‘Foundation’: David S. Goyer On A New Empire, Visual Effects & A Breakout Season Two Cast [Interview]

This season we learn the true backstory of the one surviving android, Demerzel, who has served Empire for so many years. What made you guys decide to go that round in season two?

Partly it’s just how I like to consume these kinds of shows, right? Sometimes I like holding back on certain characters and not examining very much of their internal lives. And then I remember Clark Peter‘s character in “The Wire,” they did that with him. He barely even spoke for the first six or seven episodes and then gradually he turned out to be this really instrumental character. And so with the character of Demerzel, I told Laura Birn, “This character’s going to be a slow burn, no pun intended, and we’re going to wait until the end of the second season to tell you not all, but some of this character’s backstory and it completely recontextualizes everything that we’ve seen for the previous 18 episodes.” And hopefully, it evokes some empathy, but also raises some other questions. And that’s part of the fun, I think, of a well-placed flashback. And I will say it wasn’t by happenstance that we did it near the end of season two. That will prove to be very, very important moving on into season three.

At least a few episodes in, it does become clear that her character has more maybe even influence and control/power than maybe we may have thought in the first season.

Sure.

Is that a red herring long term, or is there more to it that you guys have sort of discussed in the writer’s room?

Can the answer be both?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, I will say the show is very deliberate. If there’s a closeup of something, it’s there for a reason many times. And we may not explain what that reason is for a few episodes or we may not explain what it is for a season, but very little happens by happenstance.

Another actress or actor who gives a great performance this season is Rachel House as the leader of the Mentalics on Ignis.

Yes, love her.

Was that your inspiration for that new storyline?

Well, one of the things that Asmiov did with the Second Foundation is [the Menatlics] appear at the beginning of, I believe the third book but they appear as a deus ex machina, they’ve already existed. We have no idea how they were founded or how they were created, and we needed to fill in those blanks. And so that led us to this story They do have psionic abilities in the books, they’re kind of like a precursor for the Jedi. And it’s obvious that Gaal [Lou Llobell] has these abilities, so why would she be the only one? And now we meet some other people that are like her. But in the form of Rachel House. She’s just an actress that I adored, and it doesn’t always happen that you get the actor that you want or intended, but I fell in love with her. She was in a film by Taika Waititi called “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” and she’s known in America and Europe primarily for her comedic roles. She was also in “Thor: Ragnarok.” And I just loved her and she’s the only person I had in mind to play that role. [I] was able to get her on a Zoom, and she said, “Why in the world do you want me for this? I tend to do comedy.” I said, “I wrote it for you, you have to play it and I want you to play this villain,” but she’s also a villain that you don’t know quite where to take her because she’s also quite honest, and very plain-spoken and she seems to lay her cards on the table. And is the character good? Is she bad? [Rachel is]wonderful. She’s also an amazing human being in real life. But yeah, Rachel House, I was like, “I’m going to get her, I’m going to have her play this role.”

One of the things that’s so impressed me, especially with so many other shows having issues with their visual effects is there is not one drop in the quality this season from the first. As a showrunner, how did you pull that off?

Look, it’s not easy. I mean, we have an incredible visual effects team led by Chris MacLean and on season two, Mike Enriquez. And they’re just an army, literally thousands of VFX artists. We are fortunate in that the vendors that work for us are fans of the show. They know we want to do something quality, and they know that their work is going to show up on their reels. They’re annoyed by us because we’re very exacting and we’ll kick back lots of iterations of effects. And I’m very into visual effects, I QC every single shot, we had over 4,000 of them, twice a week, we have a VFX review and we’re literally going through version 16 of this shot, and Chris and the team and I are giving notes. And sometimes I’ll email these vendors myself and say, “I know this is really hard, but I just need you to go take one more pass. The shadow modeling on this, just I’m not feeling it, or it doesn’t feel fully photo-real here,” and for better or worse, that’s the approach that we take the entire show. We just want it to be as beautiful and as good as it possibly can be.

“Foundation” debuts on Friday, July 14 with new episodes every week for the following nine weeks.