Science Friction: The ups and downs of Terra Nova
Filmed on the Gold Coast, Steven Spielberg’s latest TV offering, Terra Nova is the most expensive show ever made. It goes to air in Australia this weekend.
Between floods, inflation and fired staff, the production has had as many dramas off screen as on.
Confidence was suitably high for Fox when the bankable Spielberg wanted to tell a story that blended an apocalyptic future with time travel and dinosaurs. Spielberg was in his element.
It began strongly. Fox, rather than commissioning just a pilot, went ahead and commissioned an entire 13 episodes. Emmy-winning director/producer Jon Cassar (24), is one of a multitude of executive producers on Terra Nova. He says it was a smart thing to do on Fox’s behalf. “When you’re making a sci-fi show you don’t just find a set, you have to build it and if you’re going to the expense of building it you may as well commit to 13 episodes.”
Sci-fi fans are optimistic yet anxious. This is a series that was due to air in May struck by a multitude of problems. But Cassar assures that with Spielberg at the helm the end result will satisfy. The master filmmaker is very hands on, from casting choices to script notes and advice about the dinosaurs and special effects. “He has a level of expertise that none of us can parallel so we listen when he speaks. Another thing Spielberg did was assign us Jack Horner. He is the dinosaur expert who consulted for Spielberg on all the Jurassic Park movies. No dinosaur gets designed without Jack’s consent.”
However, to build an entire colony in a jungle on the other side of the world only to have it ravished not only by dinosaurs but torrential downpours and financial upheaval meant this Jurassic tale wasn’t to be a walk in the park.
Hollywood on the Gold Coast
The decision was made to film on the Gold Coast and in its Hinterland after a major scout of locations around the world by director Alex Graves and original production designer Carlos Barbosa.
Ten weeks into pre-production Barbosa was fired. Art direction and style was already locked in whenJoseph Hodges (24) replaced him. Hodges says, “The best was to describe it as was an arranged marriage I’d eventually fall in love with.” He got the job on the grounds he didn’t change anything, however, explains Hodges, “After three weeks I persuaded them the location was wrong. The first location was very difficult to build there and the first thing I had to do was find a new location. The location I chose was where one of my mentors, who I worked with on Space Above and Beyond, had actually shot Roar.
Filming has injected a lot of money into the region. Cassar doesn’t have an exact figure but, “a good percentage of our total budget has been spent here, minus post and things we’re doing in the States. Obviously you’re biggest expenditure is production when you’re doing any TV series and because our production is 100 per cent in Australia, a lot of it is spent here.”
Likewise, the Southern Queensland filmmaking community is benefiting. “We’ve got about 150 regular crew members depending on the scenes for the day. We can get up to 300 on a big extras day. We haven’t brought a lot [of Americans] over to be honest – about 75 per cent of the departments are keyed by Australians. We were very happy with, and still are very happy with what Queensland has to offer,” says Cassar.
Rumours abound the Gold Coast nearly lost Terra Nova after Queensland’s heavy flooding that struck as the pilot was in full swing in December and January.
The rainfall caused damages and delays. “Luckily we were on higher ground with our sets,” says Cassar. “It blocked access to some of our sets but what did hurt was the rain that came with those floods. That was tough. When they were shooting the pilot it became very difficult dealing with that amount of rainfall.” The rainfall caused the shoot to stop temporarily but the rumours to totally abandon Queensland were false. Says Cassar, “the only reason we would have left is if the sets got destroyed, then that question would have come up but it didn’t happen so we were okay. We’ve had unbelievably great weather since we’ve been doing the series.”
Inflating budgets
Terra Nova hasn’t only suffered from a physical strain on the production. Producer David Fury (Lost, 24) left because of ‘creative differences’ with writer/exec producer Brannon Braga whose last creation was the high concept FlashForward that never secured a season 2 due to convoluted storyline and dropped ratings. The other major problem behind the scenes came as the whole writing team was fired before being rehired again.
The pilot alone was rumoured to cost $US20m while the show has been deemed the most expensive program ever made – Britain’s The Independent has the entire series at $US70m, with each minute on screen costing $200,000.
