Since the mid-2000s, Mishka NYC has been at the vanguard of popular streetwear. A cornerstone of their success has been designing clothing influenced by gonzo horror, Z-grade sci-fi, and the overall dank and stanky underbelly of pop culture. Indeed, their gear is worn with equal aplomb by metalheads and hip-hoppers (Lil Jon and Lady Sovereign have sported Mishka in music videos), and the label's past collaborators have ranged from everyone from Iron Maiden album artist Derek Riggs to erotic photographer Ellen Stagg to electro-reggae supergroup Major Lazer.

Label heads Mikhail "Mike" Bortnik and Greg Rivera were nice enough to sit down with io9 and answer some questions about Mishka's design philosophy, winter line, and how Stan Lee cold lamps it at Comic-Con:

What's the Mishka origin story?

Mikhail Bortnik (left): It started sometime in '03. My job I was working at was going to close, so I decided to take a stab at t-shirt design, which I had wanted to do since college. This was about the same time I met Greg. A few months into it, I realized I was in over my head so I asked Greg to join on-board and sell the line. Greg immediately came on as a full-time partner. The basic idea was we wanted to sell street wear, but we soon realized there were so many fans who were into both street wear and scifi that there was absolutely no reason we couldn't incorporate these two things.

In terms of scifi, what were your earliest influences?

Greg Rivera (right): A lot of our influences have come from B-horror films, straight-up scifi films, and comic books, especially for Mike. I was big into horror comics when I was kid and also things like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, anything with the ironic twist at the end. Both of us are also big toy fans. Being in our early thirties, we grew up with 1980s toys, which ended up being a huge influence in our designs.

MB: One example of this influence was in our Fall 2008 Skyway Trippers collection – we tweaked an Israeli Special Forces design to include the phrase "Spaceknights" in Russian, as a homage to the old Spaceknights comic and toy line.

ROM Spaceknight allusions? That's wild. On a similar note, Mishka has a roster of kaiju-like characters who appears on a lot of your apparel – i.e. the half-serpentine, half-ursine Death Adder and the Cyco Simon skull. What's the story behind them?

MB: Actually the notion of bringing characters into the clothing brand goes back to metal bands. Cyco Simon is a reference to [Megadeth's ] Vic Rattlehead and Eddie from Iron Maiden, and we wanted our own. As for the Death Adder, we use our designs to tell a story with him – he's often seen teaming up with our Soviet super-soldier character.

Are we going to see an Adult Swim series with these guys anytime soon?

MB: I'll be honest, Greg and I would love to be able to a comic book or cartoon series with them.

What was the first sci-fi influenced Mishka piece?

GR: "They Live" was probably one of the first ones. It's hard to remember since we've had so many designs over time.

One of my early favorites was your Judge Death-inspired "Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode" logo.

MB: That was a mixing of the old Brian Bolland artwork with what people guessed [what the name of German industrial band] KMFDM stood for. KMFDM actually gave us a cease-and-desist for that one.

Really? Not the 2000 AD people?

MB: We figured we'd get something from them or Depeche Mode, but no, it was from the KMFDM people!

On a similar note, when was that moment when you said to yourselves, "Holy crap. We can't believe we just put that on a t-shirt."

MB: The "Tom of Eternia" t-shirt.

GR: Mike had the idea of doing a Tom of Finland-style shirt [featuring He-Man].

MB: If you've never hear of Tom of Finland, he's like the homoerotic artist. There was this impetus [to create this shirt] early on when someone made the comment that all we do is put naked girls and 80s cartoon characters on our shirts. Street wear on a whole seems more macho than we are as a brand, so Greg and I were like, let's do this.

GR: Our friend Robin Nishio – who is this amazing illustrator – met up with us and Mike pitched him the idea. Robin actually went and bought two big books on Tom of Finland and aped the style exactly. That was the coolest because we got so much shit from our customers because it was like, "Here's Skeletor as the master and He-Man down on his knees, gay porn style."

What sort of pieces are in the pipeline at the moment?

GR: We did this series of shirts for [the new heavy metal-themed video game] Brutal Legend and we're working with Dark Horse Comics on a project.

Oh wow, are you at the liberty to talk about that right now?

MB: Not really, but if anyone has followed our brand, you'll know that one particular Dark Horse character particularly sticks out.

As far as the Winter 2009 line goes, you seem to have strong robot theme going. You have the Terminator cyclops, the Decepticon hearse, and my favorite, the Ultron bear. Why robots this season?

MB: We've gone so far doing themes that this season just happened to be robots. This was probably one of our most rigid designs themes. The Ultron shirt's been particularly popular.

You guys hit up the San Diego Comic-Con this year. How was it being a street wear brand at what's been historically a comic and scifi show?

MB: We were selling some things there, but we were mostly there as fans.

GR: It's been a little calculated – and not to reveal all our secrets – but if a lot more other brands saw the potential of that market, you'd see a lot more people doing it. It's hard for us to do business, because Mike and I go and we're just geeking out. Besides going out there to meet Tim and Eric [from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!], we're both really into Japanese kaiju and we had the chance to show off our own kaiju designs.

MB: Comic-Con 2008 was my first one. We wanted to see the Lost panel, but after we saw it spilling into the street, we just said "fuck it" and went to the Battlestar Galactica panel. That crowd was pretty big too, but Dean Koontz was still speaking. So yeah, we killed two hours listening to Dean Koontz.

Any good Mishka Comic-Con party tales?

GR: We crashed an Activision party at the Hard Rock Café and saw Stan Lee. If you're at a Comic-Con party and you see Stan Lee, you know you're at the coolest party.

MB: He was just hanging out with this girl on his arm.

GR: (laughs) She looked like she was twenty years old.

MB: I don't if she was, like, hitting on him or he was hitting on her, but Stan Lee's exactly how you picture him. He really says "true believer."

I wouldn't want him any other way. Do you find yourselves getting calls from influences who've enjoyed your work?

MB: Other than the artists who we're huge fans of and end up working with – like Derek Riggs and L'Amour Supreme – no, not really. A lot of our influences are grumpy old men.

What would you say is the most quintessential Mishka design?

GR: On our first trip to Japan, we stayed in this little town outside of Tokyo and found all these old Japanese horror and sci-fi press kits. These kits would take the coolest part of the movie and turn it into poster art. We found this great Westworld kit and Mike added some comic book stuff, like Ultron and Cyborg from Teen Titans to the design. To this day, it's still one of my favorite ones.

MB: We also found this Motel Hell kit in which we used for our "Electric Funeral" shirt. We electrified the faces and it turned out great.

Alright guys - some final lightning round questions. Kim Cattrall in Big Trouble in Little China or Kirstie Alley in Wrath of Khan?

MB: Kim Cattrall. I'm a Next Generation fan, what can I say.

Zardoz or Troll 2?

GR: Troll 2.

MB: Zardoz.

Would you rather have John Carpenter compose you a personal theme song or direct a movie about your life?

MB: I'd rather have him direct the movie because then he'd have to compose the film's theme song.

Shit! I hadn't thought of that loophole. Any final words to io9 readers?

GR: By all means check Mishka out - you'll definitely find something you like.

Mishka apparel is available at their website and their Brooklyn store at 350 Broadway in Williamsburg, NYC. Store photography courtesy of Dave Digioia.

As we can see from that early concept art, some of the alien designs were way stranger than the final version. Why were those rejected? Were you told to tone down the nastiness?

Those designs weren't necesarily rejected outright, we just evolved away from them. A huge amount of work was done designing these things. There were so many iterations, by the time the final design was nailed down, these early images were out of sight and out of mind. The technical approach to realizing the creatures was always in flux, so that affected the look. I'd like to note that the reason the aliens in the early concept art have such human eyes was because they were, at first, intended to be actors in make-up. Due to budgetary constraints, we didn't think the aliens could be done as pure CG, which is what they ended up being. They were originally conceived as practical make-up with digital replacement over certain parts.

