Michael Emerson discusses Ben's latest moves!

From Kristen at E!
Death, Dear Ones and the Monster: Michael Emerson Talks Lost

In case you weren't paying attention last night, Michael Emerson, our beloved Benry, turned in an astonishing performance that was earning Emmy buzz before it even aired, and as far as I'm concerned, no one has ever done better work humanizing a supervillain.

I just rang up Michael to get his take on Lost's big game, Ben's current state of mind after the brutal death of [sobbing drowns out spoiler], and, oh yeah, his brilliant explanation of the monster's mechanics. Click in for the goods.


FAMILY AND UPPING THE ANTE


What's going on internally for Ben in that minute after Alex has been shot dead?
Well, Ben is in a state of shock. Ben doesn't usually...Ben plays a game where a variety of outcomes are to be expected, but nothing outside the table of contents. In this case, something happened. Ben took what he thought was a safe risk, and it turned out to be a terrible risk. Someone else didn't play fair, so it's about as big a shock as Ben as ever had in his life.

Jumping to the end of episode then, Charles Widmore says, I didn't kill your daughter, you did. How much does Ben feel culpable in her death?
Ben is a guy who doesn't take things lightly, and I think he has a long memory. When Charles Widmore says that it's Ben's fault—that's a kind of sophistry on his part. He's suggesting that everything Ben has ever done has led up to this moment, the idea that who we are makes us guilty across the board. But Ben's not having that explanation.

I think Ben knows that his daughter died for a very particular reason, and that Charles Widmore is the guilty one. Whatever is going on between Ben and Charles Widmore, the ante just got raised about tenfold.

In the next episode there's a scene where it looks like Sawyer might get the chance to kill Keamy, who killed Alex. Is that the kind of thing that Ben would want to do personally, or is Ben more of a big-picture thinker, just gunning for Charles?
I think Ben is in a state of bloody-mindedness right now. I think he would like to personally pull the trigger on everyone connected. And we'll see whether he has that opportunity.



Interesting. Do you expect to see Danielle and Alex again, hopefully, in one capacity or another? And what has it been like working with Tania Raymonde and Mira Furlan?
I love both these actresses, and it feels like when a dear coworker moves on to somewhere, you feel sad and lonesome...and you realize how much you've personally got invested in these fictional relationships. You know how nobody is ever fully dead on Lost, so...I don't expect that we've seen the last of them. But maybe we've seen the last of them in their fleshly state.

So Danielle doesn't pop up in the next episode with just a minor flesh wound and come after Ben or anything?
I don't—I don't think that's gonna happen...

Speaking of Danielle, I was hoping she would eventually get to kill Ben.
[Laughs.] What a strange wish on your part.


THE LADY JULIET

Well, I say this with the utmost respect and love for the character, but Ben's an unkillable cockroach, and yet you would have to imagine someone eventually gets him. Juliet, perhaps?
Well, Juliet is certainly a dangerous character. I think more dangerous than we know at this point, and certainly there are issues between Juliet and Ben that have yet to be resolved. But you know, Ben's...his whole existence may end up being redeemed by the gravity and necessity of his mission.

Speaking of Juliet, that whole "You're mine!" opened so many more questions of what does he want from her. And then...I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Mitchell is like a foot taller than you, does that ever come into play when you guys are shooting scenes together?
[Laughs.] Yes, I have to say, that was not one of Ben's prettier moments, there at the place where Goodwin met his demise.

You know, when Ben gets outside his comfort zone, like many men who are geniuses or men of sophistication, there is some part of him, to compensate, that has been undeveloped. I think Ben is maybe socially or emotionally somewhat underdeveloped.

So sometimes, when he's stressed, he behaves like a teenager. Sort of. To me. So he says things bitterly...I think he possibly regrets them later, but he does behave impulsively sometimes. For this character who is supposed to be so calculated and such a chess player, he really does behave impulsively upon occasion.

Does he want to marry Juliet so she can have a million of his babies?
I don't think he even has a clear picture what he wants. That he wants is all he knows. She is a prize in his mind. Who knows what his sex life is, or ever would be? But somehow he's decided that she is to be his.

MYTHS AND MONSTERS


Do you almost feel like after that conversation with Charles we suddenly learned that Ben is the hero of the show, even though we didn't know he existed for the first season or two?
It feels like some kind of shift along those lines is happening, doesn't it? Because each season, it's like the lens of the show steps back a notch and shows the playing field of the show to be a larger one that we had thought at first.

I think this battle between Charles Widmore and Benjamin Linus, whatever it is, whatever the stakes are, whatever the game is, I think that's now big. That's a big, important thing.

And I think, I don't know if it's just from familiarity or instinct, but I think we like Ben Linus better than we like Charles Widmore. I think Charles Widmore is a more wicked man.

Partly just because Charles is really mean to Desmond, whereas Ben has always been very courtly and gentlemanly. He'll beat you to death, but he'll say thank you when he's done or something.
Yes. [Laughs.] That's right. Manners count, don't they? Come on!


OK I have some fan questions, if you don't mind. Harry asks: "Is Ben the monster's boss? Is Ben able to just take the monster out of his cage?" What's your sense of that whole thing?
Ben is privy to the secret mechanics of everything on the Island, so yes, he can sic the smoke monster—smoke's not the right word, but he can sic that thing on someone. But we don't yet know the recipe or the formula for how that's done, and we don't know what it costs. There seem to be a lot of forces on the Island, but nothing is for free. A toll is paid every time the machinery works. Everything is bargained.

Tom asks, "Did you have any sense that between the time Ben disappeared into the tunnel, and came back sooty later, that he was essentially in a time bubble where he worked out that Sayid would help him take down Charles Widmore, or do you think that was genuinely in the future?"
I had it in my head that those things were genuinely in the future. But the passage of time is being perceived differently by different people. I thought that period of time when he went down the tunnel to enable the smoke monster and emerged sooty, I thought that was just enough time for him to take care of that, physically, by himself.

I think it all has something to do with metallic dust. I think the smoke monster is connected to that ring of powder that surrounds Jacob's cabin. They've established that there are supermagnetic forces are at work on the Island, so what better medium for those forces to work through than through fine filings of metal?

Would you like join the Lost fandom? Because you would be really good at it.
We who work on the show—we're all Losties, too! We're all theorizing and trying to put the pieces together. It must tickle the writers to see us trying to work these things out!

OK, last question. Mark from Dundee, Scotland: "Where do you think Ben stands on a scale of one to 10 where one is Hurley, totally good; five is Locke, good but willing to do bad things to achieve his ends; and 10 is Charles Widmore, evil?"
I think Ben is not bound by your scale.

God love you, sir. Want more of Michael Emerson's answers and personal brand of awesome? Check out the Lost Redux and tune in to the spoiler chat on Monday and we'll get you the hookup! Meanwhile, I want and expect you all to testify toward Michael's Emmy in the comments below. Go.

Speed Racer PREMIERE in Los Angeles...

Saturday April 26th....Los Angeles....Matthew Fox at the SPEED RACER PREMIERE!

OHHHHHH....I can't wait! Just glad to see FOXY pop back over here to the mainland for a few days! LOVE YA MATTHEW!


~NIKI

When characters die on this show...They aren't REALLY 'LOST'

In the closing moments of the last new ''Lost'' episode in March, it appeared that Rousseau (Mira Furlan) was cut down by an unseen enemy along with her daughter's boyfriend. For fans of the Frenchwoman, a character whose past has barely been explored, it was a disappointing shock. Maybe she was shot with a dart and not a bullet?

''They were shot with bullets,'' confirmed Damon Lindelof, a ''Lost'' executive producer, who refused to divulge the fates of the shooting victims.


''The good thing about 'Lost' is that being dead can lead to more work,'' said executive producer Carlton Cuse. ''It can improve your standing in the cast by getting killed. If, in fact, Rousseau proves to be dead, it doesn't have much bearing in terms of whether you'll see more of her story. We think the backstory of Rousseau and her science team is interesting and we'd love to tell that story at some point.''

After its fourth-season run was interrupted by the writers strike, ABC's mystery-filled hit returns with a run of new episodes starting at 9 tonight on WLS-Channel 7, leading up to its two-hour finale on May 29.

Talking to reporters last week, Cuse and Lindelof were coy about the show's future, refusing to comment on reports that ''Lost'' had been taping in London and that another lead character will be killed off.

''If we tease there will be a death, like when Shannon died, then everyone chases it down and spoils it,'' Cuse said. ''If we say everyone is safe, it would ruin the dramatic impact of the finale. We're excited about what's happening. There are some large and seismic events that will happen to the castaways between now and the end of the season.''

Other tidbits:

• "There are some compelling events involving Claire (Emilie de Ravin) between now and the season finale,'' Cuse said.

• The smoke monster will be featured tonight. "This episode is very dark, and very grim," executive producer J.J. Abrams told the Sun-Times earlier this week.

This year's season finale will be less smoke-and-mirrors than last year's flash-forward head trip, Lindelof said.

''Lost'' will conclude in 2010, and Lindelof said producers have already envisioned the series' closing moments.

''The last scene has been determined,'' he said. ''There would have to be some major shift in both our mindsets to back off of that.''

Source: suntimes.com

Finding FOX

Lead roles in top US dramas Lost and Party of Five have made Matthew Fox one of the most recognisable faces on international television.

