THE ONE and Only James Wong Part Two

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Wednesday, November 07, 2001

In part one of CINESCAPE's James Wong interview, the director of THE ONE discussed the origins of the new Jet Li film as well as his views on the martial arts genre in general. Today, in our continuation of the interview, Wong talks about his past tenure on the genre TV shows MILLENNIUM and SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, plus what's still to come from him and partner Glen Morgan.

While Wong usually handles the directing chores on his projects, his partnership with Glen Morgan is essential to the success of the team's projects. Together, the two conceive, write and produce their film and television projects, and as Wong explains, this has been their arrangement for many years.

"We've worked in every way that you can imagine," he says. "From the beginning of our collaborations, we'd just sit downand this was before word processors, a typewriter is even worseand you basically had to agree on every word, which is impossible and crazy. Depending on what the schedule is, we've written one scene and the other's written another scene. We've done a little of someone [writing] the first draft and someone [writing] the second draft. We've done it where one of us would write the script and show it to the other person. Like in TV in particular, and in particular MILLENNIUM, there were moments where we were too understaffed and too busy, so we were just writing separately almost. So we've done [it] every which way, and it continues to evolve."

Proof of the continuing evolution

of Wong and Morgan's partnership can be found in the duo's next two projects, remakes of the 1970s thrillers DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK and WILLARD. In the case of the latter film, Morgan wrote the script by himself and will serve as director, while Wong will simply co-produce the project.

"When I was doing THE ONE, he was actually writing WILLARDI wasn't available," Wong explains, while also noting that the film will be updated for modern audience consumption. "With WILLARD, I think the story's a lot darker in sort of a PYSCHO mode, [with] the character of Willard being Norman Bates-ish. With the rats themselves, obviously with the technology today we can do a lot more with [lead rats] Ben and Socrateseach of their personalities. And hopefully the ability for us to make swarms today will be much more creepy and scary."

As for DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, Wong will be directing from a script co-written by him and Morgan. The filmmaker confesses that the appeal of both of these projects stems from a childhood attachment to the original versions of the filmsthough he admits that neither film has exactly aged well.

"I guess when you're a kid, you get frightened by things that you don't get frightened by anymore as you grow up," he laughs. "[DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK] doesn't really hold up right now. But I think the ideas are really scary. There's something in your house... those hidden secrets and mysteries, and all you've got to do is sort of peel the first layer and you can get in touch with it. Those are the kind of things that we're interested in and it seems like a good candidate for updating."

As with THE ONE and their previous theatrical effort, FINAL DESTINATION, Wong and Morgan are acting as free agents on the two upcoming remakes, not tied to any particular studio for more than one project at a time. As such, Wong says, the former television writing/producing team has come to experience a liberation of sorts when compared to the dynamics of TV production.

"It's a different thing," Wong explains. "It's great to do different projects and completely [new] things one after another, but at the same time with TV there's the immediacy of being able to do something with your characters that is different and sort of long-lasting. I guess with television you always have the chance for next week, which is a kind of nice thing to have, [whereas] with movies you have to work really hard for one shot. Right now I'm really enjoying the movies, that's for sure."

But while the two are

working in features now, they did in fact get their start in television. After gaining prominence as writers/producers for THE X-FILES, in 1995 Wong and Morgan were given the chance by Fox to develop their own program. The result was the much-praised, but short-lived, SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND. Wong still looks back fondly on the show, despite his misgivings about its fate.

"I feel like if we were given another season we could have really done something that was memorable," he says. "I think we really hit our stride in the midseason of SPACE. In the beginning we were sort of floundering, trying to figure out what the show was, [but] I think by the teens we were hitting our stride. I think we had some really good ideas. We pitched the next season to the Fox executives at that time and I was really excited about it."

Wong does have an idea why the show didn't go so smoothly during its early production.

"It was really grueling for us because that was our first show," he says. "I didn't feel like the people we hired in the beginning really helped us too much, or at least maybe we didn't communicate well enough or whatever. But by the middle of the season, [Fox] started moving us around [on the schedule]. You know, same old TV laments."

As the first season of SPACE wound down, it became more and more clear to Wong and Morgan that Fox was not planning to renew the show. In fact, it was during postproduction on the final episode that the team got confirmation of the program's demisejust in time to make a slight alteration to the series finale.

"Actually the last episode, we were editing it when we found out it was going to be cancelled, so that's when the decision was made to kill everybody," Wong laughs, in reference to the fate of most of SPACE's lead characters. "We had a kind of cliffhanger already, but it wasn't as definite. But once we found out we were cancelled, we thought, 'You know, let's give these guys a hero's ending.'"

After the cancellation

of SPACE, in 1997 Wong and Morgan took the helm of the second season of Fox's struggling X-FILES spin-off, MILLENNIUM. The show had received mixed reviews and disappointing ratings, so the two were called in to take the show in a new direction.

"I've heard that other people were unhappy with the things that we'd done on the show," explains Wong. "[Maybe, series star] Lance [Henriksen] was unhappy with our work, or [creator] Chris [Carter] was. I don't know. I've heard those things, but I was proud of the work we did on MILLENNIUM. You know, the first season is what it was, and it was a mandate from the network to bring it back, to change the show, to really make it less 'serial killer of the week.' And we brought in, I think, some interesting ideas in regards to The Millennium Group, and about the coming of the millennium and what that means and what that portends. I think it was scary in a very different way than a serial killer stalking you, and I'm proud of the work that we did on that. So, I think it may have been sometimes a little too intellectual or sometimes too obscure, but on the other hand I think [for] people who really dug it, it was a show that didn't talk down to you and kind of went for big ideas."

Ultimately, Wong and Morgan left MILLENNIUM at the end of the second season and eventually moved on to their big-screen careers. Still, Wong says that new TV projects remain a possibility for them, and that the two actually have a concept germinating now that they're working on with sci-fi novelist Gentry Lee.

"[Lee] co-wrote several science fiction novels with Arthur C. Clarke and he co-created COSMOS with Carl Sagan," says Wong. "There's a project that we're working with him on, sort of like a 22nd-century historian looking back at the 21st century. [It's] a historical perspective of the future kind of show [that] will just basically talk about the moral implications of what technology is going to bring to us and what that means for us living here. It's very speculative obviously, but Gentry had this kind of incredible take on what he thinks will happen."