Damon Lindelof Talks Flashbacks/Flashforwards

Maureen Ryan with The Watcher recently sat down and talked to him about Lost. Here’s a little bit about flashbacks and flashforwards that I found interesting!

So what do you do? When you’re in the writers’ room, and you know there are 70 opinions about Locke or Kate or whatever, what do you come back to in terms of guidance?

“You always come back to, ‘What do I think is cool?’ Because we are all geeks and fanboys ourselves, so you have to hold yourself to the standard of what you think is cool and hope that other people share it.

“And sometimes the idea gets executed just right. Like with the finale, it was like, we knew we had this very bold idea, which was, we knew that we were going to start using flash-forwards in the show, but is it time to do it now? In the finale? We’ll actually Trojan-horse it like it’s a flashback.

“We could pull that off in an hourlong episode, but it’s like the wheelchair with Locke, at a certain point you go, ‘Why is he sitting down in this flashback?’ So you can probably get away with it for three or four scenes before people smell a rat.

“So it was like, how could we get away with it [in the finale], how would we design it, what are the distractions, like the coffin, the suicide attempt, that you can couch the idea in.

“Other times you have ideas that are cool ideas but in the execution of them are horrible. Like the Others having a funeral for one of their own. You go, ‘That’d be cool if they wear these cool tunics and you realize they have these rituals that are sort of very pagan.’ Then you watch that on film an you go, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Let us edit it down to its barest essentials and get the hell out. It’s just bizarre.’”

It didn’t work.

“No, it didn’t. But when you have the idea, you think it’s cool. So I feel like the fans are not judging the idea, they’re judging the execution of the idea. You can’t allow the fans to edit [the writing process]. You have to continue to take risks. Sometimes you go, ‘If this doesn’t work, it’ll be a huge disaster and the fans will hate us.’ But if you don’t take risks, the fans will say, ‘The story is moving too slow, and nothing exciting is happening.’”

So is it a constant battle to balance the character stuff versus moving the story forward? Or have you developed a rhythm with that?

“No, the rhythm is completely changed now. There’s a lot of curiosity [about the new season on both sides, from the writers and the fans]. For the first time ever, I really don’t know how the fans and the public at large are going to absorb the new season. I really can’t tell you, because it’s so different.

“It’s not a different show, but the whole paradigm of the show [has changed]. Every week it was like, ‘Here’s a conflict on the island and here’s something about this character that helps explain why they’re acting this way or what’s motivating them.’ It was more emotional — [the flashbacks] were never plotty. The flashback stories always were, Carlton likes to say, these little New Yorker short stories. They had a beginning, a middle and an end. ‘This is the time that Kate got caught in Australia, this is the time that Sawyer decided to stop conning, this is the time that Locke went on walkabout, this is the time that Jack ratted out his dad.’

“Now, when you talk about doing flash-forwards on the show, the paradigm shifts entirely, because you’re showing the audience A, which is, they’re on the island, and you’re showing them Z, which is, they’re off the island. But the audience doesn’t know B through Y.

“So when you watch the flash-forwards, there’s an emotional component, but you’re also completely engaged on a plot level, because you’re like, ‘How did they get here?’ Every little sentence they say is a clue to what B through Y may be. You have to watch the show in an entirely different fashion.

“I think it’s great, and exciting for us as writers, because we were so sick of writing flashback stories. So we’ve changed the paradigm of the show, but in doing so, it’s a fairly new world in terms of how it’s going to be watched. My fundamental thinking is, half the people are going to think it’s great, and half the people are going to say, ‘This is not the “Lost” that I know and love, and I want it to go back to being the way that it was.’ And of course those will be the same people who were kvetching about the flashbacks being boring.”

So you said something interesting at Comic-Con last summer [more on that here], that flashbacks are going the way of the dodo. Are they gone?

“No, they’re not.”

Will it be a gradual transition to more flash-forwards?

“I don’t really want to say. I feel like, what the new rules are that the show plays by – [figuring that out] is going to be part of the fun of the new season. All I’ll say is, we’re done telling flashback stories that are not relevant to the uber-story of the island.”

One flashback I loved was Claire’s flashback to what happened when she was kidnapped on the island. Also Ben’s flashback to his own history on the island, that was cool.

“Or Juliet’s. She still has some chapters left in her story. It’s all a matter of how you want to tell it. I’ll just say again, we’re not done with flashbacks, but the flashbacks we want to do and are doing are relevant on a story level to the macro story of ‘Lost.’”

Read more here.