Warehouse 13 stars reveal more secret artifacts to come

The cast of Warehouse 13 celebrated its successful debut at NBC's party for the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Wednesday night in Pasadena, Calif.: After only five episodes, Warehouse 13 has scored well for Syfy, and cast members offered us a preview of the stories—and the supernatural artifacts that set them in motion—still to come. (Spoilers ahead!)

The show centers on the title storage facility, home to legendary supernatural artifacts and the people who find, retrieve and store them when they cause trouble.
One item that may come as a surprise to viewers is Studio 54's disco ball, said star Eddie McClintock ("Pete Lattimer"). The '70s dance club was legendary, yes, but magical? "Well, the Studio 54 disco ball absorbed all of these lost dreams of the inhabitants of 54," McClintock said in an exclusive interview. "When [club owner] Steve Rubell and that all went down, it was kind of the end of a time of innocence, with the war in Vietnam and all that stuff. It's just so random, and I love that about the show."

Joanne Kelly ("Myka Bering") totally bought into the Studio 54 theory. "Well, Studio 54 had magical powers, from what I've read," she said. "It's an artifact, it's in the warehouse, man."

Kelly's favorite artifact belongs to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll: the mirror that Carroll described in Through the Looking Glass. "We see Pete playing ping-pong with it in one of the first episodes," Kelly said. "It's a mirror that has your reflection, but it's not you. So the essence of the mirror is not you, it's different. Very tricky, this mirror, and I'm a huge Lewis Carroll fanatic, so that was pretty exciting to me."

Another artifact belonged to the Italian inventor of the electrical cell. Allison Scagliotti, who joined the cast in episode four as Claudia Donovan, got harnessed up to portray the effect of that artifact.

At one point, I become magnetized to the ceiling after putting on Alessandro Volta's lab coat," Scagliotti said in a separate interview. "That was just awesome to shoot. I was literally 20 feet up in the air on a wire, exhausted. Those harnesses are really constricting. That's what's so cool about Claudia. She's always got her hands on some awesome steampunk gadget. The Warehouse is like Treasure Island for me. Every day is discovering something new."Perhaps the greatest new artifact in Warehouse 13 is Claudia herself. After debuting in the episode "Claudia," in which she kidnaps Artie (Saul Rubinek), she now works by his side in the Warehouse.

"The only episode I don't appear in from here on is 'Implosion,' which airs in two weeks," Scagliotti said. "Other than that, I'm here to stay. I'm a fixture in the Warehouse. I'm pretty quickly part of the hardware, I think. Next episode you see me build a tool that helps Artie reconstruct crime-scene footage. It's really, really cool the dynamic that Artie and Claudia share, what eventually arises between Claudia and the Pete and Myka characters. If we're a family unit, then Artie is sort of like our curmudgeonly patriarch. Myka is our serious overachieving sister. Pete is the kind of goofy jock, and I'm like the kind of punk middle child who's getting into trouble."
As Artie, Rubinek appreciated what Scagliotti adds to his role. "As much as he obviously has delight in the kind of artifacts, but they become his children," Rubinek said. "He has no wife, he has no kids. Thank God Allison Scagliotti is playing Claudia Donovan as part of the show now and becomes a kind of surrogate daughter for the character. So he has to learn life lessons that he never had to learn before."
McClintock and Kelly also enjoy seeing their fictional boss get some company. "It's great for Artie to have a foil, too, back at the Warehouse, because it gets lonely," McClintock said.

Kelly added, "I think she brings an edge that we needed."
Warehouse 13 airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy.

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Producers tease Fringe season two: More 'Over There'?

The season finale of Fox's Fringe introduced a parallel universe where the twin towers of the World Trade Center still exist, and the show's producers said today that they've named it "Over There" and that it will be the only alternate dimension the show will explore in the upcoming second season. For now. (Possible spoilers ahead!)
"We have decided that though science acknowledges a multiverse, we're only going to tell a story about two, here and what we're referring to internally as Over There," executive producer Jeff Pinkner said during a press conference today in Pasadena, Calif., at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour. "They are two versions of reality. It's not time travel."

Pinkner added that the bulk of the show will still takes place in our world, though the characters will know that something else may be happening Over There. "It takes place predominantly over here, but what's happening Over There is impacting what's happening over here," Pinkner said.

Series co-creator, writer and executive producer Roberto Orci added that Over There is meant to fuel the imagination, not stand as an expression of the scientific principles of multiverses. "Thematically, the other universe exists [as] a foil to what might have been different in this universe," Orci said in the press conference. "In this other place, Kennedy lived. It's more wish fulfillment and riffing on our world than 'We have to follow the rules of two universes.'"

