Molly Sullivan:  For the show-runners, can you talk about the genesis of this project? How many seasons do you see?  If you go for two seasons, will you answer this question and then have another blackout and try to solve that one?

David S. Goyer: By the end of the first season, most of the questions raised in the pilot, including the one you see at the very end, will be answered. The over-arcing cause of why the blackout happened, that’s like our background radiation mystery of the whole series. I think, to really do the show justice, we would need at least three seasons, and it can kind of accordion out, Courtney says, to 21 seasons. [Laughs]

Courtney B. Vance: Rawhide.

DSG: I’ll be in adult diapers by then. [Laughs]

Marc Guggenheim: I’ll be in adult diapers by the end of the season.

Joseph Fiennes: That depends.

DSG: In terms of the genesis, it’s loosely based on a novel that Jessica found about eight years ago.

Jessica Borsiczky Goyer: I read the novel, Flash Forward by Robert Sawyer, about eight years ago, and at the time, David and I were friends.  We had a working relationship, and I brought him the book to read, and he was just as taken with this concept as I was.  The thing we were both so taken with at the time, that stayed with us for eight years, was what if you could know your destiny?What if you could know where your choices would lead?  What would you do about it if you could know?  And we both went on to do other things.  We eventually married, and afterwards, we still kept talking about this idea. David had a lot of projects coming at him and kept, “I think this could be a television show.”  We’d originally talked about it as a movie, and I could tell it was sort of spinning in that spot in his brain where projects go to germinate, and he came back from a dinner one night with Brannon Braga, and he said, ”We talked about it. Brannon and I have completely figured out a wonderful way to do this show.”  I felt like I’d won the lottery of television writers taking an idea. We had an amazing time figuring out how to adapt it from the book.  In the book, the flashforwards are 21 years into the future.  We’ve adapted it to, obviously, about six months.  We took some other liberties, came up with new characters, and David and Brannon wrote the script, which we then sold to ABC as an available spec pilot, and we had the bible for the entire series worked out to pitch to Steve McPherson to really show where the series would go…and that was the genesis.

MS: That opening scene looked like it was partly on real freeways and partly on a studio lot.  Is that right?

DSG: All real freeways. We shut down the 110 Freeway.  That was awesome. [Laughs]

MG: Send him your hate mail.

DSG: I had a lot of friends texting me saying, “Is that you shutting this down?  Thanks.”

JBG: That was John and Joe.

MS: For how many days did you shut it down?

DSG: We shut it down intermittently for three days.  It was cool.

MS: Obviously there’s a lot of Lost influence here, including starting with the hero on the ground trying to figure out what’s going on.  What have you observers learned, because Lost has learned a lot of lessons.  What have you learned from Lost that you will apply as this goes on?

DSG: I’m pretty good friends with Damon [Lindelof].  It was interesting because the genesis of this idea happened before Lost, but I think the primary reason why we’re on ABC is I’m an enormous fan of Lost because I thought it was such a genre-breaking, bold show, and it proved to me that there could be a place for a show like that on network television.  Then once I started talking to Damon even more and he was saying how supportive ABC has been of doing something like that, I became convinced it was the right home.  By the way, we would be thrilled with half the rabid fan base of that show.  We should be so lucky.  I think Lost taught me that you can do a show with a large ensemble cast, which is something that I, as a viewer, really like; that you can tell a big cinematic story; and that Lost traffics a lot in shades of gray — different shades of morality — which is something I find really interesting.  In terms of the lessons, I don’t know.  Damon just constantly tells me, “Just tell your story.  Just stick to your guns.”

MS: Damon admits he made some mistakes early on.  He got too complicated…he did this, he did that, and set an end point when he  realized he had gone too far.  So are there any not-tos?  As great a show as Lost is, are there any not-tos that you learned from Lost?

DSG: I don’t know that the lessons of Lost are necessarily applicable to our show.  It’s kind of impossible to predict.  We’re not on the air yet. Whether or not there have been or will be any missed steps, we’re trying our best. We’re huge fans of TV.  Whenever we’re breaking story with Marc — and Marc can speak to this — we first approach it from if we were watching a television show, what would we really like to see.  Just the one thing I can say is that, as a viewer, I really like to feel that the storytellers know where they’re going, so I feel like we have an enormous obligation, especially with a show like this, where we stake this claim April 29th [in the show], and that we just constantly talk about the obligation we have toward our viewers to really figure it out and know where we’re going.

MS: For the producers: the flashforward at six months or about six months — is that going to take us from the fall to the season-ender, or are we going to see those six months develop in the first season?

MG: The answer is yes. By the end of the first season, we will get to April 29, 2010.

