oh, I know where we’re going to shoot this, then, I know where we can crash the ship.” And that was another one where, because we constantly made the Wizard of Oz connections, it really had to be in this, in 200. And again, that’s one of those things that the true fans are going to know and everybody else is gonna go, “Why did they choose Wizard of Oz? You know, I understand why you chose Farscape, I understand, but why did you choose…”

David Read
There’s, like, 20 Wizard of Oz references throughout the show. There’s a lot of subtle ones.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and a lot of it was Amanda coming up with stuff like that and the writers writing stuff in and the actors just grabbing onto it and going, “Yeah, let’s use these references.”

David Read
Just craziness. Yeah, I’m thrilled that you guys did it, that you had the budget to pull something like that off and I think it will continue to go down as one of the top 10 of the show, because we all know what it is that you’re doing and you guys do it so well and that’s just, you just [blows kiss] sending us a kiss.

Martin Wood
Yeah, that, I mean, truthfully, 200 and Lost City were the two that we spent a massive amount of money on and they had the money to make them what they needed to make them.

David Read
Lost City, very much. I wanted to talk about this one, because in some respects it’s four episodes. It’s Lost City one and two and then it’s Rising one and two, they all fold together.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
What can you tell us about… because for a long time we had — and I was on the news side of this at this point — there were rumors about the Stargate feature film, the Stargate movie, “We’re gonna finish the show and do a movie,” and Lost City, in my understanding, was many of the elements in that were from one of the proposed outlines that was potentially going to be the movie, had season five ended, with the threat of Anubis and that was it!

Martin Wood
Right.

David Read
So, tell us about creating that with the team.

Martin Wood
I mean, that was… for me Lost City was its own entity. I wasn’t thinking about Atlantis at the time, I don’t think a lot of people were thinking about Atlantis at the time, because Lost City was so big. And the mechanics of what was going to be Rising one and two wasn’t solidified yet when we were into what Lost City was going to be. So, for me, Lost City just needed to be this denouement kind of feeling to what SG-1 was doing, until they found… this was like finding a new planet within walking distance. And that whole idea of finding a power source, of having that influence that the chair gave you, that all those things that came together in Lost City were important elements to keep on their own. Because if we tied them too much to Atlantis, if we tied them too much to where we were going with it, I think that it would have gotten lost in Lost City one and two. It needed to be all discovery, all discovery. Nothing… does that make sense?

David Read
I think so, yeah.

Martin Wood
What I’m saying is, what we didn’t want to do was set it up as if, “Okay, this is where we’re going with this.”

David Read
Right.

Martin Wood
It’d be all discovery for the team, where they had no idea what it was, you know? It’s like finding the extra Chevron. It’s when you find… like, it’s one thing to blow up suns, okay, it’s another thing to find a power source that you can control.

David Read
That’s true.

Martin Wood
Sorry, Amanda, I hate to bring up that painful memory.

David Read
“You blow up one sun, everyone expects you to walk on water.”

Martin Wood
Exactly! But understanding what those were going to be, and then trying to design those things. With the idea of design elements that would go into what we were going to see was a big part of what Rising was. Rising was “What are the elements we really like about this? And what do we move in to the new series, into Atlantis, to make it look like it is something different?” It was the same thing that would have happened with Universe. There are elements that need to be in the human tech that will allow us to do this kind of stuff, so, it’s not just wiring up a new battery.

David Read
No, there’s a whole philosophy behind all of it.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
We had Jessica Steen on at the end of our first season, on Dial the Gate, she was wonderful. And she was very upfront and honest about the things that went down on set, about Burning Man, and all these other things that she felt contributed to, “You know what, they went with someone else.” What was it like working with — I’d like to get to William Devane in a moment — but what was it like working with her on the set? And bringing Elizabeth Weir to life, for the first time?

Martin Wood
Yeah. She and Torri are two different characters.

David Read
Oh, yeah.

Martin Wood
Very, very different. It’s not like Torri picked out what Jessica did. Torri created a new Weir. And Jessica played a softer version, that was… And truthfully, part of this was me, in conversation with her and part of it was Rick, and the way he wanted her to play it. Part of it was, obviously, Brad and the team sort of saying, “This is what we need this person to be.” I think that certainly she had the strength to do it, but it was a different strength. And I honestly think — and this is nothing about Jessica — it’s not about what she did with the character, it’s where the character ended up going. I think Torri gave it that gravitas that… it may not have come to the… you know, going toe to toe with Sheppard was something that Weir did very well. And that Amanda did very well. Amanda, when she came in, it was like, “No, we’re not doing that.” I mean, she was able to do it without… it was just, “This is what we’re doing, this is what Command looks like at this point.” Whereas Torri had to find Weir’s command.

David Read
It’s a new base.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and it was also something she’d never done. Weir was not a command leader like that. So finding her feet there — and I’m talking about Weir, not Torri — finding her feet with Flanigan, or with Sheppard, was part of the story. When Jessica went toe-to-toe with O’Neill…

David Read
And with Kinsey.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and, I mean, it was… Yeah, it was different, I think, than the control that Weir would… that Torri would have brought to it. So I didn’t… I mean, I was on the periphery of the decision making, I was not privy to some inner machinations of it, but I was there. I’m not saying I wasn’t part of it, but I was on the outside part of it. And I did not disagree with the change. I felt that Torri was a strong choice for that character.

