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Last Updated on July 24, 2024 by Jella Erhard
Peek behind the scenes of The Guide to The Orville with author and science consultant André Bormanis. Discover his favorites, inspirations, and the making of the incredible world of The Orville and beyond.
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As we’re waiting for the publication of André’s new book, The Guide to The Orville, we decided to get to know him a little better and get a clear picture of how this incredible book and world came to be.
In our conversation, we skip the spoilers and dive into the heart of André’s work and his favorite moments, the characters he loves, and the joy of merging real science with fiction. He shares what fuels his creativity, recounts memorable fan interactions, and reveals the collaborative spirit that makes The Orville so special.
If you’re a fan of The Orville or just love good sci-fi, you’re in for a treat. André Bormanis opens up about his journey, his inspirations, and his favorite stories, giving us an insider’s view of the magic behind The Orville.
Once again, we’d like to thank André for being such a fascinating interviewee and for generously sharing his time and incredible knowledge with us. Enjoy!
A.C.: Could you mention some of your favorites? Favorite moment, characters, spaceships, or anything else that comes to mind when it comes to the show?
A.B.: Oh yeah, there were so many over the three seasons of the show. We did an episode that involved the Orville discovering a huge starship that was a multi-generation ship that was made to look, for all intents and purposes, as if you were on the surface of a planet when you enter the Ship. That was a lot of fun to do.
There was a planet that we featured in the very final episode of season 3 that we see only in the environmental simulator a character we’d met in an earlier show Lysella from the planet Sargus 4 has found her way back to the Orville and Kelly wants to show her some of the most amazing, you know, things that are out there for her to explore, potentially as part of the crew of a starship. And there is a planet that’s essentially like it’s an asteroid a few miles in diameter, there is centrifugal force that creates a kind of gravity so that you could walk around on the inside surface of this asteroid.
But if you got up to the poles, the gravity would start decreasing. And since this was sort of an icy, watery world, I said, you know, there’s going to be weather on this asteroid. It’s going to be internal. And we should have condensation near the poles raining down toward and then, you know, falling onto the interior surface near the equator. So, we spent several hours talking about this and the creatures who live there live on the interior. So it’s like an inside-out planet.
I had a great deal of fun designing that with our special effects supervisor, Brandon Fayette, how to make this work. I said, well, it would have to be rotating so that there is centrifugal force that creates a kind of gravity so that you could walk around on the inside surface of this asteroid. But if you got up to the poles, the gravity would start decreasing.
Another… The episode with Charlize Theron, she, as it turns out, was, spoiler alert, a con artist. She helps us navigate through a dark matter storm, which could have destroyed the ship.
Now dark matter is something that we have known about for 25 or so years at least, probably longer. There seems to be something in the universe that has a gravitational attraction which explains the way galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate their dynamics.
We have no idea what this matter might be. We can’t see it. We only know it’s there because of its gravity. And we have yet to detect it or to figure out what it might be made of. Is it a new kind of subatomic particle? Is it maybe neutrinos and they have more mass than we realize, at least some of them? Could it be microscopic black holes? Nobody knows yet.
So the problem in this episode, of course, was, well, we can’t see it and yet we’ve got to see it to be able to navigate through the dark matter storm so we talked quite a bit about how to visualize that and of course, you know, we proposed that you can’t see it with regular visual scanners. So we made up some kind of a subatomic particle as a scanning beam.
And it had that property that it just happens to illuminate whatever the dark matter is made of. And we kind of, you know, skipped over what that might be because nobody knows. And I didn’t want to produce something that five years from now people will say, well, that’s ridiculous because now we know it’s not that. It’s this other thing, right?
A.C.: The Orville had so many amazing guest stars. Do you have favorites that you were extra excited to work with?
A.B.: We have been very lucky to have some absolutely terrific guest stars. The main cast, of course, is fantastic, and we couldn’t have asked for a better group of people. Seth, you know, made all the casting decisions. The chemistry is great. They’re all really talented actors.
You know, I was particularly thrilled, I have to say, in season three, when my writing partner on The Orville, Brannon Braga, we got to write an episode where the guest star was Dolly Parton.
She’s an icon. She’s amazing. I’ve always liked her work. I’m not a particularly big fan of country music. I like classical and jazz. You see my piano over there.
But, you know, I love Dolly Parton, and some of her songs, like Jolene and others, just amazing works of art. And I was so thrilled.
She’s an amazing person, done so much good in the world, and I’ve never heard a bad thing said about her. I was so thrilled we were going to get to write a scene for her, and I was so looking forward to meeting her, but COVID put an end to all of those plans.
We started writing that episode just before the world went into the COVID lockdown in March of 2020. We were into production in March of 2020. Most of the scripts had been written. We were doing some rewrites. I think we’d shot at least one, maybe two episodes of the third season. And I remember being in a production meeting on the morning of March 13, 2020. It was a Friday. And at the end of the meeting somebody came in and set up “Everybody’s got to go home we’re shutting down.” and we knew that could happen.
