In a day and age when artificial intelligence apps can churn out a resumé, job posting, or term paper in seconds, how do you stay ahead of the science fiction game when it comes to screenwriting? You make it about people, not technology.

Dean Devlin is the writer behind some of Hollywood’s biggest sci-fi films, including Stargate, Independence Day, and Godzilla. His latest series, which he co-showruns with longtime collaborator Jonathan Glassner, is The Ark which follows crew members aboard a spaceship called Ark One some one hundred years in the future. When the unthinkable happens and they’re forced to make do with backup leaders and limited supplies, the question ultimately becomes about their humanity – the choices they’ll make and the type of people they’ll become.

Tell me about your approach to both story and character development with this series. We’re essentially thrust into the middle of the timeline at the beginning, so backstory becomes very important. And not just for your characters but for what led to the need for an “ark” in the first place.

In this particular case we’re talking about a show that’s going to be told in a serialized way. Your first few episodes really are Act One, right? It’s your setup. There have been so many science fiction shows about people in spaceships! Your approach can be “I’m going to do something so original that no one’s ever seen any of this”. And then it becomes very plot heavy to try and do that.

Or you can take another approach, which we did. We said “Let’s not pretend like we’re inventing the genre”. Let’s assume that everyone has seen these other shows. Let’s stand on the shoulders of giants. But then let’s use that to have people think that they know where we’re going, or think that we know who our characters are. Or think, “Oh well, I’ve seen that character. I know what’s going to happen there.”

So, I think part of it for us was to see how we could take the tropes of the genre to help us quickly establish our plot and our story. And then, allow the format of a serialized TV show to take us to places that you wouldn’t expect, to develop the characters in ways that is surprising. And hopefully make a show that’s compelling from a character point of view, since this is not a show that’s going to have aliens of the week or giant laser battles.

So “The Ark” is mainly character-driven?

That’s entirely what the show is. It’s entirely about these characters.

However, they’re on a damaged ship… and space is always trying to kill us! That’s the thing about being in outer space, it’s literally trying to kill you every second of the day. So if you’re on a faulty ship and you don’t have the people who know how to run it, that creates a pressure.

What I think is interesting is that it’s the life-and-death stakes of these pressures that we experience in real life that force our true characters to come out. For the best and for the worst. Even some of the characters that behave badly early on… they’re not bad people. It’s just the way they’re responding to the pressure and to the high stakes of the situation. So that’s what the entire season and the entire show is about. It’s about the triumph of the human will, how the best of us can rise and how the worst of us can become obstacles in that.

Dean Devlin

Are there any religious undertones to the story beyond the title?

I wouldn’t say there’s a religious overtone, but there’s certainly classic storytelling that will be touched upon. I think I do believe in the collective unconscious. When you look back on just the resurrection story, for instance…how many resurrection stories were there before the Jesus story?

So again, I don’t think this is a commentary on religion, or any one religion…but I do think it touches into the way in which we use stories to understand our world and to understand each other.

Tell me about co-showrunning with Jonathan Glassner.

The first time I ever did a serialized television series, it was with Jonathan Glassner. It was a show called The Outpost and he really was something of a mentor for me, on how to slowly peel the onion. And what kinds of ingredients you need to make that very particular type of meal.

I wrote this pilot really focusing on the aspect of “If I got to do my own spaceship show, what would be the angle?” And for me the angle was “What if there was this horrible accident, but the people who didn’t survive were the people who were in charge of running it? What would happen to the rest?” My assumption is everyone on board was picked for a reason. But what if that reason wasn’t to run the ship? What would happen?

That really became my whole reason for wanting to write the TV show. But then as we got into it, and when I showed the original draft to Jonathan, he started giving me notes, “I see where you’re going with this character… but what if we change it slightly? Because that can give us a longer arc in this direction, or that direction”… and it really opened my eyes as to how to shape that pipeline. Which may not have been as good as a pilot, but was much better for the health of the show.

So I learned a lot from him. And of course, after the pilot, Jonathan assembled this incredible room of television writers. They started coming up with ideas and plotting things out and then they would bring me in and I’d give some notes. But for the most part I was just enchanted with where they wanted to go with things, and I was constantly surprised. I think that’s the fun of a really good writers room and having the first group of people who have very different thoughts on how things should go. And it’s the advantage of telling a story over many episodes as opposed to just a feature.