The Fringe writers said that they are ahead of their original schedule. Co-creator, writer and executive producer Alex Kurtzman said that fan feedback showed that the audience would be receptive to going Over There after only a year.

We never intended to reveal the parallel universe until season three," Kurtzman said during the press conference. "It became very clear they were open and ready for more, so it felt like, why stall it? Let's throw down this challenge to ourselves where we have to come up with a way to take the stories even further."

The season premiere, which screened for some press, has one character go in a shocking direction at the end. Without spoiling the premiere, Pinkner explained why the writers chose to change the game so dramatically. "Because it seemed awesome," Pinkner said, without naming the character or the twist.

As for William Bell, the character who was finally revealed in the first-season finale (in the person of Leonard Nimoy), Pinkner said that Nimoy has shot only one episode of season two but that producers plan to write him in whenever Nimoy wants. "Truly, we've made an open invitation," Pinkner said.

Orci added that season two will run more smoothly as the team has figured out how to balance season-long arcs with stand-alone episodes, character stories and overall mythology. "That's been the whole thing from day one," Orci said. "How much can you serialize? How much can you stand alone? You try to modulate. In the first season we had to plan around resetting the series once or twice, doing it around three or four weeks [breaks]. That makes us more flexible."

Moving the production to Vancouver, Canada, from New York gives the Los Angeles-based producers more direct control, they added. "The fact that we're closer than we were from New York is helpful," Orci said. "We can be up there a little more, communicate better. I think we're just a tighter ship this year."
Fringe returns Sept. 17 at 9 p.m. on Fox.

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SGU's Lou Diamond Phillips reassures Stargate fans

Much has been said about how Syfy's upcoming Stargate Universe will take the long-standing franchise in a new direction, but star Lou Diamond Phillips promised there would be enough for faithful fans of the Stargate series as well.

"The Stargate is at the center of it," Phillips said in an exclusive interview Wednesday at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour in Pasadena, Calif. The show will also focus on the combined military and civilian exploration of space, much like SG-1 and Atlantis before it, he added.

But Phillips, who plays Col. Telford, said the show will do some new things as well.
"I think audiences today are looking for something that's a little more grounded, so to speak, even when you're doing sci-fi," Phillips said. "It's grittier. It's darker. It's very much character-driven. It's about the dynamics between very real people in an extraordinary situation and not so much about heroes and villains, you know? And also not as much about the hardware anymore. I mean, certainly it has created its own world, it has its own mythology, but it's about how these everyday human beings—be they military, scientific or political—fit into this scenario."

SGU follows a band of soldiers, scientists and civilians who must fend for themselves as they are forced through a Stargate when their hidden base comes under attack. The desperate survivors emerge aboard an Ancient ship, the Destiny, which is locked on an unknown course and unable to return to Earth. Phillips (Syfy's The Triangle) plays a lifelong military man who is the chosen leader of the ill-fated expedition.

"I'm supposed to go through the Stargate into this unknown address," Phillips said. "The base is attacked, and a lot of people who should not be in charge are stranded on this ship out in the middle of nowhere called the Destiny. I get stuck on Earth, and it's my mission to try to get to these people ... back, but I have no way to physically get on the ship. ... [So I] keep using these telecommunications stones, exchanging bodies with people and trying to take over and ... get them home."

The body-changing communications device is presumably based on the Ancient technology discovered in the season-nine SG-1 episodes "Avalon," parts one and two.
"It leads to what I hope is going to be the most talked-about love scene of the fall," Phillips adds.

The new SGU will also feature characters with conflicted motives, Phillips added. For his part, "Col. Telford is so focused on his mission that ... he basically comes off as a jerk an awful lot of times," he said. "I mean, he is by the book: ... whatever it takes to get it done. And also very much driven by his ego and the fact that he wants to be the one in charge. Knows that he is more qualified than anyone to complete this mission. Yet there are some dark secrets, and, I think, there are some very interesting surprises about Telford to come."

Stargate Universe debuts Oct. 2 with a two-hour premiere at 9 p.m. ET/PT; it will air Fridays at 9 on Syfy

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No one told Stargate Universe star not to reveal spoilers

Stargate Universe star Robert Carlyle fortunately didn't get the memo saying that stars of sci-fi series shouldn't tell reporters what's going to happen, and he was only too happy to share with us a raft of spoilers for the upcoming Syfy original series.

Carlyle headlines the ensemble cast as Dr. Nicholas Rush, the reclusive leader who is responsible for an accident that sends a group of soldiers, scientists and civilians through a Stargate onto the runaway Ancient starship Destiny. Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead!

