Lostpedia
Register
Advertisement

Welcome to Oahu is one of the DVD extras for Lost: The Complete First Season. A transcript follows below.


A transcript is a retrospective written record of dialogue, and like a script (a prospective record) may include other scene information such as props or actions. In the case of a transcript of a film or television episode, ideally it is a verbatim record. Because closed-captioning is usually written separately, its text may have errors and does not necessarily reflect the true Canonical transcript.


Transcripts for Lost episodes up to and including "Enter 77" are based on the transcriptions by Lost-TV member Spooky with aid of DVR, and at times, closed captions for clarification. She and Lost-TV have generously granted us permission to share/host these transcripts at Lostpedia. Later transcripts were created by the Lostpedia community, unless stated otherwise below.

Disclaimer: This transcript is intended for educational and promotional purposes only, and may not be reproduced commercially without permission from ABC. The description contained herein represents viewers' secondhand experience of ABC's Lost.


PandoraX is responsible for this transcription. The following is a special featurette seen on Disc 7 of the Lost: The Complete First Season DVD box set. It is called the "Welcome to Oahu", and discusses the trials and tribulations of filming the expensive and complex Pilot double episode.


[Various production set scenes shown from the filming of the Pilot]

Damon Lindelof: Day three. Polar bear's here.

[Production man says, "We just bought this plane, whatever it is, six weeks ago, in Mojavia. And here it is in the jungle."]

Dominic Monaghan: The first day of shooting was actually me, I think it was supposed to be Evangeline at one point. The work papers for Evangeline hadn't come through, and mine unfortunately had so, the first day of shooting was Charlie on the plane being chased by the air stewardesses into the men's room and doing drugs.

[Shot of Damon Lindelof seated in plane seat typing script at laptop, saying "We're into Day 32". On the side, Charlie is being filmed, with the scene of the lunch cart nearly hitting him as it rolls down the aisle (split screen to show that it was actually controlled by someone holding onto it). Someone yells "Cut! That was good." and Charlie laughs and says "That was great!"]

J.J. Abrams: Shooting the sequence on the plane, the interior set, which was the only true interior that we had in the entire Pilot. The sequence required this plane to drop, y'know, hundreds of feet and crash, and it was a plane that existed on the stage floor. There was no gimble, no movement of the plane. To figure out how to make this whole sequence look realistic, we had really wonderful and cooperative background actors be extras in the scene, who would, on cue, move accordingly, in the old kind of Star Trek model, where you move the camera in one direction, people move the other direction. We did a lot of that.

Larry Fong: The good thing was, we used steady cam almost exclusively through that part, so instead of just a shake, it was kind of this, kind of this organic thing like an airplane would do. [Plane movement shown]

J.J. Abrams: Greg Lundsguard, who was the steady-cam operator, was acting as much as any actor. I mean he was performing that camera. Every move that that airplane makes inside the fuselage was performed by Greg. And he was wonderfully collaborative. I love those like little jitters that happen... not the kind of big shakes so much. So he would let me like hold onto the film magazine, and shake the magazine, to get that kind of little look. [J.J. shown shaking magazine during shoot, as actors don masks]

Evangeline Lilly: I had those handcuffs on, and I'm reaching and stretching for the oxygen masks. For me, it's all about throwing myself into it, physically. And I'm not using tools, I'm just using my imagination. So I am like reefing on these cuffs. [Scene where Kate is reaching for mask shown, with stage hand handling air hose to simulate cabin air leak] By the end of the day, my wrists were raw from those cuffs because of course, it's not only those five minutes you see on the screen, it's all day of different takes, different sides, different angles. [Evangeline holding out wrist scars] These are the hands that wrestled with metal all day! [Laughs] And they have the scars to show it! My wrists are like twice the size as the normally are. [Laughs]

Fredric Lehne: [With moulage blood on his head for playing Edward Mars] There's this guy off camera, and he's got like this anchor case, and it's about this big, and it's trimmed in chrome. [Measures out case size] And it was a fake one, it was foam rubber, hard foam rubber. For fifteen or twenty takes, he was just like bouncing it off my head. And I had these tubes sticking out of my head, so everytime he'd bounce it off my head, this blood would spurt out.

[Scene showing stuntman attached to cable getting pulled back against greenscreen.]