He talks to Seven's film editor Cole Smithey about his latest big screen roles in the seminal thriller Vantage Point and The Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer
Practically anyone with a television is aware of Matthew Fox from the hugely successful series Lost, where he plays the plane crash survivor Jack Shepherd who shares a remote island with 47 other survivors. Commenting on the show's international success, Fox is quoted as saying that "it's sort of a show about the human species, not a show about anybody from any particular country or any nationality or any religious background".

Matthew Fox established himself as a television fixture on the series Party of Five before Lost began in 2004. Since that time, the charismatic young actor has bridged the gap between television and feature films, starring in Smokin' Aces and We Are Marshall. With performances in this year's Vantage Point and upcoming Speed Racer, Fox is making deeper forays outside of the small screen and is poised for leading feature film roles in the not so distant future.

In his latest film Vantage Point, Matthew Fox plays a secret service agent protecting a U.S. president during a trip to Spain. The director Pete Travis has turned debut screenwriter Barry Levy's Rashomon-inspired script into a dizzyingly complex puzzle that sits comfortably next to such great political thrillers as In the Line of Fire (1992). Fox's character Kent Taylor provides gripping surprises as aspects of his double life are exposed, and an intriguing plot about an assassination attempt against the president unfolds.

I met with Matthew at Sony's Madison Avenue headquarters in Manhattan, where he appeared wearing a motorcycle jacket and a look of satisfied exhaustion.

CS: What have you been up to lately?

MF: I've been to nine countries in the past 18 days. I've been to Japan, Australia, Korea, France, Spain, Russia, the UK, Germany and now New York in support of this film.

CS: Your character is probably the most multi-dimensional in the movie. You got to have your cake and eat it too.

MF: It was a fun role for me. Obviously, I disagree with his methods. For me, it's really always the project as a whole, the potential of the script and the director, and the director's take on the script. This amazing cast came together. I love Pete Travis, loved what he'd done before, and thought that the way he talked about the movie and what he wanted to do with it had all those elements. I like to believe that I'm the type of actor who will serve the story in whatever way I'm asked to serve it, once that sort of package feels like something I want to be involved in. And in this one it was Kent Taylor.

CS: I understand you did some training to play a secret service agent.

MF: Dennis [Quaid] got to do more training than I did. I was doing another film directly before, Vantage Point. I had less than a 24-hour turnaround on the films and I had to fly from Atlanta to Mexico City. It was a really intense summer for me. I was shooting six days a week to get all the work done on both films in the Lost hiatus. For me it was really just trying to gather, as quickly as possible from the consultants that we had on the film, the logistics of how these things would be choreographed, the positional reference of everyone around the President at all times, where weapons were carried, how communications were conducted - really outward mechanics types of questions. Most of the relationship between Dennis and I, and hopefully building a history, or a sensed history between these two guys was something that Dennis, Pete and I worked on quite a bit.

CS: It seemed like a physically demanding role.

MF: It was a pretty physical thing, but I enjoy that. Anytime I have an opportunity to be physical in a role that requires that…you're kind of viscerally activated. It takes away the thought process, which is fun.

CS: The car chase sequences you're in seem dangerous. How much of that was your driving?

MF: I would love to take credit for doing that car chase, but my actual driving in that was pretty limited. Most of my appearance in the car sequence was done on a green screen with a couple of guys rocking the car, with Pete sitting in front of the windshield going, "You're turning left, he's behind you!", "He's coming up on you quickly!". It was an incredibly frustrating experience. It was the only point in the entire making of the movie that I got into it with Pete. I was frustrated, and I was like, "This is not going to work". And he said, "Trust me, it's going to work". Now everybody says it's the best car chase, and they love it. So I saw Pete after not seeing him for a long time, gave him a big hug and said, "You were right, it did work out. I was doubting you, and it worked out".

CS: How did your impression of Dennis Quaid compare with the experience of working with him?

MF: I always just imagined Dennis as a really solid individual. He certainly proved to be that. I really enjoyed meeting him and enjoyed working on the project. This task was a really rewarding thing for me, to be in that company, and to just get an opportunity to be in a film with so many people that I had watched for so long and whose work I respected, and also get to know them as people a bit. It was pretty surreal. When you're in the work and you're coming at the day from the perspective of the character and you're sort of only seeing the other actors as in their characters, you're kind of defining relationships all the time, so you don't really think twice about it. But then there are those moments where you've got a couple hours of downtime and you're sitting around shooting the shit, and those were the moments where I was like, "Wow, this is pretty great that I'm in this film with this group of people".

CS: How do you feel about your upcoming Wachowski Brothers' movie Speed Racer?

MF: I'm very, very excited about the movie. I've seen certain sections of the film. It's pretty amazing, and my little boy asks me every single day when the movie's coming out. He cannot wait.

CS: Have you seen your action figure that the toy company made?

MF: Yes, I saw it. It's actually my second. There's a Jack Shepherd one for Lost as well. I'm just very excited for the experience of making it with the Wachowskis, and with the entire cast; it was amazing. It was an amazing summer.

CS: What did you enjoy about making a CGI-intensive movie?

MF: Everything about it. It was like doing it for the first time in a lot of respects. The whole process that they're doing is very different, the way that the images are layered in and the way things are shot, even. Most of the time you'd end up doing a scene and then the actors would be removed from it so you were doing it by yourself. Just the experience of discovering what this world is that they're building, and trying to find a way into that world as this masked vigilante, was really fun.

CS: Would you carry on with the franchise if it develops?

MF: I would hope to do two more. I would love to do more of that world and work with everyone involved with that project. I'm very excited by the prospect of that, but it's going to be one at a time obviously.

CS: Don't the studios typically ask you to sign on for franchise sequels when you're cast for the first one?

MF: Yes they do, and I didn't think twice about it.

CS: You've made a seemingly easy transition between television and film. How do you approach your work?

MF: I've always approached the business as a marathon, not a sprint. I think you've got to take your time and make sure you are making choices that are smart for you. Choices are very important. I've been doing it for about 17 years, and I've just always felt that I'd have more opportunities later in my life when I'd gotten some life under my belt. I've just taken my time and waited for the right opportunities.

CS: How much do you enjoy doing Lost?

MF: I really feel like Lost, and what I'm getting an opportunity to do on the show, is pretty complex and it's evolving as well. My character started as an idea of what everybody wanted him to be - this heroic guy - but he's actually really flawed and the island is stripping away this deep compassion in him and bringing out a much darker side. So there's an evolution happening in the character that's always been important to [scriptwriter] Damon Lindelof, and myself actually.

CS: The show takes liberties with past, present, and future. How long has Jack been on the island?

MF: From the time the plane crashed to Jack in the future is about a year and a half. Jack would have been on the island now for about 120 days.

CS: Would you ever consider directing a movie?

MF: Maybe. I directed an episode of Party of Five towards the very end of the show and it was a great experience, but I think if I were to ever take that on it would have to be something that I felt so personally strong about that I really felt like I was the one to tell it. Maybe that will happen. I think it'd be really exciting if it did, but it hasn't yet.

Source: www.sevenglobal.org

Foxy!!! On The Move

Matthew Fox is the middle brother of three and was raised in Wyoming, where his parents owned a horse and cattle ranch. He graduated from Columbia University and contemplated becoming a stockbroker before beginning his acting career. He is best known for his role in the TV series Lost and stars in the upcoming film Speed Racer. He is married with two children and lives in Hawaii

Matthew Fox is best known for his role as Dr Jack Shepherd in the television series Lost. Like George Clooney, that other star who began life as a doctor in a television soap and went on to become an Alister, he is progressively making the transition from the small screen to the silver screen.

The film that Fox hopes will enable him to do this is Speed Racer, a live-action version of the 1960s Japanese cartoon. The film promises to be one of the summer’s most action-packed blockbusters, featuring a car that would put James Bond’s gadget-laden Aston Martin to shame. The Mach 5, a sports car cum submarine, boasts blades that are deployed from the front bumper to scythe away obstacles, a bulletproof cabin, a remote-controlled droid and a giant jack that enables it to jump short distances at speed.

Fox plays Racer X opposite Emile Hirsch, who plays Speed, and relished the chance to get behind the wheel. “I’ve been a car nut for as long as I can remember,” he says. “One of the first things I wanted to be as a boy was a race-car driver, and I look at my own little boy, who’s only seven, and he’s already into it too, so I jumped at this film.”

The only problem is that Fox didn’t get to spend too long at the wheel of the Mach 5: most of the action uses computer-generated imagery (CGI), meaning that much of the time Fox was kitted out in his black leather costume acting on his own in front of a green screen, upon which the CGI images would later be added.

“My character is wrapped in leather and in disguise; doing fight sequences in that was incredibly difficult and I got very dehydrated. It was tough but really rewarding. A lot was CGI but I still had to do my own stunts, and that meant six weeks of hard training.”

In real life he drives an Acura TSX, a saloon based on the Honda Accord. He claims it is sporty, but you get the feeling he has bought it more for its practicality (he has a wife and two children) than seat-of-the-pants driving credentials. Not that he wants anyone to think he isn’t a petrolhead: “I enjoy racing and have always loved to drive fast, and cars in general. I recently got a chance to ride a Porsche on the Willow Springs racetrack outside Los Angeles with a professional driver from the Porsche Le Mans team. It was an absolute blast.

“I’ve done a few projects where I’ve taken Sixties vintage cars and modernised them into hot rods. Not me personally, but conceptualising it and then having someone else do all the work. Right now I’m working on a 1950 Mercury Coupe, which is going to be really cool.”

