From The Archives: Stargate Writer/Producer Brad Wright Interview By Mark A. Rivera.
Stargate is coming back and I am looking forward to it, but did you all know that I interviewed writer and producer Brad Wright back in 2010? Well, this interview for my website was recorded and now I’m presenting a hero on YouTube as a flashback and as a means of anticipation for the new show as we discuss the old shows and how they came to be as well as all things science fiction. I will have a transcript of the original published interview published again and a link will be placed here presently so if you want to read the interview as well, you’ll be able to, but for now I hope you enjoy listening and thank you all for your support and if you like what I do, please consider subscribing and liking because it really helps. Thank you.
(C) Copyright 2010 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.
(C) Copyright 2026 By Mark A. Rivera
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The Genre Online Interview – Stargate Universe SG-U
Co-creator/Writer/Executive Producer – Brad Wright
By Mark A. Rivera
Brad Wright is the Co-creator and an Executive Producer of the hit SyFy channel original series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe SG-U. He also was a writer for the acclaimed 1990s revamp of The Outer Limits. With the recent release on Blu-ray Disc of Stargate Universe SG-U 1.0, Mr. Wright was kind enough to sit down and discuss the new series as well as the franchise as a whole and give insight into his career in Vancouver as a professional Writer and Producer.
I found Mr. Wright to be friendly and insightful as well as patient and he was also very down to Earth too, which I found to be quite refreshing. I think the Stargate television franchise has filled in the gap a bit left in the wake of more than a decade of Star Trek television shows and while the two properties are very different, they both offered a certain amount of escapist entertainment with a variety of stories covering many genres under one television program umbrella. I told Mr. Wright, who from then on was informal enough to let me call him Brad that I felt that his previous work on The Outer Limits: The New Series was superior to all the attempts that have been made to bring back The Twilight Zone since the original series ended back in the 60s. He replied, “I did three years of that. You know it was the best job I ever had. It was so much fun.”
I told him that it was the storytelling in The Outer Limits: The New Series and in the various incarnations of Stargate that have made the shows live well beyond the time they were made. Having reviewed the series premiere of Stargate Universe SG-U for SyFy before it premiered this past fall, I was surprised at how different this show is from the previous incarnations, especially because the preview trailers made it seem a lot like the other Stargate programs that came before it. In the 2000s the genre of sci-fi has transitioned from stories that featured lots of makeup and special effects to create interesting aliens to a more minimalist and human oriented kind of science fiction programming that can be seen in such popular TV programs as LOST, the new Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and early seasons of Smallville. Like the new Battlestar Galactica, I told Brad that the immediate difference one detects when they watch Stargate Universe SG-U is the fact that it is much more adult in tone and darker than the previous Stargate TV series. I told him that some fans of the earlier programs were thrown off by it and I’d like to know why he and Executive Producer Robert Cooper made this Stargate so different.
Brad replied, “ Well for one thing we had done 15 seasons of Stargate that was the kind of fun, action, comic book, family adventure style show and we loved it. Obviously we loved it because we spent a giant, giant chunk of our lives doing it. Going forward on what we wanted our next project to be, we wanted to do something we both different because as artists we felt, if we tried to go down the same road again and just do another kind of Stargate show in the same vein as the other two then our tanks in that particular kind of show were not going to be quite as full as they are now going forward with the new series. It is different in a lot of ways besides being more adult, but I think there are elements of the second half of the first season and in season two already that have some of those adventure science fiction elements that make people love Stargate. I mean we encounter aliens in a much bigger way in the second half of the first season. There is significantly more adventure, but we wanted to establish the new show first as a character drama primarily and in the first ten episodes that is definitely what we concentrate on and so to the Stargate fan who wonders is this going to continue to veer away from the old shows, I would say much of what they liked about the old show is definitely coming back.”
He continued stating, “originally the tenth story would have revealed this, but they had more stories than they at first imagined and so the mid season finale ended up being different, although pretty damn good.” I told him it must have been a fantastic feeling to get an actor of the caliber of Robert Carlyle involved in a sci-fi project even though he had done genre features like 28 Weeks Later, The World Is Not Enough, Eragon, and Ravenous as well as appeared in the TV movie 24: Redemption. Brad told me that Carlyle was the first person on their list and “we really didn’t expect to get him to be perfectly frank. You always say, Wow wouldn’t it be great if we got so and so and this time that was Robert Carlyle and he said yes.” I told him that Carlyle’s character from Trainspotting was to me as scary as Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. I mentioned that his character on the show seems like he is carrying a huge burden on his shoulders and that I hoped we would see more sides to his character in the second half of season one. Brad replied, “There is an episode in the second half that reveals exactly what you are talking about and gives a wonderful explanation as to who he is, why he is, and Robert Cooper did a big rewrite on the original script and directed the episode and I think it’s his best work and I see an Emmy® nomination for Robert Carlyle for that episode. I mean he is brilliant in that episode.”
