 Hey, we're here at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. I flew out from New York to sit down with Damon Lindelof, one of the men behind Lost, the co-screenwriter of Prometheus, and basically just an insane genius. So let's go have a chat. So you're a busy man. You've got a pretty major project that's about to be revealed to the world. Which one are you referring to? I was talking about Prometheus. Oh, yeah. Is there something you're working on? Is there something else that I should know about? You're a very busy guy. You're doing more than one thing. There's this Disney movie, 1952, that we just announced Brad Bird is going to direct, but we're not talking about what it is. Can you tell me a little bit about what it is? No. Can you just give me an idea of the plot? It's about characters who want something, and there's other characters trying to stop them. Can you tell me who you're starring in this film? No. I would tell you, but there's no actors. It's animated. No, I'm not commenting on it. It's live action. Can you tell me how it ends? Happily. Is that true? There's a happy ending? Yes. It's a Disney movie. Well, I mean, anything's possible. In this day and age, it's 2012. Nothing is guaranteed. Even the movie 2012 has a happy ending. I've never seen it. I'm sorry to hear that. You just lost all credibility with me. Is it good? This is, by the way, not the first time 2012 was coming up, and people were... I think Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking specifically to me about 2012, and I had no response because I'd never seen it. No, he wasn't talking about the movie. No, no, he was talking about the movie, as it relates to the universe. Of course. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. He's saying it was completely right. That's how it all ends. Well, it's a fascinating movie, not to digress, but when you think about a movie that's essentially about the end of the world, and it's John Cusack versus the end of the world, what's the ending of that movie look like? How does one character beat the end of the world? Can I riff on what I think happens? Yeah, this is much more interesting probably than the actual movie. Maybe. I should give you a hint. I think that John Cusack, along with a small band of survivors, find one spot on the planet that's where we're going to start over and rebuild humanity the way it should have been built the first time around, without fossil fuels. Yes, more or less. I got the idea. I sort of amend small band of survivors to four ginormous arc loads of survivors who basically represent the lottery winners slash wealthy oligarchs of all societies. Doesn't sound like a happy ending. Yeah, but these arcs do get to the place that you refer to. Yeah, but it's all rich bastards. Most of them are rich bastards. Is John Cusack one of them? Is he a stockbroker? He's not a rich bastard. If memory serves, his ex-wife has married a rich bastard. He falls in with a Russian rich bastard. It's sort of like an Independence Day how Jeff Goldblum's wife is working with the president, so he ends up with all the important powerful people and then saves the world. And his dad, Harvey Fierstein. No, his dad is Judd Hirsch. Well, Harvey Fierstein is his boss. Harvey Fierstein works with him. Yes, he gets to work with him. He dies, they kill him off early. They let him hang out. The attractive Jew survives. Who's the attractive Jew here? Goldblum. I think you're talking about Hirsch. I don't know. He survives too, that's right. He survives. They all go into the bunker where they're keeping the alien ship. There's a lot of Jews in the alien. A ton of Jews. And there's a real, well there's a very religious kind of subject to the whole thing. Absolutely. It's an important movie. We could talk for 90 minutes just about that. It might be, it's arguable that it's more important in some ways than 2012. Than the Torah. What? Than the Torah, that's right. You heard it here first. Right, exactly. Independence Day is more important than the Torah. Yes. This is exactly what I thought we'd be talking about, by the way. I knew it. I just talked more about Judaism than I have since my Bar Mitzvah. You have Bar Mitzvahs on the mind because you have to leave tomorrow to go to Bar Mitzvah. I do. For your second, first cousin once removed. Second cousin once removed. There is some fundamental debate as to whether or not it's my second cousin or my first cousin once removed. But it's definitely a person who's related to you. Yes. That's the important thing. Correct. The son of my cousin. This is I'm sure why people have tuned in. Sounds right. They've tuned out now so we can say whatever. Let's just. So you don't want to talk about, you can't talk about 1952, which has a happy ending. Correct. And stars no one. Yes. Sounds good. But you can't talk about Prometheus, which is a small film that you've done, independent film you've done. Yes. With Ridley Scott. Sure. You are the co-screenwriter? Yeah. A gentleman by the name of John Spates wrote the first draft of the screenplay for several first drafts. He worked on the movie for about a year and then I came in after him. So we didn't ever work simultaneously. You kind of took what he had and brought it to another place. Yes. I mean that's the process out here. John went, I was just, I was still working on the last season of Lost while he was writing on Prometheus and then he went on to do Bigger and Better Things and then I came in on Prometheus. And normally there's a whole chain of screenwriters so I'm proud that it's just John and I. Right. This is actually a small process. Yeah. Cowboys and Aliens, which is the only other movie I have a writing credit on. I think there's nine credited writers. Does that bother you? That there's nine credited writers? Yeah. Would it have been a better movie had it just been your name on it? No. It would have been a better movie if I had been nowhere near it. Really? I just think. I mean because I would feel if anybody tampered with anything than I did, I would always feel like whatever the end result is going to be somehow bastardized, a bastardized version of my version. Yeah but I'm, easier said than done because I'm tampering with, you know, when I came into that movie it was between the fourth and the fifth season of Lost so I worked on it for two and a half months and injected some ideas and did a draft of the script that was built on the foundation of other drafts and then there was considerable writing done after I left which is just, it's weird. It's sort of the equivalent of like going to the sperm bank and saying like maybe this will be used in a kid in combination with a bunch of others like- You can't really do it in combination. You don't have fundamental authorship so- It's worse than that in a way because at least with the kid, you know it's at least one of them. Right. The good news was I got to meet and work with Favreau, John Favreau on that. The draft that I wrote with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orsi got John on board and then I started hanging out with him for maybe a month before I had to go back on to Lost and he's a great cool guy and I loved that collaboration. He seems like a guy who is incredibly powerful and rich and famous but whenever I've seen him speak anywhere or just he seems like a regular dude who's like a very nice guy. Yeah. Is that true or is he a huge ass? No, he's not a huge ass at all. He's one of us. I mean he's, when I first came out to LA in 94, Swingers was like the big thing and essentially he and his friends, Vince Vaughn, the most prominent amongst them, were sort of living the Hollywood existence that my friends and I were except they were much better looking and having much more success with women but that's what that movie was about. Right. And so I completely and totally idolized John Favreau and the idea that