Only in Southern California do camping grounds actually have wifi, so I was sitting in my tent and I started reading it on my computer, and I couldn't put it down. More importantly, I kept getting up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, this is cool," so I pitched them an idea that they seemed to like.

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.

It was tough to write. We had the shadow of "Lost" hanging around and I just kept saying, "Guys, we need to take a really wide birth around 'Lost.' We're going to get lots of comparisons anyway, but we need to prove, within a couple episodes, that it's not 'Lost.'"

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.

There's little things like that, that we paid a lot of attention to. We don't always know how to bond together to get help or to do something, and our attempts are often awkward, selfish or weird. We talked a lot about how to open things up.

Only in Southern California do camping grounds actually have wifi, so I was sitting in my tent and I started reading it on my computer, and I couldn't put it down. More importantly, I kept getting up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, this is cool," so I pitched them an idea that they seemed to like.

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.