What makes a good sci-fi story hold up over time?

I think that at the end of the day, it’s like anything else. It’s always the characters. Do we like them? Do we hate them? Are we compelled by them? I don’t think all characters have to be likable, but I do think they have to become compelling. You have to want to watch them. It’s very tempting to get overly enthusiastic about digital effects and giant plot twists, but at the end of the day, it’s always character. When I think back on when I’ve done things that worked and when I’ve done things that failed, it was always the difference of how I approached the characters in those projects.

Trent Baylor (Miles Barrow), Spencer Lane ( Reece Ritchie), Lt. James Brice (Lt. James Brice) Photo by: Aleksandar Letic/ Ark TV Holdings, Inc. SYFY)

What do you personally like about in writing in this genre, and what do you maybe find a little bit more challenging?

What I love is that science fiction allows you to take issues out of the contemporary, out of the argument that’s happening today, and put them in a more abstract way where discussion can take place. When I was a little boy, my mother was a guest star on the original Star Trek, and that’s how I fell in love with science fiction.

And I remember at the time thinking, “Wait a minute, Star Trek is about the Vietnam War. Star Trek is about race relationships in the United States.” But they never said that, right? In my family, my uncles couldn’t discuss the Vietnam War or racial relationships without it becoming a huge fight. But they could talk about that episode of Star Trek. And suddenly find where they agreed and where they didn’t agree.

So I think that the joy of writing science fiction is in being able to talk about things that sometimes we can’t talk about at the dinner table anymore; and give us a platform to say, “alright, let’s forget about what’s happening to us but let’s talk about the ideas behind our decisions”. And then it becomes much more interesting. 

As to the challenge… both Jonathan Glassner and I have very big appetites for the kind of TV show we want to make. But we have very little time and very little money. So it’s a matter of “How do we do this without curbing our appetite?” Both Jonathan and I are directors, so we’re constantly reaching into our bag of tricks to try and get more for less. It’s challenging and sometimes it doesn’t work. But when it does, it’s actually very rewarding.

How did you get your start in the industry?

I was an actor, and I was cast in a science fiction film that was going to shoot in Germany. When I got there, I saw the most beautiful sets. The director did such an amazing job with the camera work and he was so good working with the actors. But he barely spoke English, and he had written the script in English, so my dialogue was very stilted. So I asked him if he would mind if I did some improvisation, just to make my dialogue more natural. I did it and about three or four days later he came to me and said, “We have a very big problem. All the other actors are very upset because you have all the best lines in the movie now.” So he asked if I would mind rewriting their dialogue and I said no, I’d be happy to.

Well that director was Roland Emmerich. And that started a twelve-year partnership of he and I writing our movies together. And that’s really what launched my career.

Tell me about Electric Entertainment.

Electric Entertainment started in 2000, 2001. I wanted to get out of the studio system and have a little bit more control of my destiny, so we created a place where we could develop our properties. We could figure out how to finance them and make them independently, produce them independently and then do all of the posts ourselves. So it really became this kind of very small studio.

In order to do that with the kind of money we had, which was very little, we had to embrace a lot of techniques which, at the time, had not yet become accepted. We were shooting digitally before the rest of the world was. We were doing software-based post-production, as opposed to hardware-based postproduction, and we ended up creating this facility which we were then able to extend to some other filmmakers who brought their projects there… and that led to us developing worldwide sales. And so we started helping to finance not just our films, but other films. We would distribute not just our films, but other people’s films. And then that ultimately led to us starting our own streaming platform, Electric Now.

Is there something you have learned over the course of your career that’s stuck with you more than anything else?

My number one advice to writers is to write fast. Because the real writing takes place in the rewrite process. But the longer you take to write the first draft, the less likely you are to want to change anything. Because whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, if you have a scene that doesn’t work but it took you three weeks to write it, you don’t want to change it. In the back of your mind you’re thinking about how you were up at 3:00 in the morning trying to come up with that twist at the end of the scene, and how you can’t lose that now.

So my advice always is write the first draft really fast, as fast as you humanly can. And then take all the time you need to rewrite it. Get as much input as you can and listen to what you agree with and don’t listen to what you don’t agree with. But take the time to make it better and do as many passes as it takes.