David Read
We ran a poll saying which Weir people liked more. And I was really shocked that it was nearly 40%, the number of people who would have been willing to give Jessica Steen’s Weir a go, into Atlantis, and it makes you… regardless of whatever you guys had to work with on set, in terms of what was shot on the screen, I often would look back on those episodes and be like, “What would Atlantis have been like with Jessica’s interpretation of that character?”

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
It would have changed… it would have evolved the texture of the series.

Martin Wood
I think — and this is me, just a personal opinion of this — I think what Jessica would have brought was a more feminine perspective to it, whereas Torri brought a “We’re not talking about men and women, we’re talking about people” version of it. So she brought the non-gender leader into it. I mean, there’s, obviously, she was very much a female character, but…

David Read
Oh, of course, yeah.

Martin Wood
The decision making was not… Jessica would have brought a much more emotional version of it, which is what Rachel brought into it, when she came in too, which was really interesting, because Rachel’s character did not have that bent originally, you know. She was a warrior.

David Read
Teyla was, yeah, Teyla was on her feet, fighting, through and through. But still, just by nature of — and it’s the argument that Amanda made at the beginning, with Carter as well — don’t write a woman, write a good character and the woman qualities are going to come through.

Martin Wood
Yeah. And I think with Jessica, you could see that in Lost City, you saw that… and it wasn’t… there was no diminishment of power for it, it was just that perspective would have been different, I think. And so when I think about the difference between Jessica and Torri in that role, I wonder… and I mean, in thinking about Weir, you have to think about a number of things. You have to think about Hewlett, you have to think about about Flanigan — I’m sorry, I’m using their…

David Read
Yeah, you have to think about McKay and Sheppard.

Martin Wood
You have to think of McKay and Sheppard and you have to think about what that dynamic was. And then — I mean, Ronan wasn’t even a part of it at that point — but when you bring Ronan into it, there’s those three characters that are very, incredibly different, and how that character works with those three. And with Teyla. When you look at the team, it would have been a different team, you know? And one of my favorite episodes with Torri was the operation, the brain operation?

David Read
Ah, yes, Lifeline. Adrift and Lifeline.

Martin Wood
Yeah. And that was a place where you got to see a Weir, that was… whose defenses were down.

David Read
Yeah, she’s more vulnerable.

Martin Wood
Way more vulnerable in that. And I think Torri did an amazing job of it.

David Read
Yeah.

Martin Wood
But that, for me, was one of them. And the other one was Tabula Rasa, where we’re not seeing the formed version of the characters yet, we’re seeing…

David Read
That’s an episode that Amanda was in, Weir was already gone at that point.

Martin Wood
Right. So what you’re seeing is, you’re seeing these characters that are…

David Read
Abstracts.

Martin Wood
Abstracts of themselves. That’s where — if there was a Torri or a Jessica — where you would have seen the changes I’m talking about, the differences I’m talking about between them, because you got to see McKay without defense, you got to see Sheppard without defense, you got to see… where you’re actually seeing people that don’t know how to move forward. And that’s where that raw version of Weir, from those two, would have been in something like that.

David Read
Yeah, that’s a great episode, where you have… it comes down to… that’s an episode where when you remove all of the foibles of a person, all of their memory and everything else, all they have is really their assertiveness to engage.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and their raw, creative brains.

David Read
Yeah. And one of the things that I love about that episode is Amanda — in a lot of the the earlier scenes where she’s in — is not front and center. She’s in the background, and she’s thinking. She’s thinking her way through it, which is completely Carter. She’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna make… I need to figure out my plan of attack here before I’m moving forward with anything.”

Martin Wood
Right, yeah. And that’s what I mean, it’s those things inherently come forward and I think what you would have seen, if there had been a Weir character there, you would have seen this difference that I’m talking about, between Jessica and Torri, show up in its rawest form.

David Read
William Devane, introducing The President — this was actually done in Inauguration, the episode before Lost City — really the first episode that’s having us, in all honesty, firmly break continuity with our reality. I’ve always wanted to talk with Brad about that choice. It’s like, “You know what? We’ve got to make this… at some point we’ve got to make this story bigger. It can’t just be underground in Colorado all the time.” I think that you guys took advantage of the X2 set, for the White House?

Martin Wood
Yeah, for the White House, yeah.

David Read
And you actually used a shot of that in Continuum of his speech that you never got to use in Lost City that you held it over. Tell us about bringing in the President.

Martin Wood
It wasn’t the first time Bill’s played the President.

David Read
This is true.

Martin Wood
And we were talking about that and he said “Not my first time in this set, either.”

David Read
Oh, wow.

Martin Wood
In the Oval Office. And I loved his President, especially in Continuum, where everything is falling apart and the idea of a very, very capable President who asks for the information, rather than has the information, for me was a big part of what that that President was. He’s not going to be the guy that just lays down the law.

David Read
No. He believes… well, he and Hammond served together, I mean, he’s from the chain of command. He recognizes the importance of the chain of command.

