On September 22, 2004, the television landscape was changed with the premiere of the ABC science fiction drama, LOST. Going beyond a watercolor show, LOST permeated pop culture, with fans flocking to the fledgling internet to share their theories and thoughts on the mysteries of the island, the Dharma Initiative, the Others, and the Smoke Monster, among many others.
Now, 20 years later, filmmaker Taylor Morden is taking us back to the island with his new documentary, Getting LOST, which examines the cultural significance of the series through interviews with cast, show runners, and fans. We spoke with Morden about how the film got its start, landing interviews with most of the series’ cast, and what the show meant, and still means, to him.
Congratulations on the documentary.
Thank you. Thank you.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did the documentary come about?
Well, back in the early 2000s, I was a huge LOST fan, just like many of the people in the documentary. This was years before I ever thought I would be a filmmaker or do documentaries or anything like that. I just loved the show and I was swept up in the internet fan culture and trying to solve the mysteries and all these podcasts and message boards and the fan community and all that. That really stuck with me. I was in college at the time. I was an impressionable youth and the first time I got that into a television show.
LOST was something I feel like I experienced more than I watched. We all lived through this journey together back when it was on TV because it was once a week and you had to wait and you had to find people to talk to and be like, “What do you think is in the hatch?,” and, “Oh my God, what if it’s this?” Flash forward to 2013, around then when I started doing filmmaking, I kept saying, “You know, what would make a really interesting story is the fan community that came up around this show LOST.
But in 2013, people were still pretty down on LOST. The ending of LOST was the butt of the joke on the late-night shows and in pop culture. It was like, “Boy, that was a great show. Too bad it, you know, ended the way it did.” And that was sort of the consensus. And I loved the ending and didn’t understand.
I never understood the backlash against it.
But you’re aware of it. It was a big deal. As much as people love that show and it was a huge global hit, you know, number one show in the world, tens of millions of people watching it every week. The second it didn’t end the way some people wanted it to, everyone turned their backs on it and was like, “Well, I hated it the whole time. That’s a stupid show.” So it felt too soon back then to do a documentary like nobody really wanted to talk about LOST at that time. But it was always in the back of my mind as I was making other movies and doing other projects.
And then a couple of years ago, it occurred to me that we were coming up on the 20th anniversary of LOST., and I have this rough sense that nostalgia comes in 20-year waves and it’s OK to talk about LOST now. There are all these new people watching it on Netflix and Hulu for the first time, and from what I gather from speaking with a lot of them, it’s like there is no stigma about the ending of LOST. They just enjoy watching it. And because they can binge it, there isn’t that sort of six years of your life soaked up into this show. So, they’re not bitter about it when it ends. They’re like, “Oh, that was a good show.”
The film is about the fan base, but you interviewed quite a bit of the cast. What was that process like getting those initial interviews?
Well, I know a lot of the fans from the message boards, but some of my very first Facebook friends were these people, you know, Ralph Apel, who was a producer on it, and Jo Garfein from Cancer Gets LOST who’s a producer on it. These folks I’ve known for almost 20 years on the Internet. So, it was a no-brainer of like, “Well, I can tell that fan story. No problem.” And then our producer, Ralph had done a podcast with Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley. So from the beginning, we’re like, “OK, it’ll be about the fans, and we’ll have Hurley.”
But, of course, I would be a bad documentarian if I didn’t at least try to reach out to the 400 people credited on IMDb as being cast in the show. And we reached out to most of them. But, we didn’t think people would be in our low-budget, independent documentary about how much the show meant to the fans. But they started to say, yes, a couple of people here and there would be like, “Oh, you know what? That does sound fun. I haven’t talked about LOST in years.” And what would happen is we would do an interview with somebody and we’d have so much fun for an hour or two hours talking about LOST that it would wrap up and they would text somebody else from the cast and say, “Hey, these guys are doing this documentary. Have you heard about this documentary? It’s fun. They’re nice guys.” And it sort of expanded like that so much so that, you know, we kept going six months after we thought we’d be done filming. People kept saying, “Yes I would love to be in your documentary,” and it just kept going and going and going.
And now, in hindsight, we did sort of make this definitive 20-year retrospective look at the show. It’s still from that fan perspective because that’s who we are. But, if you had asked me when we started, who the top five build people in the cast of our documentary would be, none of the people who are would have been on my initial list. There’s no way way I’m going to sit across from Terry O’Quinn and talk about, “Walkabout,” one of the greatest television episodes in history. That’s never going to happen. And then it did happen.
You mentioned you had some later additions. I was following the progress of the documentary, and there were some where you were already talking about the premiere and then you had some last-minute additions. That had been a little stressful.
It was super stressful. Evangeline Lilly was relatively late in the process. And that’s just sort of how it works because scheduling with people at that level is a lot harder. She had said yes earlier, but, these things are difficult. And J.J. Abrams was the same way. He had responded. We sent out a sizzle reel as we were going. And by the time we sent it to J.J., everyone else was already in the sizzle. So it’s like, “Look, the whole cast of LOST is in this. Do you want to talk about how you invented it on a napkin one day?” You know, that sort of thing. And he was very kind and said yes right away. But it took the better part of a year to get a half hour on his schedule because he’s J.J. Abrams. And I don’t live in L.A, so we’ve got to schedule a trip. We had to do all these logistics. We had a crew.
So by the time we filmed that interview, we were just over three weeks away from having to lock our film for the world premiere because we wanted to premiere it on the actual 20th anniversary. That was a goal we had put in place early on. And rather than doing the smart thing and moving that date, because we were still filming in the middle of August and had to premiere in the middle of September, I just didn’t sleep for three weeks. We put that final render together, the one that people watched in that theater, like 24 hours before it screened.
