So who are some of your favorite Star Wars characters?
Han Solo was always my favorite, but I liked all the characters. Some people might call Luke a whiner, but I never saw him as that. Luke was terrific and cool, but Han was the bad boy and he had Chewie as his best pal. And then with Boba Fett being introduced in the Holiday Special, he was someone who grabbed my attention as well. He was a man of few words. But I also connected with Wedge because I could be him! I could be part of it as Wedge. I'm there, and helping the Rebellion, and surviving. I even liked Porkins!
Really, Porkins?
It's hard for me to embrace the humor about him. I do take it seriously, and I have lightened up in a lot of ways. But I can't make fun of Porkins. Come on, he gave his life for the Rebellion. You're gonna make fun of the fat guy who died over the Death Star? If you want to be one of those guys, fine. Be that way.
Ouch. On a lighter note, what's the funniest scene to you in the films?
It has to be the celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi when Leia came out dressed like she was going to a Renaissance Pleasure Fair and gave out hugs. And I was like, "What the hell just happened?!" That for me was a very maturing moment in terms of growing up and realizing that maybe the films were catering to kids and not me anymore.
So that celebration ending was worse for you than the one at the end of A New Hope?
A New Hope is a great movie for a gazillion reasons. And a lot of that is because they were constricted in terms of time and budget. And with the footage that they had a lot of scenes were cut really tight in a way that made you want more and not less. That is something that you see happening to a lot of properties and their creators after their first success that they're given more creative freedom and expanded budgets, they lose some discipline. The Matrix, I loved like crazy, but then they went off the rails on the following films. As a creator, I guess can't really fault them for doing what they wanted to do, but the process of filmmaking is very often enhanced by checks and balances in a process.
Considering how easy it is for filmmakers to make a misstep with a sequel, it's interesting that The Empire Strikes Back always ends up as the best example of what to do right in regards to making a great second film within a young franchise.
I love Empire! One of the amazing things about Empire was that it was delegated in a great way to director Irvin Kershner and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. That was a cool way to go in terms of telling the story that Lucas wanted to tell, but giving over some power to other people to interpret it. Empire had a unique style to it. I was lucky enough as a kid to see the film before it was release. My dad had made some documentary films with a guy who had done sound with American Zoetrope who had a friend who worked at ILM. So back in the day when they were making Empire and Raiders of the Lost Ark I got to go to ILM when it was at Kerner in this out-of-the-way place. And I remember walking around and watching them shoot motion control shots and see their filmmaking process. I was so excited to be there. I found out Darth Vader was Luke's father before everyone else, which was pretty killer!
Since you work on shows like "Heroes" and have such a strong connection to the idea of the Hero's Journey, what do you think makes for a compelling hero, or villain for that matter?
Both heroes and villains need the same thing. They need an internal drive or motivation that powers them, and gives them the strength to confront obstacles that are put in their way. They need to have some kind of flaw or a challenging situation in their life that really prevents them from getting what they want and living up to their full potential. Both heroes and villains need to have that desire be something that's relatable to anyone watching. Darth Vader in the first film was really that obstacle to Luke, and then when you saw Vader battle Obi-Wan you saw there was a past to this guy that made him more complex. And that went a long way in making him scary and somewhat relatable.
When I'm reading new material from writers who are submitting stories, very often they will create the ultimate secret agent living the ultimate secret agent life and I have to ask, why would I care about that character? How is that interesting? What will make me root for that character? That's something we really paid attention to on "Alias" where we have this young woman named Sydney who is a very competent spy but her emotional life was very challenging. So she had that drive, but then she had that flaw and emotional complexity that made the audience care.
Often times it seems that a character's quirks, or even their complex back stories, can make an audience take a more vested interest in where that character is going next.
Absolutely. I love how that shorthand of that was done in the original trilogy. Whether or not the Star Wars prequels needed to show us those histories is interesting.
Are there any characters in "Heroes" that remind you of Star Wars characters.
Peter Petrelli is very much a character who is very much dealing with the light side and the dark side of his powers, and who he is and who he wants to be. There certainly is a Luke Skywalker analogy there. So much of what we've done with Peter, and Peter in the future, as well as with the character Hiro Nakamura as well, both of those would drop very easily in the Star Wars mythology.
Because those are such archetypical characters, every show I've worked on has a Darth Vader character, or Han Solo moment, or a Luke Skywalker realization. The language of heroic myth from Joseph Campbell that Lucas gave to a broad audience is used by so many creative types in Hollywood.
Considering your background as an executive producer on "Heroes" have you ever got to rub elbows with some of your childhood movie icons from Star Wars?
A while back I got to go to this crazy party that Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and one of the richest guys in the world, was throwing. We were flown to the south of France, where we were put up at the Hotel Du Cap and we partied at this guy's house for a weekend, and Carrie Fisher was there! It was the greatest! It was me and Carrie Fisher and David Geffen paling around for the weekend. And I never once brought up Star Wars to her. I couldn't believe I was hanging out with her.
That's a pretty surreal way to spend a weekend. How did you resist the urge to geek out about Star Wars in front of her?
You know why I didn't? She clearly has a shtick that she does that she did for other people there who were not playing it as cool as I was. They were freaking out and asking her to do Star Wars lines. So she did her story about likeness rights and the General Kenobi speech and so on.
Why do you think people look to Star Wars for inspiration?
The Star Wars films and mythology really inspired and touched a lot of young, creative people. As we've grown up in the industry Star Wars is one of our touch points. When we're breaking story in the writers' rooms in all the shows I've worked on very often we're referencing the beats in the Star Wars movie to immediately convey what we're looking for in a certain story we're working on. The writers who I got to work with on "Alias" were hardcore fans, so all of us would be riffing on Star Wars plot points all day and would inform what we were doing on the show. There's even a scene in "Alias" that I wrote when Jack Bristow, who was Sydney's father, is referencing some technical thing and I had him do the dialog from Empire where "there's plenty of time to move the T-47s" and all this specific tech dialog that only die-hard people remember. Who knows if anyone even noticed it?
When I interviewed J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof about how much Star Wars had influenced their work on "Lost" and "Alias," it amazed me that the movies not only get referenced quite a bit on their shows, but also play an important role in the friendships made on the set.
Exactly! I remember when I was on my way to have that first meeting with Damon and I saw him walking down the hall wearing his Bantha Tracks shirt, I ran up and said "Dude!" and hugged him. We were close friends from that moment. That is such a critical moment when you think about how much Star Wars connects people. They give such a shorthand of common experience that allow people who don't know each other to instantly connect over something they both love. It gives people something exciting and positive to talk about, and bond over. That's why I'm so excited to work on franchise shows like "Heroes" that have a global reach and bring people together over a common, shared experience.
Read more about Alexander's work as well as his thoughts on transmedia on his bog -- The Global Couch. Tune into "Heroes" on Monday nights on CBS.
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