CrashFX

Stuntman getting pulled back into the greenscreen void that will later be the rip in the fuselage

J.J. Abrams: We knew that we wanted to do the back of the plane getting ripped away. We devised this, this shot of Kate in the foreground with the rear of the plane getting ripped away, where we would replace a good third of the plane with a computer-generated plane. And we had stuntment and women rigged on wires getting yanked out and yanked back. We had these giant rear fans. The whole thing is an illusion. Nothing's moving, and with the use of the special effects and visual effects and the actors and cameramen, we were able to really pull it off.

[Completed scene with FX shown of fuselage breaking and passengers getting sucked back.]

[Native Hawaiian (Brother Franklin Pao, a Kahuna) shown blessing outdoor set in traditional garb and language. More outdoor scenes shown from Pilot of cockpit wreckage.]

Bryan Burk: We have a special guest today. Uh, Greg Grunberg, A.K.A. Sean from Felicity, Weiss from Alias and Cause from The Catch will be playing our pilot.

Greg Grunberg: [On the wreckage set, in moulage] You know, me being a real manly man, tough actor that I am, um, they got me in a bunch of this make-up and they're about to yank me out of a plane... but I'm not going to do it. I'm gonna have Jake do it. [Points up at stuntman] There's my twin! There's Jake! [Jake waves back from high up and says "Fine landing out here, Cap." Greg laughs.] What happened was, I ordered a Mai Tai, and uh, they made it a little stronger than they usually do... and we were just, we were cruising... [Makes drunken steering motions, then waves at wreckage] and things happened... this tree should not be where it is.

J.J. Abrams: I loved that location, where the cockpit was against the tree. When I first walked into the cockpit, and sort of started climbing up, I actually got nauseous. I got really, severely nauseous. And it was because I looked at what should be level, and it was so askew... that it just... it made me sick. And not only that, it smelled horrible in there.

Sarah Caplan: The mud in the jungle is very smelly. It's rotted, so it's this incredible smell of decay, that followed us everywhere. [Laughs] It was in all the trucks and our boots and our clothes.

[J.J. Abrams gives Dominic direction on the set, about keeping his hood up to have Charlie scare Kate.]

Dominic Monaghan: I've never been to Hawaii, but obviously, I was very interested in a few big elements of Hawaii. First of all, being the surfing, y'know, that I learned to do in New Zealand about seven years ago, so I was very key to come to what is now the mecca of world surfing. And also, just the wildlife. I'm a big fan of trees and of nature, of lizards and bugs, and stuff like that. [Holds up grasshopper in his hand.] This is a katydid. It's called a katydid 'cause it makes a noise that goes, "katydid". [Insect flies off] It's a type of bush cricket.

Matthew Fox: Had nothing but intense rain for like a week, in the first week of shooting. It's been pretty intense.

Sarah Caplan: It rained for twelve days and I don't think I've ever shot anywhere where it's rained for twelve days. But fortunately, it was part of our story so that was fine. We were making rain, standing in the rain, and the... we even got flash-flooded once, out of the jungle set.

Jean Higgins: When we got to He'eia Kea, which is the cockpit sequence where they come and they find the pilot, there was a flash flood that came down the hill. There were literally camera cases floating away.

Sarah Caplan: The lights got thrown in with the ballast, got thrown into a container. The guys just ran, and they got into the container, and the container had flooded during the storm, as the storm had continued. So, when we got there in the morning, not knowing whether we'd be able to shoot, the gaffer, and the electricians were pulling out the lights, and looking at the sodden ballast, and going... "Oh." [Techs looking at cables] And the gaffer was going, "You know, if we were in Minnesota, we use like those big heaters that they use to keep the football players warm?" And then he goes, "You know, like, they're like, they're like dryers," then he goes, "Hair dryers." And actually, Kevin Blank was standing near to me, and I said, "Kevin. Do you have a credit card on you?" And he goes, "Yes." I said, "Get in the truck, get in that van over there, and tell them to take you to Long's, and buy as many hairdryers as you can find." So he rushed off and he came back, and they put the put the dryers on the C-stands. [Techs shown with dryers blowing on equipment] And they dried out the ballasts. And it worked, so we were shooting within two hours.

[Flooded outdoor set shown with Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monaghan and production crew.]