Fox says he unfortunately couldn’t take advantage of Germany’s unrestricted autobahns while filming Speed Racer there: “I really wanted to drive like a lunatic,” he says. “But when I began looking into renting something, Warner Bros didn’t really want me going out and driving 150mph on the autobahn.” Should his most recent project catapult Fox into Hollywood’s Alist, it won’t be the first time he has managed to reinvent himself. One of three sons, he grew up on a Wyoming ranch where his father, a retired geologist who had worked for Getty Oil, raised longhorn cattle and horses, and grew barley for Coors beer.

After graduating with a degree in economics from Columbia University – whose alumni include Barack Obama and Theodore and Franklin D Roosevelt – he considered a career as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Today he describes the experience as being surrounded by “go-getting wannabe Gordon Gekkos”. So he left and took modelling work at first, then roles in television commercials, before landing a part in the TV series Party of Five, which ran for six years during the 1990s.

His big break was being cast as one of the leads in Lost. The series has gained cult status, not to mention a thousand websites all trying to make sense of the contorted plot. It has been running for so long that Fox and his family have moved to Hawaii, where it is shot. It sounds idyllic, but Fox says the novelty has long since worn off.

“I’ve been living in Hawaii for almost four years now, so it’s not really paradise any more, man. Throwing snowballs on a mountain top is now paradise. It’s been a good place for us, and for a while I was excited to get out of Los Angeles, but we won’t be staying after Lost is done.

“Being in Hawaii has also been beneficial in that I really don’t like the whole paparazzi thing in my daily life, or photographs of my kids and that type of thing. It does happen but it’s very rare. I think if I was living in Los Angeles it’d be more difficult for me. There’s not a lot of paparazzi who want to do the 2,500-mile trek into the south Pacific for a shot of me walking on the beach.

“Working on Speed Racer in Germany I was barely recognised at all. The Germans really don’t give a shit, man! They might notice you, but they’re gonna pretend like they don’t, which is cool. I like that.”

But even Germany may not be isolated enough for him. His brothers and their young children live in Oregon, and he says that he and his wife, Margherita Ronchi, an Italian model who was his college sweetheart, are discussing joining them. “We’ve been talking about moving to Oregon for a while, so whenever things get tough, I just keep Oregon in my sights. I enjoy fishing, hiking and skiing, and the mountains and fresh air and all these things are available pretty easily in Oregon without having to drive a long distance.

“I’m really excited to figure all that out, but it’s still a couple of years away, so I’m just enjoying life right now.”

My stuff...

On my CD player
Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Shotter’s Nation by Babyshambles. I know that guy [Pete Doherty] has had a rough go of it, but I’ll tell you what: it’s a killer record

On my DVD player
I just watched A Clockwork Orange. I had never seen it before. I’m going back and grabbing some movies I should have seen but haven’t

In my parking space
An Acura TSX, left. It’s a nice sporty little sedan

I will never throw away
My iPod. I don’t go anywhere without it. The first thing I do every morning is put on my music

Source:www.timesonline.co.uk

DARLTON discusses LOST SCIENCE with POPULAR MECHANICS

After a five-week hiatus induced by the Hollywood writer's strike, Lost finally returns this week with a new episode, "The Shape of Things to Come." Show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who both produce and write episodes of the ABC drama, are self-professed geeks who haven't promised sci-fi entirely based in real-life science, but they still want to get it right—or at least right enough that the show's rabid fans will believe it. The duo took a break from editing Lost's three-hour season finale script to take us behind the scenes in the writer's room, talk physics and drop exclusive hints about what we can expect from the show's future. —Erin McCarthy

We fact-check the science and technology behind Lost every week and most of the time you guys get it right. How much time do you spend researching each episode, and where do you do your research? Do you have a panel of experts on speed dial?

Carlton Cuse: We do not have a panel of experts on speed dial, although we do have Greg Nations, who is our script coordinator, who is someone we will turn to who will track down specific facts. The internet is also a beautiful and wonderful thing, and we have our own areas of expertise. Damon is a real comic book geek and I'm a little bit more of a science geek. I took a couple of years of high school physics and my dad was an engineer. I think even though I maybe don't possess a deep science knowledge, I do feel like my brain kind of works a little bit in the way of, you know, does this seem like it makes sense or not, and then Damon and I will go and find an expert or some factual stuff to try to support what it is that we want to do narratively.
Damon Lindelof: We have an awesome production team in Hawaii, so if we send down a script that says "Faraday has equations scribbled all over the chalkboard behind him," that falls upon them and Jeremy Davies, the actor who plays Faraday—who is very method and has been reading a lot about physics and trying to understand it—[to execute] what it says on the script page.

How important is it for you to get the science right?

CC: The science needs to be right enough that we kind of create a sense of believability to the story telling.
DL: We function on Jurassic Park rules, which are, if you can convince me that a mosquito can bite a dinosaur and then get preserved in amber, and that the DNA will not degrade over all that period of time, then you can show me a cloned dinosaur and I won't call it a science-fiction movie. And, you know, we try to do the same thing on the show. If something highly unlikely occurs, we try to offer up some grounding in the actual physical world that we understand in an effort to explain it—except in the case of things that don't potentially have a scientific explanation, which is where the show begins to go into its own territory.
CC: But we're always trying to skirt that line between the two possible explanations, the scientific one or a mythical and magical one, and we are purposefully ambiguous about which one might be correct. Obviously, certain things fall into the science category and certain things fall more into the mystical category, and that just sort of depends on what story we're telling that week.

There's a lot of fan talk that any non-rational or fictional or magical explanation of the island's happenings is a completely unacceptable cop-out. So far, there are plausible scientific explanations for everything that's happening, so people have accepted what's going on. Does being called out by viewers (or the press) worry you?

DL: Well, first off, I would challenge that assertion, and say, how does Yemi walking out of the jungle, the deceased brother of Eko, have a scientific explanation? I guess you would argue that he doesn't walk out of the jungle, that this is all sort of happening in Eko's head, that it's a hallucination. Would that be the case, is that...


No, what I was thinking was the stuff that has been explained so far has a scientific explanation, whereas the other stuff, we're waiting, we don't really know.


DL: Right.
CC: I think the question kind of strikes right at the core of the central theme of the show, which is the notion of faith versus empiricism. Jack represents the empiricist camp, and Locke represents the faith camp, and, you know, who is right? Well, the show hasn't fully answered that question yet.
DL: Hopefully it won't feel like it's a cop out when the show does answer that question, because we never promised a show that was based entirely and grounded in science. It's nice that it's able to do that, but we reserve the right to go in the direction that the uber-plan directs us.

Desmond first time traveled in the third season, but it's not until season four that we see the scientific explanation for it. So this is a chicken-or-the-egg type question: Did you learn about the science first, then work it into the show? Or do you think of a plot element and then research different scientific theories that back it up?

DL: This is where, while Carlton has a much more practical background in science and engineering, I have a long and storied history in every single time travel story that's ever been written, and draw upon that to fundamentally provide our stories with what we want to do. In this case, we said the way that we want to do time travel on Lost is consciousness based, as opposed to somebody gets in a DeLorean or a HG Wells-like apparatus and zaps themself back in time where they can interact with an earlier version of themself. It's more interesting if your brain basically drops into your body at different points in your life, which is more consistent with the sort of Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, paradigm, and also helps insulate you from paradox. So we decided to do that with Desmond. He felt like the logical person to do it with. We find an emotional core for the story—in his case, it's his desire to be reunited with Penny—so we tell time travel stories that sort of focus on the romantic element, which is why we think Peggy Sue in Back to the Future and Somewhere in Time all work. They're science-fiction stories, but they have an emotional core. And we go from there. And then we do the research.
CC: But the two aren't really separable, that's the thing. It's like, when we're actually talking about a story, and we're constructing elements, you know, we're always talking about the plausibility of any given beat. I think the danger that always exists on this kind of show is that the audience has to buy what you're doing. We use all sorts of different things to inspire our storytelling, but you're constantly weighing any sort of story beat against that criteria—will the audience believe it, will they buy it, particularly when we do something as out there as consciousness traveling. So we try to find a way to make it seem plausible, and yet, at the same time, clearly it's a real flight of fantasy kind of story.
DL: And the coolest thing about consciousness time travel is, you know, you're sort of a slave to your memory. So if Desmond travels back in time and he remembers that a certain team beat another team in a football game, and then something different happens, we're hinting at the idea that the future has changed, when in fact he just remembered it wrong, which is kinda cool for us.

What's the vibe like in the writer's room when you're putting together these really scientific and technical episodes? Is there a lot of back and forth, or is it ironed out ahead of time?

CC: The writer's room is a very lively place where every story point is debated and kicked around. We break the stories in their totality in the writer's room down to really the very very kind of minute details of scenes, so, you know, you're kind of harnessing the brain power of eight people in there, and that mind hive is very helpful in problem solving. And different people know more about various subjects, so, you know, one of our favorite pastimes in the room is we play this game...ah, what's the actual title...? It's Geek versus Jock.
DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who's like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We'll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game...
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play...
DL: And then we'll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it's fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

And what's the prize if they get it right?

DL: Bragging rights, and they avoid the scorn of the rest of the room. In fact, there's a lot of betting...once the questions are asked, all the other writers basically bet whether or not that person will get it right, so it's just, it's a face saving technique.

Is there a scientific explanation for the smoke monster?

