A Career Amongst the Stars: An Interview with Ronald D. Moore at the Austin Film Festival

Photo of Ronald D. Moore Courtesy of Dennys IIic/Austin Film Festival.

There are few writers that have impacted the landscape of the science fiction genre over the past few decades, quite like Ronald D. Moore has. After all, he expanded the world of Star Trek in a manner that continues to be used to this day, he revolutionized the reboot and showcased how sci-fi can tackle real world issues in a new way via Battlestar Galactica. Plus, he updated how epics are adapted via Outlander and of course, he paved a new path for ‘what if?’ type stories with his work on For All Mankind, and well… we here at NTG had the distinct and humbling honor to sit down with Mister Moore at the Austin Film Festival to discuss his stunning career.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Regarding His Career

John Betancourt: What was it that inspired you to get into writing in the first place?
​
Ronald D. Moore: I think… I don't know. I just started writing things as a kid, like in elementary school. I wrote short stories, kind of for my own amusement. My mom kept this one. I wrote this long story with little pictures of us, me and my dog on this crazy trip to Disneyland, and the dog getting out, and me chasing through all the rides, because I was a huge… I loved Disneyland Park as a child, and she kept it. And she bounded a thing, and it's still like, it's like 20 pages or something, of all this hand, hand scrawl of mine when I was a kid and I was just like writing, and I always enjoyed it, and I always did well in classes that featured it in one way, shape or form. But I come from a very small town in central California, and being a writer wasn't real job, so I didn't really think of it as like something I was going to do one day.
 
John Betancourt: You've had a very unique career and a very fulfilling career, and I'm curious what it means to you to be in the chair that you're in now as a person and as a writer.
 
Ronald D. Moore: It’s… I have the best job in the world. I mean, to be a showrunner, to create a show, to run a show, to put a team together, to, you know, to be the player manager, and in a baseball sense, that nobody does that role anymore, but I get to do that role. It's incredibly fulfilling, you know, and then to present to an audience, and I can't imagine doing anything else with my life now, it's just the opportunity to dream and play on this kind of scale. You know, these are big budget. All these shows cost millions of dollars that you're trusted with to do something with. And you work with really talented people, and you challenge each other, and you try to do something better every single day, and it's enormously rewarding. It's incredible.
 
John Betancourt: Obviously, you've done, you've written so many amazing stories, written so many amazing things. Is there a particular type of story or a genre that you haven't been able to touch that you're still eager as a writer to get into?
 
Ronald D. Moore: I'd love to do a James Bond film. But I'd be a writer, and then there'd be another writer after me, which is kind of the drag of features. But Naren Shankar, who was a friend of mine and a colleague, and I tried to resurrect The Wild Wild West. Once wrote a pilot for CBS that they didn't, they didn't do, and that's still the one that got away from me. It's still man, because The Wild Wild West was, which is kind of a forgotten show now, it doesn't come up in conversation. It's not referenced really in pop culture, right? But it was a big show that it was a huge hit at the time, and when I was growing up in, again, this trip syndication, it was like Star Trek and Wild Wild West were sometimes back-to-back, you know, Monday through Friday. And I love that show too. And I just like, oh, my God, wouldn't it be great to do a spy Western thing that also has the occult, and, you know, there were some wacky, crazy places in that show. And I just, I would love to resurrect that, but it's… I've been chasing that for years.

John Betancourt: Now with a few exceptions, shows you’ve assembled receive a complete arc, a series finale, the works. What’s that like? Since so many TV writers don’t get that journey.
 
Ronald D. Moore: You know, it's funny because I've had a specific and unique career. I know that's just what I expect it to be, is I expect to be able to finish my story, and I have, I have, fortunately, you know, not had the experience of being cut off in the middle and not I've had pilots that got made but didn't air, and stuff like that, but generally speaking, I've been able to complete the story, and that's, that's great, but that's kind of what it should be, and I just expect it to be that
 
John Betancourt: Of the many things you’ve done, is there a particular piece you’re most proud of? And why?
 
Ronald D. Moore: That’s hard. There's a lot because there I'm proud of different things for different reasons. I mean, “33” pops to mind today because we spent a lot of time talking about it today, and it was an extraordinary episode, and I was very proud of the fact that it's the only episode I've ever written where I didn't have an outline or really of any kind, because it was a whole story that I wrote that because it was between the mini-series being produced and when they hadn't picked up the show yet at Sci-Fi And there was a moment when UPN, if you remember UPN, they talked. Where they'd stepped in and they said, “We might pick up the show if Sci-Fi doesn't want it.” And David Ike was my producing partner, that was talking to them directly, and he called me, like, over Christmas and said, “Okay, UPN, might pick up the show, but they would need to see a script of, like, an episode. Could you just, like, get an episode by January?” And it's like, “Okay, I guess.”
 
