Jane Espenson

Exclusive Interview: JANE ESPENSON LOOKS TO ’BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’S’ PAST FOR SYFY’S ’CAPRICA’

Talking about the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA sequel, why she’s on the show but no longer show runner, BUFFY comics, Danny Strong, hiring James Marsters and more

There are a lot of intriguing things going on both in front of and behind the cameras on SyFy Channel’s new series CAPRICA. The series is a prequel to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, with executive producers Ron Moore and David Eick shepherding the tale of how and why Cylons were created and how humanity got itself into the fix we saw chronicled in the previous series.

Behind the scenes, Jane Espenson – a veteran writer/producer of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, FIREFLY, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and the CAPRICA DVD, to name a few prominent credits – was originally also the CAPRICA show runner, alongside fellow executive producer Kevin Murphy. However, in an unusual move, Espenson opted to step away from her show runner duties in order to focus more thoroughly on her own writing for the series.

Here’s what she had to say about CAPRICA and beyond in this exclusive interview with iF.

JANE ESPENSON: I’m still executive producer. Really the only thing that’s changed is Kevin is running the room now, as we’re breaking the last couple episodes of the season, so that I can go write on the last couple episodes. It’s really pretty much a procedural change, as much as an organizational one. Running the room and doing all the show runner stuff and all the production stuff was taking a lot of my time and it wasn’t the stuff that most interested me and I was really, really suffering from missing the writing, and I wanted to be able to get in for at least these finale episodes and not be distracted by production and actor issues and be able to genuinely do a lot of the writing. So this was initiated by me and Kevin is fantastic. Kevin has this amazing decisive equanimity that is allowing him to see it through, get stuff done, get everything lined up, so that I don’t have to be in the room, I can be at my computer, writing like a fiend. I’ve done more writing in the last couple weeks – I just couldn’t be happier. It was a matter of me asking for what I needed and getting it and it’s really a good change for the show and for everyone involved.

iF: How involved are Ron Moore and David Eick?

ESPENSON: They’re both very involved, thank the Gods. They’re fantastic. They’ve worked together for so long, they’ve got a wonderful shorthand and I’m just learning, because a lot of the producer things are things I [had] never done before, so I [was] trotting alongside them going, “Wait, what do you do when something’s way over budget? When do you cast a role in Canada and when do you cast a role in the U.S.? How much should I be listening to notes from the director, versus notes from production? How much should I be delegating to my writers versus handling myself?”’

iF: Were there things you enjoyed about hands-on producing/being the show runner?

ESPENSON: Oh, absolutely. I [enjoyed] the interaction in the room very much, because whenever there is one of those debates where everyone is all with their hearts in their throats because they really want the decision to be made in favor of the story that they think best serves the characters, and they’re going to be a little disappointed when it doesn’t come down their way and they have to embrace this other path. I never [had] to be the one who’s disappointed, because I got to say, “Oh, no, we’re going on that path.” And that’s wonderful. And I [liked] that if I read something in a writer’s script that I didn’t feel was right for our world, I had the authority to say, “No, no, this feels a little too earthbound, this doesn’t feel like …” for whatever reason, I [could] give the note. I liked having that much say.

iF: What happens now if there is a disagreement?

ESPENSON: It’s more collaborative now. But no decisions are being made that I would disagree with, so in a way, it’s moot. It’s like, "Do I have the power to veto that? I don’t choose to veto that." It’s great.

iF: Where there other aspects of hands-on producing you enjoyed?

ESPENSON: To my surprise, I’m kind of enjoying learning how to make a script filmable, which I never gave enough thought to before, like, “Wait, if we’re on that set one time, we don’t have enough there to make a day on that location, so I either have to move more scenes to that set, or find sets that are near that set, the location that’s near where that set is, to pull up the day.” Learning the line producer stuff so that I can help make our days makeable is kind of fascinating. There’s a jigsaw puzzle feeling to that, that should feel like compromise but doesn’t, because you realize when you actually get the math right and you get the puzzle solved, the show looks better, because you’re not asking people to go to five sets and make them look okay, you’re asking them to go to three sets and make them look spectacular, and you end up with a better-looking show. And the alchemy of that is really shockingly fun.

iF: With CAPRICA, are you finding it hard or easy to write into the BATTLESTAR narrative that already exists?

