itanic filmmaker James Cameron may be getting all the press about Fox's upcoming SF series Dark Angel, but it's television veteran Charles "Chick" Eglee who has taken the show under his wing. Eglee--the former executive producer of the critically acclaimed Murder One and a co-executive producer of NYPD Blue--created the series with Cameron, co-wrote the pilot and will act as the series' showrunner.
For Eglee--who first worked with Cameron on the Roger Corman movie Piranha II: The Spawning--Dark Angel's science fiction milieu represents a departure. The show stars Jessica Alba as Max, a genetically enhanced teen warrior who has escaped her military minders and now lives underground in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. But Eglee, who admits little knowledge of SF television, says the show is really more about the journey its characters make toward self-knowledge.
Eglee took a few minutes to speak with Science Fiction Weekly in Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment offices about Dark Angel, which premieres with a two-hour pilot on October 3.
Please set up the series for us. What's it about?
Eglee: Dark Angel is set in the year 2019. ... About four years from now, some terrorists have launched a nuclear missile somewhere over the East Coast at sea, maybe 100 miles out. And the electromagnetic pulse created by that explosion wipes out all the satellites and wipes out a good bit of the information infrastructure on the East Coast. And that creates sort of a domino effect globally. Imagine what happens when Amazon.com goes down 20 points and everybody panics. Well, it gets worse.
Against the backdrop of this global depression created by this terrorist act, the United States really Balkanizes and lapses into kind of a Third World economy. Our show is set in Seattle. ... Max, who is the lead character, is living there, working as a bicycle messenger, and she's a second-story girl. She's a thief. That's how she keeps body and soul together. But her backstory is that she was developed by the Army as a genetically engineered prototype to fight in these sort of regional conflicts. ... Jim [Cameron] and I actually got this idea watching the war in Kosovo, where the war grinds to a halt because three U.S. soldiers get grabbed. So if you were the U.S. government, and you're particularly demonic, wouldn't it be much easier to have people [as your soldiers, for whose loss other people] wouldn't be tying yellow ribbons around trees, ... soldiers who were ... expendable, but also were genetically engineered to be faster, stronger, smarter [and with] better reflexes. They would be more resistant to cold, resistant to bio-agents like anthrax. The perfect soldier.
That's all well and good. But what happens when those kids escape from their handlers and are on the lam, simply because it's too repressive an environment for any human being? So Max is one of those kids who, in the backstory of the piece, has escaped. And now she's living in post-pulse Seattle in the year 2019.
Tell us about Jessica Alba, the actress who plays Max.
Eglee: Max is played by Jessica Alba, who's an extraordinary young actress. We were very, very lucky to ... find her. And it took quite a bit of legwork. We looked at more than 1,000 people for that role. When you're doing a show where ... the promise you're making to the audience is that she's genetically enhanced, she'd better look like that. And, first and foremost, we wanted somebody who really had fine acting chops. When you're hanging a whole show on somebody, they better have the skills. And Jessica's got mad skills.
The other thing, too, is that because her character is genetically engineered and had been created in a laboratory in the Wyoming mountains, we wanted a performer who [would give] a sense that maybe her DNA had been selected from across the spectrum of human and even feline DNA. And Jessica brings this kind of unusual, exotic quality. You can't quite put your finger on her. You don't quite know where she's from. You don't know quite what she is. And she looks like she belongs to all of humanity, and not just part of it. So that was an important consideration in casting her. And the other thing that is really wonderful is that we had actually cast Jessica [before] we'd written the script, so we were able ... to actually write the script with her sensibilities and rhythms and tones in mind. So there was a wonderful kind of confluence between the material and the actress, which is a new experience for me.
What can you tell us about the other characters?
Eglee: We've put together a really interesting cast, wonderful actors backstopping Jessica. We have John Savage cast in the role of Lydecker. ... On the page, ... Lydecker is a villain. And the thing is, on the page, villains are actually quite simple. In this particular instance, it's "Find them. Kill them." That kind of thing. And in the hands of a less adroit performer, we could really end up with something kind of arch and one-note and not particularly compelling. But what John brings to it is this amazing instrument, and when you see the pilot, the material is relatively simple, but he elevates it, because he just gets in there and finds all this complexity and that kind of arrhythmic quality to the emotions. And he finds stuff in the material, frankly, that as a writer I didn't even know was there. So it kinds of gets my brain going, thinking about, "Wow, this guy can pretty much do anything." He's going to be--and is--extremely fun to write for.