And I didn't have any, there were no outlines. It was, there's no staff. It was just me and David, you know, and I had a… I did have some log lines of potential episodes, and it was like, we're gonna go to the prison ship, and there'll be a murder mystery and, and one of those log lines was the fleet jumps away from the Cylons every 33 minutes. And I just kind of fixed on to that one. Said, “Okay, I'll do that one. And I just decided… fade in, and I just started writing it, and just wrote it each scene and what's the next scene? And just made myself write a next scene, and a next scene, and then it became that episode. I'm very, very proud of that episode, and it was like a moment of just pure writing.

Behind the Scenes Still from Season 1 of ‘Outlander’ Courtesy of STARZ/Sony Pictures.

Regarding “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

John Betancourt: What was it like, to have one of your first jobs be Star Trek: The Generation?
 
Ronald D Moore: Oh, it was crazy. It was literally my first job. And it was, it was a childhood dream come true. I mean, it was, I was a dyed in the wool Star Trek fan as a kid. I was a Trekkie, and growing up in the 70s, and I thought that the show was this thing that I loved that nobody else did, because, again, it was a little cow town, yeah, and it was in strip syndication, so it was on five days a week when I got home from school and I could watch it five days in a row, and I loved and obsessed about it, and, you know, couldn't get enough of it. And it wasn't until I was in a drugstore one day and saw Starlog magazine for the first time, and it was issue three, and on the cover that was a cartoon drawing of the Star Trek cast members hanging from a chandelier over a convention floor of fans with signs, yeah. And I went, “What? What is that?” And that's how I realized there was a thing as fandom.
 
And so, I was like, “Oh my god.” Suddenly I wanted to go to conventions. And you know, wrote away for catalogs and all this stuff, and realized there was this whole community out there that I had no idea even existed. But then I embraced it and loved it. And so, when I got the chance to be on the show, you know, I was the fan made good. I was like, I was a fan who suddenly would walk down and sit on the bridge in the Enterprise anytime I felt like it, which is an amazing thing. It's yeah, it's… I don't even… now today, all these years later, I’m still kind of astonished that that's part of my life story, and it's an amazing gift. And I just, you know, it's, it's, it's unbelievable what the show did for me growing up as a child, and then what it did for me as an adult for a career. And it's just like, it's, it's one of the defining things of my life.
 
John Betancourt: I think something that I've always been very intrigued by is that you are, in essence, the father of the modern Klingon. That's probably the best way to put it. So, with that in mind, I'm very curious how you managed to build that world so well. Because we could not think of the Klingon Empire without the work that you put together.
 
Ronald D. Moore: Well, thank you. It was, it really wasn't by design. It was just kind of happenstance, because when I showed up on the show Michael Piller, the late Michael Piller, who was the showrunner at the time, he was just getting to know the Star Trek Universe, and didn't really know really the difference between Klingons and Romulans, and he kind of turned to me and asked me to write, “Could you send me a menu of all this stuff? Can you just send me a memo of who the Klingons are and who the Romulans are?” I went, “Okay.” So, I wrote what I thought, I think the Klingons, the Romulans were, and then he handed me on that same day, he said, “All right, here's two scripts about Worf that we're having trouble with. See what you can do with them, it has to be an episode”. And Som I just took these two scripts and combined them, and that's what became Sins of the Father. And in the course of writing Sins of the Father, because it was the first time the Enterprise was going to the Klingon Homeworld. Homeworld didn't have a name. It was a lot of things had yet to be defined.
 
So, then I could just play around with sort of who I thought they were based on things that were mentioned and referenced in The Original Series and the movies. And they had done that one episode of Next Gen, “Heart of Glory,” first season that kind of told you they had some rituals. And it was just, there was just a lot of room. And I could kind of play and do a lot of things and set stuff up. And once I did that episode, because it ends on sort of an emotional cliffhanger with Worf has lost his honor. You knew we were going to revisit that story at some point. And when we did it was kind of Michael said, “Well, you should write the next one, because you wrote that one,” and that was Redemption Part One and Two, and after that, yeah. I was the Klingon guy at the staff. I was the Margaret Mead of the Klingon Empire. It was like, “Okay, I'm gonna tell you.” It was fun. I really enjoyed it.

