Jack Bender

World Screen Weekly, August 23, 2007

Director

ABC’s Lost

Director Jack Bender has worked on a number of hit dramas, including Felicity, Judging Amy, Beverly Hills, 90210, Alias and The Sopranos. It was while working on Felicity and then Alias that Bender got to know the creator of both shows, J.J. Abrams, who then enlisted him to work on Lost, which launched on ABC in 2004 and quickly became a cult hit.

Bender notes that the show, shot in Hawaii, poses a whole new set of challenges as compared with his previous work. “In terms of making and producing and directing the show, we are at the mercy of the island in the same way the characters are,” he says. “We live on the island, we deal with the weather. We don’t get full 12-hour shooting days because the sun goes down in the jungle at 4:30 p.m. and it’s dark. One time we set up this long dolly track [to move the camera around] on the beach and these two sea turtles came out of the ocean. The crew and I looked at each other, and I said, ‘Let’s move the track.’ So we broke up the shot and moved 20 feet over so the sea turtles could go by. We deal with the realities of the ocean.”

And then there are infrastructure challenges, Bender explains. “We’re very much in the middle of the Pacific and sometimes it’s difficult to get things. There are no prop houses. You can’t just call up and get a crane, because there’s only one on the island. It’s difficult to work there but beautiful and wonderful. And our local crew is great.”

Bender adds that dealing with a large ensemble cast poses its own set of challenges, including making sure that all the characters’ stories are told well enough that the audience feels invested in their fates. “After our pilot we focused on one character and one story in each episode,” Bender says. Having audiences develop a connection to the show’s characters, however, has made for some unhappy fans; Lost has never shied away from killing off significant players in the series, most recently Dominic Monaghan’s character, Charlie, in the season three finale. “Part of the concept of the show is that the island is a dangerous place,” Bender says. “If everybody survives all the time our show loses a certain thread that makes it dynamic. It’s about survival. Occasionally we have to sacrifice someone we love, and in this case with the storytelling and where we were going with Desmond foreseeing Charlie’s death, we eventually had to go there.”

In May of this year the series’ creators, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and J.J Abrams, generated headlines again when they announced that Lost would end its run in 2010, with just three more seasons of 16 episodes each to bring the mystery-filled series to a conclusion. Bender notes of that unprecedented decision for a U.S. network show: “Damon said that in order to continue on the show, he didn’t want to write it until there’s no one watching. Our audience needs to know there is an ending. Stephen King was a major fan of the show originally. During the first season he said, this is the greatest thing that’s ever been on TV, but kill it before it kills you, don’t let the network turn this into a cash cow that lasts forever, because this is a book, and the book needs to have an ending. And Damon and Carlton and J.J. all agreed. What’s great about that is the audience knows that every episode is building towards an end.”

Season four returns to the ABC schedule in February 2008 and will air without repeats until May. “When you do 23 episodes, you inevitably have to put on reruns. With the Dick Wolf [Law & Order franchise] it doesn’t matter,” Bender says. “Our fans got so mad at us.”