CC: We can't answer that question without answering the question of what is the smoke monster or without giving too much away. So we have to pass on that one.
DL: We have ruled out that the smoke monster has a basis in nanotechnology, though, which is the most popular scientific explanation for the smoke monster.

When are we going to find out what the smoke monster is?

CC: Before the end of the show. That's one of the big questions, along with what is this island, and those are kinds of questions that get answered in the end run of episodes when the show is drawing to a conclusion in 2010. They're not, they're sort of foundational questions and I think those questions are the ones that we're building towards answers for.

What sort of science and techy stuff can we look forward to proving or debunking when the show comes back?

DL: We basically did an Orchid Darma orientation film for the Orchid for Comic Con last year, which is available online, I'm sure, and was set up for where we were going in our season finale. Our characters are in fact going to discover the Orchid and see a bit more of that film. There will be plenty to sort of fact check and debunk on that axis.
CC: We can say that we've been very interested in these physicists who have been building this particle accelerator in the Alps, and there's been a lot of debate and concern about what's going to happen when they start smashing these particles into each other. People who are following that will probably enjoy some of the stuff that we're doing in the upcoming run of episodes.

Obviously this piece is about the science behind Lost, but I wouldn't be a good fan if I didn't ask you to give me some scoop on what's going to the rest of the season.

CC: It just seems really appropriate that we tell Popular Mechanics that there's going to be a really juicy kiss coming up in the finale and that there's going to be a lot more on the Sawyer-Kate-Jack romantic triangle. I mean, that's the scoop that should really be in Popular Mechanics.
DL: Here's the scoop for Popular Mechanics: According to the rules of our show, a communication between sat phones is not affected by temporal distortion, but if you were to send a radio broadcast and/or a telegraph message, it would be affected by temporal distortion. That's the scoop for Popular Mechanics and Popular Mechanics only, and it will make a lot more sense after you've seen the first episode back.

Speaking of satellite phones, one of the tech things that didn't stand up was your satellite phone, and you guys got a lot of flack in the press for that. Why did you decide to go with that particular idea?

CC: I think one of the things that struck us is that [when] watch an old Julia Roberts movie and she's walking around New York holding a cell phone to her head that's the size of a toaster, we didn't really want to put ourselves in a position where we were literally married to everything that exists technologically. We decided that our satellite phone would be a very modern, high-tech version of it, and created one that we thought was cool.
DL: We have technical experts down in Hawaii on the production end, and I think that the thinking at the time was, that although these sat phones were built in 2004, that the people who had them had access to the latest technology. So it's sort of like when you travel to Japan, their cell phones are two years ahead of our cell phones. You can walk up to a vending machine with your cell phone and scan a barcode and it'll spit a bag of chips and a coke out at you. The technology existed to build a phone like that in 2004, they just weren't readily available in any American market.

How do you keep track of all the complicated plot angles? You've got characters in flashbacks and flashforwards and everyone's interconnected in some way...how do you even begin to keep track of that?

CC: I don't think that Damon or me would win a Lost trivia contest, but we obviously know the general details of everything and we keep that in our brains. But Greg Nations keeps the sort of elaborate series of bibles and timelines and charts the number of days of stories and, you know, he's sort of the keeper of the wisdom of Lost. So whenever there's a question about continuity or where an event takes place in relation to another event, Greg can plot it in the overall kind of schema of the show. So he is an invaluable resource and he is the guy who makes sure that everything makes sense or at least makes as much sense as we can make it make sense.
DL: You know, the chronology of the show has become very intricate, especially since we just started doing flash forwards. Before it was which happened first: Sawyer met Jack's dad in a bar in Australia, or, Walt and Michael get on Oceanic 815? Now that we're in the future, and we're telling future stories out of order, so last year's finale you got bearded, pill-popping Jack screaming at Kate "We've gotta go back!" And this year you're seeing Jack in other people's flash forwards obviously before that series of events took place, so...he's testifying at Kate's trial, or he's visiting Hurley at the mental institution and we need to sort of plot out when in time are those events happening in relation to each other. It's not an easy job.

One of the things that the fans really love is assigning meaning to things that they see in the show, and sometimes they assign meaning to things that have no meaning. So do you ever place a scientific name or an Easter Egg that's a joke or meant to confuse people?

CC: I think it's more a question of how much meaning do things have. I mean, sometimes names, like Minkowsky, that's meaningful. Sometimes we name characters and they're named after somebody's friend but it also turns out that they're a famous person. So, you know, without kind of detailing which are which, we have a spectrum of meanings that we assign to things, and it's just sort of circumstantial or narratively we get to a place where somebody has to be named something that's really important for the story, but it really does vary...
DL: If you look at the freighter folk, Charlotte Staples Lewis is named after C.S. Lewis. Miles Strom is named after a pun because his name sounds like maelstrom, you know, when you pronounce it very quickly, and...
CC: Oh, Faraday is obviously a famous scientist...
DL: Yeah, and Frank Lapidus is a name that Eddie Kitsis, Adam Horowitz's writing partner, actually, and one of our other writer/producers, has just been saying for years, "There's gotta be a character on the show named Frank Lapidus."
CC: And he has a buddy whose name is Lapidus.
DL: So if there's anyone out there going, oh, you know...
CC: Working on the Lapidus anagram...
DL: That would be somebody finding something we did not intend.

Does it amaze you the lengths that people go to to research the show?

CC: It does, in fact. And it's kind of flattering and it kind of boggles our minds, actually. We actually really just set out to make a show that we thought was kind of cool and entertaining, and we never imagined that people would get wrapped up in the intricacies of it to the degree that they have. I think Lost was really a pioneer in the use of the kind of connection between a television show and the internet, and the internet really gave fans an opportunity to create a community around the show. That was something that wasn't really planned, it just sort of grew up in the wake of the show.

FRIENDSHIP is the KEY..DARLTON SPEAKS!

From CTV.ca


Producers and long-time best friends Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse say their relationship is the key to their success on "Lost."


"We can count on one hand the number of times we disagreed about anything," Lindelof tells CTV.ca.


Cuse and Lindelof have been scrambling to finish writing and shooting the final six episodes of the show's fourth season, with two crews shooting round-the-clock to wrap the show up in time.


"The show is a hugely demanding beast, particularly coming back after the strike," says Cuse.


"Fortunately we are very good friends and we get along great and I think we have a collaboration in which the total is greater than the sum of the parts."


"Lost" returns from a four-week break on Thursday April 24, with a new episode at 10 p.m.


The show picks up right where it left off, with the survivors trying to figure out who the mysterious freighter crew are and how some of them are going to get off the island.


Lindelof and Cuse are well known to "Lost" fans, from cracking jokes on-camera during "Lost" recap specials, their weekly irreverent podcast and countless interviews where the duo tries their best to avoid giving anything away.


"We spend the majority of our time in each other's company, but over the course of the day, we will divide and conquer on occasions when the fire is burning bright," says Lindelof.


"It requires tremendous shorthand to do the job that we do."


The pair first met when Cuse was working on his series "Nash Bridges" and had hired Lindelof as a writer. The pair quickly became close friends.


Following "Nash Bridges," Lindelof went on to find success with "Crossing Jordan" and later struck a deal for "Lost" alongside J.J. Abrams.


Abrams is originally responsible for coming up with the idea of "Lost," and alongside Lindelof, developed the characters and the plot.


When "Lost" was picked up for development, Cuse was brought on board to co-run the show alongside Lindelof, and the rest is "Lost" history. The show has gone on to earn multiple Emmy, Golden Globe, Producers Guild and Writers Guild awards.


"I think that it's very special for me to work with Damon and I feel like the joy and the collaboration is a big part of what makes doing the show fun," says Cuse.

Emilie de Ravin discusses her OTHER projects...

From TV GUIDE.com

TVGuide.com: So, tell me not to worry about Claire.
De Ravin: To worry or not to worry.... What can I say? Oh, you know my lips have to be sealed, unfortunately.

TVGuide.com: Her pregnancy was positioned to be so significant to Lost's mythology, I always assumed she would be around for the long haul.
De Ravin: They're doing a lot of interesting things with my character, so I guess we will have to wait and see. [Chuckles]

TVGuide.com: Do you have any private, top-secret insight into why Baby Aaron is with Kate in the flash-forwards?
De Ravin: No! I'm very intrigued to find out why, though. That’s one of the big questions I have right now. I always have at least one big question — and I never get answers until I get the script!

TVGuide.com: Was it hard saying goodbye to Dominic Monaghan (Charlie)?
De Ravin: It was hard in many ways. We had gotten so close working together. It was very sad, very emotional.

TVGuide.com: You must have thought that at some point they'd get to dive into their oft-stalled romance....
De Ravin: Yeah, but it got cut short, didn’t it?

TVGuide.com: So, turning to your Tribeca Film Festival premiere, Ball Don't Lie: How does a pretty young thing like Emilie De Ravin fit into a teen boy's coming-of-age story set in the world of street basketball?
De Ravin: [Laughs] I'm actually in the flashbacks, playing the boy's (newcomer Grayson Boucher) mother. There are a lot of flashbacks, a lot of back-and-forth. She's a bipolar prostitute, so she's got a lot going on.

TVGuide.com: But is she the bipolar prostitute with a heart of gold ?
De Ravin: With a heart of gold! She's a very sweet girl, but she's on the wrong side of the tracks.

