To The Max Pt 1

Dreamwatch April 2001
By Jenny Carillo

Is this character based upon anyone or any character in particular?

Not really. She’s not really any homage to anything. I mean, I had the idea about ten years ago about a bunch of genetically engineered kids escaping from a lab in Russia and escaping through the snow, and that was basically the start of it. Originally I was designing it for a feature project but it never got developed to more than a paragraph. When Chick and I first sat down I [suggested] this idea and we started to talk about it and he started to like the idea of a young girl in the urban environment, a sort of hip hop thing. Chick was skeptical about the ability to do it as science fiction and I said not to think of science fiction as silver lame and space fatigues! Science fiction can be about sociological science fiction. It can project a future of our society that’s a plausible future, and I think DARK ANGEL is a plausible future. It doesn’t jump ahead five hundred years and into pure fantasy. So Max just evolved from that little segment of a past story.

Is the character going to have a chance to deal with the injustices in the world right now?

Yes, on a microcosmic scale. We decided that we were not going to put her onto a global stage. She is not going to get dropped into Kuwait or Afghanistan to fix problems. It is really just her beat. It is her friends, her city, the stuff that is right in front of her. I think that’s okay, I mean, if everyone just did that, took responsibility for their immediate sphere, it would improve the world.

Could you tell us roughly where the series is going to go?

I see it as kind of a continuing story which unfolds like a novel, one chapter ast a time, yet each week stands alone. There is an A story and a B story for the week, and then the C story which is the continuing story that every once in a while becomes the A story. This allows us to bring some of her past into the present. We engaged the audience on a going forward basis with the resolution of that past mythology. For example, what is happening with the program back in the labs? Are there other generations after Max that are coming through that are different, and what happened to the kids that didn’t get away? We have a lot of different avenues to explore. We are going to explore some of them in the first season, and hopefully have an opportunity to explore them even further in the future.

Will we be seeing the siblings of the genetically engineered?

Yes, eventually we will see the others and they’ll have different relationships. Sometimes they’ll be allies, sometimes they’ll be adversaries. It’ll always be played from the emotional context, that Max’s real goal is to find a sense of family, of belonging. In a funny way I think she expresses a lot of things that the average teenager is going through. It’s like, what am I here for? Why have I been given these skills and these faults? I’ve got however much time on this earth, how am I going to spend it? Am I going to make the wrong choices? Who can I trust? Who do I listen to? Who can give me guidance and mentoring? She goes through it all but it’s heightened because it’s a fantasy show. But we are trying to ground it very much in drama, not fantasy. This is an one-hour drama that happens to have science fiction elements woven into it.

Your work raises the assumption that you know women quite well.

I very much enjoy the company of strong women. I feel like I’m on good footing around them. I am much less comfortable around women who see themselves as submissive, trying to make a man happy. That makes me nervous. I want to have them at an eye level kind of dialogue, so I think the women I write are an expression of the kind of women I have as friends and colleagues.

What makes you believe that this series will be a success?

First off, anyone who asks me to do a project for them knows that I deal in science fiction. My body of work, for the most part, is comprised of science fiction, and they are all dramas. I think, though, what makes us different from , say, THE X FILES or MILLENIUM is that we are here to tell a story. I think people buy experiences because they genetically resemble another experience that they have had. They invest in the experiences because of the specifics, like God in the details. Too many of the people in my business think in modular blocks – if this was successful then we must do a sequel. A lot of the shows that tried to be like THE X FILES failed. We are just trying to tell a story. We don’t know if we are going to succeed or fail, but we are off to a good start. We believe in our cast and our writing team. I think we have every chance to keep this thing alive and have it be constantly interesting and compelling.

Do you see Jessica Alba as a star of the future?

Oh, I think her potential is unlimited. I think people have a really warm response to her. She gets the audience on her side. There is a combination of strength and sweetness, a realness that makes people believe she can do anything. I certainly think she’ll have a future career, and we hope very much that DARK ANGEL will be a hit for her for a long time.

NEXT ISSUE: James Cameron reflects on his awesome contribution to the science fiction movie genre.