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I'm not a sci-fi lover; I wasn't from the start. So perhaps I miss that passion for other worlds, other dimensions, that sort of scope and that magnitude of storytelling; that's not my thing though I meet plenty of people whose thing it definitely is.
People often ask me about what constitutes a nerd-friendly show - like, does it have to have sci-fi elements? But I think it's just a show that satisfies the secret craving we all have to be obsessed with something and not feel at all stupid about it.
I've always loved 'lived-in' sci-fi. We take it for granted now, but it was a revelation in the late '70s - '80s, when movies like 'Alien', 'Escape From New York', and even 'Star Wars' introduced us to the idea that the future could, in fact, look old.
What I love about sci-fi is that every generation's films are based on what we know at that point in time. We make movies about the future but it's always based on what we have. Then as science grows and we discover new things, so do our ideas. You know?
I don't know exactly how I end up with some of these roles. It mystifies me sometimes, but I am a fan of sci-fi. I love being taken into a strange world, and when it's told with imagination and credibility, I love being taken on that trip. I always have.
I am such a 'True Detective' fan. I was anticipating it each Sunday as it came. I'm kind of a sci-fi fan. I was really hooked on the 'Battlestar Galactica' series. I think I owned every box set of 'Battlestar Galactica.' I also really love 'Bob's Burgers.'
Epic science fiction game, that's always been on my mind. Post-apocalyptic, 'Fallout,' was our first choice. Sci-fi was our second at the time, when we got the 'Fallout' license. We were going to do our own post-apocalyptic universe if we didn't get 'Fallout.'
'Jurassic Park' and 'Star Wars' shoved me into loving sci-fi and film in general when I was a barely coherent 3-year-old. And 'Lord of the Rings' took me to another planet entirely. Before that series, I knew I loved writing, but after, I knew that I had to write.
I feel like we've found an interesting little corner of the sandbox here as far as the way we're telling sci-fi stories. I don't think it's limited to sci-fi - I think anything fantastic can co-exist with people you and I know, and not these hyper-real movie people.
Everybody wants blockbusters. I like to see a few pictures now and then that have to do with people and have relationships, and that's what I want to do films about. I don't want to see these sci-fi movies, and I don't want to do one of those. I don't understand it.
I'm really into sci-fi. The reason I'm an actor is because of 'Star Wars' - I saw that and I knew that's what I wanted to do. But most of the projects I'm offered as an actor are straightforward dramas, so I haven't really been given a chance to do that kind of role.
The other day, a doughnut shop in Portland called Pip's Originals tweeted me telling me that they named a doughnut after me called the 'Dirty Wu.' It is a cinnamon sugar doughnut drizzled with honey and Nutella. It was so good. I just won the Oscar in the sci-fi world.
I've worked on all sorts of things, like the sci-fi stuff for Vin Diesel, where the script is numbered and is in unphotocopy-able colours and your name is stamped into every page. And it doesn't really help because it creates a false sense of specialness about the thing.
The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.
As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?
FlashForward' is definitely not a sci-fi show. It doesn't have the mythology of 'Lost.' We have one major event that happens that you are asked to buy into. After that, you're dealing with very human ripple effects - how people deal with it and how they come to terms with it.
'FlashForward' is definitely not a sci-fi show. It doesn't have the mythology of 'Lost.' We have one major event that happens that you are asked to buy into. After that, you're dealing with very human ripple effects - how people deal with it and how they come to terms with it.
I just watch movies I like over and over. It seems to be a lot of sci-fi stuff. My favorites are probably - besides the first two 'Alien' films, I watch '2001', I watch 'Star Wars', the first ones, because those actually had a huge effect on me as well, 'Empire Strikes Back' especially.
Sci-fi fans are the best fans you can have. You could be doing the worst piece of tat which might have a robot or vampire in, and some people will become obsessed by it and know every little detail. 'Being Human' has crossed over from sci-fi fans to being a drama that everyone can enjoy.
I was dirt-poor. I could barely hold down a job. Eventually, though, I started getting small parts on shows like 'Smallville,' 'Supernatural'... and lots of really bad sci-fi movies. I was running around the woods in wolf contacts, covered in fake blood made out of pancake syrup, roaring.
Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I've done it all.
I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.
'The Watch' is first and foremost a comedy, but since I got to shoot the film using elements from the sci-fi genre, I wanted to make sure the alien didn't look goofy. I got to make a real alien that looks dangerous. That was a big plus for me because I got to do something really fun and cool.
I keep waiting for a paradigm shift to happen that will let network and studio execs see that sci-fi is the same as any other genre in terms of how you approach it - logically, character-based, with challenging ideas and forward thinking - but I worry that it might never happen in my lifetime.
I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.
Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that's unique and for me incredibly influential.