We were shut down for nine months. We didn’t resume filming until 2021 and when we did it was a very strict, you know, quarantine kind of protocol. So only people who had to be on set were allowed on set.
Writers like me, we were not necessary to be on set. So we couldn’t get to go. And not only that, but Dolly Parton shot her scene back in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives. Seth and the director went out there, and they built a little one or two wall set to match the one that we had on our soundstage. And I never got to meet her.
Imani Pullum, who plays Topa, she’s an amazing young actress, she’s terrific. Charlize was great. I love Rob Lowe as Darulio. Rob Lowe was great.
And I got to, you know, I spend a certain amount of time on set, you know, before the lockdown happened. I was there, you know, two or three days a week typically. Sometimes I would be there specifically to look at computer graphics, you know, on our computer screens, and make sure that they were depicting the things that the script called for. And, you know, I would help supervise some of that.
So, Seth liked me to check those things and he’d have me come down to do that sort of stuff. And then, of course, in the visual effects, you know, after we shoot the show and we’ve got to do all of the visuals, I would be very involved in that if it was something astronomical, you know, something scientific, right? But I was on set when we were doing the first season episode with Darulio, Rob Lowe’s character, where we hear him speak. And he seems to be getting everybody excited somehow. It turns out he releases a pheromone.
It was a great episode. It was written by Liz Heldens, who’s an amazing writer and she was fantastic and did a great job on that show. Rob was just, Rob was so fun to talk to and you know, of course he’s in this blue makeup and you wouldn’t recognize him if you didn’t know it was, if it was Rob.
Something he and I have in common… We were both big fans of a TV show called Lost in Space. Okay, it was a pretty silly TV show. The robot and danger Will Robinson and it started off as kind of a serious family drama, but then it turned into this kind of crazy campy thing. But Rob and I were both huge fans as kids and we spent a lot of time talking about Lost in Space. “Do you remember that episode where the guy was dressed up like a carrot?” “Yeah, what was up with the carrot guy?” When you’re a six-year-old kid, it’s fascinating, you know.
A.C.: You’re a writer and a science consultant. Which part of your job do you enjoy the most?
A.B.: Well, I enjoy writing. I enjoy writing scripts and dialogue and coming up with stories and writing for characters, you know, and we have so many great characters on the show. When I first came to Los Angeles in 1993, I was hired to be a science consultant on the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I came here, with the intention of trying to sell stories to the show. I had written some story ideas, I had not sold anything. I wrote what we call a spec script, a speculative submission, an episode script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. I think it was in their third or fourth season. And I sent it in, and I got a very polite, thanks but no thanks, but I was encouraged enough to want to try to do that again.
And getting hired as their science consultant gave me the opportunity to go in and pitch story ideas. And I’d taken some screenwriting classes. I’d learned, you know, the basics of how to write a script for a television show and thought I had some pretty good ideas. I eventually sold a story to Star Trek: Voyager, and then a month later sold another one.
And then they asked me to write a script because everybody on the writing staff was busy and they needed somebody to quickly take a story that they developed and turn it into a script. They asked me to do it, and I did it, and they liked it.
So that’s what I kind of came out here to do.
I still love science. I still love reading about and writing about science. I love helping the other writers and Seth with the scientific ideas and visualizations on The Orville. I Gotta say it’s very fun to be kind of at the intersection of art and science and being a worker and a consultant on The Orville allows me to do that and that makes me very happy.
A.C.: As a science consultant, did you have an especially exciting or challenging task?
A.B.: Yeah, you know, I think the time travel episodes are always challenging. We did a couple of those. Pria episode, one called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which was the first of two parts.
It’s always tricky because there are always these sorts of paradoxes in time travel and the idea that if time travel were possible and you were to travel back into the past… could you kill the grandparent before your parents were born? That’s a paradox because if you kill your grandparents before your father or mother is born you would never be born. So how did you exist to travel into the past? Right?
These are the kinds of things that always crop up when you do time travel stories. But you know what’s interesting today, the way we think about time travel, at least the way physicists think about it, you know, it’s becoming, I think, more and more accepted that space and time are not fundamental properties of the Universe, that space and time are emergent properties of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics being the physics of atoms and subatomic particles and how they work and interact, which is very, very different from classical physics.
You know, if you throw a baseball and it’s spinning, you can measure exactly how it’s spinning and what direction. In quantum mechanics, if you have an electron traveling through space and it’s spinning, you cannot know how it’s spinning until you measure it. And you will find that it is either spinning up or down. Only two possibilities, up or down, in the direction in which you’re taking the measurement.