he was also a writer and a director and started putting more time and attention into that part of his career than the acting part of his career I thought was commendable and then he's into all the same stuff that we are as fanboys. He's nerdy. He's a nerdy guy. He's nerdy. And it comes across in his movies. I mean they seem like they have the touch of obsession. No, definitely. Which is a huge component for making these things work. And also like tone is everything and I think I give massive accolades to Joss Whedon for Avengers and he did an incredible job but I think that Favreau was the guy with Iron Man that did the first, like for so, when you see the Avengers other than the fact that it's awesome and you want to see it again you go like why did it take so long to figure out to do this? I mean these characters didn't get invented like 10 years ago. Why did it take them so long? And the answer is it's such, it's so tonally difficult to pull off those movies and Iron Man was the first one where it's sort of like I'm going to take this seriously. I'm never going to have the characters turn and wink at the camera but at the same time it's going to be super fun to watch. Women are going to want to go and see it. They're legitimately funny movies. Yeah, they're awesome. So I give Favreau huge props for basically kick starting that whole progression of movies. It's like he kind of took the, and we're still way off topic of my question, but it's like he took, which I don't mind at all. He took the. I can't wait to hear it. I know there's a lot of anticipation now. I don't remember what I wanted to talk about at this point. He took comics the way comics used to be even up until the 80s when they really got dark in the 80s but where you could tell a real story but still have fun with it and there was actually like there was something kind of adventurous and exciting that wasn't dark and heavy and brooding. You know, it wasn't all Batman basically. And he made a movie that did all the stuff that a great Batman movie should do, right, where it's like action packed and has serious moments but is somewhat light in a way that like is way more palatable to a broad audience. Yeah, no definitely. Which is weird because it's actually really nerdy. That kind of tone is kind of a nerdy weird specialist tone. Yeah, it's completely and totally socially acceptable right now and actually socially expected to think superhero movies are cool. And we take for granted that 15 years ago that was not the case. Well, this is a good bridge to talking about your new movie. Well you told me to say that. That's right, I did. You basically said when in doubt go with that segue. Just say that and we'll move. So Prometheus is an R movie. It's not really a broad audience. Well it's obviously a broad audience but it's an adult audience. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts are. I mean you've got movies like The Avengers that are very much like they're for kids and they're for the kids' parents as well and this seems like you specifically, Ridley, and you are obviously trying to make something that is for adults. Yeah, I think the first thing that I have to say and I mean this completely genuinely without an ounce of Hollywood bullshit false modesty is it's Ridley's movie. John and I, John certainly contributed a tremendous amount of ideas, most of which I built on and then I came up with some stuff organically to the process but at the end of the day my job was sitting across the table from Ridley Scott asking him a series of questions like he was on 60 Minutes and then based on his answers to those questions I then went and generated a screenplay but that process that I just described to you went over the course of three or four weeks so I really felt like I just kind of bullied Ridley into dictating the movie to me and then I got to put my name on it. So the movie, a lot of the ideas are actually the seeds are from Ridley directly. Absolutely because aside from its relationship to the original Alien which is a question, iterations of that question are the things that I've been asked about the most. I'm looking forward to it. At the end of the day when you're working with Ridley Scott who is, people throw the word visionary around a lot but that's literally what he is by definition and so he's going to make the movie, he needs to get the movie and it's not about me coming in and saying hey Ridley I've got this great idea, do you want to direct it? It's about him saying I want to direct a movie in this universe, here's what I want it to be about, here are the ideas that excite me, here are the thematics that I'm interested in and here are the character traits that I want to demonstrate and it's not to reduce the process of screenwriting but I feel like in film which is much different than what I did in TV, it is a little bit like Mad Libs where my job is essentially really saying adjective, noun, euphemism. That's how the movie was made really. I'm sure he'll be excited to hear that you described the movie making process as Mad Libs. But I do feel like I have great pride in my own lack of authorship in the movie and I feel like if the movie is a huge success it's all because of Ridley Scott and if the movie is not a success it's because I wasn't able to execute his vision successfully and that's the feeling that I have. So let's talk about the connection between Aliens or Alien or that universe because there seems to be some, and correct me if I'm wrong but I feel like people who are talking about the movie, who are involved with the movie have gone not out of their way but have made a point to say look this isn't a sequel to Alien or Aliens or Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection or Alien vs. Predator or Alien vs. Predator 2. You're saying this is a different movie but it's not a sequel, it's a prequel if anything right? But you're not even calling it that. Well I mean I take exception to the fact that it's called a prequel because and I know a lot of this sounds a lot like that you have to get on slightly defensive terrain but for me just as a fan boy when I hear the word prequel that doesn't get me excited and the reason that it doesn't get me excited isn't because I have a negative association with prequels. We have to think let's contextualize that word. The first time that I heard that word in any sort of public or social setting was in reference to the fact that George was going to do the first three Star Wars movies and I was enormously excited about that. That aside once you actually see what a prequel is, a prequel is by definition a march towards the inevitable. So while we know that the guy is going to get the girl or there's going to be a happy ending, there's certain story beats that you hit. The idea of saying I'm now just going to watch this young boy turn into Darth Vader, you're leading me into the story that I already know. There's certain things that I know can't happen like nothing's going to happen to Obi-Wan because it's a prequel. I went and saw the Thing prequel and I love John Carpenter's The Thing and I was really excited about it. But then when it ended, spoiler alert, The Thing ends with a dog that has The Thing inside it running across the frozen tundra as it's being chased by a helicopter that's shooting at it. When I saw that there was a small degree of satisfaction in terms of like oh this is where the other movie began. On the heels of that, a tremendous amount of disappointment and going like then why did I just watch this movie? It was just sort of you just wrote the prologue for me. I felt it was really important that Prometheus was not positioned as a prologue to Alien. In fact, if Prometheus were successful and there was a sequel to it, the sequel to Prometheus would not be Alien. I also felt like Alien is as close to a perfect movie as it gets. I was very reluctant