Question: Thomas, you created PAN AM, which had this glowing beauty to it and now MANHATTAN, which has kind of a bleak desolate look. What was it like to create those visuals?

Thomas Schlamme: That [referring to a preview clip that was shown immediately before the Q&A] looked bleak? (Laughter.) Well, first of all,there was no intention of, "Gee, I was able to work in the '60s with PAN AM and now the '40s." I just happened upon a really great script, which was the most exciting day in a long time for me. Where we are shooting this is how we sort of set this world up. We are shooting it in New Mexico at a location that we found early on when we were sort of coming up with how do we put this show together. And what Sam had written was a show not only about science -- on the men and women who work there -- but about a family and a community. So that's a big world to set up. We found an old Army hospital that was ready to be torn down. I mean days away. If we had gone location scouting two weeks later, it might not have been there. The actors don't know this was filled with asbestos, so don't let them know that, whatever you do. But we were able to clean everything out. We abated everything. We basically took ten acres, and we created a world. And part of that hope was to create a world that they could walk into that didn't feel like a sound stage, that really felt like maybe what it could have felt for the men and women who were transported from their homes and just plopped into the desert.

Question: Could reflect on the straight-to-series order that MANHATTAN received and how that might have changed your storytelling perspective?

Sam Shaw: So what I can say about that, from my standpoint, is it was incredibly liberating. Obviously there's work that any first episode of any TV series needs to do to introduce the world and introduce the characters, and we still felt that responsibility. But there's a thing that happens in the pilot process where you feel enormous pressure to jam the great Episode 6 cliffhanger into the end of Act 2. And I think there's often a sense that you are forcing an emotional experience onto a viewer as the viewers are just getting their bearings and learning who the characters are. What was really great for us in this experience is that we not only felt the freedom to slow down the storytelling, we also had a dictum from our partners at the network.

Sam Shaw (continued): They had this script, they read it, they sat down with us, and they said, "This is great. We have some thoughts. There are a couple of story turns here that we think you can sit on. Let's take some time, and let's really spend some time getting to know the characters." It's incredibly exciting as a writer. It's a note that you almost never get in your lifetime, and so, from my standpoint, it was really helpful to the show.

Thomas Schlamme: It was also nice to do a show where you knew you had a job after the show. In other words, you weren't waiting for it, and I'm sure for the actors too, that they were going, "We don't have to tell everything about our character." We sort of approached it as we were making a 13-hour movie. That's sort of how we approached it. We really hope we get to make a longer movie.

Question: Sam, The Manhattan Project obviously covered a finite amount of time. How fast do you move through time in the season? And what do you envision for future seasons?

Sam Shaw: That's a great question. From the outset, for me, the concession of this show was that it would not be a finite story that ends with the end of a war. It's actually not a story about the end of World War II; it's a story about a birth of an era. One thing, I'm a real book nerd and research nerd, and it was really exciting to me as I began to immerse myself in the world of the history of Los Alamos in the 1940s. It was a situation that was already really fraught of all of these physicists and their families and the military in this very peculiar bubble in the middle of nowhere, which actually only became more complicated and more interesting after the bombs were dropped.

Olivia Williams: What's very positive for us as actors, looking for long term work, is that Los Alamos is still the foremost nuclear research center on earth. So, hopefully, it will be a job well into my eighties. (Laughter.) Sorry, that was flippant.

Question: Are these people real people? I mean, are they based on real people?

Thomas Schlamme: These are real people [pointing to the actors on stage]. (Laughter.)

John Benjamin Hickey: I am a hologram. I'm a hologram.

Question: I know Oppenheimer was real, but I didn't recognize any of the names.

Sam Shaw (cont): But the approach of this show and my thinking from the beginning is that although it is set in a world that is really carefully researched -- and we make painstaking efforts to be as faithful to history and science as we possibly can be, as someone who is neither an historian nor a physicist, but we keep them around to keep us honest. The model for us is E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. It's a story that captures the emotional truth and as much of the texture of a time and place, although it's populated with fictional characters.

Question: Are we going to see Oppenheimer at all after the first episode?

Sam Shaw: What I can say is that he is a character who returns, but there's a, sort of, Olympian godlike quality to him in the role that he plays in our storytelling. He's not at the forefront of every story we tell.

Thomas Schlamme: Sort of how he was in the first episode is kind of his place throughout the 13 episodes.