TVGuide.com: This film features quite the ABC all-star team. Harold Perrineau (Lost), Richardo Chavira (Desperate Housewives), James Pickens Jr. (Grey's Anatomy)....
De Ravin: I know!

TVGuide.com: Was that coincidence, or did you all know someone who was putting this project together?
De Ravin: No, it was complete coincidence. It was funny when I heard that Harold was doing it because I never saw him on Lost. We had no work together.

TVGuide.com: Do you have any other films in the works?
De Ravin: I worked on a movie last summer called The Perfect Game, which is a children's baseball movie based on a true story and set in the '30s.

TVGuide.com: How did you like the 1930s' sort of wardrobe?
De Ravin: Oh, it's amazing. My character's wardrobe and speech is based on Katharine Hepburn, so it was a lot of fun researching that.

TVGuide.com: I look at movies like Brick... you playing a bipolar prostitute.... Do you have any aspiration to be the romantic-comedy darling?
De Ravin: Oh, I'd like to do that as well. I'm just trying to explore everything. It's fun to mix it up as much as you can. I don't want to get pigeonholed in any one genre. I like to extend myself as much as I can and challenge myself.

TVGuide.com: A romantic comedy would probably be a day at the beach after the likes of chasing zombies with a pick axe.
De Ravin: [Laughs] Exactly! It's a little bit different

YUNJIN KIM discusses SEASON 4 of LOST!

From TV GUIDE.com


TVGuide.com: Was it any special thrill, if only because of the job security, to learn you were among the Oceanic Six?
Yunjin Kim: Initially I thought it would mean job security, but it doesn’t really look that way. It doesn't really mean anything. If you're not one of the Oceanic Six, that doesn’t mean you're going to be killed off the show.


TVGuide.com: When you were reading the script for "Ji Yeon," were you led to believe that Jin was on his way to see Sun?
Kim: Yes and no. The Year of the Dragon was a pretty significant sign that we weren’t talking about in 2005. I got a sense we were in two different time zones.

TVGuide.com: Were you touched to see that Sun and Hurley are still friends?
Kim: I thought that of all the characters, Hurley would be the one coming to see the baby. The question is, why was he so glad none of the other Oceanic Six members would be there? While we were shooting it, we discussed how far Jorge [Garcia] should go with that. Should he be really glad no one else was coming, or half glad...? We did a couple of different variations, and they made it very ambiguous.

TVGuide.com: From where you sit, is the energy on the set at all different this season? Does the show feel tighter, more exciting?
Kim: Because of the huge [strike] break, we were all happy to come back to work and find all the crew members returning with us. I was afraid to walk in and find a new crew. But yeah, I agree that the episodes have been great. [Sun and Jin's] episode had the right combination of the story going forward with Sayid and Desmond on the freighter, and also dealing with the A-story. And, of course, the huge surprise at the end raised so many questions. That’s what Lost is all about.

TVGuide.com: What is Sun's involvement in this week's new episode?
Kim: Well, usually when you do your "own" episode, you take it easy for the next one or two. But the story continues: Are we actually going to leave the island? Right now we’re going crazy trying to shoot three episodes all at once. [Laughs] We have three different units working, we're working every single day.... I think the finale is going to be amazing. I'm a huge fan of the show, and as soon as I get a script, I plow through it to see what happens next. People will be very amazed by how we end this season and set up the next one.

TVGuide.com: What has been your favorite episode of this season?
Kim: I really loved our episode, but I also loved Desmond's. With the love story between Desmond and Penelope and those last few seconds on the phone, as they were trying to get their words out, and the music.... It was so emotional and so satisfying. You really are rooting for those two to get back together. I hope people will do the same at the end of the season finale for Sun and Jin! People could have the same reaction.

TVGuide.com: Do you know anything about the "Frozen Donkey Wheel," aka the finale's big twist?
Kim: Hmm. They’ve omitted, I think, two scenes from the finale, which was not even a script, it was a book it was so thick! It's amazing. We go out with another huge "What?!" reaction at the end.

TVGuide.com: You're one of TV Guide's Sexiest Stars [to be detailed in the May 5 issue]. How does that honor rank compared to being on Maxim's Hot 100 and a Stuff pinup calendar?
Kim: Now all my dreams have come true. [Laughs] I was very flattered. I feel like we have a very good-looking cast, so we'll each take our turn.

TVGuide.com: It must feel good to be called "sexy" when you spend every episode covered in grit or sand or are in a lot of the same clothes week after week.
Kim: Right! I guess they find dirty sexy nowadays! [Laughs]

Get to know...REBECCA MADER (CHARLOTTE)

For Rebecca Mader, Los Angeles is a long way from her native England. Since her arrival, her acting career has taken off, but she still has one troubling dilemma... she just can't seem to find a good cup of tea in the U.S. The British-born actress says even though she buys tea bags from English grocery stores in Santa Monica, they fail to whet her taste buds. "There's something about not being able to make a proper cup of tea outside of England," Mader playfully muses. "We all sort of whine about it, but I've come to realize the water and the milk are what change it. The first thing I do when I get off the plane at Heathrow and get to my sister and mum is [demand a proper cup of tea]."

Mader's inability to satiate her tea cravings seems a small price to pay for the success she's experiencing stateside. A newbie on Lost this season, Mader has quickly developed a following among the show's loyal supporters and often finds herself being recognized in public, which she describes as "really weird" and "really funny." "I got spotted this morning in Staples buying some office supplies," she says in amusement.

On Lost, Mader plays Charlotte Lewis, a member of a rescue team who has landed on the island with a set of ulterior motives. Mader says portraying a character shrouded in mystery fascinates her. "In a way, it's actually quite liberating, and it's really freeing. I get to create my character along with the writers."

Although this is Mader's first season on Lost, years of hard work underlie her current stint in the spotlight. At age 18, she began her career as a model in the hopes that it would lead her to becoming an actress. "I started modeling first, because I couldn't afford to go to drama school," she explains. "I thought I'd do it for a year or two, save up some money and then go to university. But it takes so long to get established in the fashion world. One year became two [and two] years became three. Then, I was making money. I thought that maybe I was supposed to do that for a while and then it would take me to America and I could get into the business in America."

While Mader points out that there are more differences than similarities between modeling and acting, she credits some of her modeling jobs for helping her develop an appreciation for quality storytelling. "In certain photo shoots, it's just not about standing there and trying to look pretty in a dress. A good editorial photo shoot usually has an art director, and there's a story that you're telling. Even though it's about fashion, there's still an artistic element to it. Those were really the only shoots I enjoyed. I wanted to be an actress, so those were the times when I got to shine and have a good time at work."

Once Mader moved to the U.S., she was finally able to parlay her modeling experience into acting. "In this country, as a model, to be able to do TV commercials, you have to be with a TV agency. I went in and started working with them and said, 'I can act.'... It was sort of an easy backdoor transition."

With several acting projects now gracing her resume, Mader drew the attention of the Lost staff when she auditioned for Executive Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. "They did not have me in mind, so I had to explain to them that it was a good idea that it should be me," she says.

"She told us she had read 'The Secret' and was thusly willing herself into the role," Lindelof lightheartedly recalls of Mader's audition. "Carlton and I were powerless against the cosmic hand of positive thinking."

Mader's optimistic outlook may be one of her most endearing qualities, but her real "secret" is that she has that rare blend of charisma and talent that translates to compelling on-screen performances. Whether in England or the U.S., that is one combination that always leads to success.

TV SHOW HOST (and LOST fan) JIMMY KIMMEL Interrogates DARLTON!

On a Monday morning earlier this month, the late-night talk-show host arrived on the Disney Studio lot in Burbank tasked with a mission: Grill Lost's executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, about their massively dissected drama, which returns April 24 to round out its critically hailed fourth season. (We were lucky enough to tag along!) Kimmel, a diehard fan since the pilot, has frequently championed the series on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — interviewing cast members, trekking to Hawaii for a set visit and coining a catchphrase for Hurley ("Hey, ladies, it's Hurley time!"). He's even given the world "Lost: The Musical," a parody skit featuring a Riverdancing polar bear. (And you thought you were obsessed.)

As Kimmel greeted Lindelof and Cuse — there were initially few signs of the funnyman who recently fired up YouTube with his A-list viral video "I'm F--king Ben Affleck" (a retaliation to girlfriend Sarah Silverman's "I'm F--king Matt Damon"). He not only arrived 10 minutes early with a writer from his show in tow, but also came armed with a two-inch-thick stack of research, which he'd diligently printed out the night before after roasting Simon Cowell at Idol Gives Back. As Cuse would later note, Kimmel had "the laser-sharp focus of Mike Wallace."

After a tour of the writers' room — which, sadly, had been stripped of any visible top-secret scribblings –– the producers settled onto a sofa in Cuse's sunlit office and noshed on a breakfast of fruit and pastries. Kimmel, meanwhile, took a seat across from them and painstakingly laid out his research on a table in front of him. "Don't be alarmed," he said, "but I want answers." — Shawna Malcom


Kimmel: The island heals some people and doesn't heal others. For instance, Ben needed an operation from Jack to beat cancer, but it seems like Sawyer gets injured every sixth episode and by the next, he's fine. Is that just a TV thing?