to engage in a conversation that would somehow diminish Alien. If for some reason Prometheus didn't succeed creatively, that when you went and watched Alien again you'd be like this movie is now diminished. You'd be used to it. The taste would be soured in some way. Yeah, why bet that? So all that by way of saying that my hope is that if you see Prometheus and you watch Alien again, there will be certain things that were mysteries before about Alien that you have more clarity on, but the mysteries that made Alien great are still mysteries. I've had a certain degree of success and failure in mystery resolution. I feel some mysteries are just much more engaging than their resolution and I don't want to answer those. It's like, ooh, where is Amelia Earhart? She's rotting somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. You're saying that's- Probably, unless she was abducted by aliens or she's living somewhere in France and has discovered the Fountain of Youth. But the reality is the answer to these mysteries are usually less compelling than whatever our imagination transposes onto them. I do think that we succeeded in, if there's a sequel to Prometheus, it's not about the things that Alien is about, which is eggs and face huggers and chest bursters and xenomorphs. Not only Alien, but then aliens, they need to go and live off on that tangent. Prometheus is servicing that tangent. It's saying, here's an explanation. You'll understand the context of maybe where some of those things came from, but it's much more interested in going off in its own direction. Were there a sequel to Prometheus, it probably wouldn't need to trade in any of those ideas. Let's just get nerdy for a second. I'm going to get real specific. As opposed to what I've been for the last 20 minutes? You're speaking very broadly about you're setting the stage for this, but here's my impression based on the trailers. It's funny because I actually could not... I haven't seen Alien for years, probably not since I was a teenager or really young, like 13. It was on television. We had this debate on the podcast and we were talking. I was like, how does it start? Because I couldn't remember. It was on television. I watched it and I remembered. I saw a bunch of stuff. I was like, oh yes, now it all makes sense. This clearly is not about Sigourney Weaver's character. It's clearly not about... I think from just what I see in the trailer, it's not about people fighting the alien creatures. That doesn't seem to be... At least that's not a hint of what I've seen. But it does seem to be taking place in or on or around the beginning of Alien, or Alien full stop, which is this large alien craft they stumble upon. That seems to be in Prometheus. There is some connective tissue there. There are places that are shared, I guess is what I'm asking. Yes, but not... I think that, again, I'm not trying to be overly cryptic, but if I answer all these questions, I think that we cross that line from... Let me just say, there was a two minute trailer out there that people were like, I can't wait to see this movie. Then there was a three minute international trailer. That one extra minute of material is the line that you cross where people start to say, you told me too much. I agree. I think the three minute trailer gave away a lot of stuff. My desire to not tell you what is the relationship between my hope is, and again, this is frustrating to some, but it's the space in which I live, which is the reason to me that I loved Inception was after Inception was over, there was stuff for me to fight about and discuss with my friends as to what it meant, what happened, what was a dream, what wasn't a dream, all those things that the movie left in some sort of ambiguous space. I know ambiguity is a very scary word, especially when you apply it to the context of the television that I've done. However, I will continue to embrace ambiguity because I find it really interesting and I have a tremendous amount of faith in the intelligence of the audience. Most of them are much smarter than I am and I will have an intention, but the idea of not spelling it out entirely, I will tell you right now that this movie, even when you go and see it, there is space to debate what the relationship between this movie and Alien is. We are not connecting the dots for you. We are giving you the requisite information to have an impassioned discussion about it. You will know a hell of a lot more than you did before, but it's not like this movie ends with a derelict spacecraft full of eggs crash landing on LV-426, which is the derelict spacecraft that the Nostromo happens upon at the beginning of Alien. That's inevitability and it's not interesting. With ambiguity, the danger there is, and by the way, I'm not trying to get you to tell me what happens in the movie. No, no, I totally get it. I guess my question was, they're in the same universe because there's been a debate with people that this is in a completely separate universe. They share the universe. Absolutely, and I don't want to segue into the viral of the movie, but I will say when Ridley and I, and I'm sure he and John and a couple of guys worth mentioning, Michael Ellenberg, who was Ridley's right hand guy at Scott Free when I came on there and an executive producer on the movie, and then a guy, Steve Asbell, who was an executive at 20th Century Fox, who was the hugest alien compendium of information, incredibly impassioned, creative guy. Those guys are worth mentioning. Very early on, we started saying, this is the question that is not going to go away. Is it a prequel? What is it? Is there a way that we can start generating content other than just the trailer, as opposed to Ridley Scott in interviews, or me in interviews saying, here's the movie's relationship to Alien, where we can begin to message to the people who care about that stuff, and the people who care are the people who are fans of the original, the nerds, the fanboys, if we're going to typecast. That was the birth of the Wayland idea. Now Wayland was a character in John Spate's draft, he is a character that appears in Prometheus in a different way than he did originally, but I said Wayland becomes the universal bridge, because we all know the name of the company in Alien is Wayland-Yutani. They are the company that basically the Nostromo works for, and they're a conglomerate that's into terraforming, amongst other things. And so if we say Wayland is in our movie, and we give the audience some context for who he is, then they'll know that they're happening in the same universe. And can we shoot a cool piece of material that's not going to be in our movie, it's not a trailer, it's not a scene that you see three months before the movie comes out, it just exists completely and totally on its own, that will begin to message that to the people that care. We think it's important to do that, and Ridley completely and totally agreed, and that was the birth of what evolved into this Peter Wayland TED talk that we unveiled to TED and then went viral that Guy Pearce, who plays Wayland in the movie, agreed to do. And I think that it's hard to watch that in any context and then make the argument that these don't occupy the same timeline. So getting back to the ambiguity point, I think the danger there and what's frustrating for people, and I think that with Lost, I think a lot of people feel this way, is that ambiguity can sometimes come off as not like, hey, here's something for discussion, but you didn't know. Sure. Or like you didn't have the answer, right? Right. And it's very frustrating to feel when you're very attached, and I think Alien is a franchise, obviously people are very attached to, Lost obviously people are very attached to. And it's frustrating when you love something and you really care for it and you want there to be real answers. You know, especially for comic