DSG: And beyond.

MG: Yeah.  I was going to say that’s not necessarily the season finale.  We’ll definitely get up to the future.

MS: Dominic, could you compare the two projects, since you know them intimately?

Dominic Monaghan: There are obviously similarities, as David said — a large ensemble cast, very ambitious storyline, and a very easy way to sell the show internationally.  I think there are distinct differences at the same time.  I don’t think we’re necessarily dealing with something as deeply rooted in a mythology that needs to be solved.  I think this is a show that is — not necessarily to use the word ”simplistic” — but is probably not as sophisticated in that deeply rich mythology as Lost is.

MS: What about your comfort level in this? Obviously you have a great comfort level in this kind of storytelling.  Where does that come from?

DM: I pick projects based on good scripts.  I don’t stipulate between film or theater or television.  I receive scripts and I read scripts. When I read a script that’s good, I then get married to it and talk to my agent about what happens next.  For me, what happened was I was actually in Hawaii.  I read Flash Forward.  I loved the pilot, but I called my agent and I said, “I love the show, but there’s nothing I can do.  I don’t see a part in here for me.  I don’t want to take a deeply American part away from someone who is authentically American and pretend to be American when I’m from Manchester.” [Laughs]

[Sonya Walger is pretending to leave, and Joseph Fiennes is gesturing.]

JF: Awkward.

DM: Sorry about that.

Sonya Walger: No biggie.

DM: Apparently his standards are a little higher than yours. [Laughs] Different people, different ideas… So that was my feeling, and my agent said, “Well, look. I’ll talk with the Goyers and see what they say,” and I guess David and Jessica very generously said, “Look, why don’t we meet and we’ll discuss and we’ll chat, and we’ll see what’s going on.”  We met at a bar called Delancey on Sunset and Bronson…

DSG: And you drank Boddingtons.

DM: I did drink Boddingtons from Manchester.  And essentially, it was one of the more special business meetings in my life because David had said, “What do you want to do next?  What’s your plan?” And I said, “It’s important for me as an actor, as it has been throughout my career, to try and do something drastically different from the last character I played” — the last character I played being Charlie on Lost, who David and Jessica obviously knew quite well.  And they said, ”We think we can do that.  We think that we can find a character for you that would help you to get there.”  Then all we needed to talk about was money. [Laughs]

DSG: It was a really interesting meeting. We were fans, obviously, of Lost and of Dom, but he signed on without any kind of script, without any scenes written for his character, so he took an enormous leap of faith. But it just so happened I said, “Yeah, let’s start from a place of what do you want to play in an ideal world?”  And he told us, and I said, “Interesting enough. We have a character we’re going to introduce in a few episodes that kind of hits that sweet spot.”  So there you go.

MS: Seth MacFarlane — how many episodes?

DSG: Seth is a friend of Brannon’s.  I think Brannon was just idly talking about it and saying, “Hey, do you want to come down and do a part?”  We were friends of Seth’s, and we just thought it would be fun to do it.  So he’ll be popping in and out now and then. He’s a great guy.

DM: The guy’s amazing.

JBG: He’s game to do more, having him as part of the FBI cast. I’m a ridiculous Family Guy fan, so I just shake in my boots every time he comes around.  I love it.

MS: It’s been a while since I read the book myself, but it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of characters in the book, except maybe Lloyd Simcoe.  Is he going to be the same guy, or is it just the name?

DSG: He’s a version of that character.  The book obviously jumps 21 years in the future and concerns a group of particle physicists at CERN…

JBG: Which is in Switzerland.

DSG: Which we thought, if we led with that, it’s a group of wacky particle physicists in CERN. [Laughs]

MG: Hey, that was my idea.

DSG: We met with Robert Sawyer, who completely grasped that in order to make it a TV show…basically, we took the premise and truncated it, and then we needed to provide more points of entry and we pitched it to him, and Robert liked where we were going, and he’s going to write an episode for us in the first season.

JBG: But the Lloyd character is not exactly as written in the book.  If you were to read the book to look for clues where the character is going or what his part in the story is, it wouldn’t be accurate.

DSG: It won’t help you map out the show.

MG: If the show doesn’t work, look for us to be back here next year with our show about wacky particle physicists.

MS: Does Twitter crash during those two minutes? [Laughs]

JBG: Doesn’t Twitter crash like every 20 minutes anyway?

MS: Seriously, how do they really know that these visions take place in the future? Obviously, it’s sort of a reference to the fact that we really don’t know that they take place in the future, but is there anything concrete other than the shared visions and the dates to suggest that?