Now people at first, when they realized this is how it works, said that, oh, we’re just ignorant. You know, we just don’t know. And Albert Einstein was one of these people. He said, oh, there are hidden variables, things we don’t know about yet, that would tell you before you make the measurement which way that electron is spinning. And ultimately, we discovered Einstein was wrong. That is not the case. It is a fact that not only can you not tell ahead of time before you make the measurement, but how the electron is spinning is not determined. Its spin state doesn’t exist until you measure it. That is bizarre, right?
But here is the most bizarre thing. If you have two electrons, and they are in a state that we call entanglement, meaning that they were created at the same time, for example, they have a connection between them. And if you sent them into opposite directions, into space, hundreds, thousands of light years away from each other, you know, traveling close to the speed of light. If you measured the spin on one electron and you found it was spinning up, the other one would have to be spinning down.
How does the one tell the other which way to spin? Neither one of them has a definite spin before you make the measurement. They’re both determinate, but yet when you measure one somehow instantaneously, the other one, no matter how far away in space and time is going to be the opposite.
How does that work? Well, we think that it’s because there is some connection that transcends space and time between these entangled particles. And entangled particles are the rule in physics. All of these different subatomic particles that make up ordinary matter and all of the exotic subatomic particles, they obey these weird laws of quantum mechanics.
What does that tell us about space and time? Well, it probably tells us, among other things, they’re not fundamental. Maybe time travel is possible, if we really understand more deeply how space and time emerge from these quantum probabilities, right? It’s crazy stuff and it is very exciting to think about what that might mean.
Technology for what we can’t do with physics, what we can do. I find those kind of questions still absolutely fascinating. One of the joys of working on a show like The Orville, I get to think about and explore those questions and talk to the other writers about them, talk to Seth. And it makes for a lot of fun conversations in the writers’ room.
A.C.: The Orville fans are also passioniate. Have there been any memorable interactions with fans that have stood out to you over the years?
A.B.: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you know, we’ve been to Comic-Con a few times. I’ve been overwhelmed by how positive the reception to the show has been. The fans are always very enthusiastic. They are very generous with their praise, and they have all sorts of questions, just to see the excitement.
And I like it when the fans challenge something, you know, and they say, “Wait a minute, but if you did this, because you’ve done that…”, you know, I love that interaction. It helps keep me sharp, you know, it helps me keep thinking about some of the undermining science.
And, you know, I do talk to other scientists about the show. In fact, when I was writing The Guide to The Orville, I wanted to make sure that our discussion of our faster-than-light quantum drive, how we can travel faster than the speed of light and go to other star systems in a matter of hours or days. I wanted to come up with an approach that was different from the way that we described it back on Star Trek.
So I talked to an old college friend of mine, Joel Sercel, who is a Ph.D. plasma physicist and engineer. He helped design the engines, the ion engines for a spacecraft called Dawn that explored the asteroids Ceres and Vesta a few years ago. And Joel told me about a theory by a well-known physicist named Roger Penrose, who has his own theory of quantum gravity. And I thought, oh, I want to look into this.
And Joel explained it to me. I don’t claim I understand it in any great detail, but it’s kind of fascinating. He took a very different approach than the idea of warping space per se, and that’s what I used as the basis for describing how our quantum drive works in The Guide to the Orville. And I’m the first to admit that there is a lot of hand-waving, as we say in my description, because I can’t explain it because nobody knows how to build something like that. We have some ideas about how something like that might work.
And we know, for example, that, you know, conservation of energy would have to play a role, that this idea that space and time and gravity are not fundamental, but are emergent properties of quantum mechanics, we think that maybe that’s where the key to creating something like, you know, the quantum drive would have to be.
So that’s how I talk about it in the book and how I’ve talked about it to Seth. And you know, we wanted to distinguish our show from some of the established technology and language of Star Trek. Clearly, there’s a fair amount of overlap because, you know, we’re 400 years in the future, it’s a starship with a crew and, you know.
It is quite different. It is different in tone and different, I think, in substance in many ways. We share the same idea of humanity has a great future ahead of it. If only we can kind of get our act together today, which is the challenge, the real challenge, right?
A.C.: Is that where you get your inspiration from, colleagues? What else inspires you when creating new episodes or writing new scenes for The Orville?
A.B.: Oh yeah, absolutely. And you know, keeping up with what’s happening in the real sciences. I follow a lot of the news, I read journals online. I try to keep in touch with friends who are working in physics and astronomy, you know, I have friends who are astrophysicists, theoretical physicists, and I talk to them on a regular basis. Most of what we do on the show are things that I’m already familiar with and that I know enough to be able to talk to the writers about.
But I also want to find out what’s new, what’s happening, where are the breakthroughs. When we detected the first gravitational waves, that was only a few years ago. And I happen to know Kip Thorne. I don’t know him well, but I’ve met him a few times and was on a panel with him, who is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work developing those gravitational wave detectors, you know. And so that’s exciting and it inspires me.
