Neal McDonough, you've appeared in Quantum Leap, White Dwarf, the animated Incredible Hulk series, Star Trek: First Contact, Minority Report and Timeline. And now there's Tin Man. Is it a coincidence, or do you like genre fare?

McDonough: It's the make-believe in life that I like to explore. My character, Cain, is the least sci-fi type of character in [Tin Man], actually. He's straight out of an old western. He's a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy with a heart of gold, and that heart's been buried for eight years. And here's this character within the confines of this sci-fi world. To me, I love that, and the challenge is to find the heart within the make-believe of it all. That's how I feel with any role that I play in any genre, but it's especially exciting in projects like Tin Man or some of the other sci-fi things I have done, like Minority Report or Star Trek. However, I think, still, my favorite sci-fi thing that I have done is White Dwarf. That was a great pilot, a two-hour movie that we did that didn't make it as a series. I think it was a little ahead of its time. That was my favorite. How was the Tin Man shoot?

McDonough: It was a blast. They're all so incredibly perfect for their respective roles. Zooey is so terrific in the character. She's that angst-ridden 20-something-year-old girl who's just perfect in this really different ride. And it's a different ride from what you'd expect with The Wizard of Oz, and it's an amazing emotional ride. Alan, if there's ever a dull moment, he'll do something to make everyone laugh, and he'll do it without even knowing it. He's such a great, funny, charming, wonderful guy to have on a set. You always have to have an Alan Cumming on every set. And Raoul, my God, what this poor guy had to go through. Every day, he spent hours in a chair getting the makeup put on, and he never complained. I'm telling you, he never complained. I wouldn't be able to take it. I always have two rules when I'm choosing roles, and they are two things I can't have: tights and prosthetics. Raoul would go through that every day for hours. I was like, "Man, how do you do it?" I'm just claustrophobic, I guess. He's so perfect as Raw.How pleased are you with the finished product?

McDonough: It's way beyond anything I could have ever expected. [Producer] Robert Halmi, when he says he's going to do something, he damn well does it. He's such an inspirational guy. He's 83 years old and he's bouncing all over the world, doing 30 films a year. He said, "Tin Man is my baby, and I'm going to make sure this is perfect." You'll be surprised. You'll be amazed at not just the eye candy of it—it's got 1,500 special-effects shots—but it's also got a great story and it's incredibly emotional. And I think SCI FI Channel is really happy with it. I've been walking around Manhattan, and at every bus stop there's a Tin Man poster. So they're really breaking out the stops. They're thinking something is really going on here.

Raoul Trujillo, how out there did you find Tin Man?

Trujillo: I'd just come off the set of Apocalypto. That is out there. I didn't see it as out there. More than anything else, I thought that it really respected the same metaphysical journey as the book, but it really made it accessible to a new audience that's been raised on computers and games. I thought it was going to be able to capture their attention. The original film is dated and it's romanticized and it's more innocent, and it was reflective of the time. So I think something a little grittier, a little darker, a little bit more foreboding was called for. So I didn't find it out there. I think it's just been adjusted for the times that it's coming out.Give us a sense of Raw and his journey.

Trujillo: All of us in Tin Man, we all have this one part of us that's lacking. I feel that Raw has this spiritual gift, this telepathic gift to read through his heart, which you don't get a sense of in the original film. And I think that little extra bonus of having a gift sort of makes it obvious for us living today that there's always this spiritual part of us that is our empowerment. As long as we are reminded to pull on it and not to fear it, then it will give us our power. I think the DG character makes Raw realize that I can use the gift to help not only myself, but to help all of us. And because we're all lacking something, we all, as a unit, become a whole. So I think it really serves as this great metaphor that in life this is what it's about. We're a tribal society, and we have to not only draw on our spiritual empowerment, but we have to draw on the fact that we're in this together, and together is how we proceed on the journey.How long did it take to achieve Raw's look each day?

Trujillo: I have to tell you, it was one of those things that had I known [in advance] what it was going to be like I would have said, "Tone down the fur." It was so bloody warm and uncomfortable. I hate the process. I'm not going to lie to you. A 3 1/2-hour makeup and hair process sucks. There's no enjoying it whatsoever. But as soon as it's done, as soon you're in it, as soon as you surrender to the fact that this is what it is, like with Apocalypto, it helps you to just surrender to who this character is. But it was a difficult thing to do. I remember Neal McDonough saying, "I don't do tights and don't do prosthetics." But in a way, for me, it was almost more fun, because you really get a head start on losing yourself and losing your ego about who you think you are as an actor. It takes you so into the character. Like I said, though, if I had it all to do again, I would have just said, "A little bit less fur," because once we when we got into the studio I was just roasting. I was probably the only one comfortable outdoors. Everyone else was freezing and I was fine, but once we went indoors it was the opposite. I was miserable.

Alan Cumming, how familiar were you with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

Cumming: Pretty familiar. I watched the film more as an adult than a child, I suppose, and then right before this I watched it again. I'm not avid. I'm not kind of crazy about it, but I always thought it was a beautiful film and it was something I'd view at Christmas.What appealed to you most about this reinterpretation of the material?

