Interview with Ronald. D Moore for Real Life

10 October 2017

What’s Real Life about?

It’s basically about two people, a woman who’s a cop in the future and a man who’s a technology entrepreneur in the present. Each of them is having a virtual experience and they start to believe that their reality is a fantasy and they are actually the other person. They’re sharing this experience and trying to figure out which world is real, which one is their real life.

Why did you pick this story?

I’d become really interested in virtual reality and current VR technology and so when I was reading ‘Exhibit Piece’ I recognised those themes were driving that story, losing yourself in another world, having a fantasy of another time and another place and finding that more attractive than your current reality and I thought that’s fun, let’s play around with that and use it in a VR format which is what we are talking about at this moment in time so it sparked me.

Have you strayed far from the original source material?

It’s pretty different; I took the underlying idea of it and ran with it.

What are the pitfalls of adapting an existing story? Is it easier or harder than writing an original script?

It depends on what the underlying material is, so with ‘Exhibit Piece’ I grabbed onto the themes but there are other short stories that we read that provided a little bit more of a framework, or a fundamental plot to expand on from there. It was also about what each individual writer wanted to do. Each writer approached the material differently and some saw more to utilise than others.

What do you hope that viewers are going to take away from the series?

I just hope that people are really entertained and it makes them think and at the end of an episode, and it sticks with them a bit and they go wow I never thought about something like that, or I keep thinking about that show I watched. I hope it touches people and makes them think.