ctor Peter Weller and executive producer Manny Coto have teamed together to save the world in their new Showtime series, Odyssey 5. The series, created by Coto, leaves the fate of the world in the hands of five astronauts who travel back in time to stop the Earth's destruction. Weller plays Mission Commander Chuck Taggert, the man who must lead the five in solving the mystery behind what has happened. Showtime will air Odyssey 5's two-hour premiere on June 21.
Weller is an accomplished actor who has starred on stage, film and television. His stage roles have included Sticks and Bones, Streamers and A Streetcar Named Desire. While he has done many films, Weller is best known to sci-fi fans for his roles in the films Robocop and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. In his directorial debut, Partners, Weller received an Academy Award nomination for best live-action short. Besides starring in Odyssey 5, Weller is currently preparing to develop and direct a new picture for Showtime.
Coto has been writing, directing and producing films for over 20 years. He was co-executive producer for Showtime's The Outer Limits, co-executive producer for ABC's Strange World and is the co-creator and executive producer of the SCI FI Channel's upcoming miniseries Taken. His directorial credits include Star Kid and the sci-fi comedy television movies Zenon: The Zequel and the Disney Channel's The Other Me.
Tell us about your new series.
Weller: Five astronauts on a Challenger mission in the future happen to watch the world explode, Earth, like the big bang theory all over again. And the goodwill of a particular entity downloads their consciousness five years in the past. They don't time-travel. It's their minds that are downloaded.
Coto: So they go back essentially. But what happens is—boom—all five astronauts wake up where they were five years ago with all the memories of the next five years. But each one wakes up, first of all, in the same situation they were five years ago. For example, one astronaut wakes up next to her first husband, who she knows she's going to divorce. And she knows in the next room is her child who's alive, who's going to die of cancer in two years. One astronaut is 22 years old. He's [suddenly] 17 years old and he's got to go through high school all over again. So they're all five years younger, but
with all the memories of the next five years and they have to figure out some way to, first of all, deal with the reality of reliving five years.
Weller: And they have five years to find out why the Earth exploded, and meanwhile, while they're at it, they might as well fix their lives.
Or screw them up in some cases.
Weller: Or screw them up, yeah. Which is what basically they start to do. It's a very interesting concept to screw up time, and we think we can fix things, and what we do is seem to end up screwing up things worse than they were. There's somebody handling a cancer, a cancerous child. There's somebody handling a broken marriage, somebody handling a gambling addiction. And there's somebody handling a corrupt father. And, you know, we're all back in time trying to fix the past. And it's a great platform for addressing the woes of the world as we see them today, 'cause everybody would like to go back. You know, everybody has regrets and, you know, I wish I could go back and tell so-and-so I loved her a few more times or hug their kid a little more. All those things. That's the great leverage of the show, going back in time. Not as you are, but as you were.
And certainly there's an interesting mystery going on in the background, too.
Weller: Yeah, a great mystery about what has happened.
Do the astronauts have any clues?
Coto: They have minor clues. The one clue that comes up [involves] something that they launched, a satellite, and this is actually revealed after they go back, that the payload they launched is a secret military payload. There was basically an orbital physics experiment and the project was termed Bright Sky. There was something about this that they believe may have something to do with what destroyed the world. It's the only clue they have to go on.
How could that affect other worlds?
Coto: That's the big question. But I have it all worked out.
As a viewer, I'm glad.
Coto: [Laughs.] So am I, because I'd be in pretty bad shape if I didn't. What it was that destroyed the world, first of all, it happens from within mankind, so it's amongst us. And secondly, it has spread. It actually starts on Earth and it spreads. It's something that obviously is
going to take time to unfold.
Odyssey 5 basically unfolds on two levels. First of all, it's kind of like half drama and half science fiction. It's the repercussions of them reliving their lives knowing the next five years. So each of their lives begins to spiral in a different direction, just on a pure personal level. But then
there's the overarching level, where they begin to uncover what it is that once destroyed the world and what's living amongst us that led to the Earth's destruction. I don't want to give that away, but I'll say it's not aliens. It's something completely different that they slowly uncover, or they think is
responsible for what destroyed the world.
Weller: By the way, I don't know where this is going. You know, Manny has told no one. And a couple of Showtime executives have said, "Oh, we know where it's going." And so I'll talk to Manny. And I said, "You know, so-and-so came up to me and said he knows where it's going." And Manny just kind of giggles and says, "He thinks he knows where it's going." One of the actors came up to me and said, "Well, we have Sentians, we have synthetic beings. It's going too fast. I mean, why are they giving this away now?" And I suggested to this actor, "Perhaps Manny's just getting through that one so that we can get the Dune element out of the way, you know. Or Philip Dick, who is a great science-fiction writer. He's always moving on to something new." And this actor went, "Oh, you mean you don't think this is it?" I said, "Well, no. I hear we've got 18 episodes here. We're only at number two." I don't think that synthetics are the answer to the mystery anyway. But I don't know where it's going. It's a beautiful thing not to know where it's going.
Is this the series you imagined in your head when you first came up with the concept?
Coto: I think it's somewhat better than I imagined. I'm really most surprised and delighted by the performances of the main cast. They're making it breathe and live in a much more dynamic way than I really had imagined it. Absolutely my biggest point of pride is the five people we've put together.
Where did this idea come from for you?