The other character Max hooks up with, Logan Cale, is a cyber-journalist. He's actually based on a journalist in Mexico, who, because he'd been writing these articles and pieces exposing corruption in politics and the police department, going head-to-head with drug cartels and things like that in his articles, everybody wanted him dead. And he ended up having to go underground and filing these communiqués from the underground. ... Logan Cale's character is based on sort of a cyber version of that. ... This is a guy who has pissed so many people off by trying to expose them that he has to file his pieces from the anonymity of cyberspace. And he hooks up with Max. And he ... enlists her as his samurai. ... At the same time, emotionally, he's calling her to a higher part of her own being as a person. It's an interesting dynamic. He's played by Michael Weatherly, who's just a wonderful actor. He's really, really good. ... There's an idealism about him personally. He's really intelligent. ... If you're talking about writing a character who's a journalist, ... you have to be able to see a certain spark in that guy. And Michael's really got that in spades.
What was the genesis of the project?
Eglee: I've known Jim for about 20 years. We started out at Roger Corman together, back in the old days of making silly movies about carnivorous fish flying and eating people. So we've known each other for a long time. And obviously Jim has become the great, iconic American director in the last 20 years. I pursued a career in television. I've been doing some work that I'm proud of.
We've stayed friends. And over the years, we keep each other up to speed on what we're working on and what we're doing. This goes back to 1988, when he was doing The Abyss, and I was writing and producing Moonlighting. And we were talking one day, and he said, "You know, the thing that's really frustrating to me as a writer"--which Jim is first and foremost--"is that just when I'm starting to really kind of understand my characters and know them and fall in love with them and understand where the beating heart is, the movie's over. And the cool thing about what you do is that you get to tell stories about characters over time. Relationships over time, and sometimes years, so it allows you to keep peeling back the layers of the onion, to reveal more and find out more." And that was very appealing to him. So we talked about working in TV over the years.
I sort of had my hands full working on other things. I'd been working with Steven Bochco for the last decade or so. And when that ABC deal was done, Jim said, "Hey, let's go do TV." So Dark Angel was really the love child of that relationship.
Is it a departure for you to be doing science fiction?
Eglee: I don't really look at it as science fiction. When we started talking about it initially, we fell in love with this character. And Jim, who's so good at ... spinning these fantastic worlds, starting talking about, "OK, it's the future, and then there's been this pulse, and everything is ... Third World America, and she's genetically engineered." And as the details started to meld, I thought to myself, "Oh my God, this is science fiction. And I don't know anything about science fiction." I never read it as a kid. I'm not a comic book guy. I don't particularly go to see sci-fi movies. It's just not my thing. And it's certainly not anything I've ever done. And Jim said, "Yeah, but don't you see? That's the beauty of this. You write characters. You write people." So once I sort of recovered from the moniker, I began to understand that, "Yeah, ... what science fiction really gives us here is a setting." It allows us, first of all, to use our technological present as the narrative future. And it allows us a prism to look at contemporary society. ... It also gives us a venue for the storytelling.
I look at science fiction in this case as being analogous to, say, writing a Western. The thing about Max as a superhero is, if she were walking around in the year 2000 trying to fix things, everybody would look at her and go, "Who's this chick? What's up with her?" But if you're creating a world where the social infrastructure has fallen away, where all the social safety nets that we've taken for granted--things like the police, government, the rule of law, social service agencies--if all of that's gone because of economic extremis, then it creates a context where a real hero can emerge, much like the Wild West. Wyatt Earp's got to strap on the Peacemaker and go out and bring law to a town, because there is no law. That's really what science fiction gives us here. There's no robots or aliens or anything. I don't know anything about that and wouldn't feel myself qualified to write about that. But it is writing about a character and relationships and people and somebody trying to achieve their own wholeness, somebody on an epic quest. Somebody trying to rise to the higher part of their adult being and sometimes take heroic action. That's what it's about.
Dark Angel seems influenced by all kinds of other SF things: There's a little cyberpunk, a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Were any of these things in your mind?
Eglee: I don't think so. I don't know if Jim's seen Buffy. I've never watched it. ... We were really thinking of the 1930s more than anything else. We didn't want to create a depressing, dark world, where nobody wanted to be there, nobody wanted to watch. People tune in, they see it, they go, "Ew, I'm going to watch some eye candy on another channel." What we wanted to do, again, was to create this social environment that was accurate.
