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Peter Sciretta, Slashfilm.com: I have to ask you about Lost. I’m wondering, I’m a huge fan of Lost. I loved the finale. I loved everything from the first season that you were heavily involved with to everything. When you were working on the first season, did you know what the smoke monster was going to be?
JJ Abrams: We had a lot of discussions about what the thing could be, and we knew that we had a few interesting ideas. It was everything from a creature that had been factored into a security system to…we discussed a bunch of things. All of them kind of had full possibilities. But we also felt like this was a… We wrote the pilot, shot it, edited it, distributed it in 12 weeks. The whole process was so fast. And as we were writing it we discussed things, when we were shooting it we discussed things, when we were cutting it we discussed things, but we didn’t have a bible written of what the show would be, like any series. And anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest. You cannot know every single answer. You have big ideas that gives you a roadmap, and you can have a willingness to take that leap of faith, you are going to find it. But we did not have, in any way, every answer. At the time we knew specific things that we felt it was where the show needed to go. But when you think about things like Ben is not a character in the pilot, we didn’t know he was going to show up. But you think of how critical he was and what the others said and what his relationship was to the whole cast. It just shows you how the show, any show, evolves over time. So what Damon and Carlton and the others came up with as they worked on the show was never anything that we could have known after we did the pilot. But you go into it knowing as much as you can and believing that you’ve got a sense of what there’s going to be. What it ends up being is always different, sometimes very close, sometimes as far away as you can imagine from those real ideas. But you go into it with at least a bag of best ideas you’ve got, but you are well aware that as you travel down that path, if you are lucky enough to stay on the air, that bag of best ideas is going to shift, sometimes entirely.