Jean Higgins: We all had boots on, up to our knees. The water and the mud were over the boots. Getting into your boots, sloshing around, but we kept shooting. And we were making rain at the same time, because it would get lighter, and we needed the same consistency. So, even though it could be raining, we had the fire hoses and the rain towers going at the same time.

Matthew Fox: It does rain a lot in Hawaii over the winter, and I think it's wonderful for our show. The truth is that anytime we do those big jungle rain sequences, which we've done a lot of them, and I've done a lot of them, they're brutal to do. They're brutal for the crew, they're really difficult for the actors, I mean, they're cold, they're muddy, they're... y'know, because we're not doing, using obviously natural rain, they're firehosing us and stuff, but they really look good. They look amazing.

Larry Fong: It's always hard to bring lights into a remote place like a jungle, and whatever lights we could drag into a jungle, we used for film. [Scene of Kate running through wet jungle, chased by dolly camera] But we used a lot of existing ambients, even though there was so little because of the weather. I think we used the fastest film, and the fastest lenses, and still barely had enough light to shoot there, even in the daytime.

J.J. Abrams: We did a shot of them running, the three of them, and uh, it would have been funny because they weren't running, they were just standing in place, going like this. [Makes arm motions] Three of them in a row. We were shaking the camera, and it looks like they're running, it's actually incredible.

Bryan Burk: Jack, Kate and Charlie were fleeing from the cockpit and the thing. And he wanted to have like a close-up of their face where they were like horrified, and being chased, but it's very difficult, obviously, particularly in the jungle and the mud, where to keep them in focus, where they're running, and be able to have a really tight shot. So, what he did, the camera came really close, and we got a close-up of their face, and we had them running in place. And like screaming and running, and really looking like they were screaming, and looking over their shoulder and being horrified, and the camera was bouncing all around so it gave the illusion that they were actually running, when they were just running in place. [Scene close-ups of running shown]

[J.J. Abrams demonstrates technique himself in front of shaking camera, pretending to jog in a silly way (another crew fools around in the background). Cut to another scene of the three cast members again, someone cuing "Rain!" in the background, then with Charlie asking "Hey, guys, is this normal? You know, the day turning into night? Torrential rain? Kind of, end-of-the-world-type weather?"]

RainWithHoses

Fire hoses spray the actors with "rain" as dolly cameras chase after them on tracks.

Dominic Monaghan: Foxy and Evie and I, while we were shooting all the scenes where Charlie and Kate and Jack go and try and get the transceiver from the cockpit, become very close, because it was kind of a baptism of fire. Y'know, we kind of spent about seven days in the middle of the jungle with three fireman's hoses pointing directly at our faces on full blast to create this kind of torrential, end-of-the-world-type weather. [Bonding scene with actors] We connected very strongly. And then the weird thing that happened was that we then jumped into the day with the polar bear coming out of the trees, which was then the introduction of Maggie, Ian and Josh and Naveen. [Scene with dead polar bear and that group standing around intercut, Boone asking "Think that's what killed the pilot?" Charlie says, "No. No, that's a tiny, teeny version compared to that."]

Ian Somerhalder: Where the polar bear was a coconut grove. Totally surreal place, thousands of coconut trees, perfectly planted in a line, and everything underneath was just quiet and silent.

J.J. Abrams: It was the first time that many of these actors had met, and certainly the first time many of them had worked together. We all got together and rehearsed the scene. It was sort of fascinating watching these actors meet each other and figure out kind of who they were, not just in terms of who their characters were, but kind of, who they were to each other. [Naveen Andrews and Josh Holloway rehearse Sayid saying, "You found a gun on the U.S. Marshal?"]

Naveen Andrews: At that point, we didn't know how it was going to develop. We didn't know where it was, how it was going to go. [Iraq scene with Sayid and Nadia shown] For instance, now, we know the character is romantic, almost erotic in some ways. At that time, it seemed that the contribution he could make to the group was his technical know-how.

Evangeline Lilly: I sort of allowed the wave of the show to gauge how I figure out Kate and who she is, and where she's coming from, because we are left in the dark so often. I don't know for sure exactly how old she is. They won't, they won't disclose anything, I don't know anything until we get that script, and that script says it in that script.