Martin Wood
Yeah, and asks the right questions and had a humility to him that played beautifully as a President. It’s before we saw an Obama President that could ask those questions without feeling like… I mean, it was, honestly, there’s been a few Presidents that you guys have had that have been those kind of Presidents that you believe would reach out to the people who really knew what was going on, and would take that in, and then try and make decisions with those people, rather than “Here’s my decision for a thing,” which is what a lot of movie Presidents do. They make decisions, they’ll hear something, and then they just make a decision about it…

David Read
Right. That’s how I kind of looked at Harrison Ford with Air Force One. One of my favorite interpretations. But depending on that situation, that’s an action movie.

Martin Wood
But I mean, that’s part of it, and you look at… what’s the one now? White House Falling?

David Read
Oh, I haven’t seen that one. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

Martin Wood
Yeah, but that’s, again, Presidents that make decisions and things like this, but without having to think about what the ramifications of the people around them are. In this case, Bill was making decisions that felt that you really liked him, you really appreciated him being the President. Because you could get… I mean, we’re up flying F-15’s and looking for an answer. And it’s so easy for a movie President to be bluster and…

David Read
Patton.

Martin Wood
Patton or Fourth of July, it’s those kinds of Presidents that they’re, “This is what’s gonna happen to be able to make this happen!” And instead, his character was very much, “I know you need this permission, I know you need these things. I’m going to do that.” And it was in a way that you felt there was a humility to it.

David Read
Yeah, I was so delighted when you guys brought him back for Continuum, because I thought one of the crying shames that we never saw him again after Lost City. He was mentioned a fair bit, you could tell that there was a reverence for him, for the character, he left his stamp on the Stargate franchise, for sure. And then when we got him back in Continuum, I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is the cherry on top.” And then the scene with Don.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
An excuse to bring Don back for one last time.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
I have so many more questions that I want to get to, but I’m going to set those aside for the future, I’d love to have you back again. It’s time to turn it over to the fans.

Martin Wood
Okay!

David Read
So, Michelle Lee wanted to know, “Martin, if you could direct a favorite movie or series from your childhood, what would it be?”

Martin Wood
Oh, wow. If I could direct a movie…

David Read
What did you grow up on loving that you could take a swing at.

Martin Wood
I think in terms of movies, I’ve always wanted to do a Master and Commander kind of ship-based movie.

David Read
Ah, high seas.

Martin Wood
Yeah. And I was a big submarine fan, I was a big… there was an old, old movie called Gray Lady Down, which I loved is a submarine movie. And I have always wanted to do them. You’ve seen it, in Stargate, sorry, in Sanctuary, and whenever I get a chance to do submarine, I’m all over submarine!

David Read
Oh, absolutely. You made a meal out of it with Small Victories. That was so cool!

Martin Wood
So I’ve told the story about being in the torpedo tube. Yeah, and for me that was… I loved being in submarines and so I think it would be a submarine movie or a square rigger or a barquentine kind of movie where I’m being able to shoot it on the sea. So a Master and Commander kind of thing, I would love to. And period pieces, I like period pieces because of the things that it offers you.

David Read
Well, yeah, there’s so much attached to it, sociologically. You got people interacting in a certain way at a certain period of time with certain things that they are… certain foibles that they are dealing with. There’s a whole ton of stuff that goes along with that, for sure.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
One of the more interesting ones, I think, recently was there was a War of the Worlds that was set in Victorian England. And it was like, “Wow, that’s, I mean, that’s… Wow!” It was really an interesting take.

Martin Wood
There’s also Cowboys vs. Aliens, but I don’t think… I wouldn’t have done that one.

David Read
Yeah, I hear you. Vicky Cartwright. “I would like to ask if Martin Wood is a secret Sam and Jack shipper, as lots of Jack and Sam moments happened in the episodes he directed.” You talked to us about Out of Mind and that scene with Rick and Amanda, but, yeah, I’m interested to hear…

Martin Wood
I was one of the very first people to start pushing that. I knew that it was a deal and because Rick and Amanda had so much fun doing it, the…

David Read
It’s chemistry!

Martin Wood
Yeah, yeah.

David Read
Solitudes is all you.

Martin Wood
That was where it started, with that very close contact, where she’s lying down beside him, you know? And…

David Read
“It’s my sidearm, I swear.”

Martin Wood
I was just about to say that, it’s one of those great lines. But truthfully, I was a big promoter of the Sam and Jack, and then when I got to do things like the Saran wrap between them, and that moment of being able to look at each other’s faces through the forcefield like that.

David Read
Upgrades and Divide and Conquer he’s talking about.

Martin Wood
Yeah. That for me was… I very much liked promoting that kind of stuff. So I would say yes, I’m a shipper.

David Read
It brought tension to the show in a series where you have the Air Force clearly saying “In the same chain of command, this cannot happen.” So you cannot deny eros between human beings. It simply exists. So let’s acknowledge it, at the very least, and you guys were able to do that.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
For sure. I… let me see here. Eva. “One of the filming locations in Virgin River is Jack’s cabin. Did it remind you of any Stargate memories?”

Martin Wood
Wow. I chose it!

David Read
I’ve been, it’s a wonderful location.

Martin Wood
Yeah. And it’s very close to my house.

David Read
Oh, there you go.