DSG: You pose an interesting question, and that debate will continue on for quite a while, at least for the first act of the first season, and we pick up that debate in episode two. Just by way of example, I don’t know how many people there are in this room.  Say there are 200 or 250 people.  If we were in Flash Forward world, all 250 people would remember this moment, so there’s something disconcerting about that.  It’s kind of hard to ignore something like that, and there were definitely a lot of instances where people were in a highly populated area and all recall, down to every single detail, the exact same thing happening.  But that debate is very much something we traffic in throughout the first season.

MS: You guys, at Comic-Con, said that the kangaroo is a thing.

DSG: A thing. [Laughs]

DM: I can confirm that.

MS: That it will be back again.  Can you dig a little deeper there?

DSG: The kangaroo will be back, yes, more than once.

JF: The kangaroo is behind it all.

DSG: The kangaroo caused the blackouts.  Look, a kangaroo is a thing.  People like the kangaroo.

SW: That’s why they are tuning in.

DSG: I heart marsupials. I came up with this idea that I said I want a kangaroo on Broadway, and my line producer was like, ”What?  No, no, no.”  ”Let’s put the kangaroo in.”  He was like, “Can’t we just…” It was expensive.  Here’s the deal…

JBG: Because it couldn’t be a horse.

DSG: The trainers say it’s not like training a dog.  It’s very hard to make a kangaroo do what you want, as we learned, much to our dismay, and went into many hours of overtime on Broadway with that kangaroo.  So when I announced that the kangaroo was coming back in episode 6, you could hear this sort of collective groan come up from the production office, because it was like, “Oh man, here we go.”

MS:  Can you guys talk about the significance of April 29th, in choosing that as a date?  Also, if the flash-forward of the date of that is going to be fulfilled in the first season, will there be more flash-forwards?

MG: So can we spoil the show?

DSG: So you are asking if we thought about what happens after April 29th?

MS: Or if there will be other flash-forwards, yeah, what happens after that, and also the significance of that date…?

MG: The significance of the date is one of the mysteries of the show, so we can’t speak to it, unfortunately.

DSG: But April 29th is a Thursday when we are airing.  That’s for sure.

MG: Conveniently enough.  [Laughs]

DSG: Somebody actually did look at the calendar…

MG: As far as what’s going to happen after April 29th, that’s another mystery of the show.

DSG: It would be a disservice to our audience to say what’s going to happen after April 29th, but we’ve thought about it.

MG: Probably April 30th.

MS: You’ve got a couple of familiar faces — Alex Kingston from ER, also Gabrielle Union… When are they going to be joining?  Is Alex going to stay with the show?

DSG: Alex will be back, and Gabrielle Union shows up in episode 3. We are just about to film episodes 3 and 4, so we filmed a bunch of scenes with her.

MG: Alex’s script is written.

DSG: We had a lot of lead time in writing scripts.  We are already up to episode 11. We had seven scripts in the bank before we started shooting because it was sort of necessary, for this kind of show, to really plan a lot of stuff out in advance.

MS: How long before we find out whether they can change the future?  You are not going to tell us that?  Is that true?

DSG: No, sorry.

MG: That’s a tough one to call.

DSG: That, again, is part of the heart and soul of the show, and the debate and where I think a lot of the drama and suspense can be mined is whether, if you saw your future, what would you do about it, and can you change it?  We’ve basically broken our series regulars down into three categories.  A third of them fear the future and they are trying to do everything they can to fight it.  A third of them, their futures are aspirational and they are trying to do everything they can to make it happen.  And a third of them are kind of agnostic because they just don’t understand what it means and they are trying to figure it out.  Now maybe fighting it is what causes it to happen, or maybe trying to cause it is what causes it not to happen — that is sort of what the show is about.

JBG: Thematically, one of the things we are always talking about, and the actors think about a lot, in terms of their performances, is even if you took away the premise of this show, everyone in this room everywhere should be thinking about “What can I do to change my life?  What can I do to change my future?”

MG: Who doesn’t? Yeah.

JBG: Is my fate written in stone? Am I in control of my destiny?  Our hope is that a lot of these questions will touch the audience outside of just the premise of this show so that we can really live with these questions.

MS: This is a series and not a movie. You have this very attractive married couple who viewers, I would think, are going to meet and like immediately. You’ve established this future where he’s a drunk and she’s cheating on him.  Why are people going to come back to watch that?

SW: What’s not to love?

DSG: Yeah. I think one of the primary reasons why people come to drama is for conflict, and I think lots of marriages in real life have lots of issues they deal with — responsibility, infidelity, A, B, and C.  To me, one of the interesting things about this is this show hopes to kind of traffic in the gamut of human experience.