Ian Somerhalder: It was really hard for us in the beginning if you weren't shooting a lot of scenes, because the storyline hadn't evolved to that yet. And it was really hard. I didn't shoot my episode until a little over a month ago. So from July until November, I was a lunatic. [Scene with polar bear and Boone shown again]

Dominic Monaghan: I wanted to truly invest in this idea of this, this weird island of Dr. Moreau, this, this kind of foreboding sense that the island itself is a character on the show. Y'know, that it's always looming over your shoulder. I feel like the rules don't apply on this island, that in some way, the island is able to emotionally tap into people and just draw emotions out that other times, they might try and hold in, y'know.

Jesse Alexander: Where they are is something that we've talked about, and what the island is something that we've talked about, and have a very clear definition of in our heads. And y'know, J.J. loves to have those very clear big ideas, and then be able to, y'know, texture them in whatever way he sees fit: the books they might be reading or the references in their discussions or the things tend to come out in the moment very often as the thing is being conceived. But they all serve the greater mystery that we have clearly in our heads, and yet want to maintain some sort artistic freedom in how you illuminate those ideas.

[Again, polar bear scene, now with Sayid and Sawyer arguing.]

PolarBearPuppet

Prop guy stands by with the polar bear "puppet".

Josh Holloway: First day of work, I get there, and we're shooting the biggest scene, y'know, dialogue-wise, of the entire Pilot for my guy, so I'm like "Great, okay, thrown right in the fire, here we go." And I prep without an accent, I'm doing the lines and J.J. came up to me about halfway through the day, and he's like, "It's good, what you're doing is good, but it sounds like you're trying to speak without an accent." And I was like, "Yeah! Of course I am! Y'know? Is it working?" He's like, "No! You don't speak without an accent! That was before we hired you! You're Southern; let it ride." And that just set me free. [Scene of Sawyer shooting polar bear]

Jean Higgins: Originally, the polar bear, we really weren't going to see too much of. Sawyer was going to shoot it, and then we would see it laying there. And the effects guys put a bladder in it, so y'know, we sort of see its last breath taken, and then he would die. And the issue was, y'know, "Where'd you get the gun?" And then J.J. wanted the polar bear to chase him, but the polar bear didn't really move... [Polar bear prop shown] And he wasn't really animatronic. And we talked about bear suits and well, pretty soon we thought, we'll just do high grass, and J.J.'s going, "Yeah, we could get like tufts of grass coming up." So, we've got tufts of grass coming up out of air rams as the "bear" is coming through the high grass.

BlankBearChaps

Kevin Blank runs through brush in polar bear chaps.

Kevin Blank: When they first said they wanted to have a polar bear, they said, "Can you do a CGI polar bear?" And we said, "Sure we can!" [FX people painting spittle on the mouth of the bear prop, then a scene where a dirty white furry pillow is launched towards camera] But I guess, hanging onto the reality rules, J.J. did not want to do a CGI polar bear. [Storyboards shown] He wanted to have little snippets and pieces of fur moving through or legs moving. [J.J. Abrams shown examining polar bear costume prop] They built a puppet and said, "Someone's going to have to run through the jungle." [Kevin Blank shown sitting with furry polar bear legs] And we were just saying, "Who's going to do that?" And in the middle of a production meeting, I found myself raising my hand, and the next thing I know, they strapped on polar bear chaps and we went over to this little dense green area, and I was hopping through the jungle trying to mimic the four-legged run, because all we were going to see was two legs, and I was the polar bear running through the jungle. [Laughs, scenes shown of Kevin Blank hopping madly through high grass with furry legs]

BearLaunchFreeze

The fake-looking prop bear that was launched out of an air ram, and shown on the pre-air commercial

Jean Higgins: And then J.J. decided the bear should like, attack, so we tried launching him out of an air ram. [Scene shown of obviously inanimate and floppy bear prop being launched towards Sawyer; Jean Higgins laughs] It didn't work.