It inspires me to think the big picture and what else, you know, what are these other, you know, extraordinary discoveries that are happening now that could someday lead to the kinds of technologies that would make a ship like the Orville possible.
A.C.: If you could collaborate with any historical figure in science or literature on an episode of The Orville, who would it be and what kind of episode would you create?
A.B.: Yeah, you know, that’s a great question. And I thought about that, you know, when I first saw your list of things that you wanted to talk about.
One thing that came to mind is a guy named Fred Hoyle. Fred passed away some years ago, I met him sort of accidentally thirty some years ago in Montreal, Canada, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union that I was invited to. This is when I was doing space policy work for NASA and I lived in Washington, D.C. and was a student, graduate student at George Washington University.
I’m at this I’m to this conference up in Montreal, sitting down one afternoon to have lunch in the big cafeteria and I see a table that could seat five or six people. There was just one old guy there. So, I sat down and I said, “Hey, do you mind if I sit here?”, he said, “No, no, no, no”.
And I looked at his name badge and it’s Sir Fred Hoyle. I’m like, oh my God, Fred Hoyle. I knew his name because he was a pioneer astrophysicist in the 1940s. Like probably starting in the late 30s and early 40s and 1950s. He was one of the people who figured out the fundamentals of something called stellar nucleosynthesis.
How atoms in stars, you know, stars are mostly hydrogen and helium. Stars get their energy by converting, fusing hydrogen into helium, you know, two hydrogen atoms come together to make a helium atom and it releases energy. And the helium atoms later, when you run out of hydrogen, can come together and make carbon and oxygen and things like that.
Well, Fred figured out a lot of this and how the heavy elements got made, and how stars are heavy element factories. And that’s where all the heavy elements in the universe come from. Yeah, amazing guy, right? Also a science fiction novelist. And I remember he wrote a book in the 1950s, I think, called The Black Cloud, where a black cloud is approaching our solar system and it’s going to kind of dim the sun, and we’re all very worried about how that’s going to affect the climate.
Well, it turns out this cloud is intelligent. It’s like a giant brain, and the electrical activity is happening in the charged particles in the cloud. And this thing is hundreds of millions of miles across. Fascinating. I think he was the first person who really kind of raised the idea that consciousness could exist in something other than an organic brain.
And he also came up with a lot of other really interesting ideas that were considered kind of far out and science fictional. Like, you know, why do comets historically, comets are thought of as these portents of doom, right? That they could, you know, potentially mean like, oh my God, the king is going to be murdered, you know, or this, that, or the other is going to happen. Well, they were also associated with plagues and pestilence.
Fred thought we’ve discovered organic molecules in the spectra of the tales of comets. Maybe there are actually viruses in comets or other pathogens that could fall to the Earth. You know, the Earth passes through the tales of comets, comet debris, pretty regularly. That’s when you get a meteor shower. A meteor shower is usually debris from comets that have passed through our solar system hundreds of thousands of years ago, right?
He thought maybe that was where these legends came from. Interesting idea. Very brilliant, creative man. And I just luckily sat down next to him, totally random chance, at this meeting and had a lovely conversation with Sir Fred. He was knighted by the Queen. He was The Astronomer Royal of England for many years and a wonderful, fascinating guy. I would love to collaborate with somebody like Fred Hoyle. He passed away, as I said, many years ago.
The other person I would have loved to have collaborated with is probably my favorite writer from growing up, still one of my favorite writers of all time, Ray Bradbury. First met Ray when I was 19 years old. I actually got to work on a couple of projects with him many years later for a group called the Planetary Society, which was founded by Carl Sagan and a couple of other people.
And we were doing a fundraiser based on readings of the works of Ray Bradbury. And I got to work with Ray on putting together the readings and choosing the material and getting some of the actors from Star Trek that I was working with to be presenters and to do these little short plays and readings. And it was fantastic. Lovely, wonderful man, full of enthusiasm, loves writing, loves science. He was just fantastic. He was a huge inspiration to me growing up. Very kind man and great mentor.
I still love doing it. And I was so excited when, you know, I was approached by Seth and David Goodman, one of our other writers and executive producers, about this book idea. You know, they came to me. This was actually probably just a few weeks before we had to shut down because of COVID. And Seth had told David that Dark Horse Comics, which had published some comic books that David had written, wanted to do an in-universe book about the Orville, like a coffee table book, you know.
But they wanted it to be in-universe, meaning treating the ship and its crews as if they’re real people and this is a real ship.
So Seth didn’t really have any ideas and he went to David, and David wasn’t really sure what to do with that. And David came to me and he said, you know, they want to do this book if you’ve got any ideas.