Martin Wood
Yes. In fact, I was setting up a shot, with a crane, very reminiscent of the fish jumping out of the water shot.

David Read
Oh the pullback at the end of… yeah.

Martin Wood
And I put a melon-Jack sitting where Jack and Sam had been sitting on that little bridge there. And now, there’s a deck built across the pond right now, that I started using with Virgin River, but it gives you the best look at the cabin. And the interesting thing is, never having gone into the cabin, in Stargate, it’s having this whole set, that’s built inside the cabin. I did go inside it in Primeval: New World, I was inside the actual cabin, which is terrible. You don’t want to be in there…

David Read
It’s very small.

Martin Wood
Yeah and if you have a respirator on.

David Read
Oh, got it.

Martin Wood
But we shot in there for Primeval: New World. So when we built it for Virgin River, it was so different than what I imagined it would be for Sam and Jack, for Jack and his cabin. But yeah, it’s always the same. It’s always the same shots, it’s always the same feelings because it’s a very small area that you can be in.

David Read
Claire Cowan wanted to know, “Did you keep your costume from Continuum, filming in the Arctic?”

Martin Wood
Yeah! It is so funny, I actually… my wife has been trying to clear out this area that we’ve got downstairs and I was actually looking at some of the stuff I have down there. I have several of the SG black jackets. They were comfortable, and I’ve got one of Chris’s which, thank God, is still too big for me. But I have all of the stuff I wore with… I know why Claire’s asking it, because she wants to buy it, but it won’t fit you, Claire, it’s not like the Amanda stuff. But yes, I do have a bunch of that stuff, I have the boots. I have the… I don’t think the big coat I kept, because I have that red one and that was the white one that I was wearing was not nearly as warm. But yeah, all the rest of the costume that I had on there, because we were all wearing icebreaker [inaudible] Merino wool, which was amazing.

David Read
Just crazy the amount of punishment you guys put up with to get those amazing shots on the film.

Martin Wood
Favorite time shooting.

David Read
Absolutely.

Martin Wood
I’d go back there in a heartbeat.

David Read
Theresa Mc. “Have you always been interested in space travel, or perhaps even time travel, when growing up?”

Martin Wood
Space travel, absolutely. I had all of the Saturn V rockets, I had all the… I had the Lunar Lander, I had everything in my room, it was just covered in that kind of stuff. And for years and years wanted to be an astronaut, and this was before Canadian astronauts were a thing. And my parents kept trying to convince me, “No, you’re not going to be an astronaut because there’s no astronauts that are Canadian.” And they were never harsh like that, but it was a reality at the time to be an astronaut, and I spent most of my very young life wanting to be an astronaut, and watching everything. I was such a sci-fi junkie when I was… I read everything, I had a massive… I mean, the books behind you, you see are Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, they’re everything I could get, I still have. So when I see things like the Foundation series coming out and so that I just jump on those things, I love those things. Anything that is canon sci-fi, I was a huge fan of. Snowpiercer, not so much, but…

David Read
I liked the movie.

Martin Wood
I liked the movie, and honestly, I like parts of the series and things like this. I think what they’re doing is incredible, to make it work the way it is. I would work on it if I was given the opportunity [inaudible]. The story that I had in my head was not the story that’s being told now and that’s part of it.

David Read
I think that in the film, I think when I saw the monologue that Chris Evans has at the end of that, it was like “That is Oscar material.” That is a harsh scene. What did you think of Dune?

Martin Wood
I loved it, I’ve seen it four times now. Because, I never liked the first Dune…

David Read
I didn’t care for the movie either.

Martin Wood
No, and…

David Read
Mini series is good.

Martin Wood
It’s okay. But still, it wasn’t what I thought. And then when I saw what Villeneuve did with the size, I just, I keep going back to this… when those little ships get spit out in space and then suddenly you see the size of them on the planet, I’m thinking, “That’s what Denis does so well, is that he can create that sense of size, of what it was.” And the sandworms are the same thing. And, honestly, I really love what Timothée Chalamet did with it. I think that I’m looking forward to what Zendaya does with it in the second part.

David Read
Jason was wonderful. He was Duncan.

Martin Wood
And it’s so funny, because Jason gets away with playing Jason all the time. If you know who Ronan was, you know who Aquaman is, you know who Conan is, you know… because he does that so well. And he really… I mean, I love watching Jason like that, and what’s funny to me is looking at him wearing that helmet and going, [shakes head] “His head wouldn’t fit in the helmet like that.” Because I always had that trouble with… we couldn’t get the helmet, that space helmet, on Jason’s head. It fits Chris’s head, it doesn’t fit Jason’s head.

David Read
That’s crazy.

Martin Wood
Yeah, but I get a kick out of watching Jason all the time, because it’s the Jason I know.

David Read
Exactly, and it’s gonna carry him far.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
Ákos Tamás Nováki. “A favorite, or one of your weirder cameos in Stargate?”

Martin Wood
The one where I’m in the — and I don’t remember what episode it was — when I’m in the elevator and Rick comes in, and he wanted to say something. And I always go back to the fact that we had this… Brad had this plan, if we could get…

David Read
Aren’t you in Lost City, shaking your head over the crossword puzzle? Isn’t that you?