J.J. Abrams: Kevin Blank said to me, "We're going to make the bear jump, computer graphics shot", and I said, "There's not going to be--I promise you, there will not be a computer polar bear in this show." And um, sure enough, there is. Because once we did the jumping polar bear, a few times--which, by the way, as silly as they were, worked fine--but because you can freeze-frame things now, they actually aired it in the early commercials on ABC, they aired the footage that was shot, and you see the polar bear, and when you freeze-frame it, it is absolutely the dumbest thing you've ever seen. [Freeze frame of floppy, fake-looking bear prop mid-air] I mean, it is ridiculous. It's a stupid, goofy, muppet-looking thing, just like--it, it, it could not be less scary. I mean, it's embarrassing. [Air ram propels bear prop again] So Kevin Blank showed me that not only had someone seen that on TV, but had freeze-framed and posted it on the internet, which made the show laughable before it even aired. And he said, "I think we can do better than that." And he actually ended up doing, if you actually freeze-frame the DVD, you can see those few frames of the polar bear jumping, and it looks really scary. [More convincing CGI blurry bear scene shown] And that's because we didn't use that big, fluffy polar bear. It was all Kevin Blank.

CGBear

The much-improved CGI bear that made it to the final cut of that scene.

Kevin Blank: My note to the artist, which was John Tesca of Eaton Effects, was "More grass. Just a little bit of bear." But it looked so good that I was compelled to show it to J.J., and he seemed to respond to it, and then we went through different versions of how much bear do we see, we don't wanna, do we really wanna telegraph what we are really seeing at that moment, because he wanted the line of "This is a polar bear" to land dramatically, and you don't want to have several moments of a polar bear leading to that, because that would diminish that moment. And, but ultimately, he seemed to buy off on what we were doing.

J.J. Abrams: The many outstanding qualities of Kevin Blank, our visual effects supervisor, one of them is spontaneity, and the ability to think on his feet. [Scene where Charlie, Kate and Sawyer are climbing] We came up with a shot here, today, of this bluescreen shot, that would allow us to composite our characters climbing the mountain into that rock face way over there. [Points in another direction] And uh, so, we are doing it, even though, typically, you want to spend a lot of time planning this, and prepping it, we just thought, "That's cool. And we're doing it." [Climbing split screen shown, final finished scene and production] And that's what this crew is. It's nutty, and incredibly talented.

[First chaotic scene of Pilot, of Jack going through crash wreckage and Michael shouting "Walt" shown.]

Harold Perrineau: When we were shooting the Pilot, my part of it, only took place here. I got to meet, finally, the rest of the cast, we were all here together. We got here and saw the plane on the beach. It was just like, "Oh my God, this is astounding. This is really real."

[Scene of Shannon screaming on beach.]

Maggie Grace: And today, we're going to learn how to run in the sand in stilettos. [Holds up gold strappy high heels] Which these, are very special stilettos, these could kill a man.

J.J. Abrams: We have five days to shoot the opening sequence on the beach. [Running turbine shown] The plane, though it was crashed, was sort of a dying monster, it was still very much alive. [Jack shown with plane wing looming overhead and buckling]

Daniel Dae Kim: I had never seen such an elaborate set. It was easy to transport myself to actually being in that situation. I was awe-struck by it.

J.J. Abrams: The thing was choreographed so that if you were looking down at the plane, you sort of tracked along each side of the plane until you made a full circle, by the time the wing crashed.

Emilie de Ravin: It's a real plane that they've made to look like this. Everything was real. Every explosion happened.

Jon Sakata: On the bottom right hand corner, I'm the guy that gets thrown back. [Explosion shown, with stuntman in the corner]

Emilie de Ravin: The wing... when that dropped, it dropped, we let it go at that.

[Action scene where Jack and Hurley rush Claire out of the way just before wing crashes and explodes shown.]

Matthew Fox: You know, there's engines on fire, and people screaming, and there's smoke everywhere and stuff falling, and so much stuff happening... you really gotta be on your game.

[Scene shows crane lifting up large piece of burning turbine and dropping it, a few feet from Dominic Monaghan.]

Larry Fong: From the beginning, J.J. wanted the show to look very real, very cinematic. And that's a challenge in some ways, because sometimes it's harder to make something look real and unlit, and almost documentary.

J.J. Abrams: We came up with this idea that there'd be someone who's trapped by a piece of the landing gear, and allow Jack to be sort of a hero and come in and sort of save the guy. But that set up a few characters y'know, in a situation near the engine. You sort of think it's just about Jack and the hero, but what it's really about is setting up this giant engine. And as soon as you see the engine going, you just know someone's going to get sucked in.

Gregg Smrz: We're gonna test our rig for camera, before camera and everyone watches it. We rehearsed this the other day, and now we're just going to test it and make sure everything's ready to go, because sometimes it changes day-to-day. [Behind him, stuntman is getting hooked up into harness in front of turbine shell (hollowed out)] And he's going to run into the shot. And in the script, someone's yelling for him to stop, and he stops right in front of the engine, and the engine spools up and sucks him right in.

