'V' executive producers on the beautiful visitors, special effects

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by: Tyrone Warner
Date: 5/11/2010 5:51:00 PM ET

If you could make yourself look beautiful, you’d do it right?

That was the line of thinking that the executive producers of “V,” Steve Pearlman and Scott Rosenbaum, had in mind when decided what the new batch of visitors should look like in the sci-fi remake of the classic 80’s series.
 
“They have cloned human flesh to put over their lizard skin, so why would they make themselves look ugly; right?  So they make themselves look beautiful.  And we try to make sure that we populate the ship with beautiful people.  And yes, we do have a beautiful cast, and there's nothing wrong with that for television,” says Pearlman with a laugh.

“Yeah, but it was something that was thought of, like, as part of the fabric of the show, because I think the idea is they're coming here. They're aliens.  They want to sort of put on, quote/unquote, like the friendliest face that we can and feel not intimidating.  If they all looked like Brian Urlacher -- if they all looked like rugby players, like tough, tough guys, people might be more intimidated and a little nervous.  Anna's very smart.  And all this will play out through the show, is she's done research on human beings, and she knows that pleasant-looking people are nonthreatening-looking people, that having that visage will allow us to be more accepting of them.  And it's not just beautiful.  It's also nonthreatening or pleasant-looking.”

Rosenbaum recently served as an executive producer and writer for “Chuck,” and previously spent six years working on “The Shield.” Pearlman has been involved in series such as “ER,” “Friends,” “Without a Trace,” “Nip/Tuck” and “Two and a Half Men.”

On the topic of Anna, the leader of the visitors and played by Morena Baccarin, Pearlman says she wasn’t the easiest character to cast.

“There was a lot of discussion about that character and about the character for Erica, because Elizabeth Mitchell was one of the last people to be cast in the show too.  We knew that we had two female leads in the show and that they had to balance off each other.  And it was difficult in the casting process of the pilot, when we didn't have either, to kind of know which way to turn.  With the casting of Anna in particular, we ran the gamut.  There were women that came in that were older, more matriarch-like.  There were other younger women.  It needed to be somebody of stature because she is the head of state.  And we were running out of time.  The studio told us -- this was a Friday.  The studio told us we had a 5 o'clock casting session, we had to bring our five best choices in.  This was after several weeks of trying to cast this character unsuccessfully. And we had a casting session all day, saw about 40 women in that one day alone, and brought five people to the studio that night, of which Morena was literally one of the last three people in the door. And Scott Peters, who wrote the pilot, and I kind of looked at each other and thought, "Are we" -- she had a very severe haircut, obviously, and it's making a statement.  It's a daring way to go.  It's not as TV -- typical TV.  She, by far, for us, embodied who this character was.  And we took her to the studio and the network, and they felt the same way,” says Pearlman.

“And then as a kind of funny side note, after we cast her, there was about a week-long conversation about whether or not we should make her wear a wig. We had to do a wig test for her.  We had to bring a wig in from Seattle because there weren't wigs in Vancouver. Then we had to take pictures.  We all wanted her to be with the short haircut.  So we're like, "Make it look bad.  Make her turn her head so the wig flies all over the place." Anyway, they came around.”

As for special effects on the series, Rosenbaum is proud of the CGI on “V” and boasts that they have some of the best graphics of any sci-fi series today.

“I learned a very good lesson when I was working on "The Shield" with Shawn Ryan, and I'll never forget it.  I'll just tell you a story to answer your question.  I was writing one of my first scripts, and I pitched it to him.  We sort of talked about what the episode was going to be about.  And I was writing it, and I had, like, four pages.  It was short, four pages.  So I decided to write this, like, crazy action sequence where, you know, the team is running and there's punches and there's cars blowing up and guns firing and all this kind of stuff.  And, you know, so he read the script, and he's like, ‘You did a really good job.’  He's like, ‘There's two things:  One is do you have $2 million that I can borrow?’ ‘Because this is not producible.’  But he goes, ‘Really what I want to ask you is here we have this story you're telling, and then you added these, like, three pages. Why did you just’ -- he wasn't being critical.  He was just saying, ‘Why did you write this action scene?’  He was setting me up, of course, because he had his answer. And I said, ‘Because I felt like it needed some action’ -- this is many years ago, and it was a good lesson learned – ‘and it needed the drama.’  And he goes, ‘Listen, let me tell you something.  Television is about people, actors in a room.’  And he's like, ‘For you to succeed in this business, you need to be able to put two people in an interrogation room and make their conversation and their dialogue so compelling and so fascinating that it trumps any action sequence that you could ever come up with.’  And so I've always sort of taken that -- I've learned from that, and I've done that. I would say with this show, this is a character drama. The money moments are not the visual effects moments. The money moments are the interpersonal moments.  And we accentuate that with -- and we help build into it with the effects and with the stuff that -- and Steve can talk about that more and all the things they're doing up in Vancouver producing the show, but the story always trumps any sort of visual effect or action.  Yet at the same time, it's been wonderful for me because the stuff they are doing is incredible.  I mean, you will not see -- visually you will not see a show on television that's anywhere -- can even compare to what we're doing on ‘V’ in terms of the green screen work and the special effects.  It's an incredibly pleasant surprise.  I often think when I write something that it's not going to be doable, and they get it done,” Rosenbaum.

Pearlman adds: “We are pushing limits on visual effects in terms of what's being done currently on television and what has been done.  And you have to on a show like this because you're living in the world of ‘Avatar.’  And the audience is too smart, and the audience -- when they can sit there on their television set at home and get ‘Avatar’ and get ‘V,’ and if ‘V,’ which is being shot for a fraction of the cost, doesn't look as good, they're going to watch ‘Avatar,’ even if it's for the fiftieth time.  So we spend probably more money on visual effects than any other television -- than any other network show, certainly, on the networks here.  We have a system -- first of all, all of our -- everything that we shoot with the mother ship is virtual sets.  So when we shoot it, you walk into a big empty sound stage that's all green.  It is all built in postproduction and visual effects, all the sets.  And we have a system that is -- we are the only TV show that is using this system that allows us to actually see the sets on camera so we can watch the actors actually walking through a set, but -- we're sitting here on the monitor watching them walk through the set, but if you're looking over here, they're just walking through a big, empty green sound stage.  So it really allows us to do things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do on an episodic television schedule and with directors who -- you know, you have a different director almost every week, and some have more experience doing visual effects than others.  Well, this system really allows people who have even no experience with visual effects and green screen to be able to succeed with it.”

“V” airs Tuesday nights on /A\, with full episodes available online at CTV.ca.