Martin Wood
I think so. Honestly, it’s the one where I was… what I was doing was, I was experimenting with a new way to do the elevator, so I could actually move the set piece in front of it and I put myself in that scene. In Lost City, I remember I was in the corridors with with Dan in that, so we could put ourselves into Atlantis if we wanted to. I can’t remember what episode it was from, but that was my favorite one was that version. I gotta tell you, my favorite Dan Shea one was when he gets knocked off the stairs and has to land…

David Read
Upgrades “Hey, Siler!” [Wilhelm scream]

Martin Wood
That was my favorite Dan Shea one, and I think… was I at the bottom of the stairs in that one looking at helping him? I think that’s where I was on that one.

David Read
I remember something about this story, but I just remember thinking “What a tricky… if you get that wrong, he’s gonna go sliding.”

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
Man, that guy put up with a lot of punishment and his line in 200 is the best. “Why is this always happening to me?” Let me see here. Tinman wanted to know, “I’d like to know if any of the sets are still available from any of the series.” Those have been long gone, haven’t they?

Martin Wood
They are long gone, yeah. I know some people have recreated the boardroom in their basement, I know some people have. And there’s an awful lot of people out there who have sets in their houses, but no, I don’t think that any of the sets still exist.

David Read
Have you seen Stargate Network?

Martin Wood
I have.

David Read
Yeah, the Unreal build, it’s getting better and better, it is so cool.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
Shantel Leo. “What is your favorite episode of Sanctuary?”

Martin Wood
Of Sanctuary?

David Read
Uh huh.

Martin Wood
I think, for lots of different reasons, Next Tuesday was.

David Read
I thought you were gonna say that.

Martin Wood
Yeah, but there’s a couple of them. Honestly, Kush was one of my favorites too, and it’s just because it’s so contained and because we met so many cool characters in that. But I think Next Tuesday was probably one of my favorites. I mean, there’s so many good episodes, in that, for different reasons, were incredible. Yeah, I mean, anytime I get to have Ian and Amanda fight for five days, it’s gonna be a good episode, you know? That was a great episode.

David Read
Is it streaming anywhere right now? I haven’t followed up on Sanctuary online.

Martin Wood
I don’t think so. I know that there’s been — and I have to be very careful about what I say about it right now —

David Read
Of course.

Martin Wood
There is movement right now. And there is movement in Sanctuary world.

David Read
Is that the next iteration?

Martin Wood
Yeah, I have to be…

David Read
Potentially?

Martin Wood
…careful what I say, so…

David Read
Of course.

Martin Wood
But yes, there is talk.

David Read
All right, I like that.

Martin Wood
I’ll say this. There’s more than talk.

David Read
Okay. Good for you. So potential… if there was a next thing, that there’s potential involvement on your part?

Martin Wood
Potentially, yeah. I mean, you have to know that the forces that be have talked to Damian, Amanda and myself about that, but I can’t say much more than that.

David Read
Okay. Well, for Sanctuary fans, I’m excited for you guys. Terrific. Johann Foss. “What, for you, was a big difference between directing Stargate and directing Sanctuary?”

Martin Wood
Sanctuary I had much more control of.

David Read
That’s true.

Martin Wood
Because there were the three of us really making all the decisions, all of the decisions in that — Amanda and Damian and I — there was much more camaraderie involved in that, because it wasn’t as big a machine. It was a very small machine that we bled into every day. And there was always blood on the carpet with it, that we had to sort of deal with, and so for that reason, Sanctuary was a passion project that I got to be more passionate about, because it was my blood that was there on the carpet. And, truthfully, it had started with a specific idea. Damien, walking into my office from across the hall, handing me a script and saying, “What do you think?” And me going, “Oh, my God!” and then it sort of exponentially took off from there.

David Read
Wow, that’s so cool. Sommer wanted to know, “I heard that the character of Martin was based on you?”

Martin Wood
I wish! I wish. No, I mean, Martin was based on Willie Garson is what it was. It was very much written for him. The name was the same, but I don’t think that Brad or Robert or any of the guys had — or Paul or Joe — had me in mind when they were writing that character. I wish, but I can’t take any credit for it.

David Read
Understood. Tune Tamasha. “Martin, which episode had the most reshoots and retakes and why? Whether props, camera issues?”

Martin Wood
The pilot. That’s how I started with it. We went in and I reshot the whole scene of the escape from the prison was a reshoot.

David Read
The whole scene?

Martin Wood
Yeah, I mean, the whole escape was a reshoot.

David Read
What happened?

Martin Wood
It didn’t turn out the way that Brad and Jonathan had wanted it to, and so that was my… I was firsting the third episode with Rusty in it and got asked if I could do… in fact, I was gonna leave. I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but I was the first AD on the third and the fifth episode.

David Read
So, Enemy Within, with Kowalski’s death and then the fifth one. Okay.