Neill actually encouraged us to make the aliens gross and unpleasant. He was very keen that the aliens should look revolting when they were eating, and left it up to us as to what that meant exactly. So I did my take of what an open alien mouth would look like, and some viewers have been disturbed by it! They took note of the genitalia-like aspect. It's my job to disturb people sometimes, and to be honest, I was only a little worried that genitaliia-esque aliens were old hat. But I think they continue getting such visceral responses because they remind the viewer of his or her own vulnerability, not because of the shock value. In the end, that aspect didn't make it into the final alien, possibly due to censorship issues, but as I said, these illustrations were old news by then. Oh well, it's all good.

It seems like a lot of the meaning of the story changes depending on how aggressive or how loveable the aliens appear. Was there ever any talk of making them cuter? Or more scary and soldier-like?

Definitely for the little child alien, Neill wanted to make him very cute. I collaborated on the child alien with Jamie Beswarick, and Neill encouraged us to play up the big eyes and rounded head, etc. For the the general alien populace, Neill wanted them to be intimidating due to physical strength and size, and off-putting. I think the endearing quality of the generic aliens was due to their ineptness and victim status, one felt sorry for their plight. There was another design phase of the Prawns I personally liked, where they looked very much like those early concept images, but with larger bug eyes. That evolved further into the final aliens. Neill really pushed the eyes to be bigger and bigger, which I initially wasn't sure about, but upon seeing the final movie, I understand the decision. A lot of people seemed to prefer that. It seemed so obvious to have big puppy dog eyes, but without them, perhaps no one would care about Christopher Johnson and his kid.

So the aliens were pure CG, not a mixture of CG and practical effects as you'd considered. How would that mixture have worked? And were any of the alien body parts still done with practical effects?

The Prawns themselves were entirely CG, from head to foot. The alien parts on Wikus were prosthetics built and applied by Weta Workshop (Sarah Rubano and Joe Dunckley took care of the make-up work on location), and there were various alien corpses that we fabricated physically, such as in the laboratory dissection scene. Initially, the aliens were to be an actor in a suit, who would then be augmented with digital replacement in some areas, at an earlier stage we considered mechanical puppetry mixed with prosthetics. Ultimately the decision was made to have them be pure CG.

The aliens in D9 are amazingly expressive — they do a lot of "acting" with their eyes and mandibles. It seems like the biggest problem for a really alien creature is getting human audiences to identify with it or feel its emotions. How did you approach this problem?

That credit should mainly go to the animators and Neill Blomkamp. They solved how this thing we designed should move and emote. But from a design standpoint, it would go back to the eyes. Throughout most of the design process, the aliens had mammalian eyes with pupils and sclera, etc., so we always knew they would be able to emote warm-blooded emotions. Neill didn't go with our versions of the eyes as solid black or cephalapod pupils, so they retained a relatable humanity to them.

Obviously, a lot of the press about D9 focused on its low budget. How do you create aliens who look more convincing and interesting than most big-budget movie monsters, on such a low budget?

Of course, that credit goes to Neill's filmmaking sensibilities. I was part of an initially larger team of designers who were later scaled down to Greg Broadmore, Leri Greer and myself. I worked as lead creature designer, concentrating on the organic creatures. Greg designed all the robots, bio-suits, weaponry, vehicles, the mothership, etc., and was the lead concept designer. In his role as art director, he also contributed studies of the alien's body coloration, as well as some subtle last minute tweaking on the final version aliens. Leri did the graphic design, logos and costumes. With Neill directing me, I just offered up as many possibilities as I could, bearing in mind that it had to be relatable to human audiences and based around a roughly humanoid shape. Initially, we tried not to heed any budgetary or technical constraints, so as not to become creatively impaired, but those things factored in later on. Eventually, time just ran out.

The aliens in the film are standing in for South Africans during Apartheid, but they don't act or appear like any human ethnic group — did you have any discussions about avoiding the "Jar Jar Binks" effect, and making them look less like members of a human ethnicity and more like real aliens?

I don't remember that we did. They spoke in an utterly inhuman language and were so insectile, they didn't really run the risk of mirroring any human ethnic group. Personally, I never thought our space lobsters would strike anyone as ethnic caricatures!

In the film, we got very little information about the aliens' social structure and how they came to be in such bad shape. Were you told anything more about this, during the design phase? Is it true that most of the aliens on Earth were worker drones? Did you have any ideas about what other aliens, like their Queen, might have looked like?

I think the idea was that the vast majority of the aliens were workers, and that Christopher Johnson was much brighter than most. Which sort of explained why the overall population were so lost and ineffectual. There was definitely talk of the social structure of the aliens during the design phase. It factored into how we designed them. There was a lot of stuff designed and talked about that never made it into the film. It's possible that Neill may want to save some of these ideas for other future projects, so I don't know if I should talk about it.

Earlier in our exclusive interview with director John Hillcoat, we discussed exactly what author Cormac McCarthy wanted put back into the film that was originally cut from John Hillcoat's translation. But strangely the writer had no issues with the missing scene from his novel where The Man and The Boy discover a baby being roasted over a fire. We found out just why, from the director...

People are asking why some of the cannibal scenes were cut from the film.

There were some definitely, that I wanted cut. I had to fight to cut them. And I was supported though. Because first of all, I fought like hell to make sure we had shot that stuff, and I got my way. Then I realized it didn't work, it was total overkill. It just made it redundant and didn't have any impact. Because once you go through the road game and the house, the cannibal house, you know about cannibalism. And the trees is the new element. Whereas if you go back to that, it's like going back to the start of the film again.

What was the reasoning for cutting the baby over the fire scene?

It also it all works in the book because it's in your head, when you visualize some of this stuff it just becomes too much. And it was overkill. Luckily, Cormac himself, he really understands how film works as a medium, how different it is. He didn't miss anything from the book other than four lines of dialogue... Just those four lines. Nothing else. He didn't miss any of it, he didn't even bring up the baby. He said, 'Oh, that's irrelevant.'

What did you think when you saw the first trailer for the film?

Well I was a little disappointed. I thought it was a little misleading. I would never put stock footage that isn't part of the film in something, like the trailer. But I also understand, from their point of view, what they were trying to do, which is give people context. Because their point was that most people haven't read the book that will come and see the movie. And in the film it's a very subtle, gradual thing that befalls [humanity], but it's never fully explained. So what they said is, that in when you have 30 seconds or a minute, this was their way of putting it into context for people. But it didn't work, they have a much better trailer now.

How do you walk the line of bleakness and hope that was in the book. It was a pretty bleak in some points, the book.

I never really saw it like that, for one. The heart and soul, the reason this book is now the most translated of modern time, apparently, is because of this love story between father and son. If it was just about that other stuff it wouldn't have struck that kind of chord. That's if you focus on the background scenery. I'm a little defensive about that. But sure, it's a projection of everyone's worst fear. The apocalypse has been around as an idea since ancient times.

It's very simple, it's humanity's worst fear. What is it? It's us dying, the world dying. And we saw what happened with the dinosaurs, so we don't want to join them, and that's understandable. But then I think, also, every individual has their own personal apocalypse, where your time comes. We're mortal beings, we have to check out. So I think in many ways it's just a projection of our fears. And it goes through different periods. In the 50s they were really freaked out about nuclear threats, so you had the mutant monsters that came out of radiation. A brilliant masterpiece of all apocalypse films is Dr. Strangelove. But again that came out of the whole nuclear situation, the Cold War. And you can see in ancient times, and the biblical apocalypse.

But that's also why it's not really about bleakness, it's about fear. And actually there's a morality tale about this. We see a man that we project on to, and we can see that his choices, under pressure, we see how he can, understandably, lose his humanity. And it's actually the boy that gives him back that humanity. So I'm with Cormac when he said that his was a book about human goodness and kindness.