Question: Is the government cooperating in any way at all, or is this all based on various source materials, and you are kind of piecing together composite characters and what might have happened?

Thomas Schlamme: Well, the government is not restricting us in any way. So, from my point of view, then they are cooperating. (Laughter.) We haven't really asked for anything yet. We didn't need, like many shows, the Department of Defense when you need certain equipment or things like that. But, obviously, much of the research that we've done has come from files from the government that we were able to have access to and read and use to our benefit.

Olivia Williams: Something that's been great for us as actors is that if you go to Los Alamos, there is a museum, there is an historical society, and there are many documented testaments of the people who established Los Alamos in the first place -- both the physicists and the wives and the children and anybody who lived there. And any anecdote that we found that's been interesting from those testimonies, I've emailed them off to Sam, and quite often, they appear in the story. So many of the events in the story, particularly the good anecdotal ones -- the ones that are fun to play as an actor -- are based on the experiences of people who lived there and established this secret base in the first place.

Question: As you were putting this show together, did the film FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY inform you about the issue of rampant anti Semitism in America and how Jewish scientists involved in the project were torn? MANHATTAN is much more of a family oriented theme, but will it explore some of those themes?

Ashley Zukerman: It definitely has never felt, in the making of this show, that it's a family-oriented show. I think it's about families only to the extent that it's about human beings, and there's something inherent in the events that took place in Los Alamos that had a huge impact on families. I think all those themes are very pressing. I think anything that happened there that was material, we used. Anti Semitism in particular is very present in our show. A lot of the characters are Jewish, and they are in some way being used by a country that didn't really trust them and have a place for them. But, despite that, these men chose to continue their work and what they were doing. To answer your question, it is something we deal with, and it is very present in our show.

Thomas Schlamme: I will also say that I'm first generation; both my parents fled Nazi Germany. So I can promise you it's a theme that will be in there.

Question: Did the location for your filming affect your performance?

John Benjamin Hickey: This is very similitude that only God could make. We shoot outside -- 60% of each episode is exterior -- and we shoot on a ranch that's probably 20,000 acres or something. So as far as the eye can see, it looks like 1942 or earlier. And the amount of weather that dominates your performance. It's about surviving the wind, as much as it is playing an objective. It's so liberating for an actor to not be confined by lights and a room. It's amazing. If one more person says to me, "You don't like the weather in New Mexico? Wait five minutes." I've never seen weather more wacky in my life. Have you ever used a neti pot? Do you know what a neti pot is? I didn't know what a neti pot was until this job.

Rachel Brosnahan: Me neither.

John Benjamin Hickey: A neti pot is when you clean your sinuses out at the end of the day.

Rachel Brosnahan: It's disgusting.

John Benjamin Hickey: And you also can't imagine what you get out of your ear with a Q tip at the end of the day -- the dust, the dirt.

Olivia Williams: When these people were brought to Los Alamos and it was a military base, they were subject to military law and therefore subject to irrational orders from above. And as an actor who very often doesn't know what I'm going to be expected to do tomorrow and then finding out late at night and taken to a strange location in the dark and then told to perform strange acts in front of the camera, it's nice to be able to express what it's really like being an actor through drama.

Question: Could you talk about the process of both depicting, but also crediting, intellectual and scientific discovery for fictional characters in an historical setting?

Sam Shaw: A show that I worked on prior to working on this show was MASTERS OF SEX, which has some shared DNA with this show, in that you are dealing with, in that case, a somewhat fictionalized representation of the lives of real people. To a certain extent on that show we had to come up with our own rules of engagement. It wouldn't have felt appropriate for William Masters to perform the first open heart surgery because he didn't, and at the same time, we had to put words in his mouth while he was eating a Danish in the morning at work. In terms of this show, it's not as if we subscribed to a set of hard and fast rules. A lot of the storytelling in our show revolves around a particular group at Los Alamos. That group existed. The science existed. The people who were involved in that group were quite different, and so I can't say that there was a pure math to how we would approach those questions. It just was sort of a case-by-case basis and trying to create a show that had scientific verisimilitude and also not rob the graved history.

Ashley Zukerman: And also the fact that there were thousands of scientists working on this project, and what we are trying to do is explore an emotional event that happened at the time. That would be impossible if we were making a documentary about one or two people. There are times when scientists make discoveries that were made by other people, but I think we have that freedom because these characters are made up. I don't think -- and I would hope that no one would ever feel insulted -- that we are taking their property.

