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Exclusive Interview: Martin Wood The director discusses 'Sanctuary', 'Stargate' and Canada's underrated production potentialBy Michael Simpson | Thursday, October 16, 2008
Director
Martin Wood is a dedicated ambassador for Canada's film and television industry. Not only is he a passionate advocate of the country's capacity to produce entertainment that can play on the world market, he's also proving the point with his work on the
Stargate franchise and
Sanctuary.
Wood has served as both a director and producer on
Stargate SG-1 and
Stargate Atlantis. Admittedly both series are backed by major American studios, but they are shot in CinemaSpy's home city of Vancouver (see here) and the crews that work on them are comprised largely of Canadians.
Sanctuary, on the other hand, has foundations built in Canada. Wood worked closely with
Damian Kindler on the creation of the show, which began in 2007 as a series of eight high-definition webisodes. These were released on the Net in on a pay-to-download basis by Stage 3 Media, the company Kindler co-created to make Sanctuary. Stage 3 Media was originally based in a small office in a crumbling building in Vancouver's Gastown district. Since then, it has moved to newer premises and
Sanctuary has been picked up by SCI FI Channel in the United States, Movie Central/The Movie Network (TMN) in Canada and ITV in Britain.
Sanctuary has bucked the prevailing trend among the many popular series that have been shot in Vancouver. Instead of being 'imported' to Canada by US networks looking to reduce production costs, it was created, produced, directed and distributed in Canada using a cast and crew that is almost entirely Canadian. It was then popular enough on the Web to be sold south of the border. Of course, that has happened before with Canadian shows, such as
Due South,
Corner Gas and
Flashpoint, but most have been unable to capture a prime-time slot on a US channel. Sanctuary, however, has been placed at the heart of SCI FI's popular Friday night line-up alongside
Stargate Atlantis.
The show stands a chance of competing in this slot partly because it stars long-time
Stargate lead
Amanda Tapping. Also, many Stargate alumni have worked on the cast and crew, including Kindler, Wood, producer
N. John Smith, stunt co-ordinator
James Bamford and actors
Christopher Heyerdahl,
David Hewlett and
Kavan Smith.
Sanctuary is also there, though, because it has the same high production values that are seen in SCI FI's American-backed series. That's something new for a sci-fi show born in Canada and largely financed by Canadian money.
As
Martin Wood explained in a recent interview with CinemaSpy, making
Sanctuary an example of what Canada can produce has been integral to the vision that he, Kindler and Tapping have for the series. In the interview he also challenged the myth that nothing new is being produced in Canada and spoke briefly about his experience directing the DVD movie
Stargate Continuum. Continuum was praised by Stargate fans when it was released earlier this year and Wood had good news for those hoping to see him return for a future film in the series.
A brief excerpt:
CinemaSpy: I spoke to Damian a while ago and I asked him what different qualities each of you brings to the scripts that you write together. He jokingly said that you are "reckless, chaotic and irresponsible," while he knows what he was doing [see here]. I'm going to turn that around and ask you the same question.
Martin Wood: [laughs] Well here's what happens. Damian has a sense of order and a sense of what a script should look like. I'm reckless and chaotic and completely throw all those rules out and say, "Look, let's tell the story in a lot of different ways, not just by people talking about it." So where he writes the words down and says, "This is what they're going to say," I say, "No, we're going to take those words away and I'm going to show them doing it." And we have this hybrid thing happening between us where both our brains are moving in different directions. He feels he has to explain everything; I feel you don't have to explain anything and you can have a whole show with five words in it. If Tom Hanks is talking to Wilson in Castaway, you can still hold an audience and they can still watch it if you know what you're doing. Honestly, when Damian writes a script he writes a really solid story, but it's always too many pages too long. So what I'll do, I'll go into his scripts and say, "You don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this." It's like pulling the arms off a child in front of him, but he understands that it's sort of the symbiosis we have, because without the arms to pull off I wouldn't have anything to do, and without the arms being pulled off it wouldn't look as cool as it does. So we both sort of look at each other and say, "OK, this works."