Was it just coincidence then that the 20th anniversary was coming up and you’re like, “OK, well, there’s a goal we can meet,” or was that something you had planned from the very beginning?
From the very beginning. Ralph and I were talking about this movie just over three years ago in November of 2021. We started outlining the movie and we started pre-production three years ago. And on that very first meeting, we said, “Oh, we’ve got to premiere it on September 22nd, 2024, because the LOST fans will go nuts.
We thought we’d be competing with other fan events and with ABC doing some official thing, and Michael Giacchino does these great LOST concerts. We thought, “Oh, we’ll be one of the events on the 20th anniversary,” and nobody else did anything.
You were the event.
We were the event. So, hundreds of people from all over the world came to L.A. And there were fan meetups and there were parties. We had this premiere and a lot of the cast came and we had the actual polar bear from the pilot episode on this theater. And it just became this really amazing thing. It was such a throwback too, because LOST would be at Comic-Con every year back when it was and the fans would get together. And then there would be these panels and these fan meetups and all kinds of things during the run of the show. But there hasn’t been a LOST event like this in 14 years, since the finale.
What was your biggest takeaway from the film? Did it change your perspective on the series, or are you still in tune with what you originally saw when you watched it?
Both, I think. I still appreciate the show as just a great piece of television and a formative moment in television history, which is something that I thought was under-appreciated. It was something we really wanted to try to explain to people through the documentary, which is there was TV before LOST and that everything you love about TV now. Most of those things you can trace back to this one show that broke all the rules. So, when I think about LOST, I think about how important it was in my life and in a lot of people’s lives and to television in general.
I don’t think we get the same level of prestige television as early as we did without a show like LOST without JJ and Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse breaking the rules and just saying, “No, we’re going to pick an end date and we’re going to do that. And we’re going to have shorter seasons and we’re going to, know the arc. And it’s going to be so serialized that you can’t just tune in and watch one episode.”
So, it’s still that. I have a little bit of a harder time just sitting down and watching it now, having met most of the cast, and having talked to the creatives behind most of the decisions. It’s weird just watching it. It’s like, ”Ooh, these are all my friends.” It’s lost a tiny bit of the magic, but I still very much appreciate what it is. I’ve spent the last three years just engrossed in the world of LOST. So, I think I need a little bit of a break from watching it. I’ll watch it again, maybe in a couple of years.
Have you found that there is another generation of people that have really appreciated the series?
Yeah, a lot of people, sort of in our generation are showing it to their kids. and then people who worked on the show are showing it to their kids. A lot of these fans are using it as a way to bring family together because that’s what the show did 20 years ago. It was one of those shows. I watched it and my wife and her parents and her younger siblings. If we could, we’d watch it together. But if not, I knew they were watching it, and then we’d talk about it when we would have dinner the next weekend or something like that. And it was such a thing that brought people together. I think people are trying to recapture that now by saying, “Let’s watch this thing.”
There are some great stories like Michael Giacchino, who did the music for LOST and also gave us music for the documentary that’s fantastic. He told the story, it’s not in the movie, of showing it to his kids. I think he said when they turn 15 is when he lets them watch it, maybe 14. And what he does is they get out the Blu-rays, but he only lets them watch one episode a week.
Oh, that’s great.
Because that’s how you’re supposed to experience it. You get to think about it and you get to turn it up. He doesn’t make them wait six months between seasons. But he said that’s what they do. And they all sit together as a family and they watch this thing. What I was more surprised about is that I’ve met so many people now, because we’ve been premiering it around the world at these theaters. And there are just young people, their parents aren’t showing it to them. They just found it. Somebody said, “What’s a good show? I’ll watch LOST,” that are as obsessed with the show now as we were then. There are people on TikTok, breaking down episodes. And there’s still this hugely active online community that is fascinating for a show that hasn’t been on the air in 15 years.
I know you’re doing some festivals and stuff. Where else can people see it right now? And what’s the game plan for a home video release?
So, right now we’re working on something. We’re partnered with Eventive and they do live virtual events. We’re doing a live virtual premiere, which will be worldwide on December 7th at 4pm EST. The plan is if you get the app, you can watch it on your TV like any streaming thing. But, what we’re going to do is we’re going to show the movie, and then there’ll be a chat and you can ask questions. And we’re going to get some of the cast and some of the people live. So, if you watch the doc and you have a burning question, we’re going to try to get as many of the cast on there so that you can have this interaction. So, it’ll be like a live event with a Q&A, which is what we’ve been doing at theaters. But because it’s virtual, we can bring in people from all over the world.
The cast of LOST is so spread out now, good luck getting five of them in a room. But in a virtual room, we can pull it off. So that’s what we’re working on next. And then later in December, we don’t know the exact dates yet, we’re going to have it up on VOD on at least Vimeo. We’re working on Amazon, and then I think Apple and Google will be in January. So it’ll be by January. You should be able to buy or rent the movie anywhere you get movies.
In December, it’ll be a little bit more difficult because we’re putting it out ourselves. And it’s just some places take longer to get up on the platforms than other places. But it will be available worldwide.
And right now, we’re doing things like getting subtitles in different languages. Because the show was so big all over the place, we get messages every day on our social media platforms from people all over the world who just love LOST. And part of the fun of this documentary, I think, is that it’s just kind of like more Lost. You get to go back to the island and hear stories from people 20 years later who were there. And I don’t know. It feels like a little more LOST, especially in the theater. People getting together. And people are dressing up in costumes. It’s real fun.
Well, thanks again for taking the time to talk to us. And congratulations and good luck.
Oh, thank you so much.
The Getting LOST Virtual World Premiere w/ LIVE Q&A will take place on December 7th at 4:00 pm EST. You can purchase tickets at Eventive or the Getting LOST website.
You can watch our full interview with Taylor Morden below.