TurbineManSuckedIn

Turbine man is rigged to a harness, and pulled through an empty shell; CGI blades later added.

Frank Torres: This is the jet engine that I'm going to get sucked into today. [Hollowed engine shell shown, without blades, then he harnesses up and is yanked in by a wire] And basically, what we have is a rafter system here. I've got a harness on underneath here, and uh, you can kind of see here. [Lifts up shirt to reveal harness] Just hook me up in the middle of my back and through there, over there [Points to hollow shell, then two guys] Dane and Jake are running the system, and everything should be fine.

[FX guy sits inside shell and says, "We'll actually remove this entire piece here, and build this entire engine in CG. And blow that up." Intercut scene of Locke trying to wave man away from turbine, before he is sucked up and engine is blown up.]

Terry O'Quinn: When the guy got sucked into the engine, and stuff like that, that was pretty wild. I was pretty amazed that we were doing a television show, and that that stuff was being involved in it. But at the time, I didn't know Locke's story. I didn't know then that I had been confined to a wheelchair. So they were holding everything pretty close to the vest. So, I didn't know that when I ran over to help, I wasn't aware that a moment ago, I had been a parapalegic.

J.J. Abrams: One of the things I wanted to do was to not have it be gruesome. I wanted it to be scary and shocking, but I didn't want people to get disgusted by it, so I wanted there to be no red, at all. So that the plane never had any red on the logo, no one wore any red clothes, because once it became a bloody mess, which was probably more realistic, once it became a massacre, it just, to me, would be untennable, people would just tune out. So, I wanted it to be shocking when you saw blood, so when the guy gets pulled out from underneath the landing gear, and you see the blood on his leg, you have a reaction to that blood. [Bloodly leg shown] If we had been realistic and had as much blood everywhere as there probably would have been, seeing that blood on his leg would have had no effect.

Mary Jo Markey: The opening 22 minutes of that act of that crash sequence, the way that I work as an editor is I try to work empathetically. I try to place myself in the position of the character and then imagine what the character is feeling, and then try to work from that. Like how do I best communicate what this character is emotionally experiencing? [Editor shown sitting in front of several computer screens] The footage from that crash was so harrowing, it used to bring me to tears sometimes while I was working on it. It felt so intense!

Stephen McPherson [ABC Exec]: I mean, when it came in, we were just blown away. I mean, we were all so proud of it because y'know, to do a Pilot like that, and to be the studio that was involved in that, and to be the network, I mean, look at this piece of work. I mean, it was just a devastating movie.

Dominic Monaghan: It felt like a film. I've kind of been immersed in the film industry for so long that I got confused and thought we were making a film. And the cinematic kind of scope of it... I thought at some point, ABC was probably going to say, "Let's try to release this at the cinema and turn it into a feature film." It was that grand in its scale and that ambitious.

Michael Giacchino: And my big point in was that there's got to be some element that is comfortable; something that represents home to these people, but surround it completely by this very esoteric, weird, strange, uncomfortable sound. [Sound studio shown] And I was trying to think of what instruments can we use? Because we do this live, there's live orchestra. And I wanted to set up this very different sound for this show. I didn't want it to just be, "OK, I'm scoring another show, and it's gonna have that sound to it." I wanted it to be really different. So I started thinking about, "What's our ensemble going to be?" And the strings--we knew we wanted a strings section. Because strings are really versatile, in that you can make people feel really like... it can be tender, it can be beautiful, or they can be just horrifying and scary. [Harp and then violin section shown] So those are great tools to have. Then, what do we surround that with? And we thought, "OK, How about just bizarre percussion." Y'know, the first thought was, "They're in a jungle, but it was like jungle, no, we don't want jungle percussion." We wanted stuff that was like, bizarre. So what we did was we shipped home sections of the airplane.