Where do you think we are now with post-apocalyptic movies? What do you think the trend is now?

Well I mean the focus tends to be on the big event, so much so that there's no human dimension. I think that's all valid, I like to see spectacle, we all enjoy that. I like roller coaster rides, although I'm actually having trouble with them as I get older. But, there is thrills and adventure in The Road, but the focus as I say is more about this human experience. And really more, I love films where, what I love speaking in scifi, like I saw 2001 when I was 9 years old and I'll never forget I actually felt like I went into outer space - like I really felt like I was transported into this other world. And the more I watch films, the films that I love are those where you feel like you've gone to another place and that's what I love about scifi. When it's just a CGI fantasy or like a video game, that's when I kind of tune out of it. I don't feel like kind of, being transported.

So that's you comparing The Road to those other post-apocalyptic films coming out. Because we know the difference. But even when I was at the Book of Eli panel at Comic Con, people were asking, 'So how's this different from The Road?'

[Eyes widen] Well, ok, the big difference is also what we've tried to do is, well what I always try to do with genre, is find and make it fresh again, like something we've never seen. And ironically what we've never seen before is the real thing. And so that's why we shot at Mount St. Helens, the mountain blew up.

[Via CBS]

While he was doing press for drama Brothers we caught up with producer Ryan Kavanaugh and got an exclusive update on his next project, the massive relaunch of The Crow, penned and directed by Stephen Norrington.

I heard The Crow script received great reviews, where is it at now?

The script is great. We're very excited about it. The Crow is definitely going to happen, we're just getting all the pieces together right now. It's not officially greenlit, but it's going to happen... I think in a couple months we could have the package together for sure.

Any casting ideas?

Can't talk about that yet, but we've got good ideas.

Are you casting right now and looking?

We're looking. We're in discussions....I think it's something cool, we're approaching it differently. It's really a whole relaunch of the franchise, much more of a dark superhero type.

Will it be a well known actor, or someone we've never heard of before?

It will be an actor you've heard of, yes. We're not ruling anything out. We're looking at both, with the very well known and the "very talented but they may not be quite there yet."

A lot of people were worried that it would be the original, but we know the Crow character can inhabit different people...

It's not a remake it's literally a relaunch of the franchise.

But will he have the same makeup?

No, totally different... He'll have makeup, but it will be different. The best way to compare it is the first Batman and Batman Begins. In terms of their look and feel and character.

I'm excited to see the world and how you build it. Will it still be dark and gritty?

Oh yeah, we're sticking to the flavor of it. We're just relaunching it and making it with a much more present day character, someone more relatable to everybody.

And the script is totally finished?

Yeah we're still tweaking it, but it's finished.

Six days a week, Unshelved chronicles the daily lives and antics of a crew of librarians. Each Sunday, the focus shifts to the books themselves with the Unshelved Book Club. They cover a wide range of books and graphic novels, aimed at a wide range of audiences — with a particular leaning toward science fiction and fantasy. Here's just a small sampling of books the Book Club has covered:

We talked to Unshelved's creators, cartoonist Bill Barnes and pseudonymous librarian Gene Ambaum, via email about the inspirations behind the Book Club and the unexpected perks of doing comics about books:

Unshelved usually chronicles the daily lives of librarians. What inspired you to do the Sunday Unshelved Book Club strips?

We are both opinionated readers, so recommending books comes naturally. And given its setting, the strip felt weirdly empty without books - the hard part was figuring out how to talk about them without making fun of the books or their authors.

How do you go about selecting the books? You often revisit old classics, but do you try to keep up with the latest releases in the strip?

It's really just whichever books we're reading that are good enough to recommend. Over time we have forced ourselves to forage farther afield than we otherwise would have, which has yielded a few pleasant surprises. We do feature some new releases, but we are just as happy to pull an underrated classic from the backlist.

Have you gotten a lot of feedback from people who have read a book because of the strip who probably wouldn't have otherwise?

A daunting number of people have told us that the Unshelved Book Club is their reading list. We hope that's not literally true, but it makes sense that someone who enjoys our comic strip would also match well to our taste in books. But the best moment is when these same readers recommend books to us that we've never heard of — their recommendations are usually dead-on.

Do librarians ever use the individual Book Club strips to try to recommend certain books to patrons?

It's quite common for libraries, bookstores, and stores to post our strips in a display. They reportedly make books "fly off the shelves", especially for younger patrons.

What has the feedback been like from the authors?

Getting email from authors like Ursula K. LeGuin and Dan Simmons is one of the perks of the job. Bill keeps waiting for someone to tell him he drew their main character wrong, but it hasn't happened yet. We have, however, spelled an author's name wrong on more than one occasion.

Have any reactions from readers surprised you?

A few tell us it's their favorite part of the strip, a few tell us they can't stand it, and the rest seem to take it in stride. As you'd expect, most of our readers are pretty book-positive, so they're generally receptive to new titles (or a new take on a classic).

Do authors ever ask you to do a strip on their book?

Yes, in that we get a lot of review copies from authors. These days an author really needs to be their own P.R. department, so I love seeing them take the initiative to promote their work like that. Sadly we only do one a week, so the odds are kind of rough.

A lot of the books in your strips are science fiction, fantasy, or graphic novels. Are those particular favorites, or do you feel they translate particularly well in the comics medium?

Mostly that reflects our immense nerditude, but it is true that they tend to yield good illustrations.

You occasional have guest cartoonists do their own Book Club strips. Do you approach other cartoonists about doing a possible guest strip, or do people approach you with books they're dying to write about?

A little from column A, a little from column B. We love love love seeing cartoonists do their own take on a book. And if it saves us little work, well that's nice too.

What upcoming books are you looking forward to tackling in the Book Club?

That would be telling.

[Unshelved Book Club]

We sat down with Hillcoat and talked about the end of the world, and translating a film into a movie. The director shared with us the only issue McCarthy had with his film, which Hillcoat promptly changed...

io9: How did you deal with what to cut and what to leave in The Road?

JH: Cormac himself, he really understands how film works as a medium, how different it is. He didn't miss anything from the book other than four lines of dialogue. And this is where it's very telling as to what the real story is. Because those four lines of dialogue, which we did shoot and put back in, is when the boy says, "What would you do if I died?" And the father says, '"I'd want to die too, so you could be with me - so I could be with you."

Which is a beautiful thing to say, and that's in the movie. But that's what his interest was always - the focus of these central characters going through this journey. And the more cannibal stuff, it just becomes a different movie.

So that was what he wanted put back into the movie?

Just those four lines. Nothing else. He didn't miss any of it... It's been great, because he could see the more you focus on that other stuff [post apocalyptic doom, explosions and cannibalism] the more unbalanced it becomes, and it becomes something else.

Michael Chabon, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, his novel about Golden Age comics creators dealing with inspiration, sexual identity and the Holocaust, among other things. He also wrote the Hugo-winning alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Both Manhood and his earlier essay collection, Maps And Legends, deal with geeky, science-fictional elements. And he edited two anthologies of pulp science fiction by some of today's best authors, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. (And according to his Wikipedia page, he created a fictional alter ego, a quasi-Lovecraftian horror novelist named August Van Zorn, which I didn't know about until just now.)

The thing that's stuck in my head most about Manhood For Amateurs is definitely the passionate espousal of fandom, and the idea that fan obsession comes from the same place as the artistic impulse — the desire for communal expression. Why do you think people often see fans as in opposition to "true" creative people? Now that fans are running all the comic book companies, producing Doctor Who, and reinventing Star Trek, do you see this changing? What will it take for a work of fanfic to be recognized as art? Have you ever written fanfic?

