Q: Wasn’t it tough to get permission to go inside the Lincoln Memorial?

Jon: It’s very tough. A lot of restrictions went with it. They’ll often give permission for documentaries because the crews are very small. Surprisingly what’s tough about shooting in these places is not security, they’re okay with – they know you’re not blowing the place up, their biggest concern is that you’re going to ruin the vacation of a family from Iowa who spent a lot of money to go see the Lincoln Memorial, and what’s great about America is that the Walt Disney Company is not more important than that family on vacation. So we needed to promise them that we wouldn’t upset access, that we wouldn’t ruin someone’s trip, we could only send six people in, and you add to it that the Lincoln Memorial is a little special, it somehow has a spiritual quality to it, and I’m telling you it sounds dumb and hokey, but you’ll feel it if you go, there’s something very –

Q: Spiritual?

Jon: Sacred. I was going to try it, I didn’t have my Thesaurus. But there is a hallowed ground aspect to it, and you’ll hear people lower their voice when they go in because he was killed and because of the awkwardness and humble visage of Lincoln, and you read those words that are inscribed on the walls, it’s really very special and they don’t want to destroy that quality by having a circus inside there.

Q: What about shooting in Buckingham Palace and in Paris and all of that?

Jon: Screw them! Same really. The same. Shooting on the streets of London, you know, a car chase in London is almost impossible but we bite it off in little pieces. We would shoot only on weekends. They would close pieces of streets. There’s no street in London that’s more than two blocks long anyway. So you find that little thing. There’s no way. To go around you got to go to Ireland. And what we would do is we would set up from 3 in the morning until 6am ‘til the sun came up, shoot ‘til 9 and be gone.

Q: How long?

Jon: Nine weeks of weekends to do that. It’s not cheap.

Q: What about Buckingham Palace? Did you actually get inside?

Jon: No. We kind of had the inside scoop on palaces that look like Buckingham Palance from Helen Mirren. She’s like, ‘You want good Queen stuff, I got the Queen stuff.’ Experts. We created, recreated some stuff. There’s an extraordinary palace literally across the square from Buckingham Palace we used. Again every single person who shot needed to have their names in a week in advance for background checks and security and all that stuff. But if you have the production… You ask why do movies cost so much. This is one of the reasons they cost so much. You need that amount of bureaucracy on your end to organize all of that and be that prepared to get all that done. That cost us $72 million just to do that.

Q: John, I want to ask about Jericho. Do you think this writer’s strike might be a benefit to Jericho because it will end up being the only new program?

Jon: And CBS will probably put it on against “American Idol.” [Laughs] That’s probably how that’s going to go. Yeah, maybe. The problem is if it’s a hit, then what? There’s seven episodes. We have seven episodes waiting to be aired but if they’re great, there’s no eighth episode. So who knows? Who knows?

Q: Have they given you an air date yet?

Jon: No, but the rumblings are maybe February. They’re looking sometime in February. I think that’s when they’ve kind of exhausted what they have. I think it’s changed, you know, the notion of canceling shows went out the window because they have nothing to replace shows with so they might as well show what they’ve paid for and see where it takes them. The strike is bad for everybody.

Q: How hard will it be to mount up after seven? Is everyone all split up again?

Jon: Oh no. We can get going. You just got to do it and if the strike’s not over, it’s a problem. There’s no scripts.

Q: I mean you can get picked up for after the strike?

Jon: That’s true. If we get picked up for September, great. But see this is what they know they made the mistake with the first time was when we went off the air for 13 weeks, the momentum of the Fall season went away and when we came back after the 11 weeks off, we had lost the flow. Look, the same thing happened to Heroes. Heroes had 30% of its viewers lost from the beginning of the season until the end of the season and that was considered a big hit.

Q: Was that because they intentionally chopped it in the middle and wait? What is the theory behind this?

Jon: People aren’t really watching TV during Christmas time, in January, and we want the season to go longer and so…

Q: Do you want to pay for extra actors?

Jon: Well more than that, the belief is that on serials like Jericho and Heroes that reruns don’t play as well. So let’s not have reruns. So instead of showing two, rerunning one, show three, rerun one, let’s wait and show 11 in a row. So that was the theory there.

Q: We heard that you just finished the film just a few days ago.

Jon: Yeah, basically.

Q: How challenging was it? How much pressure was there to deliver the film? I’m curious how many scenes and how many minutes might have been cut out and might be on the DVD?

Jon: Nothing gets cut out because you don’t have time to make the movie unfortunately. I would have loved for them to say ‘You only have six more weeks. Don’t bother with this.’ They go, ‘You only got six more weeks. You’d better hurry.’ The movie comes first so you just have to … I’m not kidding. It’s 7 days a week, sometimes 24-hour days for 5 straight days. That’s another reason why movies cost a lot of money. You’re working as hard as you can and then one day you’re driving down the street and you see your poster with a date on it. Okay? The movie’s coming out that day so you’re put in the position of how good is your movie going to be and I can stay here and not see my kid or I can just say that’s the best I can do. It’s a tough position to put people in but what are you going to do.

Q: I was just going to ask about the DVD. Do you have 20 or 30 minutes you think is going to end up on the DVD?

Jon: There’s two answers to that. The first cut was 3 hours and 55 minutes long. Okay? So there’s about an hour and 50 minutes cut. That’s a movie. That’s an actual version 3 done. I want $11 million please. The fact of the matter is…alright here’s a little inside scoop. Everybody believes in the financial world that “Pirates of the Caribbean 3” would have made another $50 to $100 million had it been 45 minutes shorter. Okay? The filmmakers will say you’re wrong. It made this money because it worked at this length. The studio says it would have worked at 45 minutes shorter and more people could’ve seen the damned movie and people can go more than once and all of that. So the studio was really concerned about the length. That’s coupled with I’m always concerned about the length. I don’t like really long movies and I know when a movie feels too long. Now it’s dumb to cut things out just for the length but I’ll tell you a scene can be boring if there’s 2 hours of movie in front of it and not boring if there’s 1 hour of movie in front of it. So the film itself can benefit from being shorter. That said, just ‘cause scenes get cut out doesn’t mean they were bad and doesn’t mean they were boring. Sometimes they’re terrific scenes that were just not necessary when you look at the whole thing to the movie. Some scenes get cut out because they don’t quite work and for me, why would I still want to show that on a DVD? It’s like, you know, ‘Look what a shitty job we did.’ It’s crazy putting these deleted scenes on some of these DVDs and I know film buffs and people like it but they never play great because they’re always out of context. So you’re sitting there not really watching a scene in the movie. You’re sort of watching other things and it’s just dumb. But ‘Oh, it sells DVDs and the audience loves it.’ ‘Really? It does? Will I get more money?’ ‘Yes. Here.’ [Laughs] So the good deleted scenes will be on there.