Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
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Highlander |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: Base of Burrard St Bridge (where DM pulls CM from the water) Bill Panzer: Hi, I'm Bill Panzer, Executive Producer of Highlander... and the first season of Highlander, what a grand adventure it was for all of us. The first episode... we tried to connect the Highlander legend from the films, in the person of Christopher Lambert, with the new Highlander, in the person of Adrian Paul, and we wanted to expand the notion that Highlander was a broader spectrum than we had in the films. To that end, we shot here at the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver for the final fight of that first episode. It was our first Quickening. It was, you know, kind of the shake-down cruise of a television series. We discovered that, if you were paying REALLY close attention, that Richie Ryan -- Stan Kirsch -- was the potential of being an Immortal, had the potential of being an Immortal. But you had to watch real close, because we weren't sure ourselves that he was going to become an Immortal. It was the kick off to, you know, six years of exciting television for us behind the camera, and hopefully for you guys out there. In doing the first episode, we had a lot of firsts, a lot of things we had to explore. We had to get across the idea that there would be flashbacks in Highlander, that these Immortals had known each other in the past. If you were a fan of the movie, you already knew this, but if you were just coming to us kind of cold, we had to make that clear -- that these guys lived for hundreds, thousands of years, and they've been in contact in the past. We had to set up the fact that Connor MacLeod knew Duncan MacLeod and in fact had been his mentor when he was a newborn Immortal. We needed to set up the fact that Slan Quince had known Connor in the past and bore him some enmity. And we needed to establish what kind of a Quickening we were going to have. In the movies, you know, we had a lot more license, but this being television in the early nineties, we couldn't have a lot of body parts flying around. So we tried to choose something that created the idea that somebody got their head cut off, but that it was more like a jolt of light came out of the head and the lightning flew around and, you know, it was -- it was less violent than the, uh, than the movie version. And then we had to deal with the concept of Immortals being able to sense each other's presence from a reasonable distance. We call it "the buzz". That word is never used, but that's how it's referred to in the scripts. And we had to start with something. We started with a buzz, and it gradually evolved from this first episode, over the course of the next hundred and eighteen episodes, as the directors and the post-production staff, the, uh, the music people, the sound effects people, all gradually honed the buzz to where it became kind of a defining Highlander moment. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: 1982, I ran into a guy named Greg Widen, who was a student in California at film school. He had written a project called Highlander. It's a little darker, it's a little less action, didn't have any special effects, but the story was very cool. Three years later, we made the movie. A year after that, it was released to thunderous silence in America. Huge hit in Europe and the rest of the world. Gradually became a cult following on video in America. And Marla Ginsburg came to us from Gaumont Television and said, 'Why don't we make a TV series out of this?' 'Great,' I said. That was the full extent of what I knew about television, except it was a smaller screen than movies and a definitely smaller budget. And had rules of its own. So not knowing anything about this... This being the first TV show of our French partners, Gaumont Television, they didn't know anything about it either. Rysher, the syndicator in America, they didn't know anything about making dramatic series. With that firm foundation, we said 'let's march off to Vancouver'. Co-production deal was put in place with, uh, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, America, and off we went. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Sometimes when you're writing an episode, and the actor has to go from point A to point B on kind of an excursion to find something out, it becomes impractical, impossible, too expensive to have the full unit go along with the actor to take him from point A to point B. In this case, Richie is trying to find the guy he thinks is his father. So he has to go out on the street and ask people if they know Joe Scanlon. In order to do that, Don Paonessa, a cameraman, and a couple of people, four people, and Richie -- Stan Kirsch -- went out and wandered around the seedy side of Vancouver, and they would stop the car, jump out, Richie would do a shot, and then they would jump back in the car and go away. Kind of gorilla film-making. So they needed somebody to react to all of this, but we couldn't afford to pay anybody or script anything or get them involved. So they stop the car, Don and the cameraman get out, and they start rolling. Richie gets out of the car and walks up to some complete stranger on the street and says, "Hey, have you, uh... do you know where the nearest McDonald's is?" And the guy turns to him and starts pointing down the street, like, "Yeah, there's the McDonald's down there." And when -- in the script, what he's doing, of course, is saying, "Have you seen Joe Scanlon? I think he's my father." So you get the shot of the guy pointing down the street, perfectly naturally, Richie's saying thank you, exiting shot, and we get a little closer to point B than we started at point A. |
(Actually, Richie is looking for Mr. Stubbs's candy store. He doesn't know anything about Scanlon yet at that point in the story.)