Also, it's a subjective environment. Because even though we live now in an era of incredible prosperity, if you're 18 years old and you're flipping burgers and trying to pay the rent with four other roommates, it feels as if you're living in an economically distressed environment. I know that's the way my daughter feels. So this is a subjective view of the world.
And what we also wanted to do was get the contrast between that and glamour and opulence. And I think in Third World countries, there's that distinction, where there's not an equitable distribution of wealth. It was certainly that way in the 1930s. I mean, on the one hand, you had the Hearst Castle, and then you had soup kitchens. That's really the world we were trying to create. Less a science-fiction world, and more just a world that was sort of accurate socially.
What is James Cameron's day-to-day involvement with Dark Angel?
Eglee: Jim's very involved. Especially when we sat down to author this world. Again, I mentioned ... Jim can just spin these worlds. This is where he lives. We had a really good time writing the pilot together. It was a lot of fun. He's very hands-on. He certainly watched all the dailies and was involved in the casting decisions. Now that we're off and running on the series, he is as involved as his schedule permits. We've been talking about stories, production concerns, design things. He's very involved. ... What's really freed him to be involved in a way that makes a terrific difference is that he's not directing this. So we get tapped into the writer part of his brain and the producer part of his brain. The writer part of his being is his day job, I think.
What can you tell us about genre television director David Nutter, who directed the pilot?
Eglee: David Nutter is the Nutman. A terrific director and a lovely guy. ... I had not worked with him before. I'd seen the pilot that he'd done for Millennium and I'd seen one of his X-Files. We were up against that for the Emmys a few years ago, on Murder One, so I was aware of David's work. But I had the good fortune to work with him on this. And he's terrific. He's wonderful with the camera. He's great with action. He's got a very gentle touch with the actors. It was a very good experience. And I know he's got a big following in the sci-fi community with Roswell and shows like that.
Are you concerned about how the show is going to be perceived amid the boom of SF shows out there?
Eglee: I think audiences are going to find our show. I'm not equipped to talk about other science fiction shows, because I don't watch them, and I don't know much about them. But I think audiences are going to be drawn into this show by our characters. ... We're working really hard on the page to create ... compelling characters with really good, strong, relatable storylines. There's a large component of humor in the show. We make ourselves laugh a bunch. We've got terrific actors, a very appealing cast. ... The cast photograph isn't sort of a collection of generic smiles. We've got really interesting, variegated folks. And I think it's going to invite people in.
How do you see the series playing out week to week?
Eglee: The good news about the show is at once the terrifying thing about it. It's not a conventional franchise show. It's not like it's a hospital show or a cop show or a law show, where you've got a set of jokes. It's this character and this group of characters in a world.
So the terrifying thing about it is that you sit down and go, "Oh my God. What is the show going to be about next week?" But what's neat about it is that stories can come really from the four directions. You've got an epic quest going on, which is Max out there trying to find her siblings and hook up with her parents and all of that. So it really is a grail quest story.
You also have a fugitive story, which is ... people who are chasing her. So the mythology can service both of those areas. The other thing ... is you've got Logan, the cyber-journalist. Stories can kind of flow in through him, through his network of people. And melodrama would have a way of finding him.
What it won't be is Charlie's Angels. ... It's not going to be Logan saying, "Hey Max, I've got a case for you to go and do." There's a certain formulaic quality about that kind of storytelling that we're absolutely not doing. The other thing is that melodrama can flow into Max's world through her network of friends. We've got kind of an urban ensemble group there--stories that affect Max's world and her turf.
We're not finding that there's a lack of stories. What's interesting is that they seem to be coming from all kinds of different places, and that's unusual for a TV show, and ... I think it's going to be a fresh show.
Can you offer us any spoilers?
Eglee: I wouldn't be surprised if Max maybe runs across some people from her past. But I don't want to give anything away. I want to be greedy.
I think we've got a really cool show that's unusual. ... I think there's a musical sensibility at work in the show that's going to set it apart from other shows on TV. There's not a lot of shows that are kind of working in this kind of urban, hip-hop environment. We're certainly getting a lot of interest from artists in that arena, whose work we hope to incorporate in the show. Chuck D's writing our theme right now. It's really cool to have somebody from Public Enemy, particularly him, because he's such an icon. I think it's going to be a cool show.