book fans and like fanboys, getting the answers is really important. Sure. And so I think that the fine line you have to walk with being ambiguous is, was it ambiguous because the person doesn't have the answer or is it ambiguous because they want you to ask the question? Right. And I think that that's what can be frustrating. I mean, I told you I was going to ask you about this so I might as well just get into it now. Sure. I mean, I watched Lost all the way through and thought the ending was extremely disappointing. Disappointing because it felt like, I felt like there was a promise of something much more, and not profound, maybe not more moving, certainly not more moving in my opinion, but something smarter. And it felt like it ended in this way that was like, well, so what was the point? And so there, the ambiguity was not, I mean, there was stuff that was specific and stuff that was ambiguous, but I feel like it felt like, well, they didn't have the answer. This was the neatest way to wrap it up without having to answer any of the questions or avoiding some of the questions. Does that now haunt you, that kind of sense of people being, of needing the answer and not getting it and you having to answer for it? I mean, I know you tweeted about Mass Effect, the end of Mass Effect 3. Sure. You said, I wasn't involved in the ending of this. Right, right. And you were disappointed with some of its ambiguity. Sure. Does that feel like it's haunting you, and does it haunt you with this? I think haunt is probably not as accurate a word as, I think haunt sort of implies like, it's something that creates a tremendous amount of stress and sadness and fear for me as much as it is something that I accept as a part of the legacy of that show. Do I embrace it? I embrace it in the same way that Matt Damon embraces Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, like under duress and wanting to punch it too. It is a deeply conflicted ongoing battle that I have, but as obnoxious and entitled as The Sounds, I also have no regrets about it. In order to be haunted by it, I think regret is part of haunting, where it's sort of like, if I could go back in time, I would do it differently. And for me, I just sort of feel that, and again, my own authorship in Lost, I have to say there were a bunch of other writers on the show. There was JJ at its inception, there was Carlton all the way through, there were amazingly talented writers in the writers' room. But I take responsibility and authorship for Lost in terms of my own feelings about the ending, and I make no apologies for it. I do feel like that was the ending that I wanted to do, and I was always comfortable with the ambiguity of the show. And I think that there were times, if there was one regret that I had, there were times over the course of the show where in interviews I said, the answers are coming, but I challenge you to look at any interview that I gave post the middle of season three, which was the turning point, when they said, we can now give you an end date to the show. Because up until then, there was a degree of improvisation that had to occur because we didn't know how many of these things we were going to do or how long we were going to be around to be doing them. Once we said, there's going to be 48 episodes left, at that point a firm plan had to come into motion. Then from that point on, I think that I started saying publicly, if you are watching the show for the answers to your mysteries, you are not going to like the ending. And I will pull at least 10 instances of Carlton and I saying this in interviews and major publications and on television. And I'll say, hey, if you didn't do your due diligence and listen to what we had to say, you were warned. And it's not that I didn't care about the mythology of the show. I just feel like many shows have come and gone that are very focused on their mysteries and their mythologies and their ambiguity, and there is no worse scene in the history of genre than the architect explaining to Neo everything that happened in The Matrix. And I wasn't going to touch that with a 10-foot pole. That is a particularly awful instance of over-explanation of feeling like you owe it to the audience. Right. OK, so we have the architect, and then we have Lost. And the Lost is not enough, and the architect is too much. And somewhere in between is just right. And I'm going to always be closer to Lost than I am to the architect, because that is just not interesting to me. And I think my own storytelling, the things that capture my imagination and make me want to re-engage are sometimes frustrating and challenging. But for Lost, it was like, by the way, I will actually answer any questions that you have about the show. But I won't say, oh, here's what it was. I will actually refer you. I'll give you the required reading if you're worried about what the numbers were all about or what was Walt's purpose or... Those aren't the things that actually bother me. I was sitting here. I've just been sitting here listening to you talk about it, and I realized I wasn't disappointed with Lost not giving me answers at the end. I was actually disappointed with the answer it gave, which it felt like the answer was all of the things that just happened didn't really mean anything. They kind of didn't happen. That was my takeaway from it. What do you mean they didn't happen? It was like all of the things that happened, all of these things that were set up as you've got to stop the man in black because X, Y, and Z, it didn't matter. Because it wasn't real. Yes, it was. Well, but not really. It was like a shared fantasy. So the things that were going on on the island were happening in the actual world? Yes. I cannot believe we're talking about this, by the way, because I had no plans to get into a detailed conversation about it. So they were happening in our timeline. Correct. I mean, yes. I mean, there's no oceanic airlines in our timeline. No, no, no. But in the real world, not in this kind of like moment before death fantasy world where everybody's trying to find each other so they can go to heaven. No, correct. So at the end of the show, the last frame of the show, Matthew Fox closes his eyes and dies. That happened. In our context of happening, that happened. That's all real. Then from the moment that he closed his eye, all that other stuff that we did in the sixth season of the show, the flash sideways where nobody knows each other and the plane never crashed, that is whatever your interpretation is. I'm not going to talk about what our intention is, but that's what you would define as not having happened or happening, but everything that we ever showed you, anything that takes place on the island and lost happened. Absolutely 100%. The plane crashed. Those people survived. Everything that you saw throughout those six seasons, somehow- The whole struggle between good and bad, that's like a really meaningful thing that actually occurred that would have threatened the universe had it not been- The Dharma Initiative is real. The island is real. All those Hurley right now, at this moment in time, Hurley and Ben, and with some help from Walt, are actually running things on the island, maintaining it, per the ending of the show. You had to think about this for the movie that could have potentially happened. No. Again, I don't want to ruin the mystery and ambiguity of the show in terms of talking about our intention, but I do feel like one of the things that we always wanted to do and were very passionate about doing was exploring the idea of purgatory, both figuratively and literally. This was so obvious to the audience that within three or four episodes of the first season of the show, they were like, it's purgatory, right? They're all dead. We kept saying, we swear to God, they are not all dead. This is really happening. But the audience is telling us