Carlton Cuse: Wow. [Laughs] Where are the softball questions, Jimmy? What about the warm-up?
Damon Lindelof: The short answer is, it's not arbitrary. Yes, there is a certain degree of compressing story. The idea that everything you've seen has really happened in 110 days of real time feels fantastical, but that's the convention of the show. However, who gets sick and how fast they heal is something we talk about. In the second episode back [airing May 1], that becomes a major issue in the story. One character gets sick and another who has had experience being healed voices exactly that question: Is there any rhyme or reason to it?
Cuse: The healing is related to the degree to which you are in communion with the island at any given moment. Perhaps Ben getting sick and needing surgery had to do with the fact that he had fallen out of favor, that his connection with the island was maybe not what it had been in the past.


Kimmel: How do cast members find out they're getting killed off?

Cuse: We call them ahead of the publishing of the script. So whenever we actually call a cast member, they're always panicked. Even if it's like, "No, we're just calling to say you were great in this episode."


Kimmel: Did you call Mr. Friendly beforehand to tell him he was gay?

Lindelof: [Laughs] No



Kimmel: Do all the show's writers know Lost's overarching secret, if there is one?

Lindelof: They all know what the island is and what the history of the island is. But if Carlton and I were kidnapped, and the kidnappers said, "We will not release them until you divulge the last episode of Lost," I don't know if the writers would be able to provide that.


Kimmel: I see. So you don't trust your writers. [Laughs] But you do actually know the final specific scene?

Lindelof: We absolutely, 100 percent know what the last scene of the show is and could put [the pages] in a safe deposit box. But there is an asterisk next to that, which is that we're slaves to fluctuations in reality. If one of the actors in that scene decided to stop being in Lost…
Cuse: Or, perchance, got a DUI, the entire ending of the show could change. Basically, the show is in the hands of Hawaii law enforcement. [Laughs]


Kimmel: People come up to you all the time with theories. Has anyone come close to cracking the code?

Cuse: I think there are two assumptions that people make that are incorrect. One is that the whole answer to Lost reduces down to a sentence. It's not like searching for Einstein's Unified Field Theory. And the second is that you have enough information to "crack the code." The flash-forwards completely changed your notion of the show. So how could you do some accurate theorizing before you even knew those existed?



Kimmel: Has anyone made a really lucky guess?

Lindelof: In certain areas. Last season, when we showed what happened when Desmond turned the key in the hatch and he went on this little jaunt back in England, people started saying, "Maybe the electromagnetism on the island is related to space and time." But that's just one road on the map that is ultimately gonna be the entire show. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to construct a theory that basically answers everything you've seen so far.
Cuse: Even though we get asked a lot of questions about the mythology, Jimmy, we're really trying to write a character show. We spend about 80-90 percent of our time talking about how the characters are lost in their own lives as people. The mythology is kind of the frosting on the cake.


Kimmel: Do you have one jerk on staff whose job it is to come up with all of Sawyer's nicknames?

Cuse: I wouldn't call him a jerk. [Laughs] I'd call him one of our most valued writers, and his name is Eddy Kitsis.
Lindelof: And Adam [Horowitz], too. They both come up with a whole cavalcade of them.


Kimmel: What happened to the smoke monster? High winds?
Cuse: We'll see the smoke monster in the April 24 episode.


Kimmel: [Laughs] Do people find clues that surprise you guys?

Lindelof: In the pilot, there's a still frame of Walt, and behind him, burnt into the fuselage wreckage, is what looks like a Dharma symbol. We'd talked about the idea that there had been a group of hippies on the island, but the phrase "The Dharma Initiative" or the design for the logo didn't come along until much later. But it's there and it's not Photoshopped. Suddenly, you understand how hundreds of people can show up and see…
Cuse: The Virgin Mary in a piece of toast. It's a mystery that's even greater than our understanding.
Lindelof: We would love in moments like that to go, "Yes. We knew we'd be introducing the idea of the Dharma Initiative in the second season premiere and we wanted people to go back to the pilot and see that the symbol had been burned into the fuselage." But if we had known, we wouldn't have done it in such an oblique way. Sawyer would've went [adopts Southern twang], "Hey, what's this?" We want people to see our Easter eggs.


Kimmel: Something I noticed early on is that many of the characters have issues with their lousy fathers.

Cuse: Is this the part where we have to cry?


Kimmel: Jack obviously. Locke. Sun's father is a killer. Kate killed hers.

Cuse: You'd be better off just listing the people who have healthy relationships with their fathers.


Kimmel: Is that a coincidence?

Cuse: No. We're sort of working out our own psychological traumas in front of 15 million people.
Lindelof: Look, there's a certain aspect of the hero's journey, whether it's Luke Skywalker or Hercules or Harry Potter, where they're either orphans or have incredibly dysfunctional relationships with their fathers. They haven't been told what to do. They have to find a mentor character outside of their own family. The show's called Lostand we always imagined it from the beginning as a show about characters trying to be better people and evolve past their own petty insecurities and problems. And if you're gonna do flashbacks, some of them are gonna be about stuff that was put on them by their parents.


Kimmel: Is the person in the coffin someone who's not from the island?

Lindelof: [To Cuse] Tread lightly.
Cuse: You will know who's in the coffin before the season is over, and it will not be like, "Who's that person?"
Lindelof: The only people you can rule out, based on what you saw in last year's finale, are Kate and Jack.


Kimmel: And the baby, just based on the size.

Cuse: Yeah, it's too big a coffin for a baby.

Darlton Interview!

From A.V club

Neither Damon Lindelof nor Carlton Cuse came up with the idea for ABC's cult favorite Lost, and they'd never met before the network and producer J.J. Abrams paired them as, respectively, Lost's head writer and show-runner. But while any number of people have had a hand in shaping Lost—from Abrams to ABC to the show's signature director, Jack Bender—when fans want to complain about a dangling plotline or an implausible scientific explanation for what's going on with that crazy island, they hold Lindelof and Cuse responsible. The duo have embraced that role, by hosting podcasts, appearing together at Comic-Con, and doing whatever they can to answer curious viewers' questions, without revealing too much. On the heels of a strong end to season three of Lost and an even stronger start to season four (give or take a couple of episodes), Lindelof and Cuse spoke with The A.V. Club about plotting the final third of this season (which begins airing Thursday, April 24), writing a geek-friendly series in the Blog Age, and whether fans misunderstand what kind of show Lost is.

(Two notes. When this interview was conducted, Lindelof and Cuse were in the middle of writing a two-part, two-hour finale. Since then, it's been expanded to a two-part, three-hour finale. Also, this interview contains numerous spoilers, though only for episodes of the show that have already aired.)

The A.V. Club: Are you done writing the finale yet?

Carlton Cuse: We were literally just talking about our weekend logistics, because we have been holed up in our office here, working very late every night. It's like writing an equivalent to a feature film in two weeks.

AVC: It'll be two hours long?

Damon Lindelof: It's going to air in two separate hours this year, because Grey's Anatomy has a two-hour finale that airs on May 22. They run from 8-10 p.m., and then the second hour of our finale will run from 10-11 p.m. So Hour One will air the week before. They're going to air it like they aired the original pilot, which was shot as a two-hour, then split up into two parts.

AVC: Which means you also have to think about how to end the first hour too, right? So it's on a cliffhanger?

DL: We do that with our two-hour finales anyway. We hope that hour one ends with some degree of momentum going out, because, believe it or not, ratings-wise, our two-hour finales always pick up viewers every half hour. We have to design hour two like you're just coming into the show anyway.

CC: To as much a degree as anyone can ever just drop into Lost.

AVC: Before you even started writing the finale, did you already know what was going to happen? Would you have known, say, three years ago?

CC: We don't have a detailed map, but we knew, for instance, that this year we'd be going from Denver to Kansas City.

DL: But our car broke down for a hundred days, and then we had to get there twice as fast. [Laughs.]

CC: [Laughs.] Yeah, we'd planned a lot more driving on the rural byways, then we ended up having to get on the interstate. The episodes after the writers' strike have been a real push, because we were going to do eight hours, and now we're doing five.

DL: Basically, the entire writing team sat in a room between Valentine's Day and the middle of March, and over a five-week period, we broke down all five hours of the show that we're going to produce. Then one entity would peel off and start writing as the rest of the room pressed forward. So we finished breaking down both hours of the finale just about a week ago, and everybody is taking a scene here and a scene there. Carlton and I have spent, as he said, 'til 1 or 2 in the morning every night this week whipping hour one into shape, and now we're proceeding with hour two.

AVC: Do you write in L.A.?

DL: Yes, we do.

CC: We're on the Disney lot, where we do all the stories, script work, casting, and post-production for the show. The filming itself is done on the island of O'ahu, but everything else is done here in Burbank.

AVC: So right now, they're filming in Hawaii without you?

CC: Oh, yeah. Several crews simultaneously, in fact.

DL: They'll be shooting through the first week of May.

AVC: You mentioned having to change the road map. In a recent interview, you both said you felt like the strike-enforced break was good in some ways, because it gave you a chance to reflect on what you'd already completed, and think about what you needed to do. What do you think has really worked well in the season so far, and what maybe not so well?

CC: Well, I think the thing that Damon and I were most concerned about was whether the flash-forwards would play. Had there not been a strike, by the time the show started airing, we would've been writing the finale, so we would've already been positively committed to the idea of flash-forwards, without any viewer feedback. So I think the thing that was most gratifying for us was that the strike allowed us to see how some of these episodes were playing before we started writing the remaining five. That the flash-forwards did seem to engage the audience was something we were very pleased and relieved about.

