Starburst Article
"Peter DeLuise: Demon Director"

The name Peter DeLuise may be familiar to you for several reasons. For a start his father is Dom DeLuise, the rotund comic star of Haunted Honeymoom and The History of the World Part 1. At first Peter continued this family tradition, as he explains. "I used to be an actor on a show called 21 Jump Street with Johnny Depp, I was his sidekick and that's how I know [Stargate producers] John Smith and Jonathan Glassner, they both worked on 21 Jump Street." Towards the end of 21 Jump Street's run, the actor was given the chance to direct three episodes, a skill he's continued to hone with Stargate SG-1 and which sees him return to Jump Street's former base of Vancouver, Canada. "I recently got my landed immigrant status," explains DeLuise, "so I can work as a Canadian. I love this town. I've been very fortunate in their belief in my ability and they have signed me up to do quite a few episodes. I'm Mr. Happy Guy!"

Through the Stargate

The exuberant actor-turned-director is equally good-natured about his colleagues on Stargate. "They have great people here. I think the people who aren't very good either don't get hired or don't last very long. Because you're working with these professionals who are really good at their job, it forces you to be better, because they will not tolerate slackers here." Although DeLuise has made a small number of low-budget feature films, Stargate is a comparatively bigger but smoother-running operation. "It's expensive," he says. "The responsibility is awesome, so if you don't come on knowing what you want, every minute you hesitate is a big chunk of change. Every shot is not the best it could be but it's the best it could be while getting the 12-hour day. Quality versus time; it's up to me to try to get those to balance out."

DeLuise is also a big movie fan and confesses unashamedly that this has a direct influence on his Stargate work. "What I also like to do is reference other movies in the way that I work. You have to turn out a 45-minute mini-movie every week but you do not have the benefit of script development of the feature films you are being compared to. Script development could last upwards of a year to two years. So what I like to do is steal the really good ideas and because they had two years to think about it, they've got excellent references. I'm a movie buff, that's my life. I go and see every movie that comes out, and without feeling guilty about it. I do steal the best stuff. Technically, there are no 'original' ideas, so you mix and match. We don't have to do any research and development because it's already done!"

Show and Telling...

A good example of this is DeLuise's late Season Two episode Show and Tell which featured insectoid aliens [Reetous] that only became visible by using a 'Transphase Eradication Rod' weapon. "Of course we referenced Starship Troopers," admits DeLuise. "One of the cost-effective choices that was made was they're invisible until you light them up with the TER. That was a good choice. The other thing was that their presence was felt even though you couldn't see them. The boy was talking to the mother the whole time, you thought it was a figment of his imagination, so you get tons and tons of screen time without actually seeing the effect which is a very cost effective way of doing Sci-Fi. Plus you're constantly going 'When are they going to show it to us?' In music videos, how attractive is that girl? We don't know,they won't let us look at her for any amount of time, they keep cutting away! So she's the most attractive woman in the world - you fill in the blanks. It's what I call the 'book version'. Your imagination is far more inventive that any visual thing you can be shown. Here're some examples: Jaws, infinitely more terrifying than seeing an actual mechanical shark. The Abyss, where the water worm came out, you saw it begin to come out of the pool and then you don't see it again for a full two or three minutes, even though its presence is felt because you're seeing its POV wandering around the halls. I've watched this sequence a lot because it's brilliant."

DeLuise's third episode is Season Three is Demons, which features the return of the brutish sub-species of the Goa'uld race known as the Unas firse seen in Thor's Hammer. The director continues to employ his viewers' powers of imagination to portray the Unas character in the episode. "That's what I'm going to do with Unas because he is a very large monster, I have the task of creating his giant form. Visually what I will attempt to do is keep him looming in the frame. He'll always be in the foreground and I won't be able to contain his mass in frame. I'll also do a thing called 'Unas Cam', a camera looking down on all my other actors, so I'll diminish the other actors just be that alone. I was inspired by Jabberwocky that way. I didn't go to film school. I just watched movies!"

Deconstructing False Gods

Demons continues to develop the idea of the Goa'uld as false gods and how that affects the races they enslave. "SG-1 stumbles across these people and they're all descendants from 1000 BC Europe," notes DeLuise. "We have a medieval town. Most of the people, the humanoids, have been conned, for lack of a better word, that the Goa'uld are in fact gods. Instead of having to imprison you and put you in chains to rule you, they just scare the crap out of you and they make you think that you have no choice but to do their bidding." "They do these weird rituals, like trepanning - where they drill heads - and the canon in the group has got this ring of Goa'uld technology which allows his to strike people down with a thunderbolt, thus perpetrating the facade. Although he doesn't realize exactly the role he's playing, he does know he has power and he likes it. Then one of our guys, one of our protagonists, Simon, who represents what's right with the human race, breaks the old-style thinking of the religious penitence. So I think we have a really good story in that way, because there's a moral and you're rewarded for challenging old ideas. I'm fascinated by this stuff." Once again, DeLuise has drawn on our collective film experience to conjure the medieval world of Demons. "We've got Monty Python-esque dirtiness, so they're all filthy. You know The Name of the Rose look? That's what we're going for, which is again, a movie. I'm figuring what the people I'm appealing to have watched this movie, and unfortunately the movie is more real in their minds than what is actually real. If you use a reference book, you get one image on a page, versus an entire movie."

DeLuise's other Stargate episodes include Serpent's Song and Legacy. As he points out: "Mostly I've been directing episodes that take place predominantly in the silo. [Demons] is my first outdoor one. The entire thing happens on location." The director understands, though, the value of the artifact that gives the series its name. "We still show the 'puddle' and the pass-through at the beginning and the end. The show is called Stargate. It's the catalyst of the adventure, otherwise the series doesn't exist. The way that I described the formula of Stargate is 'Space travel without spaceships' and in every single episode they pretty much break the Prime Directive. In Stargate the Goa'ulds are purposely messing with these people and culturally arresting them so that needs to be negated, it needs to be fought against."

Bullet Time Re-Born

Another movie device DeLuise can't wait to exploit is the camera trick deployed to stunning effect in The Matrix. "I'm going to do this new process called 'flo-mo' - you stop time but the camera still moves. I am somehow goign to justify that thing on this show some day!" "Just in the same way that the military develops this that and the other or how race cars have seat-belts, rear view mirrors, side mirrors, that wasn't on the original cars. That's all been disseminated. We take the best from the best and reap from their research and development." If a project on the scale of The Matrix came DeLuise's way, he would of course jump at the chance. "I would love to do a movie, but this pace is the pace I like. There's no down time, you know, 'Let's do eight pages [of script] today! Anybody can do half a page in a day, let's do eight pages!' I like the energy of that. I've done low budget feature films and that is not the greatest experience because the crew sometimes hasn't worked together before and so they're not as good as they could be. These guys [on Stargate] have been working together for three years, it's a well-oiled machine."

"It's an absolute pleasure to come in here and be able to shoot this stuff this fast with these guys. With low budget you've got everything working against you - no money, no time, and a crew that's not worked with each other. This feels like a feature film to me. I get to play with all the toys and millions of people see this show every week, how many people see one of those low budget films that goes straight to video?"

Starburst Article: Peter DeLuise: Demon Director
Issue #256
By Ian Calcutt