asked Brad, “In the early episodes there were these insects flying around that seemed like they were trying to communicate with them that they ended up getting rid of on the ice planet and I was wondering if they were coming back?” He replied “The beings we met in air and water are not necessarily a part of our future plans, but we always considered them to be something we could revisit. The thing about SG-U is we are going to keep encountering different creatures and I wanted to emphasize a departure from English speaking latex aliens and that is why these creatures appeared sentient and seem to want to communicate and yet they are an incredibly different kind of life form and in time there are creatures that are just sharks. Mean bad things that want to kill us. At the end of Air, Part 3, we see a ship take off from the Destiny and we will pay that off in the second half of the season to come.” I mentioned that Stargate SG-1 had unprecedented support from the U.S. military because the show presented a positive image. “On SG-U do you still get that level of support since here the characters are not all heroes and we see one person take advantage of another person’s absence by messing around with his wife back on Earth?” Brad replied, “Yes we do. They are still supporters of the show and acknowledge that while they are mostly heroic, trying to be heroic, there are still human things that they have to struggle with.”
The next question I asked I was a bit nervous about because out of context or wrongly phrased, it could be misinterpreted as an accusation or something, but I also knew that if I did not ask him, I and others might never know. So I asked him “how he was able to get Stargate as a television franchise when Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had said they wanted to do their own feature film trilogy including the original movie and pretty much it’s impossible to that now because the characters you guys developed and the actors who play them for the television show are more the characters than the original movies actors would ever be at this point?”
He replied, “I agree with you. Here’s the thing. Those guys did the movie, but it was an MGM project and MGM owned the rights to do the television series and Jonathan Glassner and I were working on The Outer Limits and we approached MGM and said do you realize what a great television series this would be and they replied Of course we do. Why don’t you guys team up to do it and MGM had an arrangement with Showtime and we got a two season order coming out of the gate and we had that advantage of knowing we could develop two seasons at once. As far as Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, they made that movie and then they moved on. They may have said they wanted to do other things, but there has been over three hundred hours of Stargatesince.”
I asked him next if SG-1 would be coming to Blu-ray Disc soon since I was surprised that Stargate SG-1: Children Of The Gods Final Cut was released on DVD last year, but not Blu-ray Disc? Brad Wright replied “That was originally my plan. The project was driven almost entirely out of the desire to get Joel Goldsmith’s original score against the picture and the problem is we originally shot the series on 16mm film and framed it for both 4 by 3 and 16 by 9 television screens, but the resolution is less and what you get is grain in the blacks. So while I thought it looked great enough to come to Blu-ray and they still might, right now the powers to be feel differently because of the nature of the original tape conversion from film and because in the early seasons the effects were in standard definition. But all the new effects for the new Children Of The Gods DVD were done in high definition. “
Next I asked him how did he make the journey to professional writer? He told me that in his twenties his wife and him were in an ensemble theater company and he wrote the plays and they acted in them and they had a great time, but when they decided to have a family, they realized they were poor so he wrote spec scripts and broke into the Canadian industry fairly quickly. Once I was writing for the Canadian television industry and I was fairly well established and when MGM came to town with The Outer Limits, the thought of being able to write science fiction in his own country when there was not a lot of sci-fi being done there at the time was fantastic and I just leaped on the opportunity and never looked back.
Brad Wright told me that they have been shooting in high definition since Stargate Atlantis, but for SG-U they tested many different cameras because one of their goals was to make the show look fabulous on Blu-ray. He continued, “35mm film is still the bench mark, but as close as we can come though and in many, many ways with the Genesis camera I think it is even better. Just amazing. I mean I just buy Blu-rays now. It drives my wife crazy now I insist it’s in the home theater and not just in the living room.”
Stargate Universe SG-U is available on Blu-ray Disc now from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment and the second half of season one should be airing soon on SyFy. Read the Blu-ray Disc Set review by clicking here.
Big thanks to Brad Wright, Becca at B.H.I. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment.
© Copyright 2010 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.
No portion of this interview may be used in any way, shape or form without the express handwritten permission of Mark A. Rivera. Thank you.
