Ron D. Moore's Interview with VOX

From Vox:

Moore talked to Vox at January’s Television Critics Association winter press tour. He discussed the many influences behind the show, the modern state of US politics, and the best writing advice he ever got.

Todd VanDerWerff: What were some things you looked at when you were researching this period?

Ronald D. Moore: The writers brought in a lot of source material that we had in the office, and we would comb through it periodically. There was a lot of online surfing around. Primarily, I was looking at other movies and TV shows that were period pieces or associated with this period, just to see what had been done.

Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers was a touchstone for me. I always went back to that. I loved the style of shooting, and the sense of authenticity to the period was really important.

And then there were things I was looking at to avoid. The Patriot is one of my pet hate movies: “The redcoats are not going to be that color, and everybody’s too clean, and we’re not going to be glossy like that.”

Read more after the jump

TV: A major element of Outlander is time travel. What were some other time travel stories you found inspiring here?

RM: The Star Trek stories were great. [The Star Trek episode] “City on the Edge of Forever” is a classic of the genre — the dilemma of letting the woman die to save the world. That’s really great. [The movie] Time After Time I really liked, too.

We did so much of it at Star Trek that I felt like we kept trying to reinvent it and having to do a new version of time travel. Not getting caught up in all of the different timelines and science fiction books was one of the tricks of doing this show — to make the time travel just a MacGuffin and then let it go and not get too caught up in doing fish-out-of-water every week, where every week she’s looking for the telephone, every week she’s mentioning a movie. That runs cold after a while. You get sick of it. It’s too obvious and too easy.

For this project, I wanted to just set it up and then walk away from it, knowing that she’s trying to get back to her own time, that it’s an important character thing for her. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with time paradoxes and “What if she changed history by just moving the flowers?”

TV: This is a dual historical fiction story. Part of it is also set immediately after World War II. How much did you look into that period?

RM: I really liked the idea that we could keep revisiting World War II. In the book, she kind of leaves [her husband] behind and just stays in the 18th century, but I liked the idea that we could keep popping into and out of it.

I liked the immediate postwar world of Britain and Scotland. It was an exhausted time. They were still on rationing in the period we’re talking about. They had just come through an amazing apocalypse and barely survived it. This was a culture and a people and a land that had given everything they could. And I thought, “That’s a great place to do some stories.”