An over-achieving Australian dollar hasn’t helped. “When I first I arrived,” says Hodges, “the Australian dollar was at 80 cents to the American. It shot up to 110 cents, so that’s 30 per cent of our budget gone.”
Hodges felt the pinch in his department. “I had the same amount on 24, despite Terra Nova being rumoured the most expensive TV show ever made. It’s supposed to be a futuristic show and I had about $100,000 to do the vehicles, which was enough to buy four jeeps and paint them green. This is our Batmobile and I’ve got to compete with someone with a million dollars… and we’ve got $50.”
The show will access the location offset to help ease the burdon, but Cassar agrees, “When you’re spending the kind of money we are spending, it adds up.”
Cassar won’t give a price per episode, but he downplays the costs. “Believe it or not, as difficult as our subject matter is, we’re still equal to what a high end network show is doing. In our case, we have a big outlay in the set-build which, spread out over 13 episodes becomes cheaper, and over another season, cheaper again.”
That’s a wrap
As proud as Cassar is, he isn’t counting his pterodactyls before they hatch for a second season.
“There hasn’t been any official announcement and there won’t be until we air. It will be all based on the numbers we get and we’ll know that in the next couple of weeks. The network will make that decision and we’ll all have our fingers crossed and hope it gets picked up for another year.”
Despite all the trouble in the background, Cassar is sure it will strike a chord with an audience. “It’s more than what it seems on the surface, of a lot of dinosaurs running around. There’s a deeper adventure than that, with a good family at its core so it becomes this interesting mix of family adventure, dinosaurs and sci-fi as an unusual hybrid that no one has tried before. Give it a try.”
Terra Nova premieres on Channel Ten, this Sunday, 2 October.
- Colin Delaney
This article appears in the October edition of Encore magazine. You can subscribe via this link.
Jon Cassar has taken a great step developing these series, which shall detail the skills and talents of Australian film personnel. Our emerging film culture and Gold Coast hinterlands offer real world entertainment for the movie buff. Well done and enjoy this tremenous action series, yet again placing Steven Spielberg again on the top of the pick list. Looking forward to the premier.
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Action series? Well…if that’s an indication that people are still avoiding the term science fiction, I guess progress still has a long way to go. It’s a science fiction series and that’s a really good thing…science fiction, when done properly, is great entertainment.
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At the risk of spoiling things for you, the pilot wasn’t bad, but the first 30-45 minutes of the pilot were better than the rest of the show.
You can tell Spielberg’s involved – there was a definite Jurassic Park-type feel to the show and I’m not just talking about the digital-dinos. And that ain’t a good thing.
I think for Terra Nova to succeed, they’re going to have to find a way to deal with the Star Trek geeks out there like me who believe that technology is mankind’s saviour, not our doom.
Terra Nova is a show made by environmentalists, for environmentalists. And, like most environmentalists, it completely dismisses mankind’s greatest strength – and its principle difference between it and the extinct species –our ability to innovate. Our technology. Our know-how.
I was only about five minutes into Terra Nova last night when I found myself wondering, hey, if they’re able to invent time travel in the year 2149, why hasn’t anyone invented a way to clean the atmosphere?
The technology and know-how must be there if they’re colonizing the Jurassic era – so how about seconding some of the dudes who invented the time machine to set about inventing a giant air purifier?
I mean, in the year 2011, you can buy air purifiers for your bathroom or basement for, like, $49.95. Are you trying to tell me that no one – no one – was smart enough to come up with a way of cleaning air pollution on a grand scale?
Compared to time travel, cleaning up the air seems like a piece of cake – like something you could do on a long weekend in August in the year 2149.
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Just what we need, another SciFi series dominated by kids. The rebel teenage boy with father issues who never does what he is told, the teenage girl who falls for the first guy she sees, the baby girl who always wanders off an nearly gets hurt/eaten/jeopardizes others each week. Man, for all this cash you would think they could come up with something better than this. How can crap like this be compared to something like LOST?
Ordinarally, a series like this may only last for a season and a bit, but I hear FOX has spent so much money up front, they have had to commit to 2seasons ton have any chance of recouping the cash EVEN if it does well. I love my SciFi, but shows like these jeopardize the chance of any quality SciFi ever being made again.
