Al Gough: When we approached the project, we went back and read through the history of Superman, and I think the thing that we found was it's been re-invented over, over the ages, for, you know, different times. And so we're sort of respectful of the Superman myth.

Tom Welling: I didn't know all that much about Superman. I didn't follow the comic books, I know I'd seen all the movies from earlier on in my life, but I didn't have all the information and the background in my head.

Kristin Kreuk: I knew very little about Superman. I knew the story of Superman, I think everyone does. I didn't read comic books because I didn't really read comic books as a kid. But I've seen some of the Lois & Clark episodes, I've seen the Superman movie, but that's the extent of my knowledge.

Michael Rosenbaum: I knew that Christopher Reeves played Superman, I knew that Gene Hackman played Lex Luthor. Anyway, I liked the movies as a child. I used to run around the house naked flying around, or pretending I could fly. That's pretty much it.

(Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, Superman flexed his way into the world of comic books and became the first-ever superhero. Since then, the man of steel has preformed all forms of popular culture including TV, radio, movies, books, toys, and video games.)

Al Gough: We thought um, the idea of doing a young Superman was interesting, but we thought the suit, um, was something that was going to take people out of it. So, our idea was, you know, remove the suit, remove the glasses, no flying, and he was just starting to get the superpowers. So that's when we sort of came up with the motto "No flights, no tights."

(Scene from Leech with Jonathan talking to Clark with Clark asking "You weren't ever afraid of me, were you?")

John Schneider: When I talk to the writers they are Superman fans, they wanna know what makes Superman different, they wanna know all this stuff. Um, the people who are working on the crew, it's not just a job. You know, they are very, very interested in making this work, but also in being part of continuing the legend that they grew up watching. I mean, I grew up watching Superman, who didn't?

(Shows crew filming part of the beginning of the pilot.)

Tom Welling: What really brought me to Clark, was that he's just a normal kid trying to find things out, and it wasn't easy. And everything that he had going for him, everything that he would think would really help him out and make things easy for him, hinder him in a way, because he can't do everything he really can do, and he really has to keep himself grounded, and really be disciplined in what he does.

Miles Millar: We had a long time to cast, we had these five months. We had a nation-wide search for Clark, Lana, and Lex, and I think the three individually found are just, astonishingly good. And when Tom Welling walked in our door, I think we'd seen I think 400 people, and he just came in, we thought "Wow," and then he started reading with extra ambition, and we just knew. When people come onto the set and they've seen him, they say "Wow, that is exactly how I imagined Clark Kent to be as a teenager."

Allison Mack: Oh my gosh, Tom Welling is so Clark Kent it's sick. (laughs) He is the all-American Superboy. He's got the charm, he's got the intelligence, he's got the good heart, so he's very Clark Kent.

(Scene from Kinetic in the hospital, where Chloe asks "What's going on Clark?")

Miles Millar: Kristin Kreuk, who plays Lana Lang, was the first person we cast, and she came from Vancouver. We saw her on video tape, and we had people working in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York, and when we saw her tape, it just blew everyone away. And she was actually the only person we brought to the network to audition, because we just knew, she was the one.

Kristin Kreuk: Lana was born and raised in Smallville. In 1989, a meteor, hit Smallville, and uh, killed her parents, and so she's been an orphan since she was 3 years old. Her aunt Nell raised her. And she's a lonely girl, but she's really popular, and she's really outgoing, and she's got a very good heart, but she's really lonely.

(Scene from pilot, where Lana and Clark are talking in the graveyard, about how Lana dreamed that her parents came and took her back to Metropolis.)

Tom Welling: His relationship with Lana Lang is actually more than just the object of his attention, there's actually a lot of guilt involved which comes about in the first episode, as far as Clark feeling responsible for the death of her (Lana's) parents. Which is one of the biggest things in Lana's life, obviously. She actually wears a piece of the meteorite that killed her parents around her neck, and that actually is Kryptonite, which affects Clark when he gets within 10 to 15 feet of her (Lana). And that's a very interesting play, it keeps the distance between the two.