The idea that I came up with, which I pitched to David and Seth, which they loved, was what if we do it as like a new officer’s manual? Say you’ve just graduated from Union Point or this is your first ship assignment, first time you’re on a starship. What do you need to know about this specific ship and its crew so that you’re not overwhelmed when you come aboard the ship and take your place?
Kind of like, you know, I would hope that if you’re somebody in like the Navy and you’re assigned to an aircraft carrier and you’ve never been part of an aircraft carrier crew, they give you some information about what that’s like.
How big is the ship? How big is the crew? Where’s this? Where’s that? Who are the senior officers? Where do they come from? So that was my inspiration.
A.C.: It’s so amazing for us, fans as well to read the book and feel like, “Oh, I’m part of the crew”.
A.B.: Yeah, exactly. That was the whole idea. The whole idea is you are part of the crew. And then, you know, I wanted to include, you know, material from the episodes, but I didn’t want to just do episode synopses. You can find those online.
You know, if you go online, you can see the plot of every episode in a lot of detail. You can probably find some of the scripts and so forth. So, I didn’t want to just repeat that. That’s when I came up with this idea for personal logs, to have one character from each episode recount their experience in that episode and what they took away from it.
That was a lot of fun to write, too, because it gave me the chance to revisit all of those episodes and also to see them from a different perspective. What did Kelly, how did she feel after this meeting her seven year younger self and thinking about the road not taken you know all of these other things.
How did Topa feel when she finally realized that she really was not not a boy but a girl and soon to be a young woman. That was great fun. It was a creative challenge, but it made me think about, you know, what are these episodes really about?
We think about that and we talk about that sometimes in the writers’ room, but, when I write a script, when Brannon and I work together to write a script, we’re doing it somewhat intuitively. We have an outline. We outline every episode in the writers’ room. Seth is in charge of that whole process, comes up with most of the story ideas and most of the, you know, areas that we want to explore on the show. But then when we have the outline, the writer has to sit down and write the script, the dialogue, and how the characters are talking to each other. And you just kind of find that as you write, you know.
It’s great to have a partner like Brannon. I’ve known Brannon for over 30 years now, since Star Trek: The Next Generation. He and Ronald Moore wrote the great series finale for The Next Generation, All Good Things. And I got to work on that as the science consultant. That was exciting. And then we worked on Voyager and Enterprise together.
And then we worked on a show called Threshold. That only lasted about 13, 14 episodes. And then we didn’t work together for a while, probably 10 years. We’d see each other occasionally, have dinner or whatever. But then we didn’t work together again until Cosmos, which Seth MacFarlane got the ball rolling on.
Cosmos was something that I watched when I was young. I was a huge fan of Carl Sagan. I loved Carl’s writing. Another person, another scientist I would have loved to collaborate with is Carl Sagan. Sadly, he passed away much too young in the mid-1990s.
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I met him a couple of times briefly. I’ve worked with Ann Druyan, she and Carl created the original Cosmos and the movie Contact. When I found out there was going to be another season of Cosmos, Seth was the one who got it sold to Fox. It had been delayed a few times, and the astronomer that Carl and Ann had worked with on the original Cosmos was no longer available to work on the new one.
So, Brannon asked me, would you like to meet with Ann and see if she would like, you know, you, and I’m like, ah, of course. And that was great. It was fantastic.
And then the second season that we did with Anne and Neil deGrasse Tyson as the host, I was more directly involved. I was basically a science consultant on that, the first new season that we did, but then was more involved as a writer and producer on the second one.
That was just, again, it’s like a dream come true. It’s so strange, you know, because I loved the original Star Trek. I didn’t really start watching it until it was in reruns when I was in high school. I fell in love, you know. I loved Carl’s writing and I loved Cosmos. And here I am all these years later, right? And I get to do the things that I loved doing when I was a child, basically.
A.C.: What’s the most unusual or unexpected source of inspiration you’ve drawn from while working on The Orville?
A.B.: Yeah, that absolutely happens. You know, sometimes ideas just sort of come to you when we’re in the writers’ room and we’re working on stories and we run into a dead end, you know, it’s like, oh my gosh, we just set this up, now what do we do, you know, how’s that going to get fixed, you know. Sometimes, you know, something will pop into my head.
It’s true with all the other writers as well. Oh, what if we did this? What if we did that? Sometimes in my own writing, you know, when I’m just typing and trying to come up with the next sentence.
Something will pop up in my head. That never occurred to me as I was thinking about it, planning it, it just showed up, you know? And that’s part of the creative process. It’s both, and that’s what’s exciting to me about it too. It’s both invention and discovery.
When I play the piano, I’ve played the piano since I was six years old. When I got older, I learned more about harmony and theory, and I learned how to improvise and, you know, learned about chord progressions. There are times when I sit at the piano, I know what I’m doing. I’ll say, I want to start with a certain progression. I’ll do da-da-da-da. Other times, I just sit down and sort of start messing around and something just jumps that’s just so strange and it’s just preparation. It’s many many years of practice, you know, preparation.