Olivia Williams: Or indeed sue us. (Laughter.)

Sam Shaw: Besides the fact that history is so rich and complicated and strange. By the way, it was an incredibly strange moment in American history in a way that seemed to lend itself toward longer form and would be very hard to capture all of its strangeness in two hours. But it also was a world full of guys who were test tube washers and women who censored letters and people whose stories haven't been told before. Part of the essential approach of this story was not for it to be a great men of history piece. It is about the figures you read about in history books but to try to capture something of what life was like for the other 7,000 people living in this town.

Question: Married women in the '40s often had fairly restricted lives and moving to Los Alamos and being under the auspices of the military made those even more restrictive. Is there anything liberating for you as actors playing people with those restrictions?

Rachel Brosnahan: It's a very strange place for this time in history, because it was very definitive for a lot of these women. There are a lot of accounts from the women who came there as wives who weren't scientists and who weren't there to work on the project. In a lot of ways, they were restricted by these sort of vague and impossible rules, but they were also very liberated in a lot of ways. So we've said a bunch of times on this show, the rules don't apply during wartime. Women who were never ever expected to work have jobs, and they're expected to take on other responsibilities. So in a way, I love it as an actor because we're playing people and we're all under the same restrictions in a way. There aren't any different restrictions for women necessarily in Los Alamos. And so for Abby, and I'm sure for all of us, we're growing in extraordinary ways given these new responsibilities, and there's a lot of self reflection that's happening. So in a way, they're becoming liberated under these strange and extraordinary circumstances.

Olivia Williams: I had the enormous privilege a couple of years ago to play Eleanor Roosevelt, and it seemed from my research then that, in fact, women were more liberated in the '40s than they were in the '50s...

Rachel Brosnahan: Yes..

Olivia Williams: ...and sort of channeled back into housewifery came a generation later. I have the enormous privilege to play a character who has a Ph.D. and who is an intellectual with a social conscience that, in a way, possibly didn't happen a generation later. McCarthyism kind of narrowed the landscape politically. So, yeah, I get to play an interestingly radical character who is being suppressed by an authoritarian military, which is great fun. Drama is action and reaction, and I'm reacting quite a lot.

Question: Why do you think historical shows are so popular now?

Daniel Stern: Why historical? I think it's an interesting way to do a commentary on our society now, rather than directly talking about secrets or our NSA spying or our decisions about how we go to war or what wars we fight or how we fight them or drone activity. It's an interesting way to bring up those topics, but with a little distance, with a little fiction between it, and gives us a chance to have that discussion. There's a lot of issues that we maybe can't talk about or aren't as dramatic in the present that I think can lead to interesting storytelling and mirror what our situation now.

Thomas Schlamme: Technology has helped that a great deal. The fact you can use CGI, that television has grown up so much in the last 20 years. First of all, there's so many more shows, but you don't have to restrict yourself anymore and go, "Well, how am I going to set up a world in the '40s or a GAME OF THRONES or PAN AM when we did it. Twenty years ago, if you tried to pitch a show that was set in 1940s, it was a much more difficult world to maneuver than it is now. And I think what Danny says most of all, is there are all these stories we haven't told yet that are so applicable to our lives today.

Sam Shaw: And you guys look great in the clothes. (Laughter.)

Rachel Brosnahan: That's really the only reason we're doing this.

Olivia Williams: There is the fact that the stories my grandmother told me. I think people love to hear history, and this is the history of your country. And the number of people, like the guy who delivered my rental car in Santa Fe, his father died at Los Alamos, and he was born there. This is your social history. So you should be interested.

Rachel Brosnahan: I think a lot of people will be particularly interested in this because, like you were saying, both in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and also outside, it's extraordinary, since starting this project, how many people I've met who are like, "Oh, I know somebody who still lives in Los Alamos, and I know a woman" I met somebody at the airport the other day, and we started talking about the Manhattan Project, and she said that she knew somebody who was a teacher at Los Alamos during the war. So I think this particular story will be fascinating. It's a story that hasn't really been explored through this lens yet in a way that's so accessible.

Daniel Stern as Glen Babbit

Question: Daniel, you're not just using a fake beard obviously. You're living the look of the character and so forth?

Daniel Stern: That's right. (Laughter.) Talk to my wife about that. (Laughter.)

Question: Do people react to you differently when you have this look?

Daniel Stern: when I look like this?