Coto: I was basically sitting around trying to come up with a cool television idea and I just started to think, what's the worst possible thing that could happen. And what hit me was, well, I guess the world blowing up. And then I started thinking, where do you go with that. Then I figured astronauts
in a shuttle, maybe they survived. Then I hit upon the idea of the time travel. But I didn't want to do the normal kind where they send their bodies back in time to meet themselves. I wanted to find some other, almost more realistic way to do it. Which then I came up with the idea that physical time travel doesn't work. Basically what gets sent back is their consciousness, their souls, downloaded from the bodies of the present to the bodies of the past. Which I thought was kind of cool. I actually hadn't seen it done before. We're not dealing with a time paradox here. They're allowed to change history, but
they have memory and we're constantly playing with cool things. We're going to do a whole episode which is intercutting between what happened originally and what's happening now. We actually have future memories. So our heroes remember the way things originally happened, and now they're happening completely differently.
It brings up the idea of alternate futures and parallel universes.
Coto: These people are changing history as they go along. This is not a show [where] you can't change history. This is a show about changing history. Basically they're creating a whole new alternate future as the series goes. Part of the fun of it is actually as the days progress, as they get more involved in uncovering what it was that destroyed the world, events could accelerate. They could almost make it worse at a certain point, where we actually think it could blow up earlier. So it's malleable. It makes for really interesting realistic directorial flourishes.
Weller: I think that's a viable reality. There was a great interview in Playboy magazine some years ago, around the time that Spielberg's Close Encounters came out. And it included several parapsychologists and extraterrestrial experts. And one of the people was that great Frenchman whom Truffaut played a fictional version of in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now, I forget that cat's name. But he was the guy that was insisting it's not so much whether or not we will meet Martians, you know, but whether or not there are parallel dimensions or parallel universes. I did a film that kind of tripped off of that in a way, called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension. And, you know, there's a third dimension, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth dimension. For us to believe what we see, feel and touch in time, linear time as we know it, is the only extant context in which life happens. I think it's fairly naive, man, you know. So, you know, who's to say there's not a parallel universe?
Speaking of directorial flourishes, Mr. Weller, you're directing some of the episodes.
Weller: I [chose] one episode that's a personal story about people completing issues in their past. And I hope to direct another episode that's comedic, as the first thing I directed was for Showtime, which was nominated for an Oscar, which is a comedic short. And, then the third thing is probably [in] something more of the action venue. So I tried to make a distinctive choice of the three episodes [I'll] direct.
What's it like to star and direct?
Weller: Well, hopefully, the first thing I bring just as the actor on board is I do have an ear for color or dialogue. So first, I bring that. And editing on the writing. Second, when one directs themselves, it's a good thing because you have one less person to talk to.
That's true. It must create some challenges for you.
Weller: You really have to trust a good first A.D. who knows whether your performance is up to snuff or not. But the third good thing about it is that one has a tendency to get off one's back, both as a director and actor. You kind of swing with what goes instead of absolutely trying to make [it] picture-perfect every time. And subsequently the looseness in it gives away to a sort of an improvisational nature that can really make the thing sing.
Coto: The images and the performances all just kind of jump to a different level when Peter's behind the camera, because he's just so infectious with his enthusiasm and his love for the project. But also his love and passion for directing movies, it's really the performances that have improved even beyond where we were before. The actors love him and he really sits down and plans exactly what the camera is going to do. He's very meticulous and very well prepared. Mostly there's just kind of a buzz that comes to the screen for the stuff that he's worked on, that he's photographed.
Is this difficult material to direct?
Coto: You know, the plot line is that we have had our consciousness downloaded, as it were, into our bodies of the past, rather than just a sort of straight time-machine element or time-traveling element. We've literally had our minds, our souls, or whatever it is, downloaded into who we were in the past. It's a great idiom, because it gives rise to hindsight, you know, fixed in your life, as it were. So that's fun. But it doesn't really affect me directing it at all.
Is directing science fiction different than directing non-genre material?
Weller: Look, I have nothing to do with sci-fi. I've done a couple of sci-fi movies. I never approach them as that genre. You know, they're all dramas. Sci-fi, the idiom of sci-fi has created a context into which you can pour all sorts of great human dilemmas. So that's what I'm directing. I'm directing a modern-day humanist drama with comic elements.
Mr. Coto, you've done a lot of science-fiction projects in your career.
Coto: Yeah, I love science fiction.
Some writers and producers just end up getting known for it and get stuck.
Coto: I just love science fiction. I'm the opposite direction. If I got on a cop show, I'd be like, well, I guess I'm stuck with it. I don't know what to do with just cops or doctors. I got to have aliens or something.
Has that always been a love for you?
Coto: Yeah, always. Since I picked up a Harlan Ellison short story when I was a kid.
Which one?
Coto: "Along the Scenic Route." You know what? I just heard it got optioned this year for a movie. I'm so jealous.
You weren't quick enough.
Coto: I know. It's one of these things where suddenly you see it's been optioned and you're like, "What were you thinking, idiot?" Because it's a great short story.
And Ellison probably would have sold it to you.
Coto: Well, you know what? I'm trying to get him to do an episode of the show. He saw the pilot and loved it. He's going to come in and pitch some ideas to us. He's my ideal. For him to say that he liked the pilot, for me that made my whole week, my millennium.
Also in this issue: Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg.
