About.com posted an exclusive interview with former STAR TREK producer Ronald D. Moore, in which he compares his new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA remake to the TREK shows and told Julia Houston about the future of the show and his wrting style. Here are a few excerpts :

JH: Your re-visioning of the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reminds me a lot of what many fans like to do ""- watch something and then think about what we’d like to ’fix’ to make it even better. A little fanfic-ish, if you will. Was that at all on your mind when you were writing the script?

RM: I never looked it at that way, but it’s certainly possible. I watched the original as a kid and loved it, but there were things that bothered me.

JH: Like what?

Moore : Well, look. You set up that this culture has been at war for a thousand years, and then suddenly the Cylons say they want peace, and would you guys please gather your entire fleet over there and we’ll meet you. And don’t send out any fighters to check things out. And then Adama is the only one saying, ’Shouldn’t we send out some patrols to look around?’ And the others are all, ’No, you war monger!’

And I never understood why Baltar turned over the human race. I mean, I was watching it again recently, and there’s this vague intimation that he might have gotten a colony of his own as reward, but still! He’s willing to allow nine billion to die for no real reason?

I’ve always liked the premise, the set-up: the pilot [episode] destroys an entire civilization, and then they have to run with the Cylons nipping at their heels. I always sort of thought that the original series was a bit at odds with itself ""- very dark, but now here we are at the Casino Planet. The show’s a product of its time. It’s ABC; it’s the 70s; it’s coming off of Star Wars. There’s a real internal contradiction.

Anyway, if you’re going to do a remake, you work out what you think worked and what didn’t.

JH: I’ve interviewed several of the actors from the show, and they’ve all said pretty nice things about you. Edward James Olmos commented at length on your permissiveness with ad-libs.

RM: Absolutely. It allows the actors to bring part of what they do to the overall presentation. There’s a limit to page-written natural dialogue; scripts are a blueprint. With that, actors can find different layers, and the lines themselves will fit better if they massage them.[...]

You know, in STAR TREK ad-libbing was forbidden. Actors who wanted to alter a line had to call up to get permission. But a part of that was necessary. Star Trek’s style is so specific: the way Klingons speak, the way Romulans speak, etc.

With BSG, this show is going to feel like ’us’ and be contemporary in terms of character and dialogue, which will encourage more colloquialisms, a more natural way of speaking.[...]

[...]

One of the things we’re trying to do is reinvent the space opera, from the way we shoot it to the way things behave. Things have become very stale in the genre. We know what the characters are going to do. They’re going to sit in a big fat chair and look at the viewscreen, and so on.

Sci-Fi has developed so many well-worn grooves. There’s romantic, larger-than-life sci-fi, cyberpunk sci-fi - and that’s about it. Sometimes we get something different, like ROSWELL or BUFFY - but even BUFFY had to be so ironic about itself.

The space opera has been defined. It’s a pop-cultural phenomenon. The way this business works right now, studios say, "STAR TREK is what works - give us another STAR TREK." Trek has lots of aliens, and it has a captain - it’s hard to get past that. And then when you do get past that, they suddenly realize how expensive sci-fi is!

JH: Well, there’s a lot of re-defining in BSG. You seem to be trying to reanimate sci-fi by getting rid of stock characters, for example.

RM: Characters are more than conveniences for the plots and people with hardware. They are ideas that we can argue about. Look at STAR TREK.

In the 60s, the Enterprise was encountering an alien, but it was always a metaphor for something that was happening in our world. Now, it’s harder to write sci-fi that will wow you with science and technology. Society’s caught up.