Well, I'm not sure I fully accept the premise of the question: "People often see fans as in opposition to 'true' creative people." Or rather, you may be right, "people" do see it that way, but if so then these people are deeply ignorant of the history of popular culture and its production. Fans began to take over creative responsibility in the world of Science Fiction as early as the mid-thirties; I doubt that by the mid-seventies there were many major practitioners in the genre who had not started out as a passionate, Con-going, zine-compiling fans. The second great age of American cinema was entirely created by fans (Coppola, Scorsese, Rafelson, Ashby, Spielberg, Lucas, et al) ; The Godfather is as much about the intensive study of gangster films as it is about gangsters. Same goes, even more so, for Scorsese. Rock and roll, same deal. The Beatles work is fan fiction on the work of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers: It's not simple (or even complex) imitation; it's elaboration, infilling, transformation, a strategic redployment of the tropes and figures of the source material/primary text; the Beatles are in dialog with Buddy Holly, as Badfinger was in dialog with the Beatles and Jellyfish with Badfinger. Or you could go Stones/Stooges/Sex Pistols. The word "influence" is insufficient and too one-sided to describe a relationship that is much more accurately reflected by the system of tribute/ appropriation/critique that fandom employs. This kind of process, by which one generation of fan/critics (because anyone who doesn't understand that a fan is a critic doesn't know what a fan is, and there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the idea of a critic who is not also a fan) becomes the creators whose work inspires and obsesses and is critiqued by the next generation of fans, who in turn become critic-creators, has occurred in every popular art form across the board going back fifty or five thousand years. The apostles wrote fan fiction on Torah. So your "people" are silly people, and we don't need to listen to them.

The other thing about Manhood For Amateurs, now that I've had a chance to mull it over, is the sense that shifting gender roles and the changing demands as you grow older mean that you have to keep reinventing yourself. To what extent is this like the process of world-building in a fantasy/SF universe?

It means — it means, if I take your meaning aright, that I am my own sequel, my own series, the CHAPTERHOUSE OF DUNE to my own DUNE: MESSIAH.

Why do you think such a high proportion of alternate history novels revolve around World War II in some way or another? Do you think it's different for authors who weren't alive during World War II and the Holocaust to imagine them turning out differently, than for someone like, say, Philip K. Dick, who was in high school during the war?

Well, of course PKD did a pretty fair job of imagining just that in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. I think the thing about WWII is that it was so huge, so important, so clearly one of the two or three most significant periods in human history — and yet even a cursory study of it reveals it to have been woven of dozens if not hundreds of teensy little frail threads which, if pulled or tucked a different way, might easily have produced a completely different outcome. Say, for example, that the British Navy had not captured a German cypher machine from a sunk U-Boat in 1941. Cracking of the navy codes is delayed... key messages are never intercepted...

That's true for EVERYTHING that happens of course: "for want of a nail." But you can really feel the Little, Big of it with WWII.

As someone who's written both historical fiction and alternate history, how would you say the research process differs for the two genres? Do they allow you to comment on the here and now in much the same way, or in different ways?

Research is research; historical fiction is alternate history, in the sense that you are still saying What if? What if, for example, a Russian nobleman named Andrei Bolkonski, with such and such a set of traits, was running around the battlefield of Austerlitz, getting wounded and rescued by Napoleon, whom he once admired...etc. Whether you are writing Napoleon Loses Austerlitz (alternate history) or simply Fictional Prince Andrei Gets Injured at Austerlitz (historical fiction) the research is going to be the same.

When your first novel came out, you were nearly mis-classified as a gay writer. You told the Metro Weekly in 2002, "There's a big lump that's called literary fiction or mainstream fiction or non-genre fiction or whatever, and that's sort of where I am. That's not a problem that really dogs me, except for that brief moment when Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out and Newsweek did a big roundup of all the hot new gay novels. That was me being pigeonholed and possibly confined to a section of the bookstore from which it can be very hard to get out once you're in. Luckily the book attracted a diverse readership."

Do you think people who are writing science fiction or fantasy should try to avoid getting shelved in those sections, for the same reasons you were keen to avoid getting shelved in LGBT fiction? Should we, as readers of SF and fantasy, be trying to get the novels we love shelved in "fiction," or should we be trying to find ways to help deserving genre authors to cross over? (Like your inclusion of people like Tim Pratt and Cory Doctorow in the Best American Short Stories anthology.) If this is just a marketing issue, do we need better labels, or just more flexible ones?

Pride and Resentment are the twin banners flown from the walls of all ghettos. We love being in; we want to get out. We are at home; home is not the world. Endogamy weakens us over time.

I think, in the end, it is largely a marketing issue. Personally I would prefer to see bookstores shelve all fiction together regardless of genre. Or maybe just have two sections, "Good Stuff" and "Crap." Into Crap we will consign all novels regardless of genre or reputation that trade in cliche and dead language. If I ever own a bookstore I will do it that way. Only I will just leave out the Crap section.

Were you a fan of the original? Is that why you got involved with AMC's Prisoner series?

No, I never knew anything about the original, I had just read the six screenplays that were brought to me and I was actually going to shoot another movie and I was able to get out of that to do this. What got my attention first was Ian McKellen.

The second part of that was AMC and what they were doing, but I didn't really fully understand everything AMC had been doing with Mad Men. I hadn't seen Mad Men yet, and I became a huge fan of the network because I really got to see the ins and outs of what they were doing in The Prisoner. But what truly brought me to The Prisoner was the first two screenplays... I had no idea where the story was going, at any time as an actor when you get a role like this, it's kind of like one of those little trophies you can put on your mantle and be proud of. I'm definitely very proud of this.

One of the interesting things about AMC and their shows right now is their attention to detail in their production design, it's really evident in The Prisoner, it's sort of "sandy sleek". What was your favorite little world-building moment that AMC or the production crew created?

Well, I can be more specific to you, and in fact when I see movies like Giant, when I see George Stevens or any classic fimmakers, or when I see Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston but it [The Prisoner] reminded me of classic Hollywood great fimmaking... Every time I get a movie I think, "oh I'm never gonna be working in this town again if I don't get this one right," and I certainly felt that way making this because of the rapid fire of all the screenplays that were there and also the reediting and rewriting the scenes literally right there but I think we were able to pull out something pretty special here.

I'm so focused on the story and just trying to survive and the frustration of wanting it to be good and not knowing if it's going to turn out and in fact I remember one day we got to one particular scene with Ian McKellen and myself and we realized in that moment that I'm not supposed to be in this scene. So there's an element of running around like a chicken with your head cut off. So I'm sitting here acting, thinking what did I take away from that, I think the most valuable thing I got from it is I can work in some of the most extraordinary circumstances and be able to pull up performances in dire strait situation and I really kind of like that.

It was roughing the elements out there, wasn't it?

Yes, the lack of sleep, number one. Last night watching it [The Prisoner screening] and talking to Bill Gallagher [the writer], for me, it was a bit of a surreal experience, it looks so easy but knowing that what looks easy is usually rather difficult, there were hours and hours of rehearsing and then saying let's throw that out and try something else and being able to have a director come in with literally very little time... it's really a six hour film with two intermissions.

How many on site rewrites do you think you guys did?

Thousands, I can't even… at the last minute we'd say, "Do I need that line?" "Yes you do." "okay, what about this?" Then we'd try but you know for the most part, I thought that we were able to. It's like putting a square peg into a circular hole and that's what we do, and we get paid well for it and part of it is you gotta be a little bit of an adrenaline junkie.

Now your character, one of the things that's different abut him in the new series is there's a little bit more revealed about his life before The Village. Do you think that you're still "every man" even though you go into specifics running around in the desert?

I knew what Patrick McGoohan did. I knew that he was a legend, I knew who he was and I didn't totally understand the whole Prisoner thing, I never watched any of the episodes but wanted to bring something to my own performance that was original, that I wouldn't be compared to, and even I was I could say well it was a coincidence because I never watched any of his previous stuff. I remember talking to Mel Gibson one time about Patrick McGoohan and I said, I happened to ask him about Longshanks in Braveheart and he says "Well that's McGoohan" and he told me the whole story, he tried to have a run at making The Prisoner.

