MICHAEL SHANKS ON SCI-FI OVERDRIVE
Radio interview with 'Sci-Fi Overdrive' Broadcast January 12, 2004
Copyright 2004 to Sci-Fi Overdrive
Transcribed by Mon

SciFi Overdrive: And this hour, Erich, what are we doing?

SFOD (Erich): We have got the man who opened the stargate - Doctor Daniel Jackson…

Female SFOD (Lauren?): (dreamy sigh) Ahhhh!!!

Erich: ...as played by Michael Shanks.

SFOD Female: He's dreamy. I had to do the fan girl thing. Get it out of the way. Just... there we go.

[snip ads etc.]

SFOD: We’re back on this broadcast of Sci-Fi Overdrive, and it is my pleasure to bring on to the program Mr. Michael G. Shanks. Now Michael, most of you guys should know, has been the Balance of Judgement on Andromeda but apparently he's been starring in a show that used to be on Showtime – I... I did not know this - it's called Stargate SG1. (a bit of laughter in the background, so obviously a joke) Apparently I only watched season six which had Jonas Quinn but it looks like you had a major role in seasons 1 through 5.

(more laughter, and you can hear Michael – who is on the phone, not in the studio – laughing as well)

MS: That's right, I was the, um, I was the Ewok,

SFOD: (Much laughter)

MS: … or the um... I was actually, I was actually the guy with the tattoo on his forehead but it was heavy prosthetic make-up - I decided to quit as a result.

SFOD: Wow! Your biceps are really, really huge.

MS: Thankyou very much. (with humour)

SFOD: Cos, Ewok is wookie spelt backwards.

(Michael laughing)

SFOD: Um, Michael Shanks plays Daniel Jackson, the archaeologist who’s fundamental to the team. I mean he's been described as, as the spiritual backbone, the soul of it, who, ah, counterbalances Jack, and... I don’t... what do you actually *do* with Sam Carter? I mean, she's just brilliant, and she's had a Goa'uld (pronounced ‘goold’) inside her and, and you one-upped her because you became an ancient, man. That's fantastic.

MS: (obviously sarcastic and with laughter/humour) Well you know it's all about one upmanship, that's really the basic premise. I mean everybody's looking for a new way to, ah, you know, extend their own science fiction, um, following by, by creating some sort of other-worldly concept around the basic human being. So we just decide to keep doing that every year after year and Lord only knows what's going to happen in season 8.

(Much laughter)

SFOD: Are you ever actually going to do… you mentioned doing a possible episode about what you were doing when you were an Ancient one, or has that sort of gone by the wayside cos of....[the last bit very difficult to make out]

MS: No! it's… it’s still a possibility, I'm hoping, um, I'm hoping that they wanna, you know, they'll give me a chance to at least, ah, break the surface of a story that sort of digs into that mythology a little bit. We are going to do that, um, closer to the end of season seven, as we get closer we start to realise what the Ancients were about, and I think the spin-off of Atlantis (track cuts out a bit here) will be a little bit more, so maybe that's where they're gonna save it for. I'd like to dig into it just to sort of have one of those, um, you know, ‘what he did when he was away and who he encountered’, without breaking the mythology too much. Because sometimes what doesn't happen or what's not seen onscreen is more interesting than when it *is*, if it's in the imagination of the viewer.

SFOD: Yeah, I... I mean you can always plant the seeds for other spin offs, you know, other directions to take and maybe in the novelisations, in fanfiction.

MS: Absolutely.

SFOD: And, I mean, you do get to play God, because you're a writer. You did Ressurrection, which is episode 7.19.

MS: (with humour) Well I was… I would, I would call it *demi*-God (voice lifts here to note humour), cos there are a lot of other Gods that have been doing it a lot longer than me and… and they kinda ended up pushing a lot more buttons than I did at the end of the day. (almost laughing here) But it was a lot of fun to, to play in that world for a while, that's for sure.

SFOD: Actually, let me take our listeners back. Evolution part two, and, and you wrote Evolution part one…

MS: I... I actually didn't write it, um...

SFOD: Directed.

MS: It's... it’s listed in the TV Guide that I *co*-wrote it which isn't even true at all. What I did was I, at the beginning of the year I pitched a story for a completely separate episode concept, and what happens sometimes when you enter a room with, you know, a room-full of writers and they listen to ideas and they go “Oh, that’s a great idea, *but* I don’t want you to write that story, I wanna use that, can I use that?” And that’s what ends up happening, is you start fleshing ideas and somebody grabs its and throws it into their story. And, and so I think the, that one of the concepts I came up with which was a, sort of a... a... a continuing saga of the Crystal Skull episode we did in the, the third season.