Martin Wood
And so I was only the first AD on those two. And I was there, I had directed a series called Two and done an episode of that, and I had done some… I directed a bunch of stuff for a movie called Them, with Tony Todd, and had really wanted to concentrate on directing. I was firsting at the time Ron French was producing, I’d gone in and talked to Michael and Rick and said, “You know, I really want to direct, but I will first this stuff until Bill Mizel is freed up and come back.” Because Andy Mikita was doing the very first episode, then Bill was supposed to do the ones after that. I was caught in being able to do that, so at the end of the last episode, I sort of turned to him and said, “I’m gonna go, this is my last day.” And Michael said, “Can you come into Rick’s trailer for a second?” And I walked into Rick’s trailer and Rick said, “We’re keeping you as a second unit director.” And that’s really what happened was, it was me being pulled into Rick’s trailer and Michael and Rick saying, “We’re keeping you as a second unit director. Brad needs you guys to have read it, Jonathan needs you to do something with the pilot.” And so I went back and shot a whole ton of stuff with it. So I think that was probably… we didn’t do a lot of reshoots on these shows, there wasn’t the ability to be able to do it. There wasn’t the money to do it, or the ability, so there wasn’t a ton of stuff that we had to reshoot, often. The only scenes, really, that I can remember, there was another one — and truthfully, I can’t remember what episode it was for — Oh, I do! It was Other Guys.

David Read
Season Six.

Martin Wood
Yeah, The Other Guys, I had to reshoot a scene, and it was because something had technically gone wrong with it, and we had to reshoot it. And Patrick had to come back for it.

David Read
Oh, gosh.

Martin Wood
Yeah.

David Read
Yeah. You do enough planning in advance, you can pull almost anything off, weather not withstanding, and a couple of other things. But was there ever a circumstance where it was like, “We got this. This is what we have. I’m not happy with it, but it gets the job done.” Or were you always able to make it work?

Martin Wood
No, blowing up a beach once was trouble for me. Do you remember the run when we were on the planet — I can’t remember the name of the episode — the team is running toward us down the beach and it’s being blown up by a glider.

David Read
Okay, there was… is that 48 Hours?

Martin Wood
No.

David Read
Because they’re running toward camera? …that’s being blown up by a glider… Oh, yes! Okay, Into the Fire… no, In the… Line of Duty.

Martin Wood
Line of Duty, right. Because Amanda has overtop of, that’s when she’s…

David Read
Jolinar pays her a visit.

Martin Wood
Right. So, that beach scene there, we did it twice. The first time it didn’t work out and I had to do it again, which meant we had to replant all the bombs. We had to do it… The second time was one of those things where I went, “I can’t do it again. I have to live with it.” It worked. I mean, I had five cameras on it, so I knew it was gonna work. The first time it didn’t work. And it wasn’t one of those situations where it’s like, “Hey, let me show you what it looks like. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh, lets roll cameras.” It wasn’t that, it just, it didn’t pan out the way it was supposed to, the shot, and I needed something very, very specific with the glider going into the gate.

David Read
Got it. Yeah, ’cause there’s that wide shot of it coming around and… okay, I know what you’re talking about now.

Martin Wood
And so that one I did have to re… I did have to settle for, on that one, but there wasn’t a lot of that, you know? There wasn’t a lot of it. Usually it was big effects things that happened like that. Another time was when we found the Ancient library.

David Read
Yes.

Martin Wood
And to get to that there was that whole… blowing up that whole field, when we were under attack at that point. That was when we were in an incredibly dry tinder time and there were no fires allowed, and we’re blowing up a field filled with grass. And I knew that when I had one shot at it, and that was it. So again, I had to be happy with that one.

David Read
That’s it, you have to be happy. You never get… don’t necessarily get another pass.

Martin Wood
Right.

David Read
Raj wanted to know — Raj’s birthday is today, Happy Birthday, Raj.

Martin Wood
Happy Birthday, Raj.

David Read
“What are your thoughts on the future of the franchise?” I think we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I wanted to…

Martin Wood
Yeah, I mean, if it was up to me, there would be… it would continue forever. Quite honestly, it has legs forever, because there’s so much more that you could do with it. And it was one of the first times that people experimented with humor and sci-fi at that level.

David Read
And in the now.

Martin Wood
Yeah, yeah. And it really works, you know? And it really… what really worked on Stargate SG-1 was the team. That was what made that show. The idea behind it was great, the team that pulled it off was great — and I’m talking about behind the scenes and in front of the camera — that team worked for it, which is why Stargate worked. Atlantis, Universe, all those things, those elements all came together in the right way. It is certainly possible to do more of that and I certainly hope in the future that it does happen, because there are some very big brains that know how to make that kind of TV show very, very good. And I’m always talking to Brad when I say that, Brad and Robert and Paul and Joe. And Jonathan, when he originally started, there were massive brains there that came up with these things. And everybody else, Jeff King, and Damian, and all these other guys that came in, and were writing the show, all these other people that were part of that team. Alan. There’s so much there that these writers have these giant brains that could make a new series. I hope it happens.

David Read
I teeter back and forth on whether or not Amazon… because sooner or later, Amazon’s going to do something with that property. There’s… I don’t see anything else happening. The question is, are they going to want to go blank slate so that they can have the most creative flexibility or are they going to be willing to hitch themselves to 350 hours of story?

Martin Wood
That’s always been a Emmerich kind of argument, right, is who has the bigger audience?

David Read
That’s fair. That’s absolutely fair. Are we good on time? Do you need to split?

Martin Wood
I’m okay.