that they really want some sort of clinical evaluation of an afterlife and purgatory is about judgment. This show has never really offered up what I would call Christian Judeo judgment in terms of there's a deity. It's always about self-judgment. The idea of does Jack think that he's worthy or can Sawyer forgive himself for his sins or did Kate kill her stepfather justifiably? I always felt like if the characters can forgive themselves, then the show is over. Show is called Lost. It's not because they're on an island. It's because they're lost. How are we going to creatively demonstrate that self-forgiveness? We're going to do this idea. There was an interpretation. I think a large part of it came from ABC's decision to run footage of the plane wreckage over the end credits of the finale. We publicly got out and said, oh my God, that was not our idea. That was kind of like, it did almost erase a lot of... I think that was the feeling. We also anticipated your reaction in terms of... Here's the thing is, I can't logic anyone who was disappointed in the finale into suddenly being undisappointed with it. You have a visceral reaction to things. You either like them or you don't like them, and I honor your feedback and the feedback of other dissenters. That is to say, though, that I think that in the final scene of the show that precedes the church where basically Jack's father, Christian Shepherd, says some things to Jack, one of the things that Jack says is like, wait a minute, hold on. Is this real? Did any of this happen? Because Josh is going to be busting Damon's balls about this and Damon's going to need to say something. Years after the fact. Damon's going to need to say something. We edited that part out because it would have been weird for you. You would have been like, oh my God, this is strange. But then his father says, it's all real. It all happened. Everything happened. So I was like, that's going to make it pretty clear, but it wasn't clear enough. I have to say, it's been so... I mean, when did the show end? How many years ago was it? Two years. Two years ago. That's a long time. A lot of stuff has happened. Exactly. It ended May 23rd of 2009. It's almost to the day. Two years to the day. 2010, sorry. I mean, I am distant from it now, but I just remember that I had that feeling of going, well, nothing matters. It's interesting. Now I want to go back and watch it having heard this from you. Now that I've got you on the couch though, because I've actually- I've actually got you on the couch, but that's fine. I find this refreshing because I am actually really interested in... Few people will engage me on their level of disappointment because it's an uncomfortable thing to do. Well, it's like telling somebody their work sucks. Yeah, but I like it. What I would say to you is, coming into the finale, the night that the finale is going to air, before you even sit down to watch it, can you honestly tell me that you felt optimistic that at the end of those two and a half hours you would be satisfied, or were you already like this? No, I think that something could have happened where I would have been really satisfied. Up until that point in the show, you were like, I love this. I think if you guys had been- Your faith had not wavered prior to that. Oh no, no. My faith had wavered plenty. There were whole seasons that I was like, this is... Why am I wasting my time watching this show because it was just very disappointing. I have a question. I actually want to ask about that because I feel like, to me, Lost felt like a show that was meant to be fewer seasons than it actually was. You even said there was some filler there. Oh my God, sure. I mean, to me it felt like... This actually gets to... Before I get into this question, and we will talk about Prometheus at some point, look, if you guys had revealed that the entire thing was some... They were in space and it was part of an alien experiment that had been going on with thousands of other groups of humans that they'd been plucking off the planet. Yeah. I mean, I would have been like, okay, this is some weird Philip K. Dick stuff. That's how it's going to end. It's going to be like Slaughterhouse Five. I could get totally behind that because it was like it would have made sense to me that a lot of things didn't make sense. It would have also been a really upsetting ending. Sure. Sort of a not a... I feel like the ending was almost like a happy ending, which to me I didn't see coming or kind of didn't want. Right. By the way, I'm one man amongst millions and millions. I'm sure there's people... I know there are millions of people who love the ending and are very satisfied by it. Sure. But yeah, there were things that I think that going into it I felt like if there had been... My mind wasn't set against there being a conclusion that I would have been happy with. If Bob Newhart had woken up and it had all been a dream that he was having, which I talked about for years as an in-joke with my wife, I would have been completely satisfied with that ending and would have thought it was the most brilliant thing that was ever put on television. Sure. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Yeah. I guess we resigned ourselves either correctly or incorrectly fairly early on to the idea that whatever mythological construct we came up with for what the ultimate ending of the show was. I feel personally speaking, one of the most unsuccessful episodes of Lost is this one across the sea, which basically tells the origin story of Jacob and the Man in Black. It's just kind of rife with fundamental explanation. It's as close to the architect scene as we got. It also needed to set up like here's where the end game of the island is going to play out. I wasn't really emotionally invested in that episode because it didn't feature any of the people that I had been told to care about in the preceding 115 episodes. It wasn't that Jacob and the Man in Black weren't interesting characters. They were, but it was sort of like, wait a minute. I thought the show was about anytime you say to people, what's Lost about? It starts with like, well, there's this plane crash. Therefore, they don't say like, well, centuries and centuries ago, in fact millennia ago. If they say that, you go like, boop, I'm out. I always just felt like the show, the ending that we were shooting for was going to be one that dealt with sort of the emotional reality of the characters and gave some fundamental explanation for what did these people get out of this plane crash. The answer, as corny as it sounds, was the one that appealed to me the most, which is each other. That's what they got. They were all fucked up, sad individuals who were lost in their own lives and hated themselves. Somehow they found some fundamental community amongst each other. If they hadn't met each other and spent all that time on the island, then they would never have been able to forgive themselves for their past sins and break through to some sort of level of self-awakening and forgiveness. It is new agey. It is hokey. It's really new agey. It's the story that I wanted to tell. It's interesting because I feel like now the alien ending that I just talked about seems very cynical and mean-spirited in comparison to what you were talking about. You're like, I wanted to define each other and be happy. My auntie's like, they are doomed in space to go through alien experiments. The thing is, when you go for anything, there's going to be some fundamental polarization so that, like Life on Mars, for example, the American version, I will not spoil the ending for anybody who wants to embark on it, but the concept of Life on Mars is that basically a detective, played by Jason Omar in the American version, basically he is without explanation suddenly finds himself in the 70s as a cop. The series is asking, he gets in a car crash and