Things just start to start to perk up from that subconscious part of your mind. When something is discovered, a new exoplanet, and, Oh my gosh seven planets orbiting a Red Dwarf star. Who would have thought such a thing was possible? It stirs my imagination, right?
A.C.: If you could bring one piece of technology from The Orville into our real world, what would it be and why?
A.B.: I would say without question the quantum drive. So, we would be able to travel to not only other star systems, but right off the bat, just the other planets in our own solar system. I would love to be able to get in a spaceship and be on the moon in a few minutes, and you know, to go to Mars, and it only takes an hour to get there, or Jupiter, Saturn. See it all of the incredible places in our own solar system, the asteroids and comets.
I would spend the first couple of years, I think, if I had a faster-than-light quantum drop, just exploring our solar system. Then I would go to the nearest star systems and, you know, you could spend thousands of years exploring just the tiniest fraction of the stars and planets in our galaxy that we know about. That would be amazing. So I’d say without question, faster than light travel.
A.C.: Can you share a behind-the-scenes moment that was particularly fun or unexpected?
A.B.: I don’t know if there is any particular one. It’s always fun to be on set and to watch the scenes being shot, to see the actors, to see how they prepare. It takes a long time to film each individual scene, because if it’s a scene that has two, three, four, five characters…
Well, you’ve got to shoot it from different angles, you’ve got to do what we call like a wide shot or an establishing shot, and then you’re typically going to do close-ups of the characters. And a two or three minute scene, you know, will typically take hours to, well, we used to say to film, now it’s all digital, but you know, you understand the idea. And the time in between takes.
Well, as a writer, I don’t have a lot to do. So I’m just kind of standing there watching. But when I get a chance to, you know, talk to the actors, talk to the camera people, the director, that’s always enjoyable. There’s not a lot of hijinks on this set.
It’s fun to watch some of the stunts and the special effects work that are done on set. I love seeing the sets being built. We did an amazing set for this episode that Brannon and I wrote for the second season. I’m sorry, the third season, where Claire Finn, our doctor, meets an old flame who’s become an admiral, somebody that she was actually married to.
We have this strange alien space station that we go in and explore. And you’ve seen that episode, of course, and you know what happens. Watching them build that set was amazing. And to see the final product was really cool. Being on set when we have a lot of aliens and makeup, that’s always fun.
We did another episode in the third season where Teleya becomes the leader of the Krill. And she does a big speech in front of a crowd of thousands. A lot of those thousands were created in the computer, right, digital effects. They’re all in the far distance.
But we probably had a hundred actors in full Krill makeup on set to be part of the parts of this crowd. To walk around on that set and to see all of these aliens, you know, it’s like, oh my God, you feel like you’re on an alien planet. And that’s really fun.
One of the great things that Seth did when he created the show is, you know, special effects are almost entirely now done in the computer. So I remember when I was working on Star Trek: Voyager, we had a beautiful six-foot-long fiberglass model of the Starship Voyager. That’s the model you see in the opening credits sequence when the ship is flying through space and it’s the model you see when, you know, the ship takes up orbit around some planet and what we call the hero shots, right?
Well, by I think about the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager, that model got put in a box and was never photographed again. They scanned it. They did 3D scanning. They have this little pen connected to a computer. They run it over the hull to get all the shapes. And then they recreated it in a digital effects software package. And that’s what we used from then on. We would still use old shots of the big beautiful model, but it was never filmed again.
When we did Star Trek: Enterprise, we never even built a model. It was just all done on the computer. It doesn’t look quite the same. And when Seth came to The Orville, he said, “I want to build a model. I want to use a model for the hero shots.” Stephen Line, and we did the design, which is amazing. And I got to see them build and shoot that model.
The That was a lot of fun. Wow, this is not done anymore. I got to see the model of the Deep Space Nine space station. I got to see the Voyager. But that was years ago. And to see a beautiful model and the lighting, the internal lighting and everything else, all the details, just gorgeous.
And then to watch how they shot that on set, you know, when we were starting. You know, the way they mounted it on a, you know, on this metal rig. And then they had the cameras on, you know, on cranes and things that could zoom around and just the movements and stuff. It was magical. It was really great. I got to say.
A.C.: Do you have a favorite ship from The Orville?
A.B: I love the Orville itself. My next favorite might be the one that we created for season three, the Pterodon, the little fighter ship that Gordon flies. And also John was flying them as well. That’s really cool. And again, I got to see that designed and built. And we had a full-scale model of it on set, which was really cool. And I think it’s a beautiful design.