Take one recent episode. "I was floating in a tank, and that was kind of bizarre, in actual fact," Carlyle said in a group interview last month at Comic-Con in San Diego. "A bunch of aliens actually got me. Of course, Rush is left on a planet, which is what he deserves, and then the aliens come and pick him up and stick him in a tank. So that's where you suddenly pick me up again, floating in it. So that was quite cool."

But wait, there's more. "We do all die, and then we come back to life," Carlyle revealed. "It's a very, very interesting episode written by Robert Cooper called 'Time.'"

Also look for Stargate SG-1 star Richard Dean Anderson to return to his old stomping grounds, reprising the role of Gen. Jack O'Neill. "He was lovely," Carlyle said. "He really was. He was very humble about the whole thing, in fact. I think he also understood, very quickly, that this is a different thing. He said it was a different show from the one that he had been used to, and, of course, Gen. O'Neill comes back. I think that he's in four or five of the episodes, but you don't actually need to know who the guy is at all. He's so solid with his character, and that's fantastic to act with."

Robert Carlyle
SGU is built around the same mythology as the two previous Stargate series but is nevertheless intended to stand alone for viewers new to the franchise. "I guess we have to obviously give a nod to SG-1 and Atlantis, because we wouldn't be here if those shows hadn't been there," Carlyle acknowledged. "I don't think it's necessary to have watched any of that, at all, in fact. I mean, I guess you have the issues of this general, and even if you hadn't seen him before, he would just seem like another character, so we don't have to be familiar with the past to take on the future."
Aboard the Destiny, the major friction will take place between Carlyle's Rush and Col. Everett Young, played by Louis Ferreira. "Myself and Louis Ferreira are together a lot, and we go on extremely well, because we have to, because we're at each other's throats," Carlyle said. "It's very, very tense stuff."

Younger characters provide passive-aggressive tensions for Rush. David Blue plays Eli, a genius slacker. "Rush is kind of like Salieri, and Eli is a Mozart," Carlyle described. "That's what's going on. He needs this boy. This boy is probably much more clever than him, but he's not going to let him know that."

Rush might seem hardened or gruff, certainly antisocial, but Carlyle said he is not mean or vicious. "I think he's got a wicked sense of humor, but he keeps pretty much to himself," Carlyle said. "I don't think he's the kind of guy who takes pleasure in other people's discomfort or anything like that. He would be quite happy on his own. He's troubled in terms of his wife. His wife is dead, and he wasn't exactly there for her, and this is what caused an awful lot of Rush's problems. He's a very, very lonely man."

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Why the creators are still tweaking ABC's new V series

Fans who viewed the pilot of ABC's upcoming reboot of the alien-invasion series V at San Diego Comic-Con may not have seen the final version (spoilers ahead!).

Executive producer and writer Scott Peters said that he is still tweaking the first episode, particularly a fight scene between visitors and human resistance near the end of the hour.

We're doing a little bit of reshooting for the fight, because we feel like we want to make the visitors even more formidable and even more awesome," Peters said in a group interview last month at Comic-Con in San Diego.

Like the original 1983 miniseries, the new show deals with the arrival of alien Visitors who promise advanced technology in exchange for water and minerals. But as viewers of the original miniseries know, the Visitors turn out to be something more sinister.
Peters (The 4400) said that the new show sets up a bit more backstory for the aliens' presence, requiring the final fight in the pilot to be more extreme. "The original intent was that they would come in with silent weaponry," Peters said. "They wouldn't be [here] with guns, and they wouldn't be with lasers, because if they ever got captured or anything happened, they didn't want a piece of alien technology laying around. They also didn't want to draw attention. So they're very adept at hand-to-hand combat, which all makes logical sense. The feeling was it lessened their ability to seem as formidable as they are. So we're going to be adjusting that a little bit."

The fight scene as it was initially shot shows humans doing their best to brawl the alien visitors, who can jump higher and move faster, thanks to wirework. Peters wants to give visitors additional weaponry to make them even deadlier.

"We actually do want to introduce a tiny little bit of Visitor tech that comes in," Peters continued. "What we're determined to do is introduce a little bit, a new piece of alien tech, Visitor tech, try to do it every episode. Certainly try to give a little bit of culture, peel back the onion of what their mandate is, what's really behind it, what's really going on, and just see the political stuff that goes on aboard the ship, just like we have political stuff underneath the ship."