then he wakes up in the 70s as a cop. The series starts to ask the question of, well, how is this possible? They did 13 episodes. The show was canceled, but they did resolve the ending of the show. There was a resolution. There was an explanation for how that happened. I would say that it is very much in the wheelhouse of what your solution was. There were some people who said that that was great and clever, and there were a lot of people who said that they didn't like it. If there is a perfect ending out there for a long-form mythology series, the New Heart ending doesn't apply because it was a sitcom. They just did a very clever last scene for the entire series. Well, that's extreme. That one is really like, there are no more questions. It's almost like saying elsewhere, they did the crazy snow globe ending, but it was just a hospital show. It didn't even require that. If I said to you, let me ask you something. Do you like the X-Files? Are you asking me that right now? Yeah, I'm asking you. I love the X-Files. I love it. What happened at the end of the X-Files in the last episode and just anything that happened? So at least you remember- In the very last episode, I'm trying to think. It's been years. I don't remember. I honestly don't remember. At least you remember. I remember the universe. I remember the resolution, what happened to the warring alien, spoiler alert to whoever's watching it. It's been long enough. Screw you. You should have seen it. I remember what happens to the smoking man. Oh, is he... Now I feel like I am going to spoil it for people, but I kind of remember what happens. But you have a question here. What is your question? It wasn't a question. It was, at least you remember being really disappointed in the way Lost ended, and you have very specific memories of why you were disappointed. Well, it's more recent too. Right, but it's- Well, it had an ending that was very clear. Yeah. I will say that. It wasn't an ending that I particularly liked, but it had an ending. It definitely ended, and something you could say specifically happened to the characters. Right, and I feel like at the very least, no matter what your interpretation is, you do know that everyone that you ever cared about died, and that you got treated to some version of an epilogue. How it is they died and how that all fits together, discuss amongst yourselves. I feel like we were pretty clear in it, but one of the things that I didn't want people to do is like, well, when's the movie coming out? Sort of like when the Sopranos ended, and people were like, I hope there's a Sopranos movie. I'm like, if they do a movie, it completely nullifies the brilliance of the cut to black. And there were people who didn't like the cut to black, because they felt like they wanted more resolution, or that there was a promise of more resolution. And at the end of the day, they didn't even understand that a movie would completely and totally erase the boldness of that decision. It's just like, that's it. That's the last time you ever will see Tony Soprano is eating onion rings in that diner with his family. That's all you get. I also imagine that ends, by the way, that's an alien experiment. Yes. And guess what? On a spaceship. No one can prove you wrong. That's right. Even David Chase. That's why it's so brilliant. That's why it's so perfect. So actually, let's bring this back around to what you're doing right now. Since we're talking about alien spaceships. But creating something that goes on for six seasons or longer seems like kind of a challenge to on the creative process of telling a story. It seems like a finite, a book, I mean, you do have books like the Game of Thrones books that are obviously, they're going on and on. And that works. Yes. But I feel like in the creative process, you want to have some, you want to know there's a finite amount that you can say. And I feel like there are shows that work really well because they're like, you know, the British Office, for instance. They say, we're going to do two seasons and we're done. Yep. And a Christmas special. And a Christmas special, right? Where they answer a bunch of questions, wrap ups and things. Absolutely. We finally understand. We know what happened in the office. Yeah. Sure. Is it more satisfying to you in some ways to work on something like Prometheus where you have, you're like, look, I've got two hours to deal with this thing. There's not going to be any filler. I've got to tell the story succinctly and answer questions in a relatively short amount of time. Is that more satisfying to you? Now you've obviously done both things. What do you get more satisfaction out of? And do you think it's actually, I mean, because I, I'm sorry, I'm going to let you answer that question, but I have a follow up to it. Yeah. Well, it is very satisfying to do a movie that has a beginning, middle and end and you know exactly what you're getting into when you start the job. Television, you don't know what you're getting into. You don't know how many years it's going to be on for. You don't, it's hubris to say I have a plan for the entire second season of the show because no one's even watching it yet. They have to like it for you to get to that point. So they're, you know, and I talk about this often so I won't belabor the point, but the two things that sort of came up all the time during Lost were question number one, are you making it up as you go along? And the answer to that question is no. Like that's what people want you to say. No, we absolutely have a firm plan and there's a binder over there and that's where our plan is and we've got it and you're in good hands. Mommy and daddy know where we're going. Don't worry about it. You have a map. That's question number one. How much input does the audience have and the answer to that question is a lot. We listen to you guys all the time. We want to know what you like and what you don't like and we will adjust accordingly. Are these your actual answers? These are the answers that people want to hear. These are the answers that people want. You know, nobody wants to be told you don't matter. Like the audience, like we don't care what you have to say about the show. We're doing it the way we want to do it and nobody wants to hear we don't have a plan. We're kind of winging it and whatever feels right we're going to do. Like the truth is. Are those the real answers? They are not the real answers. The real answers I've given as politic as they may sound. The real answers are there is a plan and when the plan doesn't work we change the plan. And the other answer is yes we really listen to what you have to say but like 98% of the time we agree with you before you've said it because the episode that you just hated we hated six months ago when we first wrote it and we started fixing already. So there's a space between the seasons where it matters a lot because we haven't started writing the next season of the show yet. But while the show is on we can see the iceberg that you are telling us to not hit but we can't turn off the ship, we can't turn off the engines in time to not hit it. We've already written those episodes. So those are the true answers. But the inherent contradiction between those two ideas of you want to listen to us but at the same time listening to us would require you to deviate from the plan that we want you to have. It feels like it's a catch 22 which is exactly what it is. But I love being in that catch 22. I love doing that dance and I do feel like there's a lack of safety in television that's so exciting to me and that's why I watch TV because I sort of feel like anything can happen, it can sort of go off a cliff and the more fast and loose and dangerous you play the more exciting it is to watch. And sometimes that means creatively and I sort of embrace that idea. I did learn lessons from loss that I feel rolled into