SW: Because they are fun together.

MS: Joseph, would you tell me what led you to take this role?  You are so established in movies and a star and all.  And what did you find challenging about it?

JF: I think I have David to blame, and his extraordinary team — good writing.  I think film is a director’s medium.  Theater actors — it just seems like it’s a medium for writers.  I was really excited by the script and the complexities, and also really the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I think — picking up from the last point, there’s this conflict. We discover characters that have such potential to become incredibly well-rounded, more so than you might get in film, because you are not a slave to the generic one-, two-, three-act arc.  I love the idea that they contradict themselves.  There’s this impending doom.  They seem to judge each other before these dates arrive.  There’s no absolute — it’s not set in stone that it would happen.  So I love the conflict element, and I’m attracted to the idea that if you were to pursue to either embrace and make the future happen as you saw it — because we’ve got to understand there’s a lot of positive flash-forwards, and if you try to avoid your negative flash-forwards, if you build a strategy in which to either embrace or reject it, it could absolutely bring about it in a self-fulfilling-prophecy way.  So I love that.  Good writing ultimately and, I think, the opportunity to get off a horse, out of a flouncy shirt, into a guy that wears a gun on his hip and some cuffs on the back of his belt. I’ll tell you, that’s quite nice.

MG: Wait until you read the script for Episode 18.

JF: Oh, no.  I’m back on a horse.

MS: Mr. Vance, you said you had a bible for the series basically built before you pitched it.  Have you shared much or any of that with the actors?  And for the actors, do you want to know, or do you just want to play it as it comes to you?

DSG: We made a decision very early on with the actors that we weren’t going to tell them a lot about where their characters are going, because I didn’t want it to affect their performance.  I sat down with everyone and made this pact.  Every now and then, we have to titrate certain information out because, otherwise, the part they would be playing, they would be utterly confused. But they don’t know where a lot of their characters are going or what’s going to happen, and I think that’s kind of fun and exciting.  Hitchcock used to do that with a lot of the actors he’d work with.  In Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten would go to a window and he’d tell Joseph Cotten, “Just go look out the window.”  And Cotten had no idea what he was looking at, but you would look at him in the movie, and it’s amazing.  That was sort of the pact we made.  That was the rider they all had to sign in their contracts.

MS: Mr. Vance, you’ve gone from one show that’s still on the air and still breathing to this.  Can you talk about why you felt it was time to make a change?

Courtney B. Vance: It’s been three years since I did Law & Order, so those are reruns.  [Laughs] I said, as we all did, we don’t know who we are very much in this series yet.  Dom doesn’t know anything about who he is, but David and Jessika and Brannon and Marc — their creative vision is infectious. You go to work and everyone is excited. I’m excited by the fact that I don’t know what’s going to happen.  Even the audience doesn’t know, but all of a sudden, David nudges me and saya, “Gosh, you’ve got to read the fifth episode.  Oh Courtney, you’ve got to read the fifth episode.  Have you read it yet?”  “I haven’t got to read it.”  “You’ve got to read it.”  So that’s different.  It’s exciting.  I trust his vision.  I trust the team that they have around them.  When you look at his work, Kickboxer 2, you go, “I want to be a part of that.”

DSG: It’s just like Star Wars only with more kicking.

CBV: That’s why I left Law & Order, to be in Kickboxer 2.  Wouldn’t you?

DSG: I have to tell a cute little anecdote we did.  Some of us did Comic-Con, and Courtney and Joe and I happened to take the train from San Diego back to Los Angeles, and I had a copy of the script for Episode 5 in my backpack, which hadn’t been released. Courtney was sitting next to me on the train, and some big things with his character happened in Episode 5. So I said, “Hey, take a look at this,” and it was really fun because I was literally sitting next to him as he was reading it, and he was sort of going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”  It was only because I could see the expression on his face.

CBV: I had to get up and walk away.  I couldn’t breathe.  And then Joe is sitting across from me, and Joe hasn’t read it either.  And he said, “Well, what happened?”  And I’m reading just a little page at a time.  I was like, “I can’t read anymore.”  He’s like, ”What?”

JF: It was fun.

CBV: That’s the writing.  The writing is phenomenal.  I think we are all in for the ride of our lives.

MG: You never thought your character would do things like that to a kangaroo.  [Laughs] I spoiled it.

CBV: Can you believe he said that?  I can’t believe you said that.  You gave it away.

MG: You’ll get to know me.

DSG: Spoiler.

MS: Are Mark and Stanford going to be anointed by, like, the President, or are we going to be meeting top officials in the U.S. government?  Are they going to be running this whole show, or are there more characters to be brought in?

