What we were trying very hard to do, just in the way we shot it, was to make it feel as if we're in that environment ourselves, just so we can get a grasp on what it is. A lot of our influence was about getting stuck on a level on any of those video games, where you find yourself caught and you can't get out, and it's maddening. We talked a lot about that.

When we finally had a cast and could see what they could do, here was an opportunity to go back and modify things. We didn't actually do that much modifying, but we did enough to make it feel as if they fit in their own skin, and we got a lot of good input from them. They're a terrific cast. They worked really hard.

I'm not saying that I'm the grand genius that came in on a float and made it happen, but they liked my pitch. I was on my way to a camping trip with my daughter when my agent called and said, "This thing came up and it's really wild and crazy, do you want to read it?" And, I said, "Yeah, why don't you just send it to me? But, I'm going on this camping trip, so I probably won't be able to read it until I get back."

I feel confident that it will always keep everybody guessing, and yet not in that weird, maddening way where it's like, "Oh, come on, guys!" I think you will be freaked out by the end. I really do. I don't think you'll see it coming at all.

And then, what I hope will happen at the end is that there will be a big enough springboard that, if we chose to go for a second season, we would have one. But, there will be none of those maddening teases that we're going to tell you the answers and then we don't tell you the answers. That gave NBC the idea of making it a mini-series.

When you're working on a television show with actors, what you hope you're doing is playing jazz with them all the time. You see what they're giving you, so you try to write back to that, and then they play with that, and you get a sense of what is going on. That's just a natural way in which TV series usually work.

And, there's clearly not going to be any outside help coming, anytime soon. These people are going to have to figure out some way to get out of this situation, and they're going to choose all sorts of crazy-ass strategies.