Regarding “Outlander”

John Betancourt: Now I would love to know what it was about Outlander that resonated with you as a writer?
 
Ronald D. Moore: I was just fascinated with, you know, I read the book, and I could kind of just see what the show was, because I really responded to the central character of Claire in the book. First book is written in her voice, so she's talking to all the way through. And I thought she was fascinating and smart and strong and funny, and I really thought, well, I can build a show around that character. And I didn't know a lot, if anything, about 18th century Scotland. So that was like, I'm going to an alien planet. I don't know these people. I don't know what the customs -- the customs seem crazy, and they do this stuff, and all this is kind of fascinating. And I was drawn to doing it because I thought the audience would have that experience too. Like, “what is this?” And it just felt like a really big, sweeping adventure that was still grounded in intimate stories about these, these particular characters.
 
John Betancourt: And obviously now we're coming to one more season of the show. What has the response, and the journey of Outlander meant to you?
 
Ronald D. Moore: It's been amazing. You know, it's, I start every project as this wide eyed optimist that this is gonna be the greatest show. People are gonna love it. It's always, this is gonna be the biggest show ever. And, you know, doesn't always happen. Usually doesn't happen. But on that show, it happened like, yeah, it took off. People loved it. The fans embraced it. Public embraced it. Eight seasons. You know, it's, it's a success. I'm very proud of it. And it's very… it's not surprising in a certain sense, but it's gratifying. It's like, “Yeah, we did do a good show.” It's nice it's being seen like that

Still from “For All Mankind” Courtesy of Apple/Sony Pictures.

Regarding “Battlestar Galactica”

John Betancourt: So, we absolutely need to talk about Battlestar Galactica, since that's been on topic today. It really does stick with everyone. And I'm curious why you think it resonates so well still, after all this time.
 
Ronald D. Moore: It was different. It was an intense show, and it was very human show. I think it was the characters that people really connected to. And, you know, there's the cast. We've got an amazing cast, and those characters were just indelible. You know, Adama and Laura and Starbuck and Apollo and all of them. And it was just… we were daring. We were daring to do something that hadn't been done at that point. We were trying to break the mold of how sci fi was on TV. It was the time of, you know, the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were in the news, and we were talking about those things in real time. And I think that got people's attention. And it's just an extraordinary show. It was extraordinary thing to be part of. I'm very proud of being part of that. Very proud of being part of that team.
 
John Betancourt: That was something I was very appreciative of when it comes to Battlestar. That fact that it was the first piece of media that really talked about and helped us process 9/11 in any capacity.
 
Ronald D. Moore: That’s the genius of science fiction and good science fiction, we could talk about 9/11 without having you have to relive 9/11. We didn't have to, like, actually call everything by its name and make you literally go back through this horrible, horrible event, you know, again. But we could talk about it. And you knew what we were talking about it, but you had a -- yeah, it was one step removed, and it made it okay. And then we can look at it from different perspectives, you know? So, you don't have to, like, feel weird that we're looking at it from Osama bin Laden's perspective. Like, that's a hard show.  But, you know, okay, step back. It's not Osama, you know, we're not… the players are different, but the themes are resonant.
 
John Betancourt: I think what I appreciate the most about the show is that it does shift tone as we start getting closer to the end. It becomes a very beautiful and hopeful show. I personally am a huge fan of the finale, because that was just this beautiful piece. And I'm curious what went into, and when the decision was made to shift the show into this hopeful… “we’re gonna be okay,”
vibe?
 
Ronald D. Moore: It was important to me that that was the note that we ended on. I… it was, I always felt like, as tough as the show was, it always had an element of hope. It was always, you know, there's a baby born on the Rising Star at the end of 33? You know, there's always… these are characters that are dealing with incredible, difficult times. They've gone through horrible tragedies, but they're still struggling to be better. They're struggling towards the light. It was always important that we're not going to end the show on a downbeat we're not going to end the show on a hopeless note there. There should be hope at the end. Was really important in the concept of the series.

Regarding “For All Mankind”

John Betancourt: Let’s talk a little bit about For All Mankind. Specifically, what inspired the origins of it, because it's such a cool idea. I love the idea of this alternate Earth along those lines.
 