Bryan Burk: While shooting, J.J. had specifically said we should save some pieces of the plane and bring it back so Michael could use it for scoring. At the tail end of production, I kind of went through the wreckage, and uh, picked out some good pieces, as far as wreckage goes. We shipped it out in a big crate. And when we got to the scoring stage, Michael strung it up and used it for a lot of the percussion. [Hanging wreckage shards seen, with man tapping on them with drumsticks] We used that on the show. In the percussion booth, the guy plays the airplane pieces. [Bizarre metal rack shown] We have an instrument called the Angklung, which is normally a wooden instrument, but we have one that is made of metal. So we're using that, has a very unique sound to it. We're using a piano board which was ripped out of a piano, so it's just basically the guts of a piano, and just banging on--all kinds of weird different things. And the idea is to use these kind of conventional instruments in ways that you don't normally use these instruments. [Scene of Jack swimming out to rescue Joanna shown, with jarring musical score playing in background]

[Cut to scene where survivors are discussing the Monster]

Dominic Monaghan: The Monster was dealt with a lot of sophistication. It wasn't this kind of, you know, boogey-man. It was something that was genuinely scary.

[Survivors shown standing in front of a bluescreen, with Monster sounds added]

J.J. Abrams: When Damon and I came up with this show, the reason we ended the first act with the Monster is that we just wanted to say upfront, that this was the kind of show that it is.

Jesse Alexander: We really needed that kind of external force that was so overwhelming, and so seemingly unbeatable for our characters, that they could come together in the face of it. That it was a challenge and a threat that would force them to bond where they wouldn't have bonded otherwise.

[Potted branched bushes shown in front of bluescreen.]

FX Guy: What we're doing right here is that we're photographing some bamboo treetops in front of a bluescreen. And we're going to shoot different sized-pieces so that we can randomly and arbitrarily just sort of build a jungle of controlled tree pieces that break and blow in the wind and through different lighting conditions, manufacture the kind of jungle that they're looking at. And when this large thing is moving through the jungle, we can use our pieces that are breaking and snapping to create the path of this thing.

[J.J. Abrams directs night scene where survivors are looking out towards jungle and watching the Monster move through. Clapping as he says "I believe that's a wrap." to the last scene. Jorge Garcia spontaneously runs into the water on the beach.]

Jorge Garcia: The last day, the last scene, the last day of the shoot of the Pilot, as soon as he said "Cut!" and that was it, that was a wrap, I ran down to the beach and just dove into the water. A little symbolic moment of triumph.

Damon Lindelof: It wasn't the easiest shoot in the world. The weather was tricky at times, but the crew has been amazing, the cast has been amazing, the attitude has been amazing, so... It's fully realized, the script, it's unbelievable. Every writer's dream.

[J.J. Abrams holds a pair of boxer shorts and says, "We're burning the shorts!"]

JJShorts

J.J.'s infamous "bad weather shorts"

J.J. Abrams: We had a lot of bad weather on-and-off, but it was almost always blamed on my shorts.

Jean Higgins: We decided that J.J.'s shorts were the curse. I will tell you, I love J.J., but they were the ugliest pair of shorts. [Laughs] They became disposable.

J.J. Abrams: I stopped wearing them about halfway through the shoot, and we had good weather the rest of the time.

[J.J. Abrams holds up shorts on the last night and says, "We had a blessing at the beginning of the shoot, this is a reverse blessing. This is for the gods, for such a successful shoot. The burning of my hideous shorts."]

J.J. Abrams: On the last day of shooting, in a pretty somber ceremony, burned the shorts, and put to rest the bad weather demons. [Shown lighting shorts on fire, thanking crew and cast, and everyone clapping]

Malcolm David Kelley: [On set] We wrapped, it was a good cast, and we'll be back! [Pointing to camera] Believe that!

Dominic Monaghan: I don't think I'll really believe it's over until I'm back in LA, two or three days sleep have gone by, I'll realize I have to get up and go do anything. And if the show goes, then we'll be back and into the swing of things.

Emilie de Ravin: Made a lot of friends, definitely. I mean just shooting in such a beautiful place, with such an amazing set, which I'm very excited about. I'm just excited to see that this is a finished piece, too.

Josh Holloway: I've never done something so... fullfilling. As far as work is concerned. To work with this level of people, and this cast; such a talented cast.

Sarah Caplan: Y'know, it's just been a very, very amazing experience. And the whole thing is a surprise, because it started actually three months to the day when Damon met J.J., and it has happened incredibly quickly.

Matthew Fox: It's just the most amazing working experience I've ever had on every level. I'm very, very proud to be involved in it.

Advertisement