But Peters doesn't want to turn the show into a "battle of the week." "Oh, we're not going to shy away from an action element, by any means," Peters said. "It's just not going to be the driving force of the show. It kind of becomes a little less interesting to us. To us, the characters drive the show. Yes, it's set against this huge science fiction backdrop, but I can watch spaceships for a couple of minutes and be, 'Yeah, it's cool. Now what have you got?' I can watch an action sequence for a couple of minutes and go, 'That's great. Now what have you got?' Characters have to be the thing that drive the show and that you really invest in, and when you do have the action sequences and you do come to the new technology, it's just icing on the cake. It's super cool."
The characters include FBI agent Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell) and Father Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch), the investigator and the skeptical priest who discover the resistance in the first episode. "It'll take a little time [for the resistance] to grow, but Georgie [David Richmond-Peck] will certainly be back, and certainly we introduce some new folks along the way," Peters said. "But, yes, Elizabeth and Joel are not going to be the only ones fighting the war."

Erica will face an additional challenge dealing with her teenage son Tyler (Logan Huffman), who finds himself recruited by the Visitors, or "Vs." "That's exactly going to be her issue," Peters said. "'If I had a hard time fixing it before, how the hell am I going to fix it now?'"

Tyler is tempted by Visitor recruiter Lisa, played by Smallville's Laura Vandervoort. "You will absolutely be seeing more of Laura Vandervoort," Peters said. "She was wonderful. She's joined the cast as a series regular, and you can expect to see a lot more with Tyler as things move forward. She has a couple interesting things up her sleeve as well."

Getting back up to the spaceship also adds a little pizzazz to the weekly political and religious metaphors. "That's also a mandate of ours for ourselves," Peters said. "Yes, it's mostly an earthbound show, but we love the candy of going up and seeing the inside of this place."

Meanwhile, Father Jack is dealing with religious implications of alien visitors. If the visitors can cure our diseases and provide technological answers, why would people turn to God?

"He's sort of in the business of asking people to devote themselves to his religion," Peters said. "This is a guy who used to step outside, look up at the sky, where in his mind God would be, and now there's a spaceship in the way."

Another aspect of V deals with the media. Anna (Morena Baccarin) opens up to a journalist, Chad Decker (Scott Wolf), giving him exclusive access. That is, of course, as long as he asks only the questions she wants him to.

"Chad is stuck," Peters said. "He's a guy who was plucked out of obscurity. She didn't pick Tom Brokaw to do it. She picked a guy who wouldn't get up and leave. So she's pretty good at manipulating folks."

The pilot also leaves the fate of Erica's FBI partner, Dale Maddox (Dollhouse's Alan Tudyk), up in the air. Peters only hinted about plans to bring him into the fold. "That's a hard question, because I don't want to give anything away," Peters said. "We love Alan. Clearly the audience loves Alan, and it would be awesome to find ways to maybe see him again somehow."

V premieres in November.

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District 9 director already thinking about a sequel

Neill Blomkamp, the South African writer-director of the upcoming sci-fi drama District 9, has yet to find out whether his movie will catch on with wider audiences the same way it did with folks who saw footage from it at last week's San Diego Comic-Con.

But the filmmaker said that he would be happy to return to the film's universe if it became a box-office smash. "If this film is successful, if audiences want another, whatever, District 10, I would love to do it," Blomkamp said in an exclusive interview this week in Los Angeles. "It's a very personal film, and it's a universe and a place that I find incredibly creative. I'd love to go back to that universe."

The movie deals with the arrival of a million insectoid aliens, derisively called "Prawns," in a massive ship over Johannesburg, South Africa, and the uneasy coexistence 28 years later between humans and aliens who live in the grinding poverty and violence of a township-like camp. The action is set in motion by a low-level bureaucrat, played by newcomer Sharlto Copley, who heads an armed force that enters the slum, District 9, to make way for a forced relocation of the aliens. When things take an unexpected turn, Copley's Wikus van der Merwe finds his life turned upside down, and he is forced to question his assumptions and forge an uneasy alliance with an alien and his young son.

Blomkamp said that if audiences wanted something different from him, he was working on something else that would no doubt appeal to the same audience, even if the project went in a slightly different direction.

"I have another science fiction film now that I want to write for the rest of the year," Blomkamp said. "That, I think, may be the next one, and I'm incredibly into [it]. It's quite different, and it's a unique idea, but I'm very into it."

Describing the tone, he said it would feature a similar combination of grand ideas and great action set pieces: "It's similar," he said coyly. "I mean, it's a very different film, but it's a very similar genre, I suppose."

As for a follow up to District 9, there's an obvious sequel idea. (Major spoilers ahead!)
The obvious thing would be for Christopher to return to Earth in three years to help Wikus, as promised. Is that a possible story?