Ronald D. Moore: For All Mankind came out of a discussion. Came out of a discussion with an executive, actually, Zack Van Amburg, was an executive at Sony Television when I was there doing Outlander. And he and I had a casual conversation years ago where he said, you know, he grew up when NASA was a big thing when he was a kid, like it was for me. And he said, “Wouldn't it be cool to do like a Mad Men style show, set NASA in the 70s?” “Yeah, that'd be cool.” And then we didn't talk about it again. Years go by. He then left and ran Apple TV Plus, as one of the co-presidents, called me up and said, “Let's talk about some stories.” He came over and he said, “Oh, you know, I still think about that. NASA, Mad Men show. We want to do that.” And I said, “Well, wow, I thought about that in a while. Let me go think about it.” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, yeah, you can do that show. You could do Mad Men as an office thing about the culture and the characters at NASA in the 70s, and that'd be an interesting show.
 
But to me, who was a space aficionado, the story of NASA in the 70s is kind of a sad and depressing one, because it's about budgets getting cut, ambitions being curtailed. And you know, we weren't going to do these big things, I thought we can do as a kid. And I went back to Zack, and I said, “What if we did the show about the space program? I didn't get the one that was promised, where we really do go to Mars, we really do these big, big things, and to really step out into space in a dramatic way.” And he said, “Well, that's cool, but why would we have kept going like, what's different? Why would that be the case?” And I didn't have an answer, and so I decided -- I called up a friend of mine, Garrett Reisman, who's an actual astronaut and was a big Battlestar fan. We had talked to him when he was in orbit, when we were on Battlestar, and he did a cameo on the show. He's great, very smart, amazing guy, and who had kept in touch over the years. And I called him up and said, “Can we have lunch and let me just pick your brain about something?” And he was working at SpaceX at that point, went over to SpaceX, had lunch with him in the commissary, and I told him, “Okay, this is what we're talking about doing.” And I said, “I'm not sure. Why do you think they would have kept going? What could have gotten the space program to keep going after Apollo 11?” And he said, “Well, you know, a lot of people just don't know how close the Russians came to getting on the moon.” I said, “Really?”
 
Because I was a huge aficionado, and I knew that the Russians sort of made a vague attempt, but I thought they didn't really try. And he said, “Well, actually, they really made a real attempt to do it. But you know, the rockets blew up, and they had political problems around it, but they had really committed a lot of resources trying to do it. They had picked the astronaut, Alexei Leonov, was going to be their first man on the moon. In reality, they had built the space suits. They had prototyped the lander. They were down the line to try to do it, and they just couldn't pull it off. And he said, “You know that if they had actually gotten to the moon, yeah, it might have been very different.” And I realized, yeah, if they had beaten us to the moon, it would have changed everything, in my opinion, like the people, Americans, just would have gotten pissed off. “We can't. This is crazy. We're gonna double down in space.” And I thought, now we're into a story. Now we're into the whole alternate history of the country.
 
John Betancourt: See, I’m with you on so much of that. Because I too noticed that all the programs and promises were never fulfilled by NASA. But I also appreciate the commentary in the show, and the depth, and this could have been a simple, straight forward, alternate history story. But I am curious when the decision came about to add that subtext to the story.
 
Ronald D. Moore: Because it felt like we're still it's not gonna change people. So, we're gonna have, it's still gonna be problems. We're still gonna have these, elements of fighting against each other and fighting against other people. So, we wanted to go down this road that was more that was leading towards a better world, a better future, towards the Star Trek futures. As we always said, this is like the path that takes you there, but that it wasn't going to be easy, and there were going to be setbacks, and there were going to be tragedies, and there were going to be things that were questionable happening as people interacted with each other. So, it was important that we did that because it kept it feeling real, like, “Oh, it's more grounded that it's really going to still be problematic, even if it's a better, a better world that we're watching.” Generally.
 
John Betancourt: What have you enjoyed the most about piecing together this particular series?
 
Ronald D. Moore: Oh, it's a lot of fun because there's so much in the writer’s room of “what ifs” or what if this had changed, what if you tweet that, coming up with who's the president is like a really great game. And then all the little pop cultural things that we throw in, and there's so many more ideas that we have than we're ever able to do, but it's just kind of a thrill. I'm a history buff as well as a space aficionado and a political junkie, so a lot of those story lines of charting a path for Ellen, from ex-astronaut in a world where space is huge, to give her, like, well, John Glenn really did run for the presidency in 1984 Well, she's going to actually run, she's going to win. And so that was fun. Like, okay, our astronaut is going to be her. It's going to be a woman that's going to do it for the first time in our in our new sort of history of the world.