Comic-Con 2010: Interview With Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci …
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How do you balance all of these projects:
Roberto Orci: Luckily, there’s two of us. We never break the soul of more than one thing at a time. Once we have the story, then, after that, it’s down to us. Really, it’s all about figuring out what the story is. Nonetheless, we’ve got a lot of things going on.
Alex Kurtzman: I think the other key for us is to really work with the best people possible. When Peter Lenkov – our showrunner – came into the room and pitched his idea for Hawaii-Five 0, it was extremely clear that not only did he have the heart and soul of the show down – and had lived it since his childhood – but that he was going to run a very tight ship. That’s a huge part of what we look for when we get involved in anything because, at the end of the day, we can’t do everything.
Roberto Orci: And we’re used to teaming up. Cause we’ve teamed up since forever. So, we like team and we like sharing the spoils and the blame.
How does the Hawaii-Five 0 remake differ from the original:
Kurtzman: Hopefully what you’ll find with this show is that the spirit of the original is very much live and well. I think the spirit of the original was about family, for us, and how the team functions as a family – the island is the fifth character in the show.
It’s about how the team works together in a crisis to solve problems:
Orci: What’s different, though, is that it’s more like a movie for us every week – it’s more of an action show. When Len Wiseman directed the pilot, he gave it a look that I think is different than the standard police procedural where if feels a bit like a movie.
Instead of just doing the murder-of-the-week, it’s a little bit more of – Hawaii is sort of an international destination and the crime center reflects its position in the world as opposed to the neighborhood murder.
Kurtzman: I think what’s also really exciting for us is that we’ve never really done a procedural before and we’ve been fascinated by them. I guess the closest thing to a cop show that we’ve done is Fringe, but we had this whole sci-fi genre spin on Fringe. So, I think the idea of doing a more straight ahead, real-world procedural is really interesting because they’re obviously very successful and the rules [of doing a procedural] is something that we wanted to learn about.
Obviously, Peter coming off of CSI knows those rules really well. So, it felt like a really great combination.
Is it hard to go from a show like Fringe which is limit-less to a show like Hawaii-Five 0, which is based in reality?
Kurtzman: No, it’s not. I think that what’s fun for us in this is that who have four characters which gives you four different entry points at all time and you have to live and internalize and externalize those characters all the time. So, there’s a wealth of information that you want the character to draw from. So, I like that.
It’s also fun to see how they function together when they’re not always in the same room to solve a crime on a clock.
Orci: The real world is just as strange