David Read
Okay. Couple more, and I’ll let you go. That dude right there — and this is something that has bothered me immensely as a canon hound — there were multiple iterations of models in Atlantis, particularly the city itself, evolved over the course of the show. I am a Rainmaker faithful, in terms of the original design from seasons one through three. Later on in the series, you get to more angular designs [points to shelf in background] like this one here that doesn’t have the lower levels that would have been, originally, under the ice in Rising. Was that anything on your guys’s part, or did the vendors just create new models? What happened there? Because you can see it with the naked eye, you can see the differences in the show later on.

Martin Wood
I think, to begin with, Bruce was adamant that there was a design that we wanted to stick with that was something that Bridget and Richard, that we were building the interior to be a certain thing. The exterior always had a discordance with the interior, to a certain extent. And I think what happened was, that discordance started to work on everybody so that the newer models incorporated what the interior was a little bit more, to make the outside work better, to make Atlantis that much better. There was never that whole idea of being going down was difficult for us. We had multiple levels, but we didn’t have multiple levels that we could constantly move from. And when we used the effects stage, that was where it showed us the skeletal structure of it, but it didn’t give us the opportunity to be able to go down, down, down, down, down, where we needed to go to discover things. And that was the original idea, I think, was that we could get there, we could go down. There was a line that McKay had, talking about how much deeper it was than what we were seeing, and how we couldn’t get down to those levels. And I don’t think we ever really explored those the way that we needed to.

David Read
It was a big city.

Martin Wood
Yeah, it was, but that was what it was supposed to be, was big. The idea of not having a Jefferies tube that could move you sideways in it was another thing.

David Read
Or a turbolift, yeah, or the ring transport room, yeah.

Martin Wood
The Jefferies tube was the other thing, yeah.

David Read
That was a crawlspace.

Martin Wood
Yeah, anything that could get you into it. I mean, you had to move to it all the time, you didn’t have that ability to be able to move, so when you’re seeing where the puddle jumpers are launching from and where the command tower is, you’re going, “Well, that takes a long time to get from there to there.” And I think, again, that’s something that when you’re designing something, they have to start thinking, “Oh, we need people movers.”

David Read
Exactly. Before we wrap this up, TuneTamasha, I didn’t see this question near the bottom here and this this pricked my interest as well. “With Rick, you have a darker Jack in episodes like Shades of Gray, where he’s arguing in the briefing room about stealing to save our butts from alien invasion and Red Sky where he nearly shoots a priest, or an acolyte, point blank in the head. How hard was it to manifest Dark Jack with Rick?”

Martin Wood
You know where the darkest Jack comes, is…

David Read
The child, he lost the child.

Martin Wood
No, no, it’s not where it comes from, but where you see the darkest one is actually on the ice, when he’s not familiar with what the Stargate program is. In Continuum, when you see that Jack, you see what that Jack was capable of, if he hadn’t been a part of the Stargate program. He’s very… he’s by the book. He’s a… which is not the O’Neill, that we know.

David Read
And that version also hasn’t lost a child.

Martin Wood
Right. That’s right, yeah. And so I think that one of the things that you see with the Dark Jack is hints of the Movie Jack O’Neil, where, “Let’s blow it up. This is the mission. This is what we’re supposed to be doing here.” And Daniel Jackson is the stop, sober second thought to it all. But truthfully, if you see the Kurt Russell version of Jack, you see the darker Jack there. And so O’Neill had that ability to be able to be that, if you reference that kind of stuff. Rick naturally liked the humor of Jack. “You ended that sentence with a preposition!” That’s Jack. That’s Richard being Jack O’Neill.

David Read
And it’s come out of the crucible of pain and loss because he’s hiding… when he touches the pain, like at the end of Window of Opportunity, he lashes out, and so it’s always there, is that undercurrent and I think it’s one of the things that makes him delicious to watch.

Martin Wood
And I think in Red Sky, what’s interesting, too, is you see backs against the wall in a way that they weren’t normally back against the wall. It’s like, “Hey, we can fix this, right?” “No, we can’t.” And when that happens, it becomes… you see the Command Jack come out. And there were times, there were a number of times when he had to make those difficult decisions. And again, it’s the humanity of Richard Dean Anderson that gets injected into so much of this stuff because that is Rick. Rick has trouble playing dark because he’s not that guy. Like, when… If you ever see — the series name has gone out of my head — where he was the drunk cowboy. What was that?

David Read
Is that Legend?

Martin Wood
Legend, yeah.

David Read
I have unfortunately not seen it. I do want to see it. Him and John de Lancie are great.

Martin Wood
Yeah. But when you see that, we see Rick playing that guy, you go, “Oh, wow, that’s a totally different character than I’ve ever seen before.” You’ve seen in MacGyver and in O’Neill you see similarities, which is the Richard part of it. But Legend, which he had so much fun playing, it’s a different Rick.

David Read
And it acknowledges the importance of Daniel in helping to soften those edges down from the dark place that Daniel helped pull him out of in the movie. And then Sam and Teal’c — Teal’c particularly, I think, in many, many ways, more than some of the others — really helped him find his family again, in the team of SG-1.

Martin Wood
Because he had to do it himself.

David Read
Yeah.