DSG: Yes to everything you said.

JF: How did you know? You’ve had a flash-forward?

MS: While there’s obviously a lot of chaos early on and we get to see some of that, by the time we get into the last third or so of the pilot, people seem to be responding to this rather matter-of-factly and they are just having these conversations, “Hey, what was in your flash-forward? What was in yours?”  Obviously, you’ve got to fit a lot into the pilot, trying to keep this thing seeming grand and mysterious at the same time.  You have to deal with it logistically…

DSG: That’s the razor’s edge that the show traffics in, but the thing we say to the actors all the time is…and we talk about this in episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, and onward.  It’s not like these characters were watching a movie.  They had a sensory experience of what happened, so whatever they saw, whatever — if they were cold, if they were hot, whatever they heard, whatever they were emotionally feeling — was real to them.  So when Olivia comes back from that moment, she had genuine feelings of love for this other man, yet she can’t escape it.  It was real.  And the same for Joe when he’s drinking.  He’s been sober for seven years, but he had that physiological feeling. I think that’s the more interesting aspect of the show, honestly. I think the kind of mayhem or the high jinks is cool, but what I’m hoping people will really tune in for is the meat and potatoes of just how people are wrestling with all of these things, and the gamut of human experience in John Cho.

MG: I think one of the things the show is about is the resilience of humanity and how everyone responds to how the circumstance of the pilot speaks to that theme.

DSG: The other thing is I had this experience: I was in France immediately after 9/11, and it’s definitely baked into the DNA of this show. I never had this experience where there was this enormous outpouring of sympathy for being American, which doesn’t typically happen in Paris. I would be in these bistros, in these bars, and I would have complete strangers crying and coming up to me and hugging me and holding me and talking about where they were and what were they doing when 9/11 happened.  And I thought, obviously, it was horrendous, but it was also, for this one moment, for this brief period of time, this profoundly connecting experience for a lot of the world.  So we were trying to also go in that direction with this. In our show, you could walk into a bar a total stranger.  What do you see?  These people might start talking to each other because everyone on this planet — 6.8 billion people — experienced it. That’s this also kind of wonderful thing that brings the whole world closer together.

MS: Is there supposed to be anything narratively significant in the fact that so many people seem to be looking at their calendars during the flash-forward, or that’s just necessary to reveal what the date was?

DSG: There’s a reason why some of the characters happened to be looking at the calendar during their flash-forwards.

MG: When we see some of the flash-forwards deeper into the series, and when we catch up to the future, you will understand the answer to that question.

DSG: The other thing that’s interesting, though, is we’ve said that these flash-forwards are two minutes and 17 seconds, but in the pilot, I think the longest ones we’ve seen are of Joe’s character, which is maybe 30, 35 seconds. Part of the fun for us is we are holding a lot of things back, because what you saw in his flash-forward, depending on whether that was the beginning or the middle or the end, can kind of change your perspective of what we’ve done.  So there are some narrative tricks that we’ll be playing with the audience in that aspect.

MS: Sonya, can you talk about your character?  Now all of America knows she’s a ho.  Can you talk about having played that…? I’m kidding with you.

JF: What did I hear?

SW: I missed it.

MS: Good.  But can you talk about playing a character who knows she might possibly cheat on her husband?  And are you done with Lost?

SW: I don’t know the answer to that question.  I have absolutely no idea. As to playing Olivia — fascinating.  It is completely and utterly compelling to play somebody who thinks of herself one way, thinks of herself together — mother, wife, trauma surgeon — when you live with someone who is sober, then, historically, you’ve been the solid person and they’ve been the mess-up, and you’ve been the rock.  So to have that completely subverted and have your whole sense of identity undone by a vision of yourself, being the unfaithful one in the family home with no sign of your kid is, has a profound effect on her — a ripple effect that is felt at work, at home, in all of her relationships, because it goes to the very core of who Olivia thinks she is.

MS:  What are you going to do on April 29, 2010, aside from watching the show?

JF: Tuning in.

SW:  Just watching it on a loop.  I’m going to be watching it on a loop all day, all night.

DSG: Wow.

CBV: We’ll be doing the 18th episode that day.

MG: No, the 21st episode. It will be airing on that day.  You guys will be wrapped, probably will be post.

JBG: You guys will be on vacation.

SW: I will be in Brazil.

DSG: We will be these husks of human beings that are just so depleted that we will just be in a fetal position on the floor of the editing suite, I presume.  I hope that’s where we will be.

MG: Yes, I think that’s a remarkably accurate prediction.