Mel Gibson tried to make The Prisoner?

Yeah he looked at it. Yeah, it's been attempted by several people.

Finally the political undertones in The Prisoner, do you think it's more like a friendly Gitmo, or a warning sign?

JC: Absolutely. You know its how you look at mornings. Mornings can either be a good thing or a bad thing sometimes. Some people just get disturbed and would rather be an ostrich and put their head in the sand. And you know, this is an allegory for peace...Nowadays you have one guy walking around who's willing to exchange his life for millions and for an ideal. And I think people can relate to that. At the same time, very much juxtaposed to that, this is Disney Land, the music, the way they feel, it is a bit of a ride and there's a romantic element to it too, and I hate to go too far to the right and say well understand from the left here you also have this romantic undertone, you're also going to be drawn to these characters, you're going to love these characters.

So what is American Vampire?

The series follows, and is focused on, the concept of vampire geneology and vampire evolution. It reimagines vampires as these creatures that have evolved as the bloodlines hit different populations at different times, so there's different species of vampires, like there are different breeds of dogs. So there's this whole hidden history, this whole secret family tree. But the thing that it's about specifically is, there hasn't been a new breed of vampire in a couple of hundred years for reasons that are part of the fun mystery of the first couple of [story cycles]. There's only this one dominant species, and it's the one that's the classic, Euro-centric, nocturnal, stake through the heart... You know, the vampire that, when I conceived of the series, we were all a little sick of. The star of the series is the bloodline, this new breed of vampirism. The forward-moving part of the series, the part that's most exciting for us is, we have new characters with each cycle, with big parts played by favorite characters from the past, but we'll also be revealing parts of the secret history and how the world of vampires came to be the way it is. And also, the brewing tension between all the breeds of vampires that exist now.

So there's a big, behind the curtain, story that we're working on as well [as the individual story arcs].

So how did it get started? Did you pitch it to Vertigo?

I came up with it as a concept a few years ago, actually - I don't know how interesting this is, it's kind of a boring story, but I was in one of those model shops, like Warhammer shops, down in the West Village and I saw one of those figurines, and it was a zombie confederate soldier. I just started thinking about how, in so much vampire material at the time - and this was before Twilight, more around the Queen of the Damned time - vampires were always nocturnal and aristocratic and elegant and it just seemed so out of place, and out of touch with any straight-up American iconography that I could come up with, or my favorite genres, like westerns or 50s sci-fi and all that kind of stuff. I was like, how come we never see vampires in these kind of places?

I started to develop the idea back then, and I thought about doing it as a series of stories, I thought about doing it as a book, and at one point I was going to do it as a screenplay with a friend. But basically, I started doing some comic work on the side about a year ago, and I got the chance to pitch it to Vertigo last summer when an editor at Vertigo called Mark Doyle, who's since become one of my closest friends, read one of my stories in an anthology of literary writers coming up with new superheroes. He actually approached me at a reading for the book and asked if I was a serious comic fan, or just moonlighting for the purposes of the story. I told him I was, I'd always been, and I feel like he gave me a pop quiz; he was all, Well, what're you reading right now? And at the time, it was Final Crisis and Secret Invasion and everything like that. I think he was convinced, and he asked me if I wanted to pitch something. So I went there and I think he sort of expected me to pitch something more literary, but I was like, Hey, what about this vampire thing?
I'd been thinking about doing it as a comic for awhile, and thinking about approaching people who do more horror comics, like IDW or whatever, and then this came along and he really flipped over it. Once we got it on the table, it went pretty fast through development there. It was pretty much greenlit when they asked if there was anyone that I knew who from the writing world who might be interested in giving it a quote or a blurb. I knew Stephen King from before, so I asked him if he would be willing to do it. He read the pitch and decided that he really liked it and said, I'll do you one better. If you want, at some point, I'll write an issue for you. It's pretty funny; I called Vertigo on, I think it was a Friday afternoon, and left a message saying that Steve was interested - By the way, he makes you call him Steve, I don't want to sound like an asshole going "Steve, Steve" - I left a message on Friday afternoon pretty much when the office was already closed saying that he was serious about wanting to do an issue, and it was Monday morning, 9 in the morning, I get a call and everyone was there, and they're all "Did you say Stephen King was interested in doing an issue...?" [laughs]

Once he was involved we wanted to [work out how best for him to write an issue or two]. The characters were all developed, I had the seasons mapped out from the pitch. Steve wanted to write this character, who was planned for the second cycle, but Mark and I came up with the idea of doing it like an eight-page, or a teaser, at the end of each issue, to show a glimpse of Skinner, who's the first American vampire. He started writing it, and then he wrote me an email two weeks into it and asked if I'd mind if he went off the reservation a little bit. I was, like, go ahead, do whatever you want. He wound up writing five episodes of sixteen pages, doing so much better than I could've ever done. It really does raise the bar for the series, and he introduced so many big ideas about what the American West means to us, and all these questions about fact and fiction and legend versus history, and all this stuff that really enriches it. Not to mention, he just makes it really scary and vicious.

How did Rafael [Albuquerque, series artist] come aboard? His preview art is beautiful.

Oh my God. I promise you, this guy is incredible. He came in and did some sketches to see if he got the characters, based on the scripts, because the scripts were done, and he just nailed it immediately. It was, that's our guy. The funny thing is, some of the promo art, the sketches of Pearl...? That's from his audition, those're some of his first sketches. That was the first thing I saw from him, and I thought, that's my character. That's exactly her. She's a little bookish, independent, a little quirky. He's been such a creative force on the series, he brings so much to it.
Rafael, when he read the scripts, was like, Why don't I do the different cycles in different styles? So he would up doing Steve's cycle - which is the origin story of Skinner, who's the first of the new American vampire species, born of this random mutation - in these beautiful washes, so it has this painted, antique quality to it, as well as a creepiness. And for mine - which takes place in the 1920s and picks up on the second American vampire, the first person Skinner turns, who's this young girl and a struggling actress in the silent film industry - he did it in this precise inked, art deco style. I can't reiterate enough how amazing he has been on the book. He's enhanced it, he's been a total superhero himself on it.

It sounds like this a really big story.

I'm so excited for the places we're going to go. We're already mapped out through the first twelve issues. The next cycle is already page broken, after these first five issues, and after that, the next cycle is pretty much thought out. And after that, I know what decade it's taking place in. It's fun with all of the press it's getting, the fun of introducing [the concept]. There's something sexy about an American vampire, because "It's American!" [laughs]. It's an interesting time to be American. Part of the series is about investigating what's horrific about the American character, and what's heroic about it, and the difference of that in different periods. But we're really way ahead of the game in terms of giving ourselves time to do eight or nine drafts of the scripts, because, believe me, no-one is more aware of a potential vampire backlash or the pressure once Steve is not on the series. We believe in it a lot.

American Vampire seems to be more than just a title, it's a statement of the book's intent, the American versus European...

Well, it's a fun hook, and there's a kind of, I guess, patriotic thrill in introducing a vampire that's supposed to be American and is stronger and more vicious and so on, but the story isn't about cultural stereotypes. The idea is that the bloodline mutates randomly at various times, and some of the characteristics of the person are adapted into that vampire. So it's the characteristics of a person, of Skinner, rather than a nationality, because otherwise you get into the specifics of, what makes us African-American, what makes us... It's person-to-person. Every once in awhile the bloodline will jump, not with every new person it hits, but every once in awhile, the blood will make something new with someone.

We're trying to keep it geneological, but the vampiric qualities have an American characteristic, because it comes from the character of Skinner and he is a character that's iconographic to the [Old] West, where he's this vicious snakelike outlaw. He has this desert quality, but they're based on him, based on a broad cultural assessment on what makes us American.

