00:00One time in Days of Future Past, or I remember we were in the room, if you remember it, if
00:04you've seen it, like where Hugh Jackman's on the slab, and it was Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Anna
00:10Paquin, Ellen Page, now Elliot Page, and I can't remember who else, Halle Berry, and every one of them, I
00:19think, except for maybe Patrick Stewart, had been nominated or won an Academy Award.
00:29What is the last thing that you remember?
00:31I saw something on the ship.
00:36Hi, Federico Vascotto from Italy for Movie Player. Very nice to meet you.
00:40Nice to meet you too.
00:41From Mutants to Aliens, do you think that your work on the X-Men universe has given you any lines
00:48and tools to help you manage this television narrative in the universe?
00:52Absolutely. X-Men was my training ground, my sort of college to prepare me for invasion, because of a lot
01:02of things, but primarily because of the ensemble storytelling.
01:06You know, X-Men was, there were, you know, eight to ten characters that you really needed to service, and
01:11they were extraordinary characters, huge backstories in the comics, oftentimes played by Academy Award nominated or winning actors.
01:18I mean, there was one time in Days of Future Past, but I remember we were in the room, if
01:22you remember it, if you've seen it, like where Hugh Jackman's on the slab, and it was Hugh Jackman, Patrick
01:27Stewart, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin, Ellen Page, now Elliot Page, and I can't remember who else, Halle Berry.
01:36And every one of them, I think, except for maybe Patrick Stewart, had been nominated or won an Academy Award.
01:43Anne had won, Ellen Elliot had won, or had been nominated.
01:47So it was this like weird, like you've got to take care of all those actors, right?
01:53Like you can't have Halle Berry show up or Ian McKellen show up and just stand in the background.
01:58So learning how to give characters enough to play in a limited amount of time, in that case, it was
02:07actually even more difficult because it was two hours.
02:09So that storytelling really prepared me for Invasion because we have all of these different characters from different backgrounds being
02:19told in parallel to each other.
02:21That helped me.
02:22And then also, because I worked on a lot of X-Men movies, it was almost like a television show.
02:29We would come back with the same characters, the same actors, and a new scenario, a new plot.
02:34And that helped me.
02:35That was my sort of education in serialized storytelling as well.
02:39Yeah.
02:40How does it feel to have created the one alien series that has less aliens in it,
02:46that works on suggestions, on persuasions, more than in showing them all the time?
02:52Was it a choice since the beginning and to maintain that atmosphere?
02:57Yeah.
02:57From the beginning, the thing that I was most interested in was telling an alien invasion story from the perspective
03:02of the human beings really going through it.
03:05And feeling as though the characters are the most important thing about the show and that you could relate to
03:11them.
03:11Because in truth, when anything is invaded, whether it's aliens or armies, the people on the ground, the real people
03:20who aren't soldiers,
03:21don't really have much interaction with the invading force.
03:25And so it's more about how their lives change in the face of this unimaginable thing.
03:31And going through it in a very real way was important to me.
03:36And keeping it intimate and personal and through the perspective of those characters.
03:41The relationship between the U.S. government and Trevante Cole is very cheeky now that they are not sure that
03:48he's human and they don't know if he can be trusted.
03:52Is this in a way a political metaphor for soldiers that sometimes after missions overseas side with the enemy?
04:00So a political show in a way.
04:03Yeah, I don't know.
04:04I mean, certainly I wasn't consciously trying to do something political with it.
04:08There's definitely movies and shows that are political thrillers that I felt like I was bringing into this.
04:17I like when science fiction can bring in other genres, you know.
04:22And I felt like this season there's a little bit of a thriller genre to it.
04:26There's also a military mission genre to it.
04:29Kind of a Guns of Navarone type feeling.
04:32And so, yeah, for me it was more about the political thrillers of the past.
04:37And those tend to be about a mistrust or a suspicion of governments that become too powerful.
04:45And so there's an element of that certainly in the show.
04:49So since you now have graduated on a serialized narrative, how many seasons do you have in mind for this
04:59television universe?
05:00How many did you hope to be in a great design?
05:04When I thought of the show from the beginning, when I first started working on it, I imagined it would
05:09be four seasons.
05:12I have thoughts of what we would do in a fourth season.
05:15And audience willing, we'll be able to do that.
05:19I think there's a lot more story to tell with these particular characters.
05:22And there's some open-ended things at the end of the season.
05:24There's some closed-ended things, too.
05:26But, yeah, that was the way that I had imagined the arc of this season.
05:31And that's a lot of storytelling.
05:32You know, we talk about the X-Men movies.
05:34And it was 15, 20 years of my life to tell seven or eight of those movies.
05:38And it's been, I don't know, six years of my life to tell 30 hours or roughly worth of invasion.
05:45And that's 15 movies.
05:46That's twice what I made with the X-Men films.
05:49So it's a lot of content.
05:51And that's been part of the joy of it is that you get to live with these characters.
05:55and these situations in a deeper way than two hours can allow.
06:01So fingers crossed.
06:03Thank you so much.
06:04Thank you.
06:05It was very nice talking to you.
06:06You too.
06:06Bye.
06:07Bye.
06:25Bye.
06:36Bye.
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