SFOD: Oh with your uncle, um...

SFOD: Foster father.

MS: Grandfather.

(both talk almost at the same time.)

MS: With Nick the grandfather who ends up going off with…

SFOD: I’m sorry, grandfather, right.

MS: … the crystal aliens. Um, they… I wanted to continue that story and sort of, you know, end up on another mythological note, which is, you know, the quest for the fountain of youth. And, um, they liked the idea, but it, they, they thought that instead of having a stand alone, they thought it could be incorporated into an episode that was already being fleshed out, so that's what ended up happening with Evolution 1 and 2.

SFOD: And you end up doing something which is something your character almost never gets to do which is spend most of the time on Earth. Is that an odd experience now?

MS: (with humorous naivety) Well you know, isn't it odd though? That when we spend time on Earth, it looks remarkably similar to most of the planets that SG1 goes to?

SFOD: It looks like Vancouver.

MS: Almost. You would almost think that they didn't really leave!

SFOD: Meanwhile in the Star Trek universe, everything looks like California in the desert.

(Michael laughing)

SFOD: Hmmm.

MS: Yep.

SFOD: Well that, that sort of brings up the next question though. Um, with Ressurrection, which you actually did get to write…

MS: Yeah.

SFOD: …Niirti - to get into the mythology for a moment - Niirti for the longest time is trying to create a, a super human, a super Tau’ri to serve as the Goa'uld’s hosts. So what is it that happens in Ressurrection where the NID apparently succeed in, in this goal of creating the Goa’uld/human hybrid?

MS: Well the backstory of it, um… and this is something that, um….er, ah… I sort of like to delve into these… you know you watch a couple of good movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, you start to realise why you really like Stargate: the original concept in the first place, which is tying in science fiction to the mysteries of, um, our mythological past and all that speculation that we do on our history, and the pyramids and whatever. And, um (cough), the way Niirti worked, about… ah, she was always doing these DNA experiments to create the super, super race or whatnot. And it’s a very interesting concept, um, especially given the notion of, of, you know, the powers that certain aliens have and, in our universe and whatnot. It's quite interesting to be able to, you know, play with our DNA and figure out what we can create and make it more like science *fact* than it is like science *fiction*. All I did was take an idea which was based on, you know, the riddle of the Sphinx, which is where I sort of started from. And this is… a lot of this won't even end up on the screen in terms of being back story. The back story I'm giving right now is the back story that is never actually going to be spoken on camera, cos I think the exposition took up too much time but...

SFOD: The backstory of the backstory.

MS: The backstory for the backstory, yeah, exactly. It was supposed to be about the riddle of the Sphinx, which was the original concept for it, and that turned into… Cos there is a chamber, ah, at the back of the Sphinx and, of course, um, you know, couple hundred years prior Napoleon had gone there and, and dug up, done excavation of the Sphinx.

So I just thought ‘wouldn't it be interesting instead of, you know, continuing the mystery of it, if he actually found something there and what he found was something that relates to our, our, you know.. pantheon of, um, of God's and... it relates into our universe, so, so once again tying in the mythology just like with the pyramids’. All I said that he found basically a Canopic jar that had, basically the remains of a dead Goa'uld inside of it, and it got passed along from... went back to France, and it ended up in a museum, ended up getting handed of to the Nazis and they started experimenting with it and came up with something special that, um... we have a, a group of people called the NID, which is a rogue group that we use all the time to... they're basically the American bad guys who, you know, who... who... their hearts are in the right place but their methods are a little bit off. And, um, and they get a hold of it and start, you know, doing some experiments with it and start bringing to life something, something that ending up being a little bit too much like Species but I, I think that we shy away from it enough to make it original on its own. So... that's kind of the concept. And it's called Resurrection because it relates to, um, Alien Resurrection as well but it'was originally called Hybrid, and it's a, it’s just an interesting story about the... using our history to, to point fingers at our pantheon in terms of the, um, the Stargate universe so... I just thought I’d try that out for size, and it ended up being part of that but most of that backstory ended up coming by the wayside.

(Laughter)

SFOD: Do a lot of these ideas really start off with the mythology, or do, do most of these writing ideas come from “say, what if we had Daniel do this?”