It was fun to write. Brannon and I wrote the episode ‘Domino‘ which featured a very long VFX battle sequence involving the Pterodon, some Krill ships, and some Moclan ships. That was exciting to watch and to see how that came together. I think that ended up being our longest episode. I think that clocked in at like 87 and 15-20 minutes of that were the battle scenes. So that was like wow, that was pretty great.
A.C: Looking back at your career, what project or accomplishment are you most proud of, and why?
A.B: Certainly The Orville. I feel like it’s kind of the pinnacle of my career. But also, Cosmos, you know, Cosmos is right up there. It’s very special to me because Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan, his wife, were so formative to my career and my thinking, and the books that they wrote together. As well as Carl’s work, you know, his solo work, so great.
The original Cosmos TV series that they did in the early 1980s was fantastic. It was groundbreaking in a lot of ways. And again, I never would have imagined when I first saw the original Cosmos, when I met Anne and Carl at a book signing in Washington DC in the early 1990s for a book that they had written called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. They did a thing at the Smithsonian while I was living in Washington DC and got to meet them and have them sign the book. I never would have imagined that there would be another Cosmos TV series, that I would be involved in it.
It was so great. Like I said, it’s pinched me. It seems unreal sometimes. These are things that I loved and were the things that really shaped me as a person growing up, my interest in science. Carl was such a great writer of science prose. It was inspirational.
Those books that he wrote. And just when I would read a textbook, physics textbooks, they’re so dry. It’s like why can’t they be even a little like Carl Sagan? Where’s the sense of wonder, you know, where’s the excitement and again, well, you know you’re there to learn the equations and to learn how to solve them and that, Physics is applied math, and that at some level, it is what it is.
And yet I found especially through cosmos, as a physics major in college, they taught me very little, and I’m sure this is true in most schools, very little about the history of science.
I mean you learn the names Newton and Faraday and Maxwell. You know a little bit about them as people because Newton created, the universal law of gravitation and Maxwell created Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and of course everybody knows Einstein and special and general relativity but to really get deep into the lives of these men and women as we did on cosmos gives you a whole nother level of appreciation and I find that it makes me just that much more interested in the science that they created and I bet a lot of people would find science and math more interesting if it was taught by first introducing you to the people who did this work and how they did it.
Michael Faraday, who was a pioneer in electromagnetism in the 1850s and 60s, he was, born in poverty, basically. He was the son of a bookbinder. He loved science. He was fascinated by it and he lived in London and he would go to meetings of the Royal Society.
He set up in the nosebleed seats and listen to Humphry Davy and all these other people do these lectures and he would take all of these notes because he was so fascinated by it. Then he showed some of his notes to Humphry Davy who was the president of society and a brilliant chemist and vetted a lot of important stuff. And he took him on as his assistant.
If that had never happened, the history of science would be very different. And those stories are amazing and inspiring. And I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of education these days, is that inspirational component. And that’s what I hope we do with a show like The Orville and what we do with Cosmos.
A.C.: Aside from your work, what are some of your favorite science fiction books, movies, or TV shows that have influenced you?
A.B.: There’s so many. I was a huge fan of Breaking Bad. That’s a show that popped into my head here, just as you asked me the question. I happen to know the guy who created that, Vince Gilligan. He worked with a close friend of mine, Frank Spotnitz, on a show called The X-Files, which you probably know. And I met Vince a few times through Frank. More recent stuff, again, there is so much out there. My wife and I watched Drops of God, this show about a woman whose father was a wine enthusiast and a kind of an obsessive wine enthusiast.
I thought that was great. I really loved it. You know, it’s not science fiction by any means, but it was fantastic. And oh gosh, you know, there was a movie that came out here a couple of months ago called Hitman that we really liked.
I like a wide variety of things. I’m not just into science fiction, but of course science fiction is what I first fell in love with when I was young. But I love all forms of literature and music that are done well.
One of my favorite movies of all time is An American in Paris. Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant. Because I’m a huge fan of George Gershwin. And I love Gershwin on the piano. His story is an amazing story and that movie is just beautiful, a wonderful movie. And it’s all about music, and art, and living life and heartbreak. It’s just great stuff.
I’m a big fan of Jimmy Webb. We’ve used a couple of his songs that Gordon’s done. And I met him when he did a concert in Santa Barbara last year that I went to, and I met him backstage afterward. He met Seth and Scott Grimes at a party in New York a couple of months before this concert and he said he was so thrilled that they love his music and that they used a couple of his songs in our show. You know, wow, what an amazing network of interesting, fun people and creative people. It’s truly a privilege to work, you know, to be able to do this work.
A.C.: How do you see the genre of science fiction evolving in the next decade, both in TV and literature?
A.B.: I think it’s, a show like The Orville is needed now more than ever, because we do live in a kind of a dystopian world. My parents grew up in Europe during the Depression and the Second World War, as probably your parents or grandparents did, right? And that was a terrible time, and they didn’t really start sharing some of their stories until they were older.