Cumming: It's a great story, and I really liked the idea of re-imagining it in this way. And it was sort of epic and swishy. I loved the fact that my character couldn't remember a lot about his past and suddenly he's got such a big change. So that was good. Also, I wanted to do something fun and kind of magical and swashbuckling because I'd just done the play Bent, in London, and that's set in a concentration camp. That ain't Oz.How did the shoot go?

Cumming: It was a great cast. I really loved the people. It was a long shoot. It was actually like three movies, three feature-length films. It was a packed schedule. So we all kind of bonded a lot. I really loved it. They were real nice people, and I loved being in Canada. I have made a lot of films in Vancouver. Also, Nick Willing, the director, is a really great guy who I adored. He was amazing at helping you keep focus. When it's six hours of a film you kind of lose the plot. I mean, literally, you lose the plot, and you're always in these forests. There's a lot going on in the story, and it's kind of like going along the Yellow Brick Road. And Nick was so good, just at reminding of us where we were, what just happened and supplying sound effects. So I loved Nick. I think he's a really great director, and I'd love to work with him again.You had makeup horror stories to tell after X-Men 2. How hard or easy was it to achieve your "zipper-head" look in Tin Man?

Cumming: This was easy-peasy compared to that. It was like an hour and a half, and there was nothing really on my face. There was makeup on my face, but basically I got my hair all squashed down and they put that zip thing, that prosthetic piece on, and then they put the wig on. An hour and a half seems like a long time to be in a makeup chair, but compared to what I went through on X-Men 2, or what Raoul went through [to play Raw] in this, it was nothing.

Kathleen Robertson, how familiar were you with the Oz books, with the classic film?

Robertson: I was pretty familiar with them. I'd read the books, and I'd seen the film a thousand times. I grew up loving the movie and was a huge fan of that, so this was very exciting. When I got the script, the character just jumped out at me and was such an unbelievable kind of gift to be given. To be able to play that role was amazing. People have such strong opinions and love for the books and for the film, and being a part of re-envisioning the story was really amazing. How did you go about finding the right tone for Azkadellia?

Robertson: She clearly had to be scary enough and threatening enough and powerful enough that when she walks into a room everybody stops. I chose to approach the character and play her from a very internal place and in a very psychological way. I always think there's nothing scarier than when somebody is very, very silent, because you don't quite know what they're going to say or where they're coming from or how they're feeling. I think that the minute you lose your cool, the minute you start screaming and the minute you start being very gregarious and over the top with a villain is the minute you lose the power. I was very aware of giving a level of status and this very quiet internal confidence. She's very contained and very, very still. She doesn't need to do very much and people are scared of her. I wanted to find a way of playing a villain that's different and not sort of what we have seen before. Hopefully that worked.The hair and costumes really complement your performance, but some of the costumes look pretty restricting ...

Robertson: Well, they were kind of a bitch. The armor was incredibly heavy. My shoulders were bruised for the entire three months. The corsets were just unbelievable. The first few weeks of shooting were actually really challenging for me, because I'd never worn that kind of level of costume before. It actually affects the way you breathe and the way you move. I couldn't sit in the costume. So I'd actually be propped up against a chair. I could lie down, but then I couldn't get up on my own. I'd have to be helped to get up. So it definitely took some getting used to, just little things, like breathing and projecting. That was an adjustment, but the look of the character really helped me get into it. Once I was finished in hair and makeup and had my tattoos on and had the boots on and everything, Kathleen was kind of gone and unrecognizable.Steven Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle, in adapting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, what did you feel you had to retain, and where did you feel you could diverge entirely?

Mitchell: The general idea of "there's no place like home" was obviously something we had to retain. We also wanted to retain the attributes of each character, at least the main four. But we wanted to put some twists and turns on them. We didn't want to go with exactly where the characters were.

Van Sickle: The beauty of having six hours was that we could take all of our characters who are along on the journey and really mine them a lot more than they ever could have been in the original movie or even in the books. So it was a blessing to have DG and the three other characters and to really have the time to explore what they were all about and how the other three characters fit in with DG's story.How pleased are you with the finished product?

Van Sickle: Oh, it's beautiful. They just did an incredible job with the computer shots, with the look and the feel of it. We were blessed with a hell of a cast. This is a feature cast. So we're blown away by how well it turned out.

Mitchell: When you're given $33 million to spend and the actors of the caliber we had, it's a dream come true.What do you hope L. Frank Baum would make of Tin Man?

Van Sickle: I think he would appreciate it as an extension of a lot of what he had in the original books. While it's very different, especially from an age perspective—it's a little more adult—I think he would appreciate the themes and the journey and the inventiveness of the places and people we take DG through in this version. But I think that still at the heart of it is one person's journey to find where they really belong. I think that's the thing that ran through every one of his stories. So hopefully he would love it.If this miniseries is a big hit, how interested would you be in penning a sequel?

Van Sickle: Somebody at SCI FI said today that with all their big miniseries they always have that question [about a sequel or series] in the back of their minds. We wrote this in such a way that we could easily do a sequel miniseries, and it was originally pitched as a weekly series, which could easily still be [done]. So we'll certainly be talking to SCI FI about that.