SFOD: Yeah, I was thinking about that because, um, I was listening to Joseph Campbell, you know, hero of a thousand faces and I was wondering does Mike Shanks, you know, like listen to this stuff and then say ‘ah, I wonder how I can incorporate that into Daniel Jackson's character’?

MS: I think absolutely. What... what I was really fascinated by, or what I’ve started to do just by getting into the writer mode on, onto our show is… you know, sometimes our writers look around and go 'Ah, God I can't think of any ideas!’. And then when you go back to the original idea which is once again using our, our mythology from the human civilisation, and our gods, and our notion of gods and the unexplainable, and, and putting it into, you know, drawing it into our concept and seeing what works. If you watch all those specials on, you know, ah, Imhotep and, and, and Isis and all the, all the, ah, myths of that, of the Egyptian realm anyway, you know, just for beginners, on National Geographic channel or the Learning Channel, you start to get into it, you can grab tidbits of stuff and go ‘Oooh, you know this is a big mystery’. You know like the crystal skull was exactly that, and the Aztec men.

And it's just taking that concept and going ‘It's unknown, it's a big question mark. So what if we say it happened this way, and this is what it's capable of and all that kind of thing’. That sometimes happens.

But sometimes, I, I think everybody has a different way of beginning the writing process and I think sometimes it can be… some writers like to continue their own stories and they like to thread them together from season to season… an episode in season four they continue by adding another layer to it in season five -that happens. It’s... from my point of view it's always difficult because I'm stepping into it for the first time, and as anybody is when they step into a room for the first time, you’re low man on the totem pole and you sort of have to get in line with the bosses and that's, that’s fine, that's what learning is all about. But, um, what I, what I found was, what happens a lot of the time is, is that the idea gets passed around the room and what your original, you know, linear idea was, ends up having a few jagged edges because everybody adds different things that they think are really cool to it. And not everybody thinks alike. And not everybody's on the same page that way. So sometimes it can get a little bent and twisted and, um, at the end of the day it's the, ah, head writers job, the head, um, the show runners job to finally approve or disapprove of the concept in it's entirety based on what everybody's input is. So, so it can be a little bit odd...

SFOD: Hmm.

MS: ...it can be a little bit, ah... it can be a little bit political, but it's... it’s also very exciting to sort of watch everybody in the room get their, you know, get excited about something you created and actually watch it come to a screen, that's pretty exciting as well.

SFOD: Yeah, before season seven started to air, they had a special, you know, “Enter The Gate”, and they did a segment with Chris Judd (sic) who plays Teal'c, and they were talking about in the episodes that he directs, he finds it actually easier to wear a hat so that he's taken more seriously *as the director* for the action at that point.

MS: Chris Judge directed? (in a smallish, ‘I think you got that wrong’ kind of voice) (Laughing) Are you sure you got your facts right on this one? No, (still laughing a bit), no I, no I don't think... he never, um, Chris has never directed for us. He's written two, ah, almost three episodes I think. The first one he did was kind of a compilation, but he's written three or four so I'm not sure about the directing.

SFOD: Oh my, I imagine I'll receive e-mails about those kinds of mistakes.

(Michael laughs heartily)

SFOD: Not... not that... not that the fandom of...

MS: It's recorded, it’s recorded so you can just edit that.

SFOD: Not that the fandom of Stargate-SG1 would ever crucify anyone for making a mistake.

MS: (humorously and nicely sarcastic and sincere at the same time) No, no, no. We have very understanding fans.

SFOD: Who have stuck with you through a channel change and hopefully through this next break since we're gonna have to pause for just a moment.

You’re listening to Sci-Fi Overdrive. You’re on the Business Talk Radio Network, and in just a second we’ll be continuing our discussion with Michael Shanks on Stargate SG-1, so stay with us.

[commercial break]

SFOD: We're back on this broadcast of Sci-Fi Overdrive and we continue our conversation with Michael Shanks who has returned to the role of Daniel Jackson for which he portrays in Stargate-SG1, seen on a Scifi channel on Friday evenings and in syndication on probably UPN or WB which carries that sort of syndicated programming at that point.

SFOD: We left off, we were talking about that the second half of season seven is beginning. We talked about your episode Ressurrection. I'd like to if I may just for a moment go back and talk about an earlier episode, Lifeboat. I mean when you have to have a very complicated role, and, and this is... I wish I could phrase this question better. Would you rather do Lifeboat again, or an episode that involved Ma'chello again?

MS: (Laughter) You know the only thing that would prevent me from going back to doing Ma'chello is about, um, six hours worth of prosthetic make-up.

