Lost director Jack Bender interview

I got a mail from the guys at Wizard Entertainment earlier today. They’ve published a great interview with Lost executive producer and director Jack Bender.

Although Jack’s answers are quite long, it’s very interesting to read about the process of creating the Lost episodes. The interview also contains a lot of cool Lost trivia while staying away from spoilers, so I highly recommend taking a look at it.

Here is a short excerpt from the interview:

How difficult is it for you and your crew to film all of a particular set or scene in one chunk? I have to imagine that with the flashbacks and such, shooting in sequence can pose a problem.

Jack Bender: Well, you always try to do as much in continuity as you can when you’re filmmaking, but sometimes we can do that, and sometimes we don’t get to do that.

For instance, we’re shooting an episode right now, and it’s pilot season. So one of our recurring characters who’s not a series regular is doing a pilot because we don’t have him contracted for every episode. We don’t own him, and so we have to shoot part of his flashback story around his schedule. I did an episode that was on recently that was about Desmond and his whole flash-forward experience. It was in England, and Penny was in it. We played with time and answered the question of Desmond in and out of time and all of that. Well, our actress, Sonya Walger, who plays Penny, was doing a series for HBO, and she was completely unavailable when we were doing that episode. So I had to do the whole episode and shoot all of Desmond’s flashbacks, like in the bar and everything else, during the course of those 10 days of shooting that episode and then three weeks later, or maybe it was even a month later, we had to come back and shoot the scenes in two days with Penny. So sometimes that’s actor-driven and schedule-driven. Certainly we attempt to shoot all the flashbacks together if we can.