Prometheus. And what's interesting about the original Alien is you can watch that movie and be like I'm curious as to what's the story with that space jockey and the sterile-like ship. But that isn't important. The movie isn't telling you that that's important. The movie is telling you that the thing that just jumped out of the egg on that ship and is now stuck to John Hurt's face, that's important. That's what you're supposed to worry about now and then the sequel and so on and so forth. But the idea that Prometheus now enters into a more and maybe this is why Ridley and those guys sought me out in the first place into the movie is asking very specific questions. The characters are saying we want answers to these questions. Some of the answers they get, some of the answers they extrapolate, but then something happens that leads the resolution of the questions is secondary to their own survival. I think all of this stuff is already endemic. People don't want to see Prometheus like a bunch of people sitting around a table pondering the meaning of life. They want to see like what happens when you open Pandora's box. Like that's fundamental sci-fi storytelling. The scientist wants to make giant tomatoes to feed the world and the next thing you know there's enormous ants and spiders crawling through Albuquerque eating people. It's that idea of like there's a line, we shouldn't cross the line. We all know we shouldn't cross it. We shouldn't fly too close to the sun. We shouldn't steal fire from the gods. We do it anyway. We can't help ourselves. We're humans and then we pay the consequences. That's sci-fi 101. That's the story that Ridley wanted to tell. That's why I loved Blade Runner. It's why I loved Alien. It's like almost every Alien movie is essentially about an iteration of the same theme which is no matter what these things do to us the company keeps feeling there's a way to monetize all of it. You know? It's like all right well you think we would have learned our lesson after the second time. This time we got it. Oh you know the last one didn't end well. Yeah exactly. Really this is going to be it. It is odd. You would think for such a smart group of people they would just go you know what. But that's us. We can't help ourselves and we want to everyone says like oh my god like when people are in a scary you know in a house and they hear a noise in the attic and then they're like we should go check that out. You just moan to yourself like ugh. But if they just left the house like what's that movie? Right. You know? But in real life you would I mean would you go investigate the sound? I guess maybe you would. I'll tell you what I would do. I would call the police. That's what I do. Just immediately? Depends on the sound. I mean if it's just like a little like a squeak or something you're not going to call the police. No I will go and check it out. But what kind of sound would it have to be to get you to call the police? Let me ask you a question. Like is the house like have people been murdered in the house before? Yeah you bought the house. You got a summer home for your family. Yes. And you found out when you guys were moving in that a family had been murdered there. Right and then I hear a noise in the attic. You hear a noise that sounds like a person moaning. Yeah. I do not go and check that out. You call the police? Right. Well I send my wife or you know. She's just. I'm sure your wife would be so happy. Can you go see what the screaming sound is? Right. Yeah. That's really wonderful. That's a really good thing. You know I probably just like to say that's a really scary noise. Like we should just stay down here. And flip the house. Right. For profit. Sure. Absolutely. You bet. And try not to disclose. Don't mention the murder. I think we're grandfathered in. We weren't murdered. Yeah. You were there for a whole couple of days. Right. Exactly. Prometheus viral stuff. Yes. You first off what is your level of involvement in the in the viral things like the David video and you've got a new one. New viral video that's. Yeah. That just came out. The viral stuff. That stuff that we did on Lost all the time. I'm really into viral stuff for other movies. I did not invent viral by any stretch of the imagination. But it's always been something that I've really been interested in. One of the one of the failings I think sometimes of viral content is that it doesn't feature the actors from the movie. So it's just like it's kind of like just for the nerd. So it's like put together the trailer for the movie or whatever. And I love doing that stuff. But I'm essentially like for something to really like be interesting and compelling like it should have the same production value of the movie. And for that you need the resources. So it's like who's going to have the balls to say to Michael Fassbender can we take you for a day and do this cool idea that we had. But Ridley the great there are so many great things about him. But he and Tony run this company RSA which is essentially their commercial production house. And they have all these brilliant like young commercial directors who are enormously innovative individuals used to basically just kind of conceptualizing and figuring out on their own laptops how to make content. And so we had that resource at our disposal. And so Michael Ellenberg and I essentially started saying like the first idea I had was I was just really into TED talks. And I was like we should do a TED talk with Wayland. And it'll be we'll get if we can talk Guy into it we don't have to do a full 18 minute TED talk but we can talk about some of the themes of the movie. But it'll be like in the future like we'll set it in like 2023. And like we just have to ask Ted if they let us use their branding otherwise it'll be like a Fred talk and it'll feel like cheap and disingenuous. And I know this guy Tom Riley who is who's sort of you know this very plugged in super tech savvy very cool geek at TED who when I went to the conference was sort of like my conduit in there I called him up and was like would you guys be open to letting us use the TED branding. And he said I'll do you one better what if you showed it at TED. You know what if you unveiled it at TED and we and you could use even the TED website to show this thing. And so everybody got super excited about that when we pitched it to Ridley. And then he essentially I wrote the TED talk and then his son Luke Ridley's son Luke directed guy through the TED talk and then produced that entire thing through RSA. And then I said the other idea that we had was we should do a commercial for David the Android. I was like there's commercials for iPhones. This is before Siri came along. It was like there's a commercial for an iPad or an iPhone wouldn't a robot have a commercial like and what would that look like. And so this guy Johnny Hardstaff that's his real name. You know what his porn name is? Glenn Frankfurt. Like it's completely innocuous. No his name is Johnny Hardstaff. Of course he would have to be. He basically took that idea the David idea and ran with it and I wrote some dialogue for that but a lot of the visual ideas were totally Johnny's and were produced by those guys. And then the first piece of viral was Ridley wanted Noomi Rapace to basically be the star of the movie. And she had done Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and was already doing the Sherlock Holmes sequel. But I think Fox just wanted to see her on film to do a screen test with her. And so I wrote this transmission that she makes to Wayland in an effort to try to convince him to fund her crazy mission. And so that it would just be a monologue for her because there wasn't really any there weren't really any monologues in the movie. And so we gave that to Noomi and then she did it and it was super. Ridley didn't shoot like it wasn't just Noomi Rapace on video. He filmed