The Species miniseries will be written by Dennis Feldman, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. Dennis has been researching and contemplating the story that would become Species for over six years. The fascinating and complex issues dealt with in the film became his passion during that time. That's why, when Dark Horse bought the rights to the film's adaptation, it made the best sense for him to be the one to write the miniseries. Who better to include elements of the story that were not told in the movie?
In late February, I asked Dennis about Species, the Dark Horse miniseries, and his own background.
Dennis Feldman: I was a serious documentary photographer for about twelve years. I published a photo book; I've always had a lot of interest in graphic books. Then I moved down to San Francisco and became a screenwriter.
My first real success came when I wrote The Golden Child, after the obligatory eight years of struggling. It became the Eddie Murphy film. Then I wrote a film called Real Men (which I directed) featuring Jim Belushi and John Ritter, which was a rather unusual comedy. And then I worked on a number of other pictures. I wrote Species in 1993, and sold it to MGM.
Bruce Costa: Please give us a suspenseful and incomplete story synopsis of Species.
DF: A while back, I just became tired of metal can space ships that came to Earth. It's just, as many people have pointed out, a tremendously ungainly way to travel. The distances are too great, the time takes too long. It just isn't feasible that living entities could accomplish that. What's much more likely is that messages at the speed of light would be sent through different kinds of rays, whether it's light rays, or radio waves, or other kinds of waves. It occurred to me that what you would want to send is something that's interactive. Well, what is more interactive than a biological being? An organism? What if you even sent the DNA code for one of your own kind? You could program memories, or intentions, or a message to tell, or a whole point of view into its DNA.
If you sent one of your own kind, you'd want it to be able to survive in the receiving environment. Now, you know that what survives in that environment are the creatures that get the message, so the message that comes down says, "Combine this DNA with yours." When they do, they get this conglomerate creature that looks like us, and therefore functions well in our gravity, in our atmosphere, and on our Earth.
BC: What a marvelously unusual idea.
DF: Well, I don't think I'll get sued because somebody else will claim to have had it. So you suddenly have to look at the way we've treated other species. If this is the superior species, how have we treated species we've called inferior? Well, the answer is, of course, not very well. How have we even treated other ethnic groups that we've seen as a different species? The answer is we've massacred and destroyed them, and stolen their resources and environment. And that's the scary situation that this story is into. Giger designed this creature that is half alien and half us. It starts developing more human emotions, too. It also comes into our way of looking at the world.
BC: How did you alter your writing style to accommodate this film genre?
DF: I've worked with fantastic material before, like in The Golden Child, which is supernatural in part, so I used my normal style. I just used a much more scientific narrator in this movie.
I spent a lot of time with scientists. The guys over at U.C.L.A. were really great. I really put a more scientific twist in here and, I think, was more informative about science. It was also an effort to make scientists the stars, to some extent, of the movie.
BC: Tell me how you came to be involved in the creation of the Dark Horse miniseries.
DF: There are two ways.
When I was a kid, I used to go down to my local Thrifty's drug store, sit on the magazines, and read every comic on the rack. Every comic. Then I would put them back and save myself that money. It was back in the 50s, and I was a huge fan of comics. Superman was my favorite title -- it was absolutely my favorite title. I was crazy about kryptonite; I thought that was the greatest idea on Earth, or off Earth.
But my son, Neal, also is in love with comics, and I take him to our local comics store most weekends, or every other weekend at least. He picks out his comics, and we share that. When the opportunity came up he was really excited that we could get involved in a comic.
So from the beginning, I volunteered/insisted/asked to write the comic. I asked to go up to Dark Horse and see the production facilities with Neal. (We go to the San Diego Comic Con together; we went this last year and had a great time. We thought it was great -- we were both in heaven.) They said that screenwriters don't always write good comics, but when I pitched them my In doing that, I've felt that I had more freedom than another comics writer might have: to expand on the movie, to put in things that, for budget or time or for other problems, couldn't make it into the movie. I've been able to do that and have, I think, stayed true to the spirit and intention of the movie. I really have a bigger pallette. I'll probably be writing about 200 or so pages of comic-book script, where the movie was only about a 120 page script. So you can see there's more to write, there's more to put in.
BC: To then reverse the perspective, do you feel that your early influence by comics has affected your professional career as a writer of screenplays?
DF: That may be. I think that between movies and comics there's been an incredible amount of cross-germination. I'm sure that I'm as much a recipient of it as anybody. They're both graphic-narrative storytelling techniques that are primarily visual, and are intended for narrative storytelling.
BC: Would it give away too much to discuss any of the elements to the comics script that don't exist in the film?
DF: I don't think so. One of my favorite things -- and it's a normal thing in this kind of a movie -- is something I call the "red mass." Which are really about how this creature will spread, but reflects very heavily back on how the human species has spread and behaved. I know it's a common thing to show the demographics of what happened, but I thought this one went farther, and showed more, and told more, and reflected on more.
There are some other things in here that have to do with SIL's nightmares that, for production reasons and others, couldn't be made, and could in the comic. One of the things I've learned about comics is it's really cheap to draw huge, sprawling sets, locations, and productions, that you might not be able to afford to shoot as a movie. I must say, I'm thrilled to be able to have that much freedom of scope.
BC: Was there anything else about the transition from movie to comics that was unusual for you, that required you to alter your writing in any way?
DF: I think that comics take less dialogue and even more visuals. Also, comics don't have the continuity of motion that a movie has. I had to accommodate that a little. But, you know, it's kind of easy for me because I'm so inundated and enriched by this story. I've been so obsessed by it for so long that writing the comics has provided a recurring opportunity for me to work with the material, and expand it, and find new dimensions in a different medium. So it's been a real joy.