ESPENSON: Actually, shockingly easy, because of this wonderful fifty-eight-year cushion between our events and those events. BATTLESTAR was my last home before [CAPRICA] and I still feel very much a part of that. Really, BATTLESTAR’s the mother ship. You don’t feel the need to set up stuff. I mean, we’re setting up stuff in this big wonderful broad-stroke palette that we have to work with, which is, we have the war coming up, then we know the skin jobs are going to arrive, then they’re going to help the Centurions make more skin jobs and we’re off and running. All we have to do is make sure we don’t contradict anything that’s been said about that road to that first war, and not a lot’s been said. We’re inferring things that seem natural to us, which is a lot of fun, because you go, "Before these twelve colonies were unified under one government, they would have certainly had separate national anthems, national creeds, national identities. Maybe they would still use some [different] languages, they would still use cultural markers like the Tauran tattoos that we’ve seen. All we have to do is backtrack what we know and create a livable, reasonable, interesting culture." For sci-fi writers, that’s a dream – that’s not a chore, that’s fun.

iF: Because this is all based on this tying into BATTLESTAR, do you feel in any sense like it’s writing fanfic for BATTLESTAR?

ESPENSON: Well, I don’t like fanfic that introduces a lot of original characters. I like fanfic about my main characters, and we’re not seeing those characters, so it doesn’t quite feel like fanfic. What felt like fanfic was writing “Harsh Light of Day” for BUFFY, which was taking characters that already existed and then being asked to put them in unusual and sexy and charged situations. All of writing BUFFY felt like writing fanfic. To a certain extent, BATTLESTAR did. This [CAPRICA] is starting to [feel that way], as we’re getting more and falling more in love with these characters as we’re establishing them. It’s starting to become like [gasps], “Oh, my God, we can see Clarice do this, we can see Amanda do that, we can take these characters to these places.” We weren’t sure [at the outset] where it was natural for them to go. Now it’s starting to get that, but for the first eight episodes, you’re really concentrating on establishing them and turning them into those people who you want to write fanfic about.

iF: Speaking of characters you want to write about, you wrote a five-book arc of the BUFFY comics …

ESPENSON: I believe they are all out and available. So anyone who hasn’t been aware of that should be heading down to HiDeHo Comics in Santa Monica or wherever your local vendor is and pick up the BUFFY comics. I’m very proud of this particular batch. Joss handed me an amazing segment of story and gave me a lot of leeway to do what I wanted to do with it, and I think I may have finally cracked the formula for lots of action, not so much talk that works for a comic book. I may have finally got it.

iF: Is Drew Greenberg, one of your BUFFY TV series writing colleagues, currently working on BATTLESTAR?

ESPENSON: Yes. He’s sort of on loan to us between seasons of WAREHOUSE 13. They have this long hiatus. Unfortunately, we lost one of our writers, Kath Lingenfelter, who we all adored. [She] had to leave the show for personal reasons. I had this hole in the staff right when Drew was on this hiatus and was available to come work with us, and I was lucky enough that he agreed to come with us.

iF: James Marsters has a recurring role on CAPRICA as a terrorist. How instrumental were you in getting him hired?

ESPENSON: I was very instrumental in the hiring of James Marsters. I knew he was right for our show, creatively, and [wanted him on] for the joy of the BUFFY-meets-BATTLESTAR, which just gave me personal delight. I knew he was perfect and I pushed very, very hard for him.

iF: Still speaking of BUFFY, how proud of you of your friend Danny Strong, who you wrote a lot of material when he played Jonathan on that series, now that he’s the multi-award-winning writer of HBO’s telefilm RECOUNT, about the Bush/Kerry vote recount in Florida?

ESPENSON: I’m always proud of Danny Strong. Oh, my God. To have written RECOUNT, and the projects he’s involved in now – BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION – he’s getting the most amazing projects. I’m blown away. He was the actor coming to me saying, "Will you look at my script?" And just a couple years later, he has leapfrogged over me to A-list feature guy. Fantastic. And it’s totally deserved. He’s brilliant, his writing is amazing. Plus fantastic. I know him really well and I didn’t know he was that much of a genius. When he pitched me RECOUNT [as] just a project he wanted to do, I was very dubious. I was like, "The only people who do movies like that are HBO. You’re limiting your market. Why not do something a little more salable? And everybody knows how it turns out, you’re going to need to get rights to all these books …" It just sounded like an impossible project, and then bam, he’s the king of the writing world. It’s fantastic.

iF: Given the fact that you presumably are showing the prototypes of the Cylons, will we be seeing actors we recognize as the Twelve?

ESPENSON: The thing about the prototypes of the Cylons is that it is a bit down the road. What we’ve got right now is one girl and one robot. I don’t know that you would see the actors [who played Cylons on BATTLESTAR]. You would see – well, I’m not going to answer. It’ll be fun to watch it unfold.

iF: Do you have anything else in the works?

ESPENSON: Really, no. My focus is on CAPRICA right now. There may be projects that I do down the line that I’m incubating, but I have to preserve my entire heart and brain right now, because CAPRICA is all-encompassing.