DL: And we were nervous. We loved the ideas of the flash-forwards in terms of liberating the show from what it was, and pointing us in a new direction. But whereas the flashbacks before had been an emotional storytelling technique—like, "Here's how Sawyer became a con man, here's the time that Jack ratted out his father, here's when Kate held up a bank"—on a story level, they weren't that complicated. They were sort of the one thing the audience could grasp onto, no matter what sort of wackiness was happening on the island. The flash-forwards are the exact opposite of that. When you see Sayid in the future killing people for Ben, that's all story. Or when you see Hurley being approached by Matthew Abaddon, that's all story. So the show actually becomes vastly more complicated. And also in terms of the time frame of the show… The audience had to figure out that they saw a flash-forward at the end of season three, when Jack was bearded and popping pills and yelling at Kate that they have to go back. But the Jack that you see at the beginning of season four hasn't come to that point yet. The narrative wheel of these things is tricky, and we were sitting in the editing room going, like, "Oh, shit! We made a terrible mistake here."

AVC: Do you pay a significant amount of attention to fan response and critical response? Does it affect how you proceed?

CC: Well, you know, we do, but in sort of a filtered manner. We don't really get on the boards and read all those comments. It just feels like people who are writing on the boards tend to be more focused on the mythology, and for us, we're making a character show. The thing that we spend the most time on are the character dynamics of a given episode, and what we're learning about these people. The mythology is sort of the frosting on the cake. But that's what everybody talks about, and what we're asked most about.

DL: And we find that the boards can be really toxic. Nobody goes on the boards to say: "Wow! That was awesome!" Traditionally, they go on the boards to nitpick and say, "Oh, I don't understand how Michael could have gotten off the island, gotten back to New York, parked Walt, then got indoctrinated by Friendly all in a month." Well, I don't understand how [on 24] there was a coup in the Oval Office, Jack's daughter got abducted, and there was a nuclear attack in Van Nuys, and it's not even lunchtime yet. But it's television. The reality of it is, if you go on the boards and people are saying, "I saw that coming," or "This is lame," or "I can't believe they're doing this again…" Having been one of those people myself, I know better, and try to avoid it. [Laughs.]

But there is a groundswell of what we hear about the show. When we were in season three after the break last year, it was a much different vibe than it is right now, in terms of how the audience responded to those episodes. If people are loving the show, Carlton and I will be walking around on the Disney lot, and some guy will literally pull over in his little fire-marshal truck and go, "I'm loving the show this year! What's the monster?" That won't happen if people aren't digging the show. So we do get a sense of what the fans are thinking and feeling. And what the critics are saying, because it's in the paper. The day after a really good episode airs, we'll get a lot of e-mails from people we know. After the "The Constant" aired, I don't think Carlton and I had ever gotten more e-mails. You just get a sense of, "Wow, that episode really landed with the fans."

AVC: Can the intense interest of the fan community interfere with how the show is enjoyed? For example, between the set reports and the message-board conversations, the fans had pretty much predicted that Harold Perrineau's character, Michael, was going to be Ben's "man on the boat," and when that turned out to be the case, a lot of them were disappointed that there wasn't some crazy twist.

DL: Well, we would argue that we brought back Harold in front of 4,000 of our most intense fans at the San Diego Comic-Con, and basically said, "He's coming back to the show." So the fan community had a huge hint. And then they saw his name in the opening credits, in the episode where Ben says, "I have a man on the boat." We're not complaining that people saw it coming. We wanted you to know that it was coming! So why are you bitching about the fact that it wasn't as surprising as you thought it would be? The fans would like us to pull the wool over their eyes every time, and I would basically say, "What would've happened if we hadn't brought Harold out at Comic-Con?" What would've happened is that people would've seen him in Hawaii, people would've found out that he closed a deal to come back to the show, and then we would've had no control over how they found out. And there'd be the same result.

CC: I also think that it's rewarding for the audience to not always be frustrated and behind. We have certain mysteries on the show that we hope the audience figures out on their own, and can have the satisfaction of saying "Aha! I knew that! I knew that the guy on the boat was going to be Michael!" But there are other times when we have real surprises, like Michael shooting Libby and Ana-Lucia, where we go to great pains to make sure that nobody sees it coming, so you're genuinely surprised. We intentionally mix up the degree of difficulty in solving the puzzle.

AVC: You mentioned the road map you generally have for each season. How detailed is the map for the rest of the series?

CC: The most liberating and significant event that's happened for us was getting an end date for the show, negotiated with the studio and the network. Before that, Damon and I didn't know if the mythology we'd created was supposed to sustain us over two seasons or six seasons, so it was very hard for us to do any sort of planning. But once we agreed upon a number of episodes before we were going to end the show, then we were able to start a situation where we could sketch out the rest. Once we finish writing the finale, we'll have a mini-camp on season five. We have a mini-camp every year, but because we're getting close enough to the end, the mini-camp on season five will also involve a lot of discussion about what's going to go on in season six.

AVC: Do you both already know what's going to go on?

DL: Do we know the absolute end of the show? Yeah. We've had that in mind for quite some time. But can we hand you a script for the last episode of the show right now? No, because there are market fluctuations that we are unaware of at this point. Certain characters that you want to write more for sort of wear out their welcome sooner rather than later. New characters are introduced, and pop in unexpected ways. The essential nature of that last episode is more specifically about what the last three or four scenes are, and us working toward those has always remained pretty constant.

AVC: At some point, is Lost going to have to shift from flashing forward and flashing back and having mysteries and character moments, and instead become a straightforward action-adventure, in order to get to that big finish?

CC: In terms of abandoning mysteries, no. Fundamentally, Lost is a mystery show, so I think that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature. In terms of how we'll tell the story, that's something very much in flux. This year, the degree of difficulty went up, as Damon was alluding to before. Before, we were putting the tiles of the mosaic in the present and in the past. Now, we're putting tiles in the present, the past, and the future. But what you consider the present, the past, and future is dependent on where your point of view is. The only rule that we have about that is that we're not bound to any rules. We will basically tell the remaining stories in the way we think is most compelling from a narrative perspective.

AVC: Is it right to think of Lost as one big narrative, like a novel, or should it be thought of as episodic?

DL: You know, both. Ultimately, the legacy value of the show will function more as a novel. On your bookshelf there will be a DVD set, or maybe on your hard drive, you'll be able to click on any episode you want to watch at any time. That's the way people read books. Fundamentally, you can digest what will be all 122 hours of the show over the course of a marathon viewing session in one week. Or, you can watch one every couple nights, or however you want. Ultimately, that's the way the show is going to live on. The way you're watching the show now is incredibly unique. You know there's going to be a season finale on May 22, and then you'll have to wait all the way until the end of January 2009 to see the next episode, whereas three or four years from now, people who are experiencing the show for the first time will basically only have to wait a day or an hour or a minute before they decide to slide in the next DVD. It's like Harry Potter. Now, all seven books exist, but when we were reading them, we waited up to two and a half years between books. We're writing the show to stay in the zeitgeist as it's airing. We have to write finales that are compelling enough to bring the audience back for the next season. But at the same time, the superstructure of "every season is a book" is the way we've always talked about it, and every episode is a chapter in that book. That feels like the most apt metaphor.

AVC: Going back to your comment about "market fluctuations" and how they affect character arcs, are Fisher Stevens and Zoe Bell going to be returning?

CC: You know, I think we'll duck that question.

AVC: How about this: Were the "tailies," particularly Eko, Libby, and Ana-Lucia, always going to be funeral-home fodder, or did you have other plans when you first introduced them?

DL: Our deal with Michele Rodriguez was always for a season-long arc. And then when we came to the moment when Michael was going to kill her, we also thought that if we killed Libby, it would be a one-two punch. Because Ana-Lucia is a character that a lot of the audience had mixed feelings about, but Libby is a character that nearly everybody loved. So to make Michael's act as heinous as possible, Libby ended up dead. Eko… there were deal complications with the actor going into that season, and though we did have plans for that character that would have extended well beyond season three of the show, as a result of the practical considerations of producing a show, it just didn't pan out.

AVC: So with a show as well-planned as yours, what do you do in that case? Do you move pieces of Eko's story to somebody else, or do they die along with him?

CC: Television shows aren't made in a vacuum. They're made in the real world, and the real world is complicated by the fact that you are coordinating your creative plans with hundreds of other people. In the case of Adewale [Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the actor who played Mr. Eko], he wanted to go back to London. People go to Hawaii, and either they love it or they get island fever, and Adewale was sort of in the latter camp. He just wasn't happy being in Hawaii, so we had to accommodate that. We made adjustments. You can sort of dictate to a certain degree what you want the show to be, but you have to listen just as hard to what the show is telling you it wants to be. Certain actors we write for and they pop, like Michael Emerson, and we find ourselves doing a lot more with him than we originally planned. Other ones like Mr. Eko, we had bigger plans for, but, just on a practical level, they didn't mesh with that actor's desires.

DL: We've got time for one more question, by the way.

AVC: How about a two-parter? a) During your partnership, have you ever have any major disagreements about the direction you want to take the show in? And b) Are there any story decisions that you now regret?

CC: Do you want to take A or B?

DL: I feel like we've talked about B ad nauseum, so I'll take B. As obnoxious as this sounds, we really regret nothing. Though we acknowledge that we've made significant mistakes, the reality is that the intent behind all those mistakes was the right intent. You take something like Nikki and Paolo, or spending nine episodes with our characters trapped in cages—at the time we made those decisions, our heart was in the right place. For Nikki and Paolo, we kept hearing fans saying, "What's going on with the other 30 people on the island? Why don't they go on any adventures?" And we were like, "That's a good and legitimate gripe, and let's see if we can figure out a way to get some of those guys into the show." And fundamentally, it just didn't work, but we don't regret having made the decision, or else fans would still be griping about [the background players]. Plus, it was a question we had ourselves.