"I do have ideas rattling around in my head, and weirdly enough they're not to do with what you just said," Blomkamp said. "They're different. But, who knows? First, the population has to like [District 9]; otherwise, the whole thing is just moot, I suppose. But I would love to go back there."
District 9 opens Aug. 14.

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Park Chan-wook: Don't think of Thirst as a vampire movie

An internationally popular writer-director wants to tell a story about a priest's fall from moral grace. How best to put across such a story?

Well, if you're Park Chan-wook—the South Korean filmmaker behind Old Boy and the Vengeance thrillers—you very loosely adapt Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, have the priest become a blood-drinking, wife-coveting vampire and call the resulting film Thirst.

Thirst, opening today in limited release, stars Song Kang-ho (The Host) as Sang-hyun, the priest in question. He's a good man who submits to taking a secret vaccine that kills nearly everyone who takes it. In fact, he's the only survivor, but bizarre side effects soon reveal themselves. Sang-hyun gains strength, lusts after a longtime friend's beautiful but unhappy—and possibly abused—wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), and eventually begins to imbibe blood and even kill when necessary. The film ranks as probably one of the hardest-R releases ever, bursting with violence, gore, nudity, language and more; in other words, we loved it.

"In all truth, it wasn't in my interest, and I didn't try at all to reinvent the vampire genre within the conventional traditions of vampire films," Park said last week during an exclusive interview in New York City. "I chose a vampire story in order to tell this [particular] man's story."

Following is more from our interview with Park, who spoke with the help of a translator.

In the context of your films, what kinds of storytelling tools are violence and sex?
Park: These tools are used in order to clarify issues, to clarify questions. I throw questions to the audience. Every artist is interested in throwing questions to the audience that is appreciating their art. This question that I'm throwing to the audience doesn't require a descriptive answer. It's a question of choice, this or that. So it is a dilemma of choice, and in order to make the question more physical, to make it more obvious to the audience, it is more effective to put my questions in the most extreme, most pure form possible. And in order to do that, it is most effective for the question to be asked with a tinge of violence. You are placing the audience in a situation with horrific, horrific violence and asking them, "In this situation, what would be the moral choice? What would be the ethical choice? And if there is no ethically right choice, what would be the least of all the wrong choices?"

To illustrate this, rather than ask somebody, "Would you like to go without a meal, or would you like to pinch this guy?" it's more effective to ask the question, "Either he dies or you die, who is it going to be?" One has to die, and that's more effective. It makes the situation more pure and effective when the question is violent in nature.
And sex?

Park: When I was making Old Boy, the producer at the time was really concerned with incest scenes where a father and daughter would be having sex. The producer thought it would be very hard to release the film with that scene, and he wanted to take it out, but even with it intact there weren't any problems with it getting an R and getting released in the United States. So what I mean to say is that when I'm including scenes of violence or sex, it's not gratuitous. It's all done within a context of sincerity and desperation and all the different emotions that the main characters in my movies have. These scenes are the result of trying to express the emotions.

Every filmmaker wants every scene to work, but is there a scene or two in Thirst that you felt you had to pull off convincingly or the whole thing would fall apart?
Park: When I first had an idea for this film 10 years ago, there were two things that I wanted to get right. There were two things that I had, basically, that I was starting with: the process of the main character, and the question of how does he make a woman that he loves into a vampire. Those are two sequences that I think I wrote in one night, in one sitting, although it was 10 years ago. The rest of the story was all blank. I didn't have any other elements of the story apart from the past two. That, in turn, means that for the last 10 years I have been developing those sequences and everything around them. The sequence that actually made me want to make the film is the one with Tae-ju getting turned into a vampire. So that's the one I felt was the most important to get right. I thought it would become the core of the film, and it was important to me to realize that scene without detracting from the original idea I had for it. And I think I did that.

As audiences grow increasingly familiar with your work, how much harder does it get to scare them and to make them think?

Park: I would say it has become somewhat easier. Audiences, when they first experience my films, they tend to look at only what's on the outside, what's at the superficial level. They see the violence and the effects, and this is what may remain in their thoughts. I think that's especially true for someone who's never seen my movies and is seeing one for the first time. But if they're used to my films, then they come to them prepared and they're willing to look inside and what's behind everything they see.

It's just like when I saw Blue Velvet for the first time, the only thing I took from it was the ear that was cut off and all these insects swarming around it. That's the only thing I could think of for a few nights. But as I got to watch more and more of David Lynch's films I was able to get over that and see what was inside his movies.
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