Martin Wood
Teal’c was finding that himself. He was unhomed. And in being unhomed and without — literally — without a command structure, he had no idea what to do.

David Read
“For this, you can stay at my place.” It’s one of the best lines from the pilot. Last question, Peace Rider wanted to know, “”It’s my sidearm, I swear.” Was this an ad lib, as far as you remember? Or was that in the script?”

Martin Wood
I think it was in the script.

David Read
Okay.

Martin Wood
I’m pretty sure it was in the script. I can go back and look at it to see.

David Read
He could come up with some of the most amazing ad libs.

Martin Wood
The ad lib that came out was the “You’re MacGyver!” That came out of Amanda’s mouth and made everybody crack up. That was an ad lib.

David Read
And the “Stuck on a glacier with MacGyver.” Didn’t you set that up? Didn’t you set up that gag?

Martin Wood
She came up and asked if it was okay if she did it, and I said “Yes.”

David Read
Yeah, ’cause you’re gonna blow a take, you better ask your director. Absolutely. Martin. Privilege, absolute privilege having you on once again.

Martin Wood
I feel the same way, David, thank you.

David Read
And all the continued success with you. Please tell Amanda “Hello” the next time you see her.

Martin Wood
I will.

David Read
And thank you again for everything that you have done to continue shining the light on the franchise as we move forward, sir.

Martin Wood
I’m here anytime you want to ask questions, I am willing to answer them, if I can remember them, but it’s… what happens when I talk to you is, you start to bring up things that I can… I’m tapping into things that I haven’t thought about for years, but I love it! I love…

David Read
It’s all there, and it was a great period of TV history.

Martin Wood
Yeah, yeah.

David Read
Absolutely. You take care of yourself, and I’ll reach out to you later this year.

Martin Wood
Thank you so much. And thank you to Sommer as well for putting this together with you.

David Read
Thank you, Sommer. You take care, man, I’m gonna wrap up the show.

Martin Wood
Thanks. Bye.

David Read
Thank you. Martin Wood, Producer and Director from Stargate. I love this guy. It’s just always amazing having him on. He is one of these people that has an absolute wealth of knowledge about the show, and all you have to do is just give him one little thread and he’ll just start pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling, and all these stories come out. So, he’s a wealth of knowledge. Many more episodes that I’d like to talk with him about as we move forward. I have been putting off a few questions, for me, because I just get to the end of the show and I’m so excited to move on to the next one. And so I just wanted to get to those while I have you guys for a minute. I know a lot of… so, there have been a number of requests for me to answer some of these questions. Raj Luthra. “If given the opportunity, would you travel to space?” I cannot wait for the day when sub-orbital space travel becomes, like, $2,000 a ticket, or even cheaper than that, because I am totally on board for that and I think that we are within reach of that in the next few decades to come. So, for sure, going up into space. If I can go further? Absolutely. David, a different question from xiantian. “How tall are you? You looked very, very tall in the con videos.” I am six three. From Gary T. “​#DontPressTheOne. Can I get this on a mug from the Dial the Gate store?” ​#DontPressTheOne. Is that a Stargate reference? Can anyone back me up on that? Gary T. So, there’s a lot of different merchandise items and I’ll get to that in just a moment here. “David, FYI, everyone would like more trivia at a later date.” So, one of the things that I have not talked about yet, I want — and I’ve seen several comments about this — is, it’s been great to have the big group, but we’d like to get back to the first or second trivia with just me and Darren, just have one on one, and so I think for… I would still like to try to do a trivia every quarter, every three or four months, so I think the next one I think I’d like to invite Darren on and we’ll go head to head once again and see which one of us has got the goods. Thanks once again to Martin for coming on. And if you’ve enjoyed the episode, please consider sharing it with fellow Stargate friends. Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free and we do appreciate you watching. If you want to support the show further, buy yourself some of our themed swag. We’re now offering t-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, and hoodies for all ages as well as cups and other accessories in a variety of sizes and colors over at dialthegate.com. From the merchandise tab, click on a specific design to see what items are being offered. Checkout is fast and easy. You can use a credit card or PayPal, you can visit dialthegate.com for this, or go straight to dialthegate.com/merch and thanks so much for all your support. I cannot do this show on my own, it requires a team effort. Sommer, Tracy, Rhys, Keith, Jeremy, Antony, my Producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, all these people who help bring the show to life and bring the word out. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at Concepts Web, he is the web developer for Dial the Gate. Also, a big thank you to Jeremy Heiner, our webmaster, who keeps the site up to date. Next week, I am working on having two interviews but one, currently, is greenlit, the other one, there’s a COVID situation, so we’ll see what happens. For January the 15th at 10am Pacific Time, Brian J. Smith, Matthew Scott from Stargate Universe, will be joining us. We’re going to get his take on the new Matrix. And he’s going to share some stories from the set of Universe as well. Brian — he and I go way back before he even shot a frame of Universe — I was the first Stargate fan to interview him when he was cast in the role of Matt. So, very much looking forward to having him back and catching up with him on SGU and The Matrix which, if you have not seen it yet, go check it out. I loved it. It’s a love letter to the originals. My name is David Read. Thank you so much for joining me on Dial the Gate. And next week we’ll bring in Brian and we’ll go from there. We’ll see you on the other side.