The world is definitely a better place now in many respects than it was then, but it’s still got a lot of problems that frankly, they don’t need to be. These are not unsolvable problems. It’s just because there are people who are greedy and selfish and too in love with their own power, to sort of get out of the way and let the rest of the world who I think are, you know, most people are good, well-meaning, and generally kind-hearted. It’s the few bad people, who have the power to make the world a difficult place.
I understand that there is a lot of injustice still in the world, and that needs to be addressed. But violence is not the way to do that. I think that science fiction definitely went in a much more dystopian direction in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, you know. One of the reasons that Seth created The Orville, maybe the main reason is because he wanted to see the kind of hopeful, optimistic, forward-looking science fiction that Star Trek represented in the 60s and 70s and 80s that has been missing for so many years.
And I think we’re going to need more of that, not less of it. You know? I love the movies Alien and Blade Runner, that’s great stuff. But you need to have light as well as darkness, right? And I think that I hope that there is more optimistic, hopeful science fiction in the coming years, because I think we’re going to need it. You know, with AI, whatever that, you know, whatever doors that opens, that could be very challenging in the next few years. Or it could be very great. You know, it could be wonderful.
It’s doing, it’s already doing great work in medicine and material science and other things. You know, as long as it’s, as long as it’s in the hands of the, of people who have good intentions, and even then, you know, there are always potential problems you don’t see that could become really bad. But I like to remain optimistic.
A.C.: I also think art is safe from AI taking over because the most important thing about art is that it comes from another human being. Like singing—it’s Seth singing or you playing the piano. And that’s why we get goosebumps. It’s incredible because it comes from another human being.
A.B.: Yes. Right. I don’t think that it will ever replace humans in that respect. Certainly not in the arts, not in creative writing. It can mimic, it can generate interesting things. It may become that’s just interesting as a thing in itself. I can imagine people, you know, like… I have a nephew who’s 25 years old. He’s working on a PhD in mathematics. Very bright kid. You know, he grew up in a very different world than I did. He didn’t watch typical TV shows the way that I did growing up, that you turn in every Thursday night at eight-thirty to watch Friends or whatever.
Very different world that he grew up in and a lot of what he did with his friends in high school and college was, they would play video games together and comment on video games that other people were playing that’s like wow that’s that’s how they spent a lot of their free time. And then they would create their own videos, and they’d share them on Instagram.
Well, I think, you know, there will be interesting AI-generated videos that people will create with whatever prompts they put into the programs, that will be interesting, and that will be shared on Instagram and other platforms and get a lot of views. But they will be their own things.
I think they will be recognized as, oh, this is AI output. And I don’t think that that will substitute for people, actors, directors, screenwriters. I just don’t. I don’t really see that happening. I think there’s a lot of hype around AI. I’ve played around with chat GPT-4 and some of it I thought very good, very interesting. Others, it’s like, really? And it takes a lot of energy, you know, it uses a lot of electricity and power. It’s gotten to the point where the servers that are doing this stuff, it’s almost as much energy as the airline industries are using now, you know. I mean, it’s crazy.
And there’s a limit to how much energy will be available for those kinds of things, too. It seems like it takes exponential increases of effort on the part of the people who create these programs to just make small incremental improvements in how the software operates. I don’t think this is going to be a revolution in the next few years. Maybe I’m wrong.
I hope it continues to do things like you know look at 200,000 different protein molecules and five ones that are most likely to work as great new drugs for treating disease, we don’t know how to treat yet. That’s the kind of thing that I think it can probably do well. I hope that becomes the main application.
People are playing around with it to make a little 30-second movie. Well, that might be interesting, might be engaging for 30 seconds. Don’t think that we’re anywhere close to something like that becoming feature film length and people are going to be swarming the movies to go see something that was completely generated by AI in a theater for two hours. Maybe never. It just may never really take off in that way. It may turn out to be that’s not a useful thing for it to do.
A.C.: What do you hope will be the lasting legacy of The Orville in the realm of science fiction television?
A.B.: I hope it continues to inspire. Based on the interactions I’ve had with fans. It provides a level of sort of optimism and hope. I think younger fans watch it and they see that the future can be incredible if we choose to build that future and they will therefore be inspired to grow up to do such things, make such things possible. And I’m already seeing that in the interactions that I have with younger fans of like Comic-Con and I hope to be able to go to more.
I’m doing a Star Trek convention next month in Las Vegas. So I’ll be out there. I’m sure there will be lots of questions about The Orville.
I think, as a legacy, to be able to say that you inspired a generation of young people to think more positively about the future. To get engaged with social issues. To get involved in sciences not necessarily just as scientists or doctors or engineers, which is great of course, but as citizens who understand the importance of these technologies and the importance of using them well, using them to promote human welfare, not to hurt people, right? That’s part of the legacy of the show as well, I think.
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