Rachel Brosnahan: I'm terrified. (Laughter.)

Daniel Stern: Uh...

Thomas Schlamme: Let's be really honest. He walked into the audition with that look. So this guy's been walking around looking like that waiting for this role. (Laughter.)

Rachel Brosnahan: Now he's got an excuse.

Daniel Stern: When I'm not working, I tend to be more of a hermit, and I'm a sculptor too. So I sort of think I grow into this crazy artist kind of look. But we've shaped it so that now I'm the mad scientist look. (Laughter.) And it really drives the women crazy as it turns out. (Laughter.)

Question: John, your character is in a great deal of agony, but he also has this tremendous faith in America. Do you envy his total idealism? Is it hard to play someone who's constantly ravaged like that?

John Benjamin Hickey: Yeah, it is. I love him. I love this guy so much, and I just think about my sorry my father, my uncle who were both in Word War II, and this is a generation mine and Danny's characters are guys who were part of the war that was supposed to have ended all wars and then find themselves in their 50s and 60s back at it. And we live in such a cynical and bitter time now politically, to think how bitter and cynical and essentially just physically exhausted these guys must have been. And still the idea that the Germans and Hitler might get us, and just imagine what that must be like to get up every morning and know how united your country is in one common pursuit. And it's horrible because it's war. This brings up the moral quandary of it all. It's horrible because it's war, but it's such a great cause to protect the American way of life. So I love I love the idea of going back there and visiting that.

Question: Rachel, what part of the character did you like playing? And did your past roles from HOUSE OF CARDS and THE BLACKLIST help you get into the character?

Rachel Brosnahan: There are so many wonderful things about playing this character. It's extraordinarily different from anything I've ever done. It's a huge departure from anything like HOUSE OF CARDS or THE BLACKLIST, which has been incredibly exciting and terrifying. One of the nicest things about playing this character is that in television it's hard sometimes, because we don't know what's going to happen next. we get a new script, and all of a sudden, everything changes, and it affects things that you've already done, and you're like, "Oh, God, that doesn't make any sense." But for Abby coming here every second is like that. Every second is a new discovery, and it's terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time. So it's been very cool to play that and do that both as Abby and as myself.

Question: Is this an era you're more comfortable in right now or are they coming to you saying, "We just need something sort of epic from the past"?

Thomas Schlamme: Honestly, I think Danny did answer it. I think it's so great to be able to separate yourself from the contemporary constraints and tell stories of a past that you didn't know about but actually what those stories are still the human condition. That is exactly what great drama is all about. So you're doing two things. You're getting to tell wonderful stories, and you're getting to transport people. I am also sort of a research nerd, and I loved the idea when I read this to go back into that world to figure out as much as I could about that world so that I could then throw it away and just tell stories. When somebody was asking earlier about discovery and for these scientists what's that like. What was interesting is what did that feel like when they went home that night? What did that feel like the next day when they woke up? What's the emotional stuff of all of those things?

Thomas Schlamme (cont): I have two 20-year-old kids who certainly knew about the Manhattan Project. They sort of studied it a little bit in school, but they're fascinated by this show and watching the first couple of episodes because, number one, they kind of recognize the people and who they are and they think, "God, what if I was taken to a place where I could reinvent myself?" And also what about, "Should we have built that bomb, dad? Do you think that was a good idea that we built that bomb?" You know, they were asking all sorts of other questions that, if this was set in contemporary times, they probably wouldn't be asking. So, you know, it's a privilege. I think the technology allows the privilege.

Question: Do we ever see any effects of the radiation?

Sam Shaw: It's a little spoilery. So, but ...

Thomas Schlamme: So yeah. (Laughter.) Part of what's really fascinating, and it's just one. We sometimes talk about this story as a true life science fiction story, and thatwhen you really think about it, it's like it could be an Asimov novel. The greatest minds in the world are plucked from their lives, uprooted and moved to this secret city -- a kind of faux suburban bubble on top of a dead volcano in the middle of nowhere -- to build a device that will either save the world or end it. And the physics itself was so new, and that's something that's incredibly fascinating, too. What is it to be at the cutting edge of a moment in scientific discovery when the work is almost like magic? You're opening a box that's never been opened before in history. Forget about the science aspects of it, just what it is as a person to be going to work and doing that every day.

Olivia Williams: In one of the anecdotes I found at the museum in Los Alamos, there was a housewife very similar to Abby, and her husband who never came home early appeared at the back door, wearing nothing by underwear, and he said, "I've been exposed to radiation, and I may not see you again."