(SFOD people laugh)

MS: (laughing tone continues) To... to have your call time on, um, Monday morning to actually be, um, you know, Sunday, well Monday morning at two in the morning which is actually Sunday night for me, that's right around the time I usually go to bed. That's the only, that’s the only thing that would keep me from doing that all over again because you see for a couple of days it can be fine, but I don't imagine how these guys do it for season after season, day after day. I would go out of my mind.

SFOD: I just thought the fact, that in the very first introduction to Machello, the body swapping, it gave everyone, Richard Dean Anderson and Amanda Tapping a chance to sort of act how they see their fellow co-workers acting, and throw out their lines. (In an attempt to mimic RDA) 'Ah for crying out loud’.

MS: (laughing) Absolutely! That's the most fun I think, ah, and what, and what ends up onscreen is only a portion, of course, of the um, the er, the antics that go on offscreen when they're setting up shots or when we see a rehearsal where somebody's playing of someone else and you always get those 'Hey!, I don't do that' and all that kind of stuff and that's a lot of fun. It can be a lot of fun. Those episodes can be great. A lot of fun.

SFOD: I think one of the most amazing things, Gary Jones is a really great comedian, he plays the gate technician.

MS: Right

SFOD: And he's a comedian, but he always plays it so straight, so, I... you know, if you've got a comedian playing it straight, what goes on when the camera's aren't rolling?

MS: Oh, he's one of the funniest people, absolutely. He does... he does the most brilliant William Shatner, ah, imitation as well. So he's, he’s quite a card. It's very difficult for him, um, maintain that sort of, um… to say those very few lines that he has, you know, ‘chevron one encoded’ and whatnot. But what happens when the cameras stop rolling is absolutely hilarious.

SFOD: So tell us a little bit about, about Lifeboat, about having this experience, of, of basically being schizophrenic all over again and, and what kinds of challenges that brought to, um, you know, what kind of challenges you had beyond the, the obvious of playing twelve different characters all at once.

MS: Well, I... I put it into the category of be careful what you wish for, and that's something that, you know, in science fiction we have so many… people always ask, you know, ‘Don't you feel like you're gonna get typecast and whatever in a science fiction show’ and ‘Isn't it kinda boring to do the same thing year after year’, and... I think that doing anything, you know, any job for any length of time can be a little bit tedious, but when… especially with a science fiction show: every time a new script is opened up and there's endless possibilities like that, it *can't* be boring because you get to do stuff like that which you wouldn't be able to do on NYPD Blue.

So, um, we have a lot of fun and that, that kind of thins is a great trust from the writers first of all, when you pick up a script like that. You’re always chomping at the bit to do a little bit more and whatnot, and you pick up a script like that and it’s just, ah, you, you can't believe that they're trusting you with this. I mean there's very few visual effects and very few (something- hard to hear... sounds like ‘this’)

And they're, they’re handing a science fiction show over to an actor to say, ‘Here, you create this’, and it becomes almost like a stage play. So I was very flattered that, ah, Brad Wright trusted me enough to sort of throw this in my direction and that was, you know, that's, that’s very flattering and it's, it’s very humbling as well, and you really wanna step up to the plate.

Of course then there's that notion of... most of the times when we get the finished scripts it’s about four or five days before it actually goes to camera. So, um, needless to say when you're busy working and you're about to start that next episode and you're reading through the script and you're going 'How the *hell* am I going to do this?'

(SFOD people laughing)

MS: And what I usually do is, I just, you know, I... especially with characters like that that, I just start grasping at, you know, a few extremes, trying to figure out what the, what the writer wants and what kind of caricatures, if you will, will suit the roles best and then try and get specific with those caricatures, and as you go along you keep trying to make it more and more specific and more and more unique as you go and sometimes… what always ends up happening, ah, especially with me, er, I always end up looking at the end result and going ‘yeah I, I could have been better, could have been better’.

But… it's still so much fun to do and it's a great challenge and, ah, it's very unique. But once you've done it? I guarantee you, I remember saying the day I finished that episode, going, (in a lighter tone) ‘Okay, I'm very happy now. Let's go back and do my exposition…

(SFOD guys starts laughing)

MS: … and talk about mythology and play with my pencils at the briefing room table. That's it, I'm happy to do that all over again’.

SFOD: We'll save those for the DVD comments.

(MS and SFOD team laughing)

SFOD: We' are talking to Michael Shanks who plays Doctor Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG-1. We’ll be back after this commercial break. Do stay with us.

