Part One...
Battlestar Galactica Blasts Off
Producer Todd Moyer discusses his upcoming Battlestar project, as well as Wing Commander and a Jason and the Argonauts revival, with IGN.
August 13, 1999
Producer Todd Moyer discusses his upcoming Battlestar Galactica project, as well as Wing Commander and a Jason and the Argonauts revival, with IGN.
Wing Commander may have failed at the box office earlier this year, but that hasn't dampened producer Todd Moyer's enthusiasm for his upcoming Battlestar Galactica feature film with Galactica creator Glen Larson.
In fact, not even former Galactica star Richard Hatch's efforts to revive the franchise-including the assurance of $60 million from potential backers and the production of a three-minute trailer that debuted at the last DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia-is enough to discourage Moyer.
"He doesn't have the rights," says Moyer. "He can't do anything. We own the rights. He can waste all his time. If he wants to waste his own money, he can do whatever he wants, but he's not allowed to do anything with the franchise. We own it."
Moyer doesn't mind the publicity, though. "Right now, if anything helps to stir up more interest in getting people talking about Battlestar Galactica, I'm happy about it," he says.
Glen Larson
Moyer explains how the idea for a Battlestar Galactica movie came about and how Larson got involved. "We were sitting around deciding on some projects we want to go after," Moyer recalls, "and my assistant said to me, 'Hey, what about Battlestar Galactica?" And I said, 'Hey, that's a perfect thing for us to do after Wing Commander. So I just aggressively got to the bottom of the rights issue. I found out that Glen Larson owned the rights. I don't even know if Glen was fully aware that he owned the feature-film rights. He has a thing under the Writer's Guild called separated rights. I convinced Glen to partner with me on the movie. The difference was I went to Glen and Glen became my producing partner.
"A lot of people have come to Glen asking him to sell the rights, and Glen Larson is one of the legends of television. He's a lot richer than these producers who are trying to buy the rights from him. What he wants to do is have some creative input, and out of mutual respect we formed a partnership to do that picture."
Moyer believes that he has the resources to do justice to Battlestar Galactica and keep it within budget. "I can make the movie reasonably cost effectively," he says. "It will still be $45 to $50 million. Because the script is big, it would be way more than that at a studio-way, way, way more. And it's only because I control the visual effects company. I will get a U.S. studio to be the distributor of the picture and I'll put up some money towards the budget, and then I'll do tax deals and a whole bunch of other things to get the full amount of the budget."
Ambitious Plans
From the sound of it, Battlestar Galactica promises to deliver in the visual department. "We have just incredible design stuff," Moyer says. "The visual effects budget is going to be $15 to $17 million. It's going to have 500 shots. It's a big movie. Whenever you show battles in space, it's always like planes, but they're in space. We're trying to do 3D space battles, so that in the middle of a space battle, you as the viewer are going to have the sense of up and around you. Space has vast direction, and it wouldn't just be like on your tail like flying an airplane. We're trying to achieve that in the movie."
Some familiar Galactica hardware will also get a major facelift in the new film. "The modern vipers from the movie go into walker mode," Moyer explains. "They land and it becomes like MechWarrior" he says, referring to the computer games featuring powered assault armor.
However, you might have to wait a little longer to see the big-screen version of Battlestar Galactica. Although Moyer had originally hoped to release the movie on Christmas 2000, this seems unlikely now since the production's September start has been rescheduled. "We're going to push it till early next year," says Moyer, "because the size of the production is huge. I'm now going to shoot it at the Babelsberg Studios in Germany. I was going to shoot it in Luxembourg where I shot my last picture, but when I went to the Babelsberg Studios on the stage where they shot Metropolis, they just have a fantastic facility there, eight huge stages."
Even though the movie won't film on location, the adventure will still unfold on alien worlds. "Everything is going to be on a soundstage," Moyer explains. "There are planet surfaces in the movie, but what you do is you build a very small portion of the set and then you build 3D backgrounds around it."
The casting process is still in the initial stages. "I've got some ideas," Moyer says. "I've talked to a bunch of people about being in it who are real interested, but it would be premature for me to say who they are."
Battlestar Galactica may be charting a direct course to the silver screen, but Moyer also plans to extend the franchise in other directions. "'Battlestar' is the jumping-off point for a lot of different businesses," he says. "We want to do an IMAX film, a ride film, start a whole line of merchandise, all this type of stuff is going to be tied to 'Battlestar.' It's a very good property for it. I have friends who produced a lot of IMAX movies, and it would be really cool to do a space battle on IMAX. There has never been one done before." The playing field looks to be clear, especially since Paramount Pictures seems to have abandoned their plans to do a Star Trek IMAX movie for the time being.
Nor is Moyer concerned that the $70 million John Travolta sci-fi flick Battlefield Earth might steal some of Battlestar Galactica's thunder. "Oh, I'm not worried about 'Battlefield Earth' at all. I've read the script," Moyer laughs, "and I'm a very close friend of the director. Battlefield Earth is being directed by Roger Christian, who is the second-unit director on Star Wars. He's a very good guy, but I'm not worried about Battlefield Earth."
Jason and the Argonauts
Although he may have his hands full with Battlestar Galactica, Moyer already has a vision for his next project. "I'm very interested in space movies," he says, "but I have another huge movie that I'm trying to get going as well, which is a modern-day version of 'Jason and the Argonauts,' which is my next huge project. That's a really big movie. It's a well-north-of-a-hundred-million-dollar movie, so we have to figure out how to generate this. I own the rights. I got the script back from DreamWorks and I'm trying to get it going."
The inspiration to do this film came from a meeting with the legendary genre filmmaker responsible for the original. "I had dinner with Ray Harryhausen a bunch of years ago in London," recalls Moyer, "and I was like, 'Wow! If I could do a 'Jason and the Argonauts' movie with modern effects, it would be great.'"
The special-effects company with which Moyer intends to pull off these ambitious projects was developed specifically for the production of Wing Commander in much the same way that George Lucas established Industrial Light and Magic in order to make the first Star Wars movie.
"I own a company called No Prisoners 3DFX," Moyer explains. "We do 3D effects for feature films. I've done a lot of movies with visual effects and, believe it or not, Wing Commander is actually an independent feature. It is not a studio film. I raised all the money on a worldwide basis, and I did all these tax deals and I sold off different territories and I got a U.S. distribution deal from Fox.
"What happens is that you have a certain amount of money to make the movie, so we bid out the visual effects to a lot of companies, and we couldn't afford to do it. Boss Films, where all my friends worked, had bid the show at $15 million for the visual-effects budget. Luckily for me, they went out of business.
"I hired a supervisor and two producers and sixteen artists from the company that we thought were the best to work on this movie, and we put them on the payroll of the picture. After the movie ended, the work I thought was so good for an incredible price, I kept the group together as a team. So we started this company that's an extension of my production company No Prisoners. We added the 3D-effects company, which specializes in 3D."
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