But what we are starting to do is explore the idea of American identity through the different time periods. With the first issues, it's a little tough, just because of the format, sixteen pages of story for Steve and sixteen for me, so there's a tightness to it that works really well for the way they double as stories. But there's more breathing room, I think, for exploring the decades once we get past the first cycle.

Pearl seems as iconic in her own way as Skinner.

I can promise you that the way they come across on the page, they're not someone you've seen before. Skinner is not The Man With No Name, in the same way that Pearl is very much her own character while keeping that quality of the "20s Girl." She's someone who's more fish out of water, she's a lot more bookish and isn't caught up in the glamour. She loves acting for her own reasons, and a lot of it comes from her upbringing. We try to flesh the characters out so that they're more than just their iconographic selves, especially these two. Pearl and Skinner are two opposing forces early on the series. Skinner is anarchy and violence and fun, and has the opinion that what makes us American is what keeps the west wild, and that we should be wild, and the taming of the west he sees as a feminization, an imposition on the American character. You can imagine how that works itself out in different time periods, where there's prohibition, or the construction of Las Vegas.

Pearl, on the other hand, is ethical and struggling to be someone who carries the best qualities of what we would think as American. She has a more hopeful and optimistic belief.

Is this going to be a series where there's a lot of jumping around in time periods, as opposed to telling the story chronologically?

Yeah, each one is going to approach a different decade, at least at first. Each story will pick up in a different decade but the same bloodline in surprising ways, so there will be some chronological jumping.

Are you watching True Blood, reading or watching the Twilights?

I'm a huge fan of True Blood. Some things I've not caught up with... I read the first Twilight - my wife has actually read all of them - but my feeling is, each one of them brings something different to vampire lore. I've never seen vampires as teen heartthrobs the way that Twilight does it, or the reimagining of vampires as a sociological underclass and the Southern Gothic elements of True Blood make that really fresh. For us, we're trying to bring something new to the table too. American Vampire wasn't conceived as the tale end of a trend. It definitely, for me, predated both of those, so I'm hoping that - When each one of those came out, we were all, Oh, it's just part of the trend, but the better stuff comes out in the crashing of a wave and you're like, That's awesome! We're hoping that we have that kind of response.

We really have put a lot of sweat and blood into it about making it something different and high quality, so that if there were no other vampire things around, you're look at it in the same way. I was thinking about it, but other than Bram Stoker's Dracula, I haven't seen a vampire comic since the peak of 30 Days of Night. For us, it's great not to be on TV with Vampire Diaries or True Blood, and we're not a movie, so hopefully it'll stand apart as a good read.
American Vampire debuts in March from Vertigo.

At the premiere for The Box we stole a few minutes with director Richard Kelly and finally got to the bottom of a lot of questions that have been plaguing us for years, like his constant use of water imagery, what it's like coming back after Southland Tales and what he really thinks about the Darko sequel made without him.

Why are you drawn to science fiction?

I think that science fiction is something that can capture the imagination of any human being, in the way that it lets us speculate and analyze the mysteries of the world. We live in a world that's filled with a lot of mystery. Fundamentally it gets to the heart of why we pay fourteen bucks to sit in a movie theater for two hours with a bunch of strangers. It's to discover new mysteries. And you know, with something like Avatar coming out, it sort of helps me reclaim the childhood sense of discovery I got from Jim Cameron when I saw Alien or when I saw Terminator for the first time, seeing the trailer for that film brings back all of those memories and makes me realize why I got into this business so… I think science fiction is where some of the most exciting stories are told.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden are seen getting water dumped all over them in this movie, you've used water before as a supernatural element, can you tell us what that's all about?

Well I think sometimes the concept of saltwater coming from the ocean and the ocean being the driving force of the planet and our bodies being made of saltwater almost entirely… there's something fascinating about embracing that, the essence of it as a higher intelligence, a higher technology of some sort and it allows you to portray a higher intelligence in a visual way that provokes a lot of discussion and interpretation for audiences. So that's sort of been the reason behind my thought process. People may not understand that when they first see it but it plants a seed in your mind. It's something that we actually did with Donnie Darko and a little bit in Southland Tales so hopefully people are kind of connecting the dots.

What was it like directing this movie after doing Southland Tales?

It was a pleasure for me to have a simple concept to embrace, where I could still design an elaborate mystery behind it all and to try to design an elababorate roller coaster ride. And also to work with intimate characters and… really it's a three-character melodrama, it's the husband and the wife and the stranger who knocks on their door. And there's something wonderful about that simplicity and also being able to work within the studio system… is such a relief for me. To know that my film is going to get released and here we are, red carpet, and there's people here! So I'm very grateful for that.

One last question, have you seen S. Darko [the sequel to Donnie Darko]?

I have not seen it.

Are you planning to?

No. I kind of... it's not… I didn't have anything to do with it and I just.. kind of want the movie to exist in my heart the way I made it and I just I won't… I don't have any plans to see it.

The Box is theaters November 6th.

Even though John Cusack tried to be pretty mum on the details, the actor (who's also a producer) filled us in exclusively about the movie's status, and just how R-rated this film will be.

Let's talk Hot Tub Time Machine. Where's the film at right now?

I won't give anything away, but we are cutting the film right now. But it's about four guys who go back to the 1980s.

From what we saw in the trailer it seems like a pure group comedy. Who is your character in that group? What is your role?

I play sort of a guy who is a little bit of a control freak. He doesn't like to look back, and he gets forced to go back.

Since you are dealing with time travel is this going to be a Peggy Sue Got Married scenario with the actors from the future stuck in their child bodies, or will you have younger versions of yourself playing 80s you?

I'm not gonna tell you.

You are killing me.

I'm not killing you I'm trying to tantalize you.

Well the trailer looks like a return to the heavy drug usage, heavy on the swears, super fun type comedy? Are you guys doing a lot of drugs?

That's true [about the comedy]. There's not a lot of it, but there's some, you know it's the 80s, it's got drugs and sex and all the things that you know...

Why should we be excited for this movie?

I think Craig Robinson, Clark Duke and Rob Corddry are hilarious. It's pretty fun if you like those old movies. There are some characters that make fun of those old movie characters like the stock bad guys on the ski patrol and the things like that.

What about the stock good guys? Anyone skewer your past characters a little bit?

We'll we have those too [for the good guys]. I think somewhere in there it's doing that. Crispin Glover is in it and he was in Back To The Future and is an 80s icon. He's in it. Chevy Chase is in it.

Besides the cast, why did you want to get involved with this project?

Because MGM was making it, and they only had about half of a script and they wanted to start making it before the summer. So they said, you have to just go shoot it right now, and you can produce it, but you'll have to rewrite the script and write it, but you'll have to start in seven weeks. So it was a very insane project and time frame, but we decided to do it anyways. It was a mad dash. Because you know what the fuck? It's just this insane juggernaut.

With a title like that, it kind of has to go to that extreme.

Even the filming was that way, we only had about 60 pages of the script. We just had to write it as we went. A lot of it is improv.

The difference between Sierra and the other Dolls turns out to be that Sierra never consented to be a Doll. But none of the other Dolls could really give informed consent or know the kinds of engagements they signed up for. We're pretty clear that Sierra was being raped, but what about Echo and Victor?

All who consent to becoming a Doll are informed about what that entails... perhaps not in the greatest detail, but they are aware that they're giving up their minds and bodies for a number of years. But in Sierra's case, she was clearly violated. Echo's case is unique as well. As we established in Season One, she had no choice but to "volunteer".

Now that we've seen Sierra drawing the black smudges everywhere, it looks less and less like Topher's mindwiping can really remove the trauma of an engagement from the Active's mind. So are all the Actives being damaged by their experiences, or is Sierra a special case because Nolan was a repeat client and her original abuser?

All the Actives may experience trauma in one way or another, but Sierra's case is different. Repeat engagements with her original kidnapper/abuser? That's damage that runs deep.