[commercial break]

SFOD: We’re back on this broadcast of Sci-Fi Overdrive. We continue our conversation with Michael Shanks who plays Dr Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG-1. We've been talking a little bit about Lifeboat, we've been talking a little bit about Ressurrection. Ah, Mike, where can we expect to see the season going? I, I know it's all building up. You talked about finding the lost city of the Ancients. Can you, ah, can you give us spoilers?

MS: Well, ah… well it's, it’s always been interesting to sort of follow along with the creative dynamic of a, of a show like this that's been going on for so long, where every year after, I think the, um, after the fifth season, we expected to be done at the end of that year. So it seems like we're always headed towards some grand conclusion when we get there and, and… at the end of the season. And so when a new season starts up, everybody goes, ‘What the hell do we do now cos we thought we closed this thing?’

(Laughter from all)

MS: But that’s…

SFOD: The Tollan certainly feel that way.

MS: (amused) Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly! Yeah, we killed off a lot of people in season five, if I recall.

Um, but ah, ah, this year I think, the, the notion was we knew well in advance that we were picked up for another year and they also had a strong idea that the spin-off concept Atlantis was gonna go through, so they knew that this, this thing instead of closing, was.. ended up growing and, and prospering and may even turn into a film franchise as time goes by, so it’s… it's got a lot of life left in it as long as the creative people continue to, to bring it to life. And this year what we're doing is we're trying to head to a point, as we get closer - and it goes back to the Ancients and it goes back to, um, our search for this lost city of Atlantis and basically what was essentially the holy grail that we'll find there, metaphorically speaking, of weapons and technology that will allow us to overcome our enemies and so on and so forth and allow us to finish our series…

(SFOD's Erich laughs)

MS: … on a happy positive note. So we're headed in that direction. We're headed in a place that will obviously foster the spin-off series, um, and will allow us to get a little bit closer, and I think next year we'll definitely… I can honestly say… I will say in all honesty, it will most likely, definitely be our last season. But I won't say for sure. But that seems to be the way it goes every year. But I would say that this is probably as close as I can guarantee that we'll be finished after this year for SG1.

SFOD: So there's your spoiler. Anubis loses in the end. Who would have thought.

(Laughter)

SFOD: Oh, you’ve given it away!

MS: (with humour) I never said that. I never said that!

OS: So, now in the past when everyone was talking about Atlantis, it always seemed like it would be a spin-off, but it would be happening after SG1 was over. Now that it looks like the two of them might be running at the same time, any chance of Daniel Jackson appearing on this spin-off?

MS: I think, um, the last I heard there was a strong possibility of both the O'Neill character and the Daniel Jackson character appearing in the pilot for the spin-off. Um, where, as everything seems to be in the, in the real baby stages in terms of creating Atlantis, um, we're not sure what the concept is going to be. Um, but they’re basically a, a group of people are sent off to a completely different universe unfolds a whole different, a whole different universe of enemies and technologies and races and all those other things. So I'm not sure how they would manage to swing our characters in from now and again, but it's supposed to take place in the same timeline. It's not like the cartoon where it takes place 400 years in the future kind of thing, it's, um, supposed to be around the same time line, using humans from Earth as well.

SFOD: Yeah, this has Spike written all over it.

(Michael and others laugh)

SFOD: I, I do have one other question. Babylon 5 created a series of television movies which sort of like filled in the gaps. Can we ever expect to see something like that happening with Stargate-SG1? I realise the Stargate mythology will continue through Atlantis, but will you guys be up for doing two-hour long movies or maybe even doing a feature length film?

MS: I think so. I think, um, I think MGM is open to the idea. They certainly recognise the franchise potential, um, and the feature film franchise potential is, um, MGM's main franchise running. It's been keeping them afloat for years. There's been the Bond franchise and we know that, that kind of thing can definitely put a little extra money in their coffers.

So I think they’re very open to the idea of us going to a feature film world. I think also, creatively speaking, especially from Richard’s point of view that, um, a movie using the SG1 group would be a lot more pliable than doing any more, um, seasons of the show. So, I definitely think that that's a strong possibility. Um, it also depends on the success of Atlantis as well, so we'll see how, how much, um, our audience is willing to be saturated with, ah, Stargate SG-1.

SFOD: Let that be our final word. Watch Scifi, watch Stargate SG-1 and watch Stargate: Atlantis when it premieres. Thanks, Shanks. Michael Shanks has been our guest on this broadcast of Scifi Overdriiive.

(Applause)

MS: Thanks a lot guys.

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