Miles Millar: We have to be very respectful to the fact that it's been one of the most popular comic books of all time, and this character is embedded in popular culture. So we want to be very respectful, but at the same time, add a new element, and I think for the traditionalists, they're going to have some fun, you know, like we've added Lex Luthor to Smallville, and he was never in Smallville before.

(Lex Luthor is the infamous arch nemesis of Superman.) (Scene of Lex talking to his dad on the phone, before he receives the photos of Lionel and Victoria.)

John Schneider: Certainly Superman fans all know about Lex Luthor, but they don't know about him as a mid-twenties guy, you know. And what's that about?

Michael Rosenbaum: Everybody thinks that Lex is the villain. Inevitably, he's the villain, he's the arch nemesis of Superman, Clark Kent. I'm playing him, uh, he's the good guy in the beginning. He's just trying to fit in, trying to do what's right, trying to make friends, and having the last name Luthor, it's kind of a problem for him.

(Scene from the end of Kinetic, when Clark asks Lex, "What did you tell the police?")

John Schneider: They took their time in making sure that the people that are playing the Kents, and the people that are playing the friends of Clark, and the people that are playing Lex Luthor Michael - What an amazingly strange man. (laughs) Perfect!

(Mike is standing with his little video cam, filming the scene along with the real cameras and whispers, "I'm filming Tom�. And you're filming me!" looking back and forth from his camera to this one.)

Michael Rosenbaum: We tried a bald cap, and, uh, I have a big head, I have a rather large cranium, as I like to put it (smiles), and I also have a, see this nodule right here? Can you see that? It's like a little bump in the head? (Turns head and points to the bump on the back of his head with his finger) It's not very attractive. But other than that, I don't really have a lot of dense. But the bald cap made it look like I had an even bigger head, I looked like Dan Akroyd, of Coneheads.

Allison Mack: I love my character, I couldn't have asked for a better one, you know, because she's not just a Barbie, she fights for herself and she's got a quick wit and a sharp tongue, and it's great (smiles).

(Scene from Kinetic where Chloe struggles then falls out the window.)

Sam Jones: What makes Pete very special for me to play, is that he's not the stereotypical black, young teenager on a TV show, he's very intelligent, he's an intellectual.

(Scene from Leech with Pete and Chloe just before Chloe's bag is stolen.)

Tom Welling: As far as the relationships between the people, like the characters and the actors playing them, every single one that I've met, right off the bat it was, we all just got along. Then when we mould into the characters, it all just, it's easy, it makes it really easy, and it makes it really comfortable, which is for me, the most important thing. And we're all just able to have a good time, and make it work.

(When naming the city that Superman would make famous, creators Siegel and Shuster chose "Metropolis" as a tribute to Fritz Lang's classic silent film of the same name.)

Miles Millar: It was very challenging to write the script, to find a new way to tell the Superman story. It's been told so many times over the last 50 years that we wanted to really find a new way to tell the story that would appeal to both adults, and young people, and would have universal appeal.

Sam Jones: When I told my friends I was on a show, and I called it the new Superman show, and they're like "Oh what are you going to do? Be flying around with Superman?"

John Schneider: One of the great things about the show is it's not called "Superman as a boy", "Superman as an adolescent", "Superman, the �teen' years", you know, it's called Smallville. And, what that does is, folks who are really fans of Superman, they know what Smallville is. They go "Hey, wait a minute, that's where Superman grew up!" Right?

Tom Welling: Well to me, Smallville is, it's actually before anything you've ever seen about Superman. In a way, it's not even about a Superman. It's about a kid in high school who's got a lot of secrets, and has trouble finding people who understand him and what he has to deal with.

(Scene from Leech where Lex confronts Clark with "I think I hit you at 60 MPH.")

Miles Millar: It's called Smallville for a reason, it's really about this small town in Kansas, and the strange things that have occurred since this meteor shower hit 12 years ago. That's the new element to the actual mythology of Superman we've added.

John Schneider: It was so huge, that they changed the billboard. It now says "Meteor Capital of the World." So they are capitalizing a bit on some potentially bad things that happened a while ago. But what we get into in the script a little bit, it certainly has the quirkiness of Mayberry, or of Hazzard, or of any of the little small towns in our imaginations.

