There are fewer horses and heads of cattle in “Serenity” than in the “Firefly” TV series. Do you suspect perhaps the series was somehow hobbled in the early going by its more overtly “Western” visual elements?
Yes and no. I think Fox was terrified of the Western concept. The fact that there are no horses in this movie is only by virtue of the fact I didn’t find a place for them. Not by virtue of the fact that I deliberately avoided them. Because the Western element is still a part of the story. It’s a frontier story. For example, I did look back at the series and say, “Okay, Mal being thrown through the holographic bar window is maybe a little jokey for the movie.” It’s a good shorthand for the series but I think for a movie you have to work through the logic just a hair more. But the ship scaring the horses that we used in the credits? The last image of the credits in “Firefly”? That works great. That to me is a timeless image that combines the two just fine. It just didn’t happen in this movie, ‘cause, well, a lot of things didn’t happen in this movie. Because I had two hours instead of seven seasons.
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In the TV show, there was no sound in space. Will space, as rumored, be noisier in the big-screen version?
Yes and no. We’ve kept space sound-free. But the climactic battle takes place just at the edge of the atmosphere of the satellite moon where Mr. Universe lives, and because it’s inside the ion cloud, we don’t actually see any stars. They’re inside this big cloud formation above the planet. And so, because of the way it was playing, it just started to be more and more apparent that we did need to have a battle going on in there, and we couldn’t just hear it when we cut inside the ships. So we sort of – I don’t want to say “cheated,” because that would sound too true – but since we’re not looking at the stars, since we’re close to atmosphere, let’s just turn this into a big loud scary battle so that we can experience what they’re experiencing. And in that sense there has been a slight shift.