Delve Into 'Battlestar Galactica'

Your version of "Battlestar Galactica" seems to have a negative view of technology. In the show, Battlestar Galactica the ship survived the Cylon attack, for instance, only because it was obsolete. How much of that is just a plot device, and how much is your own ideology?

A lot of it is a plot device ... As we got into developing "Galactica" ... and once we had gotten to the place of 'well, the Cylons were created by man' and this was going to be a Frankenstein-type tale of this coming back and biting them, we just kind of embraced that, and it became more cautionary about where technology is leading you.

And the thing about "Galactica" being old and retro in the way the ship worked was in a large part just ... to restore it to being more identifiable to the audience -- to make it function like an aircraft carrier in the way you and I know an aircraft carrier, as opposed to a place where people press buttons and there's ... really cool displays ... It was a way to take the technology and shove it into the background and move the human characters forward into the narrative.

I'm concerned about things that happen in technology because I feel, like many people, that the technology outstrips our knowledge and our ethics and our sense of what to do with the technology once we have it. So, in that sense, sure, it's reflective of that. But I'm not really that much of a Luddite. You know, I have a [Palm (PALM Quote)] Treo and my laptop, and I use all this ... stuff all the time.

You've already started selling DVDs of the series. You're selling episodes on Apple's (AAPL Quote) iTunes. How does that change the economics of the business?

Well, I don't know, because they don't talk about it ... Those dollars vanish off into the entity that is NBC Universal, never to be spoken of again, and god knows, I don't know how much they make on it.

It doesn't affect our budget. We don't get any more because it's doing really well on iTunes.

When you watch television, what do you watch?

Interestingly enough ... almost no [hour-long shows]. The only hour I kind of watch is the "Sopranos" ... I watch at least two episodes of "Seinfeld" a day, and ... I'll surf through a lot of sitcoms and documentaries. "Project Runway" is the only reality show I'll touch.

When I watch other hour dramas, I have trouble connecting with it as a show. I start analyzing it ... It becomes work. I'm deconstructing it. And sitcoms are just such a different thing that I don't go there at all.

One fan question: Are any of the other major characters Cylons?

Oh, I can't tell you that.