I had a book that was given to me as a kid that was called 'Faeries.' It was this dark, sinister book with pictures that used to scare me because they were these creepy little creatures. But, I was always really drawn to that fantasy world, more than a sci-fi world, in terms of outer space stuff.
'2001: A Space Odyssey' is a movie that really impressed me as a teenager. And also 'Blade Runner.' And 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' is also one of my favorites. I'm always looking for sci-fi material, and it's difficult to find original and strong material that's not just about weaponry.
I don't think I'm the world's most die-hard sci-fi fan, but I definitely grew up watching 'Star Trek' religiously - all of them: the original, 'Next Generation,' 'Deep Space Nine,' 'Voyager.' I think sci-fi has an important place in the cinema world. Fantasy is a big part of why films actually exist.
We're definitely hoping 'Travelers' attracts more than just solely the sci-fi audience, too. There are so many elements here. I think this will be a show that women like, because there's a lot of unlikely romance in it between people who were in love 300 years from now, but they're in different bodies.
Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let's say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either - in the case of horror - more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.
'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?
I've been doing sci-fi for two years, and there is always something big going on. The stakes are always huge. You're fighting for your life, or you're dealing with personal stuff. It has really high stakes attached to it, and there are green screen and explosions. You're going out on these really cool locations.
I like the sci-fi channel. Just science in general. I came across a segment on time travel and how time travel is possible. We create a spaceship that's moving at almost the speed of light, we go in that spaceship in outer space, and we fly around for a year, when we get back to Earth, Earth would've aged 10 years.
After 'Divergent,' I got a job rewriting a sci-fi script at Paramount. I think they really liked what I did, so I got a call saying, 'We're about to shoot 'Ninja Turtles' in three or four months; do you wanna come in and do a little work on the script?' That was the beginning of a many-month 'Ninja Turtle' odyssey.
Growing up, I didn't really read a lot of comics; we didn't really have the money to get them. But I grew up a universal fan of fantasy and sci-fi and watching a lot of TV. There's always this question of 'Are you a fan of sci-fi or fantasy?' But can't you be a fan of both? We love everything fantasy, my wife and I.
I know in Britain with 'Doctor Who' all the classic actors, and the people who you'd really want to, work on the show. I like that the fact that 'Torchwood' has actors that want to be involved from the stage. It has raised our game, and I'm just happy for good actors who want to be in sci-fi shows who love the genre.
I never... it's a hard thing: when I think about projects, I don't come off something and go, 'I really want to make a sci-fi film next,' or 'I really want to do a political thriller next.' It's really coming across - I'm really fascinated, partly by world building, but also about the character and what the journey is.
A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running machines? Those questions, they look like they're sci-fi but they're not.
What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it.
I grew up in the '80s, and you had these original, big-budget sci-fi adventure things all the time, not based on any source material - you'd have 'Gremlins,' 'Back to the Future,' 'E.T.' 'Ghostbusters,' the list goes on and on. I would love it so much if 'Pacific Rim' was but the first in a new wave of that sort of thing.
I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.
When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then 'Star Wars' came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with 'Close Encounters,' and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome.
I remember when I was at the first showing of 'John Dies at the End' at Sundance, and I was talking to some of the people in the standby crowd who were outside and didn't have tickets. They were just waiting in line to see if they could get in. It was this whole gang of die-hard sci-fi wacko people, and they were just fantastic.
To be honest, I wasn't a sci-fi geek at all. But I do love a good sci-fi film, especially one that can really take you away. And I read some reality-bending novels growing up, like stuff by Vonngeut, so I already had one part my brain open to the unnatural and unusual, and it's generally fun to venture into that world and film in it.
While the whole 'God Butcher Saga' had elements of fantasy, sci-fi and horror all mixed together, 'The Accursed' is very much high-fantasy. Right out of the gate, we've got elves, talk of fantastic worlds, strange creatures, Malekith riding a flying tiger, as well as more dwarves, giants, trolls and elves than you can possibly count.
What's lovely about 'Eureka' is that it's a sci-fi show, but it's not monsters from outer space; it's not craziness from outer space. It's just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.
It's 'Sharknado,' people. No one's expecting a tear-jerking, gut-wrenching emotional piece. This is just wild sci-fi action/adventure at it's finest. It's one of those dopey movies that come on in the middle of the night, and your eyes just stay open watching it 'cuz your glued to it, 'cuz you're just compelled to continue to watch it.
For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.
I have so many favourite science fiction films. I would say 'Alien' and 'Aliens' are two of my favourite sci-fi films. Also 'Children of Men' would be one of my favourite science fiction films. I love the original 'Solaris' and the remake. And even though it wasn't a film, the series 'Battlestar Galactica' was one of my favourite TV shows.