Heroes executive producers Tim Kring and Jeph Loeb, directors Greg Beeman and Allan Arkush, writer Jesse Alexander, and actor Masi Oka discuss about Heroes and its future.. (via OgMog.com)

The Five Year Plan
Unlike other heroinarratives, like LOST, which have begun to meander, the Heroes gang has a five year plan. “We’ve thought about seasons 1-5 and how we might arc them,” said series creator Tim Kring. The creators explained that both specific and general story arcs have been considered far in advance. This week’s reveal of Nathan Petrelli being Claire’s father, for example, has been planned since day one.

Eternal Sunshine + The Incredibles = Heroes?
“I saw Eternal Sunshine and The Incredibles back to back – and they were my two favorite movies of that year… There was something about the Charlie Kaufman characters, these hyper-ordinary characters that I really responded to… people you felt like you knew, or maybe went to school with.. people who were unexpected and ordinary…. The Incredibles took the idea of people trying to live an ordinary life… and all of the stress and strain that being different imposed on these very ordinary lives.” – Tim Kring, series creator

Thoughts on LOST:
Both Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb worked on the first season of LOST before stepping down. Alexander as an executive consultant, and Loeb as a supervising producer. Alexander praised the collaborative story telling process on Heroes: “I worked on two other shows before this, (LOST and ALIAS) and we had the structure of an old writers room and it hurt us creatively.”

Loeb commented on the necessity of “plant and payoff,” the process of setting up information in previous episodes so that reveals make sense, rather than surprise the viewer. “On LOST,” joked Loeb, “someone new would just walk up and say ‘Hi, I’ve been here the whole time.‘”

Choosing the Powers
Tim Kring: “We chose the characters first and then I backed into the super powers based on the characters and what they seemed to want or need. Take Masi’s character for instance. I wanted a character that embraced this new found thing in his life with zeal–I wanted kind of a comic book geek, but we wanted a character that was trapped in a life that was kind of not of his making, so he’s an office worker. When we did the opening scene to introduce his character we did a CGI shot of all the cubicles to show how isolated he was.” [A shot strikingly similar to one of Bob Parr at work in The Incredibles.]

Kring also described that Niki’s split-personality ‘power’ was originally written as ability to be in two places at once, highly fitting for a single mother.

You can read all story at ogmog.com (Thanks to Nick).