Where was Ballard in this episode? (My theory is, you wrote this for season one and it got held over. Am I right?)

I like your juicy theory but Paul was absent for a much less interesting reason. We did have an exchange between Boyd and Topher that explained Paul's absence (Echo was on idle therefore Paul was given some downtime) but we had to cut that out for running time. We also had to cut a shirtless Topher bit from the end montage. DVD extras perhaps?

So Boyd is turning a blind eye to Echo's self-awareness, and Victor and Sierra are walking around holding hands and sharing a bed-coffin. Has the Dollhouse just gone completely soft all of a sudden?

Soft? Aren't we all softies? Don't we all want Sierra and Victor to hold hands and snuggle in a pod? Especially after Sierra's been through hell? We're giving you what you want America! Or the very small portion of America who watches us. And Boyd isn't necessarily turning a blind eye. He leaves an all access key card for Echo in her book. Which we may or may not deal with later. Tune in many weeks from now to find out what happens!

And finally, this episode felt, in general, like it had stronger ties to "Epitaph One" than any season two episode so far. And Sierra's violation feels like the leading edge of the apocalypse — what happened to her will happen, sort of, to everyone else. Is it just her bad luck to be the first casualty? Or are you making a statement about rape leading to dehumanization and depersonalization for everyone, not just the actual victim?

Wow. You must think we're smart or something. Yes? To what you said. In the question part. I'll go with yes.

Oh, and this one-on-one interview with Olmos contains some spoilers for "The Plan," because we talked specifics with him. So go buy the DVD, watch it and come back to read this, if you're concerned about spoilers.

What's left?

So Olmos has been very vocal about saying that he'd like to make more BSG movies like "The Plan." But what would they be about? He explains:

Simple questions, like what happened to the [final] five during this period of time? Where were they coming from 2,000 years ago? How could they be around for 2,000 years, and yet the understanding of Caprica is that the robotic trend on Caprica was started 57 years ago? How did that work? That question comes into play, and I would love to see how they answered it. That, to me, would be explosively unbelievable. I would love to have that question answered. I would also love to know what is going to happen to the people on the Earth. What is going to happen to Adama and all the different people? What happened to the Raptor that got them to the point of finding their dream space? That, to me, is just two simple ones I can think of off the top of my head.... To me, there's still a lot of beautiful story that's waiting to be unleashed in this world.

Don't download "The Plan!"

Actually, when we asked Olmos about forthcoming DVD movies, he first paused to express his displeasure with everyone who downloaded "The Plan" from the Internet before its release date. Seriously, if you're planning on grabbing this DVD from a file-sharing service, imagine Admiral Adama getting pissed at you — because he is. In a nice way. "People don't understand that if they want to see this universe again, they have to participate by voting, by casting their dollars. If they don't cast their dollars, they won't see any more of these."

So what's the deal with Starbuck?

So speaking of unanswered questions, we had to ask Olmos what was going on with Starbuck at the end of the final episode. He says "I would love to know that," and he would imagine that question being answered along with "the full story of what happened to Lee" after the show ends. Adds Olmos:

I talked with Starbuck about this. She felt that she went with Anders, that she transported herself like an angel, and she went into the sun with Anders on the Galactica. So she went back with Anders. That's her idea.

Love is the key to "The Plan"

Olmos says "The Plan" not only explains what the Cylons' goals were, but also why they weren't very successful in achieving those goals. The reason for the Cylons' failure? It has to do with encountering a human emotion they weren't prepared for: Love. That's why you see the version of Cavil who's living on the surface Caprica finding himself unable to kill Starbuck, when he has a clean shot, towards the end.

Rick Worthy is the catalyst

As we've mentioned, the TV show's most underused Cylon becomes the most memorable character in "The Plan": Cylon Number Four, aka Simon (Rick Worthy), gets a great arc involving one of his model marrying a human and adopting her daughter in the fleet, while another of his model is on Caprica with the resistance. Olmos says Simon's story is "the catalyst" that helps us understand what happened to the Cylons. It illustrates the theme of love, since Simon's love for his wife and child changes him, but it also shows how the Cylons are unexpectedly having huge divergences between different copies of the same model.

Humor is part of "The Plan":

Olmos says he enjoyed bringing out the humor in Jane Espenson's script (which has some incredibly funny moments, especially the ones involving Aron Doral and his teal jacket.) Like much of BSG, the DVD is incredibly dark, but with some moments of strange levity. Olmos says it's important that the humor comes out of the irony and the situation, and that way the comedy doesn't seem forced. Olmos says he was probably chosen to direct this because he had already made humor happen when he directed the episode "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down":

Like when Baltar is making love with Six, and then Starbuck comes walking in and sees him with his pants down and all his privates being exposed, and he's humping away on Six, but you can't see Six. All you can do is just see the doctor there humping. It's hysterical. Because we the viewer understand it, but the situation is one where by now Starbuck thinks the doctor is just out there where the buses don't run.

What you won't see in "The Plan":

Olmos is a huge fan of Dean Stockwell, who plays Cavill, and he says people don't appreciate what a great performer Stockwell is — Olmos has been a fan of Stockwell's since he saw the 1948 anti-war movie The Boy With Green Hair, starring a young Stockwell as a boy with the power to stop war. In "The Plan," Cavill befriends a young quasi-orphan boy, and the boy's costume is an exact replica of Stockwell's costume from Green Hair. Olmos had the costume hand-stitched to match.

But Olmos wanted to go further with the reference: He wanted the boy in "The Plan" to have green hair, and both the studio and writer Jane Espenson refused to let him.

People would have just been in shock, like 'What the hell is that about? And in essence, it would have been a statement that would have reverberated throughout the entire planet for centuries to come. And would have augmented something that needs to be understood, but in turn, the studio and the writer were afraid of it, they just thought "That's crazy." They didn't want it, they thought it was a stupid thing to do. It would be all about, "What? Why did the boy have green hair?" And it would be about the boy with the green hair. It should be about that. It should be that deep and in the context. So may be they'll let me paint CGI green hair and put it on him. From the time he raises his head to the time he dies, he has green hair, and nobody says anything about it. And the audience just has to deal with it. Let them deal with it.

Want to meet Olmos yourself so he can explain more of the ideas behind BSG? Enter the "Dinner With The Admiral" contest over at UGO.

Top image from Gateworld.

After a screening for their upcoming film Gentlemen Broncos, Jared and Jerusha Hess, co-writers of both Gentlemen Broncos and Napoleon Dynamite (Jared also directed both films) answered audience questions and gave a little background about the movie. During the session, Jerusha mentioned that, if Jared had his way, Napoleon Dynamite would have been about crop circles and UFOs.

Later, during an interview with the pair, we asked them to elaborate on this more science fiction Napoleon Dynamite:

Jared: I don't know, it just involved Napoleon researching crop circle crap and weird extraterrestrial —

Jerusha: Paranormal —

Jared: — stuff going down in the farming community. I don't know. It didn't get much further than that. She [Jerusha] stopped it right away.

Jerusha: There are a couple of white Bronco scenes, where he [Napoleon] was being chased by some government officials.

Jared: Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. But we didn't pursue it. We kept it —

Jerusha: Jared was so focused on the story for Napoleon, when really it was just the character that was so entertaining. And I kept saying "Jared, we don't need the story. Let's show a little glimpse of his life."

Gentlemen Brocnos opens October 30th.

io9: Tell us about how you got into futurism.

Karl Schroeder: Around 2005 the Canadian army tapped me to do a dramatization for a series of foresight workshops they'd done. They had stacks of papers and needed it boiled down to something simple enough for a 4-star general to understand. We decided to do it as a story. That's how I created "Crisis in Zefra." The African city-state of Zefra was their invention and they let me do whatever I wanted with it. The army published it and you can download it. [PDF]

And this is not the first time that the Canadian military has hired a writer to create a fictionalized future. The first time was over 100 years ago, so it's an old tradition, and it's an effective way to communicate extremely complex sets of ideas.