As for the people in the cages, it's been pointed out to us recently that when we were writing that arc, basically we were trying to negotiate for an ending to the show. We ourselves as storytellers felt like we were trapped in cages. And the story could not progress until it was progressing toward something. Which is why the second half of season three really felt like we were answering questions, moving forward, introducing Cooper, having Locke and Sawyer acknowledge their mutual connection to the guy, and so on. All of those things were about us being able to move forward, as opposed to finding new ways to stay in place. We don't regret having written that storyline, with everybody trapped in the cages. It was an issue of necessity. You have to make mistakes in order to get it right.

CC: You know, I think for us, we're always going to try to push the envelope with the show, and when you try to push the envelope and fly close to the sound barrier, that plane is going to shatter, and sometimes it's going to break apart. And sometimes it's going to blow on through, and it's going to be exciting when it goes supersonic. We're always going to keep trying that, and sometimes, we're going to miss. But I think if we didn't do that, then people would really get upset.

As for your first question, the kind of beautiful thing about the show is how well we do collaborate. We see eye to eye on virtually everything. Occasionally, when we do see differently, it really just comes down to who feels the most passionate. We've always agreed that if one or the other feels more passionately about something, then the other one will yield. But you would be surprised how infrequently that happens.

DL: And Carlton and I aren't writing this show in a vacuum. There are six or seven other incredibly talented individuals that we spend many, many hours with in a room. The fact is that nobody can get territorial about any one idea, because it fundamentally always becomes a hive mind, and the best idea always wins. Carlton has always said, and I think he's right, that we're just trying to write a show that is cool for us. And the reason that we all work so well together is, we all think the same things are cool. We've never gotten to a point where somebody pitches something, and they think it's really cool, and everybody else goes, "Oh, that's not cool." We all sort of get onboard and rally around it.

Fans won't let FOXY forget his party days

LOS ANGELES -- Before the Oceanic Six, there was a Party of Five.

It's something Matthew Fox gets reminded of "a surprising amount" by fans of that mid-1990s drama, in which he portrayed the eldest sibling of five orphans.

"What's cool about it to me is that they want to let me know they've been fans of mine for a long time -- 'I'm not one of the new fans, from the movies or Lost. I believed in you from the very, very early stages.' "

Still, he acknowledges the series, which co-starred Scott Wolf, Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt, was "not necessarily something I would watch ... According to what I like tonally, it was a little soft. And I was playing a character who was pretty soft, and, in some respect, the version of a man that a woman would tell you that they want."


Following Party of Five's cancellation, Fox spent "two years where I wanted to let everyone forget about it."

He eventually headlined the darker but short-lived supernatural series Haunted.

"It was really satisfying because it was what I wanted to do. But I was also a little stunned how fickle the business was because while it got a good response from critics, commercially it was a failure and the industry was a fickle bitch to me.

"So I thought, 'That's interesting, how quickly that goes.' So from there I went on looking for the next thing which was Lost."

Source: www.edmontonsun.com

Kristin with Yunjin Kim and Rebbeca Mader

Next insatallments of Kristin's LOST week festivities. AGAIN MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

The 'Dirt' on LOST

Working on a hit television show sounds glamorous. Until you actually do it. On this day in a jungle in Heeia, on Oahu's Windward side, slate-colored skies threaten rain. On the set -- a brief yet bumpy off-road drive from base camp, where trailers and a rudimentary buffet are stationed -- the crew erects two canopies. But humans don't warrant shelter. Cameras and monitors do. A communal can of bug spray and canvas chairs provide the only respite from mud, wild foliage and aggressive insects.

In those chairs sit actors Michael Emerson, Terry O'Quinn and Jorge Garcia, dutifully subjecting themselves to makeup artists who proceed to worsen their appearance. An artist dips a brush into a painter's palette to add more purple blotches under Emerson's eyes. Another tends to O'Quinn's scar. Garcia tilts his head to accommodate a hair specialist who fiddles with his long locks. Next up? Faux dirt on arms and neck.

It's all part of the much-anticipated return of "Lost" on Thursday, which signals the beginning of what the crew calls "Season 4.5." The episode features Michael Emerson (Ben Linus) in a pivotal role involving strenuous work (horses! fighting!) that launches the furious ride to the May 29 finale.

Michael Emerson, shows that 'Lost' life is not so glamorous.
The writers strike interrupted what began as a stellar year, with the first eight episodes landing solidly in Nielsen's Top 10. Everyone returned to work last month, and a mighty scramble to finish five of the eight remaining episodes ensued (subsequent seasons will compensate with extra episodes). Everything must be completed before the hiatus begins next month. So multiple units shoot scenes from several episodes in various locations simultaneously, not necessarily in chronological order, leaving the actors moderately confused about continuity and their characters' state of mind at any given moment.

During the alfresco makeup session, Emerson consults director Paul Edwards about Ben. The word "sociopath" floats in the air. One moment Ben is charging about, shouting orders. The next he mopes and whines. "I'm just curious about the change of character," says Emerson. Next to him, Terry O'Quinn plants a yellow straw hat on his head between scenes, strums his ukulele and sings in a soft, melodic voice, letting his large hunting knife dangle at his side.

After a brief lunch break at 4 p.m., the night session begins. Along the way, there's a campfire to monitor, and someone with arms the size of a cyclist's thighs must move rocks. Nearby, a crew member practices his steady cam shots by running alongside anyone who appears in his path. Another tinkers with a fake shotgun.

The actors don't sit for long before it's time to do it all again. Repetitive performances must stay fresh. Several rehearsals take place before any film is shot. Each scene finishes with directions to the camera operators about extreme close-ups and angles, as well as discussion among the actors about the mood or timing of lines and movements. Before the director shouts "Action!" trucks, vans, cranes and dozens of people must fall silent. And they do this again and again, reminding any observer just how many hours of work necessitate every 30 seconds of compelling television drama.

MATTHEW MEN'S HEALTH VIDEO AND ARTICLE

Well...To continue what I was saying before...YES, I DID go out and buy THE MAY 2008 issue of Men's Health Magazine with FOXY on the cover! Great article inside on how they got him on a racetrack to drive some PORCHES! He did good for an ametuer race driver! If you would like to see more and read the article check out the site

http:///www.menshealth.com/matthewfox


OH and some of you know my baby is my 1953 CHEVY....I LOVE historic cars...WELL....MATTHEW says he has some guys customizing a 1950 MERCURY for him! That is MY OTHER FAVORITE CAR! They look GREAT when they are CHOPPED!!!! I wish I had one myself! LUCKY BASTARD!


ENJOY!

NIKI (I AM JACK'S YETI BEARD)

LOST week. May contain spoilers!!!!

Kristin from E!online has visited the Hawaii and will be bring us an interview with a different cast member everyday of LOST week!! Todays video features Daniel Dae Kim AKA Jin Kwon. PLEASE NOTE IT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS, WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Foxy plans to leave L.A.

If Matthew Fox looked a bit bushed at the "Speed Racer" junket this week, no wonder.

He hopped a red-eye from Hawaii, after a late-night "Lost" shoot, to participate in the press promo this week.



Here's what the exhausted star had to say about living in Hawaii, leaving L.A. and what the heck "Lost" is all about.

DR: Is it nice shooting "Lost" in Hawaii and being removed from all the L.A. craziness?

MF: Absolutely. I think if I was shooting the show in L.A., I think it would be a lot harder. I’ve always sort of felt that if I ever reached a point where I had paparazzi following me around or posted outside my house, it would be time for me to leave. I’m trying to do the thing that I love to do and be a part of it and provide for my family and do it in a way that's not jumping into their lives. And I think we're doing a pretty good job right now. Every now and then something happens where my kids are photographed, which is just weird and upsetting to me, especially if I’m not there, you know?

DR: What will happen after "Lost?" Will you move back to L.A.?

MF: I won’t be back in L.A. After Hawaii, we're going to be moving onto a different place. We still have our house in Los Angeles but we will eventually sell it. I don’t have anything against L.A. It’s got a lot of great things to offer. We just felt like we kind of wanted to be out of there by the time our daughter gets to high school. And she’s 11, so we're not very far away.

DR: Do you have a theory about "Lost?"

MF: I do. But I don’t really talk about it. You know, my theory is definitely colored by things that I do know. You know. I know a bit so my theory is not just…

DR: Are you told everything?

MF: Not everything. There is knowing how you get from point A to point B and then there’s knowing all the exact details of how you get there. I don’t know everything but I know a little bit.

DR: Do you see yourself working on "Lost" for much longer?

MF: Unless Jack Shepard dies, which is possible. But you know, the show, we have two more seasons. After we're done with this year, we will have like 32, 33 episodes to do, I guess and it's going to be really good fast, a lot of momentum. The show has really been moving this year and I think that’s been exciting for the audience as well.

DR: Any new films coming up?

MF: I’m going to take a break this summer. I’ve been working nonstop. I’ve done four films and "Lost" over the past two years. I did two films in the previous hiatus. All summer it was with "Speed Racer" and back and forth and I really haven’t stopped. So I’m taking a breather.