Question: What are your feelings about the idea of never being able to put the genie back into the bottle?

Ashley Zukerman: I think that's a central question that all of the characters ask of themselves, and one of the things I love about the show is that it doesn't try to answer that question but just proposes characters who tackle that question themselves. This is a world where there is a team in Germany working on the same thing. So there is a now issue, which is to protect our country, our way of life. But the characters do wonder what happens after that and what humanity is if we do make this thing.

Daniel Stern: I love the nuclear issue coming up again, because I feel as a citizen I've been lulled into this sense that the nuclear warheads -- the thousands and thousands of these nuclear bombs -- are still there. They're still updated every day. They're still trigger systems and codes ready to launch these things, and that conversation never happens anymore in this country. We had it for a while during the Cold War, but now it's still out there, and that genie is not back in the bottle. It's expanding and growing into new and more dangerous ways. So I hope it stimulates the conversations of some sort.

John Benjamin Hickey: There's a great reason why this show will hopefully continue, because who knows what will happen in other seasons, but if we see these characters post what happens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what happens when they look in the mirror and say, "Wow!"

Olivia Williams: There's an astounding documentary that Tommy directed us to called THE DAY AFTER TRINITY, which nowadays would be termed an extremely tedious documentary because it's talking heads, but they're heads of those scientists who were there. Many of their heads are in their hands as they say, "We invented this thing, and we didn't think they'd drop it on people. They thought they were going to drop it on an uninhabited island as a demonstration of how awful it would be." And you see them clutching their heads going, "I don't know why we kept doing all the research after the edict."

Rachel Brosnahan: One of the things I love about this show is it doesn't just explore the scientists; it also explores their families, and we were privileged enough to have some women come visit us on set who grew up in Los Alamos. One of them very vividly recalled having found when her mother learned exactly what they had done and what they had been doing there because she had had no idea for all the time they had been there. And she recalls her being violently, physically ill and that nothing was ever the same after that because how could it be.

Ashley Zukerman: And that was after Hiroshima that the wife found out.

Thomas Schlamme: One of the inspirations that Sam had when he read this was that probably 70%, if not more, of the people there found out on August 4th when we dropped the bomb what those people were doing behind those other gates that they weren't allowed to go in. It was the first time they knew that they were building an atomic bomb.

Sam Shaw: And at the same time, that was the moment when we became a superpower and gave birth to the country that we live in now. So to a certain extent and we would be remiss not to say, it's also a story of incredible ingenuity and aspiration and high flown optimism. A lot of the physicists who were there believed that they were going to be curing the world of war forever. So it's an enormously complicated question, which is exciting for us to be able to

Ashley Zukerman: And isn't it such a very important question now that do we take care of ourselves, our families, our society, our nation or the world, and that's something that we can all identify with in some way -- nuclear or not.

Question: Are you going to touch on the financial cost? Because during the war, it was in danger of bankrupting the country. Also, do you address what Truman said after the bomb dropped that it's the greatest thing ever?

Thomas Schlamme: First of all, this was a $2 billion black ops, what was going on at this point. The U.S. Congress did not know about it. The Vice President did not know about it. And yet it cost $2 billion in 1944. So you can imagine what that was and what an enormous scientific achievement that that was. Was that worth it? Germany didn't have a bomb, we found out later as that was sort of going on. But the genie is out of the bottle. So it doesn't really matter at that moment. And that became part of the great drama that we're trying to set up, which was not the sort of big moral questions but the drama of "What if we don't get any more money?" "What if they think that this isn't going to work?" This guy has to figure out another plan because the other bomb might not work. So it's what drives the drama, but the conflict that was there was a military installation and there was a scientific installation, and those two people had to get along. Imagine today if you took the greatest professors in all our universities and stuck them in a place that the military was in charge of. A pretty tough place?

Question: Is there a parallel between Germany saying they had a bomb and Iraq saying they had weapons of mass destruction?

Olivia Williams: Full marks. You've spotted it. Good. Well done. (Laughter.) Top of the class.

Sam Shaw: This show, from my standpoint at least, is not a piece of allegory. It's not "The Crucible," but I think that it happens to be at a moment in time -- even when we don't intend for this to happen -- when the storytelling has a lot to say about this particular moment we're living in right now. That's one of the reasons that it's been exciting to be involved with it.