That story was set 20 years in the future. What did you learn from writing it?

Looked at in isolation, each new technology or advance seemed to imply one outcome, but when you combine them in a story you quickly find that they influence each other in unpredictable ways. For nearly every new laser beam or autonomous armor suit or wahtever they came up with, I found that the most effective defense was the smart phone, particularly in its capacity to be used to create smart mobs.

The smart mob tended to trump any of the cool technologies that were deployed in my imaginary story.

So what do you study in a futurism graduate program?

We study product design as well as process design, with an eye toward how innovation happens in business and science. As graduates, we could go into business or government, and look at ways to cope with change.

How does being a futurist compare to being a science fiction writer?

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer I'm never required to be right.

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

Let's talk about your science fiction. In your Virga novels, you combine classic characters and adventures with these incredible, high-tech settings. Why do you like to combine what is arguably old-fashioned with the new?

When Cory Doctorow and I wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Science Fiction, one of the suggestions I made was that you can get away with varying the setting, or the technologies, or the characters, or the plotline in SF - but you cannot get away with varying or changing all of them. I call that the principle of constants and variables. You can play with some features of the world as variables - set it in the future or the past - or can do a "what if" about technologies. But for a reader to have any anchor to understand the story and empathize with the characters, you have to have constants, things that are not changed.

With the Virga books, I carefully chose a set of variables and constants. The constants were easily-identifiable classic adventure characters in a steampunk type society. With the characters and the cultures to anchor you, you're free to explore Virga, which is otherwise disorienting.

The politics in Virga are also really interesting . . .

Various political themes emerge from my books as I write them. Primarily what I wanted to do with the Virga books was show the sheer fertility of science fiction. I decided not to use ideas from different eras, but classic stories as templates. Sun of Suns was something I consciously thought of as Master and Commander in space. Queen of Candescewas the Count of Monte Cristo. Pirate Sun was The Odyssey. With Sunless Countries, what I had in mind was Bridget Jones.

I brought in old science too. Virga is designed as Newtonian science fiction. There is no science in the series that was discovered past 1940. I wanted to show there is still so much to be discovered and invented in SF even if we limited ourselves to what we knew 100 years ago.

Sometimes artists talk about how they don't want to be psychoanalyzed because it will ruin the inspiration for their work. Do you worry that studying futurism might do something similar to your science fiction?

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF. What I have noticed in the last 5-6 years the foresight work I've done has provided ideas for near-future SF. I want to dive wholeheartedly into near-future SF, something set 5 to 50 years in the future, that is rigorously based on foresight.

One of the things I did in my novel Lady of Mazes was propose a new model of what it means to be human. That's exactly what I want to follow through on when I start writing near-future SF. I strongly feel that if you're going to write about the effects of cognitive science on us as individuals and as a society, you have to be prepared to take a leap into radically new vision of what it means to be a person. That's what I'll be exploring. I'm going to do it in the context of a computer programmer from the slums of India, and a midwest housewife who burns down her house and runs away - these are people who are instantly understandable.

What are you currently working on?

The fifth and likely final novel in the Virga series, titled Ashes of Candesce. I'm also writing a number of short stories set in Virga. After that I'm planning to do some near-future writing.

Image from the cover of Pirate Sun, art by Stephen Martiniere.

Things were a bit chaotic on the carpet last night but we managed to get a few moments with Hollywood's favorite everyman. Including how he got involved in Where The Wild Things Are, and hints about the Toy Story 3 storyline.

How did you get involved in this production?

I called up Maurice Sendack about 10 or 12 years ago, and said, "look you don't know me but I'm a big fan of your book, and if you ever want to make it into a movie, let us help you...

They shot this in Australia. And once they got going they were working on it full force. I was just saying, "What can we help do?" There's nothing more extraneous than a producer on set saying, "Hey, what time's lunch?" I didn't need to do that, Spike was in good hands.

Will you bring your kids to see this movie?

Yes, well, all my kids were all grown up.

Who are the new Toys in Toy Story 3?

There's a ton of them and I think I'm not allowed to say.

Not even one little toy?

I think contractually if I say anything, the legal team of the Walt Disney company will swoop down and grab up all your [recorders] [Hanks then jokingly grabs up all the reporters' recorders].

You're a space fan, what did you think about NASA blowing up the moon?

Oh, that was fantastic, I wish we could have actually seen it — what a brilliant idea. You smash in a thing and make it cloudy, and fly the space craft through it. Who was the genius that came up with that?

We sat with writers Orci and Kurtzman at the Paramount Star Trek DVD junket eagerly awaiting details on the next Trek. Right away they cleared up recent rumors that they've already created a storyline for the second outing — they have yet to sit down and lock themselves in a hotel room as they did the first time around. As fans of the series in all its incarnations, they have yet to settle even on who exactly they want to include, says Kurtzman, let alone whether to tackle weightier world issues.

But what about the rumored Gitmo plot line? Orci stated that the reports that they're writing a commentary on torture and the Bush doctrine (while never entirely out of the question) are a little absurd, since they've barely begun work on the sequel.

We have nothing. The torture thing was just a 'for instance.' Someone said, 'Modern day issues?' And we said, 'Yeah, sure, modern day issues.'

We're not doing a story about Gitmo. I read on some site that it was going to be about Guantanamo Bay. But now that we've established the characters, we can have a more philosophical allegory, where what's happening in the future represents our world — like the best versions of it in the '60s did with women's rights, racial equality, [and] progressive issues.

We're still just brainstorming internally, and we're going to get together soon and bust our riffs out and see where it takes us.

Also, we'd like to note there was a bit a torture in the first already. So should they revisit this, let's hope they break new ground with it.

In a separate interview, director J.J. Abrams agreed with his writers' remarks, saying that it's never as simple as making a political statement.

"It's not like we're looking to make the second movie some kind of heavy political allegory - I think it's important that there is metaphor to what we know, and that there is relevance. And I think that allegory is the thing that made shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek resonate and still vital today."

He continued on, explaining that where the first film was all introductions — to the world, to the characters, to the time period — the second has a duty to go deeper and examine this new world and grow with it.

Nimoy revealed little about his upcoming Fringe appearance, except to say that we will learn a great deal about Bell's relationship with Agent Olivia Dunham and what Bell's motives are (or at least what he claims his motives are). He did open up, though, when asked about his thoughts on the current state of science fiction in television and film:

Well, I'm concerned about the positioning of story in terms of importance. When I see a lot of explosions, a lot of chases, I'm not terribly impressed. I think there are three terribly important elements that must be given position — priority position — in science fiction as well as in any other kind of drama: the first is story, the second is story, and the third is story. Story, story, story, story, story. If the story is compelling and interesting, I think all the rest will find its place. We have great technology in our industry and that technology can be overused at the expense of story, and that's a problem for me. But when the story is in place, I think the special effects can find their proper place. I think Fringe uses the technology brilliantly, but in the service of excellent storytelling.

He did later go on to say that, while special effects can be a slippery slope, he is impressed at how they actually bolster storytelling:

It's safe to say that what an audience is seeing today on screen in a television episode is far more complex than what we were doing while we were, for example, making the original Star Trek series in the sixties. We were very, very heavy on pages and pages of dialogue and very little special effects. But because the technology has advanced so greatly, it's possible to do some very complex and very exciting and very useful technical stuff on the shows these days. So we don't have to rely quite so much on the story being told by the actors speaking. On the other hand, there's the danger — as I mentioned earlier — in going to far with the special effects at the expense of story. But if the story is well done, if the story's in place strongly, the special effects can be very useful to the actors, far more so than they were years ago when we were making the original Star Trek series.

But when asked which shows he thought balanced storytelling and effects well, he replied (a bit single-mindedly): "Fringe. Fringe. Fringe."