It wasn't at the last minute that "Battlestar Galactica" producer Ronald D. Moore decided to change Starbuck from a man to a woman. And it wasn't a decision that came easily, at least that's what he told a reporter in the latest issue of Dreamwatch magazine.

"As I got deeper into the project, I realized that it was a way to make the character work for me," Moore said. "The character of Starbuck in the original is the rogue, the hotshot pilor, the cigar-smoking skirt-chasing best friend of straight-arrow Apollo. Approaching that character again years later and starting over, I felt that the essence of it bordered on cliche. It's a very cliched idea. The rogue pilot -- we've got there many times.

"The whole thing wasn't that interesting for me. But when I was strarting from the place where Starbuck's a woman, it's a different relationship with Apollo. I hadn't seen that relationship played on camera. I hadn't see the whole notion of women in the military. That is a relatively new idea. It's become more part and parcel of the way things are done in today's world, but hasn't been explored very often on camera."

Executive Producer David Eick said that another change, making the Cylons from robots to humanoid, was a decision that also was difficult to make for the upcoming Sci-Fi Channel reimagining.

"We didn't want the face of the Cylons to be just that," Eick said. "We didn't want it to be just teh guys in the chrome suits. We knew that we had to have guys in the chrome suits because that is part of Galactica. We didn't want to completely let go of the roots. But we wanted to have a different kind of opponent. We wanted to have a different kind of Cylon, so those are not the primary Cylons that you will see in this mini-series."

Edward James Olmos, who will play Cmdr. Adama in the new mini-series -- which premieres Dec. 7 on the Sci-Fi Channel -- said that he liked the approach Moore took in doing the mini-series.

"Ron wrote a very strong script that dealt more with humanity in the characters than with special effects," Olmos told Dreamwatch. "He called it a mission to move the science-fiction genre into the next understanding of dealing with humanity. So this is not your normal storytelling. It's more character-driven than plot-driven, and the characters are based in a strong reality. They're not the normal kind of heroes that you would see. They're ordinary people that are cast into situations that are extraordinary."

Despite his praise for the script, Olmos said that a lot of lattitude was given to the actors to make changes when necessary during the course of filming.

"They allowed us to get very, very real with it," he said. "I was surprised as to how many changes they allowed us to work into the understanding. They gave us a format that was very strong. The script was finite, but they weren't opposed to going further than they had thought about."

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