I attended the recent showing of the Times Talks Live interview that Damon and Carlton (5/20/2010), and I have to tell you folks, they gave the MOST EXCELLENT discussion about concepts and theories on LOST! I wasn't able to video tape (because that would be weird). However, I did record AUDIO. I've edited the 1 1/2 hour show into small bits that focus on the topics at hand. ALL CASTING SPOILERS REMOVED. [The sound is a little squirrelly, but my audio tech knowledge is level ZERO!][Complete video available FREE online HERE - Thanks to @davidonlost]
First clip: Locke convinces Jack to help him press the button (Leap of Faith scene)
Sound-bite from Times Talks Live:
TimesTalkLive 2
Mini quotes:
Damon: The operative line in this scene is when Locke says, "I don't want to do this alone." This taps into Jack's philosophy of "live together, die alone." These people need each other. Locke could very easily push the button, but he needs Jack to do it. That was the intent behind the scene because if Locke has to convince Jack to push the button, the audience would buy into it. Jack doesn't push the button because he believes something bad's going to happen. He just think's there might be a 10% chance of something bad happening, and he's not willing to take the risk.
Carlton: We set up this thematic debate between faith and empiricism. What are the cost and consequences of faith? This debate has been used throughout the show. During the course of the series, we've seen Jack and Locke move to different poles on this same issue. This something that does kinda come to its conclusion in the finale.
Damon: In the sub, Jack is now saying the same thing to Sawyer, telling him nothing's going to happen. This is a way to illustrate how far that character's come.
Second Clip: Everyone's favorite scene from "The Constant" - Desmond/Penny phone call
Sound-bite from Times Talks Live:
TimesTalkLive
Mini quotes:
Damon: Took 5 weeks to break/write (longer than usual) "The Constant." Kudos to the EDITOR [Mark Goldman] of the season. Desmond finally gets in touch with Penny. This needs to happen because she's is going to rescue the Oceanic Six in the Season 4 finale. Premise is "absurd" and putting it together nearly drove them insane! Trying to avoid the paradox: they very carefully planned the episode to avoid problems. Nothing Desmond can do to change the future.
Carlton: We didn't have Sawyer around to take his shirt off, so -- Our first big episode of time travel, we had Sawyer take his shirt off because this was gonna be a hard season ("I only slightly jest"). When you start talking about the conundrums of "consciousness traveling" or "time traveling," it can be difficult, so we had to find the emotional core of this episode. That's why it took 5 weeks for us to make consciousness traveling work as a narrative device and still bring it back around to the characters. This scene made us believe the show could work.
Damon: As we were talking about earlier with Jack and Locke, Locke says, "I don't want to do this alone." There's this idea that the characters were all sort of solo acts, and they need each other in order to sort of "get over their stuff." We articulate this in many ways in the show, but in this episode, we articulate it mathematically. Daniel offers up a mathmatical equation where Daniel says, there's a constant. Desmond says, can that be a person. One of the things we try to do in the show is take what's in the hatch and turn it into a who's in the hatch, or turn what is the monster into who's the monster because the one thing we can all relate to is character.
Third Clip: Hurley and Miles talk paradox and time travel
Sound-bite from Times Talks Live:
TimesTalkLive
Mini quotes:
Carlton: That what it sounded like in the writers room. Hurley has to be the audience and go, "What the hell are you guys thinking?!"
Damon: And we also had to have him catch Miles. We have to have him get to a point where basically Miles has no answer for it. What we do is let the characters say what we think the audience would say. Then the audience feels validated. "That's right Hurley!" Then they stop asking it! So we know anytime you do time travel, there are paradoxical issues and problems involved.
Carlton: We thought time travel would be cool because we wanted to tell these stories about the Dharma Initiative, and we didn't want to have someone just stumble out of the jungle and start talking about his experiences. The only way to make it interesting is to put our characters into the DI. We talked about it, but when we started to get into it, it is a morass! This scene is a reflection of these dense conversations in the writers' room ...We thought, we need to acknowledge for the audience that this is complicated this is detailed...That was the place for the characters to say, yes, we understand what you guys are going through.
Damon: They had to put together a pitch together for this season for ABC executives. By the end, Steve McPherson's like: "Whatever." He's given up trying to understand and just trusting us.
Carlton: Narrating the clip shows is pretty "fun" too.
More clips to come!
