10/13/2017 The 'Lost' Creators Come Clean The Lost Creators Come Clean esquire.com /entertainment/tv/interviews/a26345/lost-creators-interview/ 5/7/2014 By Emily Zemler May 7, 2014 Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are seated around the infamous hatch from Lost. The duo, who became the voice of the ABC series during its six-season run, have met up in Lindelof's office on the WBR lot in Burbank to reflect on Lost's cultural legacy exactly ten years after shooting the show's pilot. This particular hatch is made of papier-mâché and smaller than you might imagine because it was used for exterior shots during a later season of the show, but it's still indescribably thrilling to find yourself hanging out at the hatch with these two guys. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Lost premiered in September of 2004 and quickly spiraled into one of the most compelling, divisive shows on TV. Its unconventional, complexly wrought structure, enigmatic characters, and collection of perplexing mysteries became an immediate part of the cultural conversation, engaging fans in a truly obsessive way. It's arguable that no show since has generated such an extreme level of viewer involvement and debate that continues nearly four years after its finale aired. Lindelof and Cuse, who note that they hope to work together again in the future, remain as involved as the fans, and had some thoughts on why exactly Lost affected pop culture so deeply. Just don't ask them if you can take the hatch home with you. ESQUIRE.COM: So I have one really burning question about Lost that has bothered me for years and I have to ask it first: In season one, why were Sayid's fingernails so weirdly long? DAMON LINDELOF: Because Naveen Andrews liked to play the guitar between set-ups at night in an effort to lull the cast into submission. He's an amazing guitar player. I remember J.J. [Abrams] asking him about his nails when he came in to audition and Naveen was like, "Oh, I'd be happy to clip them but you'll just take away from me the one meaningful artistic expression I have in my life other than acting." Completely and totally deadpan in a way only Naveen can. But he did clip them at a certain point — 10/13/2017 The 'Lost' Creators Come Clean or at least whittled them down. But they're aggressively long and disquieting. CARLTON CUSE: That is a unique question. We have never been asked that. That's awesome because it's really hard to come up with an original Lost question so kudos to you. DL: I wish we could back it to some sort of plot machination. ESQ: It's the tenth anniversary of the show's premiere this year but when did Lost officially begin for each of you? CC: Well, it started earlier for Damon since he wrote the pilot but we started working together after the first few episodes of the first season. DL: I started in late January of 2004. That's the first time I met J.J. and it was the formal beginning of the show. We shot the pilot in March and April of 2004, and started writing the series in early June. I was with it until the end, which was May 2010. ESQ: Literally the end and also that was the title of the finale, right? DL: We wanted to make sure there was no ambiguity as to whether we were finished. We'll call the final episode "The End," we'll kill every major character off — and then not only kill them off but show what happens to them after they're dead. That's as far as you can go! CC: We thought about reincarnation but that was just a step too far. ESQ: That's for the inevitable reboot? CC: I hope that the reboot involves reincarnation. DL: I would suspect it does. CC: I could see Jack as a grasshopper. "The network brought the idea to us. The president of ABC wanted to do a drama he described as 'cast." ESQ: How was Lost originally pitched to ABC? DL: It was a slightly non-traditional pitch in that the network brought it to us. Lloyd Braun, who was the president of ABC at the time, wanted to do a drama that he described as "Cast Away: the series." He actually developed that idea with 10/13/2017 The 'Lost' Creators Come Clean Aaron Spelling and a writer named Jeffrey Lieber. They developed a show called Nowhere, that was pretty much straight up a plane crashes on an island with survival stories. Lloyd spent the entire development season trying to make that work and it was not moving in the direction he wanted so he reached out to J.J., who was running Alias at the time. I'd been trying to get a job on Alias for a couple of seasons and so then I met with J.J. and we started from square one with Lost. Basically the network said, "Can you make this thing work?" We came back with all this stuff that was in the show. We wrote an outline in five days and then they greenlit the show based on this 20-page outline and we started writing the pilot as we were casting the show. ESQ: Carlton, why did you want to be part of this show? CC: I had hired Damon to work for me on the sixth season of Nash Bridges, which was three seasons earlier. We had stayed friends and stayed in touch and once the show got picked up J.J. made it clear he was going to leave after the pilot to go do Mission: Impossible III with Tom Cruise. While Damon was a fantastic writer, he was not an experienced showrunner so he started asking me for advice about how to manage the process. I just fell in love with the material. I thought it was really compelling and I thought there was an opportunity to do a show that was going to be special. We really made the show I think we wanted to see ourselves. Fortunately that was also a show that a lot of other people wanted to see, too. We assumed people would stop asking us if we were making it up as we went along." —DAMON LINDELOF ESQ: I was always very compelled by the series' narrative structure and how unique it was, especially at the time. At what point did you know this story couldn't be told chronologically? DL: That was very early on. We understood that one of the challenges of the show was going to be that we had to slow things down. There was a natural inertia of the show for them to get off the island or for them to begin resolving some of the mysteries on the island. The flashback, on a narrative level, became a way of slowing down the storyline but also starting multiple stories in multiple places in time. We wanted it to allow us the largest canvas possible so when you step back from the show and look at the overall image, there were interesting things happening anywhere in the image. So when one place was running low on story you could go start work on another area until you suddenly realized how it connected again. The real exciting conversation happened in the middle of season three as we were begging ABC to end the show — the idea that the narrative device was going to flip out of flashbacks and into flashforwards. Once we did that we assumed people would stop asking us if we were making it up as we went along because you have to move forward on the trajectory you've set up. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below CC: We did something that no show had never done before, which was that we negotiated an end date three years out. In network television that was an unheard-of proposition. Network television operates under the assumption that you just run a show until you run it into the ground. You run it until people don't care anymore. We did not want to do that. We decided we would rather walk away than operate in that model. Once we had the end date it really allowed us to plan out what it was that we were going to do for the remaining three years of the show. Arguably only 15 to 20 episodes were subpar, bordering on turds. It would be great to pretend those never happened." —DAMON LINDELOF ESQ: Are you aware that there is someone who re-edited the entire series into chronological order? 10/13/2017 The 'Lost' Creators Come Clean DL: I heard that! I wish I had the time to watch that and I love it when fans reshape the story to fit their own specifications. But for us, so much time and energy went into designing these episodes. So the idea that someone unwound all that stuff just to tell the show in chronological order makes it the least interesting version of Lost. I watched the Godfather movies in chronological order and it was just so much worse. CC: They actually asked us at one point if we would consider putting them together in chronological order and we said, "No, absolutely not." It just doesn't work. They weren't designed to be looked at that way. ESQ: Did you ever get trapped in any corners while writing the show? CC: I think a lot of times we intentionally painted ourselves into corners.