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The main script writer on Gerry Anderson’s classic series Thunderbirds once said that kids don’t actually want to watch kids on a TV show, they want to watch a grown up hero, someone like James Bond. I think the biggest failing of shows aimed at young audiences in the last decade or so has been the belief that kids shows must be about kids. I own DVDs of kids shows made in the 1970s and they were mature enough to be of interest to adult viewers. When they did have children, the kids had brains instead of a runaway mouth and “attitude” and there were credible adult characters with them.
As for Science Fiction, what gets me is that the standard ideas in Science Fiction would provide incredible drama if presented as they are, yet writers seem to constantly think the medium needs to bolt on all manner of nonsense to make it interesting. If there was a realistic dramatisation of what it would be like to go back in time, meet aliens, awaken from cryogenic suspension or anything else typical of Science Fiction, it would make amazingly gripping TV drama. It doesn’t need sauce on top, it just needs to be done properly.
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I started to watch a few episodes but it didn’t grab my attention as a viewer. I must admit the story lines need to be improved in order to keep producing a solid scifi series to stand on its own.
Too much action. Need more character development. I think I already can surmise that Terra Nova isn’t Earth from the past. It maybe another distant planet similar to what Earth looked like millions of years ago. The fact that they travelled back in time gave me all the clues.
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Don’t be discouraged – this genre (sci fi) offers limitless opportunities for creative writers in any stage of developement…Also gives a sense of freedom (release) – knowing they can’t contradict. (premise – but not story)..
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Hey Terranova is a fantastic production. It has great casting, location, acting, direction, sets, story. Nothing to complain about.
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I think we’ve moved into a day and age when audiences are not as interested in plot as they once were (having seen so many shows and films now that plots are all pretty much obvious to audiences) and we seem to want to get to know the people a lot more. If you look at the reality shows and behind the scenes things, they are all about getting to know the people. I think in Scifi and horror, we no longer want aliens or vampires who are just scary menaces, we want to get to know the alien, understand the werewolf, we literally want to see the interview with the vampire. Twilight for example and shows like True Blood and the like, these things “humanise” the monsters. Even Dr.Who in its current form is less about Dr.Who and his friends having amazing adventures with monsters than it is about the Doctor himself and his companions and their lives and their obsessions. A recent episode transformed the TARDIS into a woman and was all about the Doctor’s romantic relationship with his time ship. This script by celebrated writer Neil Gaiman was the type of thing modern Scifi and fantasy fans tend to go for the most, all about relationships between weird and wonderful characters, rather than plot.
So, yes, Terranova and any other new scifi show needs to get under the skins of the characters more than anything else and the more extravagantly and imaginatively they do this, the more popular it will probably be.
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Sci-Fi or Adventure, either way, it is good. I like it. Some interesting situations that are a bit out of the ordinary (death by dinosaur). I like the fact you can identify with our Aussie bush. I do feel that the character development is a bit light on, but it is building.Great show. I watch it every week. It’s a nice release and a little bit different.
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What, so all Sci Fi has to be about technology saving the world now? I actually like the new spin on the old classic – and I have to say, I didn’t stop for long enough to wonder how they invented time travel when they couldn’t purify their air (although, if you were watching carefully, they didn’t ‘invent’ time travel, they discovered a naturally occuring vortex). Honestly, I am happy just to sit and watch something different, I don’t feel the need to pick it to scientifically equal pieces. Why do we have to overthink things so much? I’m just glad they’re having a go at MAKING new Sci-Fi productions.
And as for what’s killing them….ask whomever decides when and in what order to air the eps in the US. Most Sci-Fi’s start out well, then they go on hiatus for the superbowl/thanksgiving/some other thing, eps get aired out of order, the ‘average’ viewer gets disinterested and begins watching something else, and doesn’t bother to pick it up again, leaving only the die-hard Sci-Fi fans watching – and we are a dying breed.
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It’s sad that we’re a dying breed. I suppose it’s an irony that we now have computers in our homes and people are no longer interested in the science which makes such technology possible. When I was a kid, personal computers were pure science fiction. Now we have arrived in the 21st century, people seem more interested in magic. I mean magic of all things…and the supernatural! But films like Harry Potter and Twilight now rule the box office. Science just aint amazing enough anymore, I guess.
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