(Scene from Leech where Eric gets Chloe's purse back for her.)

Tom Welling: The powers that he does possess, and that he gains, right now at the age, they come to him and go, and he doesn't always have control over them. So he's really trying to get a hold on what's going on with him, internally and externally with the people around him.

Allison Mack: He's discovering that he has all these insane powers, you know. I mean, he finds out that he's an alien from another planet, it's like, how much more confusing can you get, when everything that you thought was real or true, isn't?

(Scene from Leech where Clark saves Eric while being stuck by lightning.)

Miles Millar: You'll see how Clark deals with his powers and his emerging powers. When we started the series, Clark, for example, didn't have X-ray vision, and that's one of the things we've been dealing with, how does he get X-ray vision, how does he cope with that, and other powers he gets as well. And then it's also finding out about his true existence from Krypton, what happened to him. And he'll learn about his, it's about the little mythology episodes of the series as well, learning about his true parents from Krypton, and their history.

Tom Welling: You can almost take the fact that he's Superman, or that he will become Superman, out of the whole story. He's just a normal kid and his, the problems that he has to deal with are just the most, too exaggerated by the powers that he does possess.

Kristin Kreuk: It's definitely one of the most universal things, definitely. I think that anybody can relate to what's going on. And maybe there's some, you know, super human story lines, but underneath it all, it's all about growing up.

Miles Millar: It's taking away the suit, taking away the ability to fly, it's taking away the things you sort of expect to see with Superman, and getting to the emotion, and the heart of the story. You see this teenager as an alien, and he is just coming to grips with his new superpowers, and I think it's a very human story.

John Schneider: The great thing about this, about Smallville, is that it's not anything like what people expect it to be. It's as much about a teenager coming of age, realizing that he is Superman, as it is about parents realizing that they have a child with superpowers, and they have a child who's just trying to be a child.

(Superman co-creator Joe Shuster's job as a paperboy for Toronto's Daily Star, [today known as The Toronto Star] served as the inspiration for Clark Kent's Daily Planet.)

(Scene from pilot, the car crash.)

Miles Millar: What's great about Smallville, is we've never seen this war before. I mean, in the first Superman movie, it was basically for the first hour of the movie it was Smallville. Apart from that, it hasn't really been explored.

Tom Welling: What really attracted me to it, was seeing this character at such a younger part of his life trying to figure out who he is, why does he have these abilities, what is he supposed to do with them, how does he take these abilities which he feels are making him weird or different, and trying to fit in. It was those things that really, sort of his um, just figuring out who he is, I think was really interesting to me.

What's crazy about the special effects, is a lot of times we're shooting things that we don't know what they're going to do with them, so we have to sort of leave it open, shoot a lot of back plates, so it means that they can come in and do what ever they want with it. But we're getting the gist of it, we're getting the feeling of what they want to do. I mean when the camera's coming at you, and the camera's supposed to be a bullet, and you're supposed to be moving around the bullet in slow motion, and they're telling you that the bullet's going to go this way, then this way, it gets a bit challenging, but it's also interesting, it's fun.

Michael Rosenbaum: The whole thing is shooting on, you know, 35 mm. They're shooting it like it's a movie, like it's a feature film. They want it to look like a feature film, unlike anything you've seen on TV, and I think that's what they're accomplishing.

John Schneider: That's certainly what we're all hoping, is that people want to know more about the Kents, about Clark, about Smallville, and about what life is like when suddenly you realize that your son is bullet-proof.

Sam Jones: Unlike other shows, where all the character come from the same background, or on some shows it's all the same nationality, on this show, the characters are different, and they're unique, and they're not judged on their differences, it think they're embraced on their differences.

Tom Welling: I'm there every day, almost in every scene, and a lot of the other people come in two, three days a week. So I'm jumping sort of from scene to scene with different actors. And the actors themselves, we all take a great pride in what we're doing. We all want to make every moment sort of something, and create, which keeps it interesting for me, considering I'm there so much.