it like she was in costume. And it was there was incredibly high production value. It was like this should go on the DVD and it was like screw the DVD. This should be a piece of viral. Like if I saw this on my laptop like on YouTube I would find it enormously compelling. I'd want to I'd want to go see that movie. And so that was that was sort of the genesis for that idea. So in Fox marketing I have to say like it's easy to blow smoke because essentially they're my bosses but all the people over there from Bumble Ward and and and Catherine Colbert and Nathan Marcy have all like so embraced the viral idea they completely understood what it was. And so the idea of using that to kind of bolster the more traditional trailers because there was this period where nobody was talking about Prometheus. Is it a prequel what is it. And then very quickly we just flooded everybody with all this material. So then the conversation became about like well what is this. What does this mean. How does this how does this fit into the overall puzzle of the movie. And they just the way that they doled it out and however they doled it out created a zeitgeist where there there was no zeitgeist. There was only sort of curiosity bordering on frustration. Because it's that thing of like you've got to give me something. And I think the viral became an answer to all right well this is the something that we're giving you. What's really interesting about it too is that it creates this graph. It somehow makes the it makes the film so much larger. It broadens that universe of the movie right. It's like suddenly it feels like it's got gravity that didn't have before because there are artifacts from that universe that have you know it's kind of clear the day of the commercial is not going to appear in the movie. Yes. Right. You wouldn't just have that in the middle of the film. No. It's like the idea of this universe so much more weight to have these little artifacts that live outside of the film itself which I think is really fascinating. It's something that we now have a medium where we can we can you can you can do the film for theaters. Yes. Right. And but we've got this amazing fluid flexible medium of the web that allows you to show the masses these other little pieces that kind of flesh out in some way that the universe that you're trying to create for the big screen. And I think that people are so hungry for any additional content because it creates this sort of this this feeling of being in the know being a super fan of something you have sort of a stock and trade so you're able to say like hey did you see the David video and other people are like no and you're like oh I'll send you the link and then that suddenly makes you a purveyor of content. You're on the inside and I think it's like again to go back to like kind of what Marvel did by at the end of Iron Man by just dropping in that reference to the Avengers and having you know Nick Fury pitch that Avengers initiative and that became the first piece of viral for lack of a better word that led us down the road to Avengers. But suddenly what started happening is for any Marvel movie the entire audience will just sit there through all of the credits just to have the experience of watching 90 seconds more of content and it's like did you need to do this Joss Whedon? You did not. You're giving this to me, this gift. Like you've already got my 14 bucks and you're not only going to give me like one post credit scenes but now like if I sit through the entire movie there's yet another one and thank you. Like any kind of sort of it's a premium is what it is because you know as opposed to looking at it at viral as marketing to get you to see the next one which by the way that's what the Tony Stark Nick Fury scene at the end of Iron Man is. It's viral marketing. They're essentially saying go buy a ticket for the Avengers. Like if you didn't know what like you and I knew what the Avengers were before we saw Iron Man but my wife didn't. She was like what's Avengers? And I was like oh boy. Just wait. Yeah do you have like two hours? Let's start with the Infinity Gauntlet. Yeah that's that's I mean that is interesting I mean to think that well it's actually I think of viral as purely for the internet but it's interesting to think about it as something that now is we're like putting Easter eggs in movies because they're essentially Easter eggs in some way right because fanboy culture has bled so much into the mainstream that people are looking for it. Like you said like people are like looking for these little clues. Viral is Sacha Baron Cohen showing up at the Academy Awards and spilling ashes on Ryan Seacrest and that's you know it becomes web content because you heard that it happened but when it first happened it was live theater. It was you know it was that it was that idea of a shill being in the audience so viral by definition is any form of a content that gets you more excited for the product that it's steering you towards. Is Prometheus an action movie? And before you answer I want to set this up a little bit. It seems like modern day science fiction cannot exist without it having an action component and if you look at you know a movie like 2001 I would not classify it's not an action movie. Correct. It's something else. Yes. So did you is Prometheus an action movie or is it something else? I couldn't describe it as an action movie any more than I would describe Inception as an action movie but there's a lot of explosions and people shooting guns and the entire you know that entire final set piece in Inception that takes place at the snow fortress is actually an action set piece. It just doesn't feel like an action movie so I wouldn't describe it that way. I think not that I'm putting Prometheus and Inception on the same in terms of they're the same movie I'm just answering your question in that way with saying like first and foremost I think it's a sci-fi movie and I think that it's safe to say Prometheus is as much an action movie as Alien is a horror movie which is it trades on those genre elements obviously just from the trailer you've seen there's much more of an action fuse on Prometheus than I think Alien but I would say Aliens is an action movie and Prometheus is much more it feels a lot more like Alien than Aliens to me in terms of its storytelling I think it takes its time and it's not just about getting to the next set piece that being said once that fuse gets lit there is a fair amount of sort of scope and sizzle to it and really really wanted to do that stuff. I think one of the things that I've been hearing both again in the recurring theme of this interview you take the good with the bad is the good side it's like this feels a lot like the original Alien because there's motifs in the original Alien there's an Android you're not entirely sure you trust there's people in cryo sleep there's a female lead there's clearly something happening to these people that is reminiscent of those ideas there's creeping around through dark corridors with flashlights so people go this feels a lot like Alien and then there's other people who are saying this feels a lot like Alien so it's just more of the same. That's what you're up against when you are courting that fan base and I'll take it every day of the week that's the price of doing business because I'm just as critical of other content and I would rather have people say to me for the rest of my career you screwed up a Ridley Scott movie than not say that to me because I'm like hey I got to be involved in a Ridley Scott movie. I got to screw up a Ridley Scott movie. Not only did I screw up a Ridley Scott movie I screwed up the first Ridley Scott sci-fi movie in 30 years. If that's not going to go on your headstone then what should? I think that's a good place to end it Damon thanks so much. My pleasure. Really awesome. Yeahamos Junior.