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Probably the most telling thing that can happen is the first death of an Immortal and the realization that their parents are not really their parents, they were adopted, they were foundlings, they were something. And then in this case, it being hundreds of years ago at a time when life was far more primitive, whereas MacLeod thinks that he got badly wounded and by a miracle he survived, his family says 'you're a demon, you're no son of mine, get out of here.' And so there he is. He's wandering around. He then runs into his father again -- in probably the most famous flashback in Highlander -- he runs into his father again, he's saying 'who am I?' You know, 'where did I come from?' All these questions that for most of us are already answered. And if not, at least it's in the present day. I mean, for these guys, it's four hundred years ago and he has no clue. He's got nobody to tell him that he's immortal, he's got nobody to help him learn about the Game, not for quite a while. So for him, when he understands-- From the first episode, when both he and Connor understand that Richie is an Immortal, an unborn Immortal, who has yet to suffer his first death, he recalls what it was like for him, and he understands Richie, Richie's quest to find his father, and how he latches on to this charlatan who is pretending to be his father. And he can't tell Richie that while he is not yet immortal, he is an Immortal and will become immortal at some point. So he can't blow that for Richie, because he wants him to have -- as all Immortals, good Immortals do, they want you to have a normal life until you become immortal when you no longer have a normal life. And he wants Richie to have that shot, so he won't tell him, but he knows the guy's lying to him and he kinda has to be clever in a way to bring the truth out so that Richie is as undamaged as possible. And this is a time when Stan is, like, at his youngest. You know, he is, both as an actor and as a character, he is a very vulnerable guy. And as we all were, when you're starting a show and, you know, we're all groping around for this, and here he's gotta-- he has to play this really wonderful part where he has to disagree with MacLeod, who even by now has become this kind of hero figure to him -- father figure to him -- looking for his real father. Doesn't exist. I mean, it's just-- I just thought it was a wonderful dilemma. The fact that we came to it, to such a good show so early, was because of wanting to lay the pipe of how MacLeod had his first death and how he was rejected and how that colored his life ever since. Since by now this is the second episode-- So we've had Tom Wright, who has a concept of creating movement through cuts and who didn't look at the actors when they were performing. He would have the monitors set up so he looked away from the actors at the TV screen, claiming that this is what the audience was gonna see and 'I didn't really need to...' So coming from movies, this was, you know, like heresy, I mean, totally unimaginable to me that anybody would not be facing the actors during their performance. However, that was the first of a lot of things that I learned in television. Jorge, who, uh, by the way, was a convicted revolutionary in I-forget-where, some Latin American country, and spent years in prison for being kind of a freedom fighter, brought a bunch of anger, impatience with any system, and a need to advance the action through the movement of the camera as opposed to editing. So, being one of the more interesting guys that we ever worked with, as well as an interesting director, his first time out of the box, he gets to wander through the so-called slums, skid row of Vancouver -- which was still pretty nice, but that's, you know, Canada -- and he'd pick up all these shots, stick Stan on the street and do a visual style that was different and in fact became somewhat closer to the style as it ultimately evolved with Paolo and Dennis Berry, Peter Rellis as we got years down the road, but it allowed-- If you're willing to tell a director 'just do it the way you wanna do it, don't miss the moment with the actors, and finish as close to on time as you can,' some guys will deliver interesting stuff and some guys won't 'cause they're too mired in the old traditions of seventies and eighties TV. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: Outside Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park Bill Panzer: This is Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park. It is a monument, a tribute to the great Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, leader of the Chinese people, and it's in the middle of downtown Vancouver, hustle and bustle all around, but yet, when you walk through these doors, it's an island of peace and tranquility. But for Duncan MacLeod, it's a place where he discovers that one of his old friends has been making kind of, uh, super-human speedballs, and what we see in this episode that we haven't seen before is truly how great Adrian Paul's martial arts skills are, as he fights bad guy after bad guy, him doing all of his own stuff -- there's no stuntmen involved -- and the guys he's fighting are also skilled martial artists. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Part of the notion of this, how this started, was that here's-- If you take a guy, an Immortal, who is-- It could have been, this easily could have been gladiators in Rome, and how do you energize them to go farther than their capabilities? And he worked with this drug for a long time, finally came up with something that worked, only the downside was that you were an absolute superman and then you died. MacLeod, recalling what went on in the past, figured out who was doing this in the present and decided this was wrong, that this was again somebody who he had been close to who had turned. And these are never pleasant circumstances, but our boy being the hero that he is, takes care of it and makes sure that the last of the drug -- whatever it was -- is gone. So at the end of this, his old pal says, 'okay, I won't do this anymore', and MacLeod, being an honorable and trusting guy, says 'okay' and doesn't kill him, but he still destroys the stuff. So is that like, 'I know I believe you, but just in case'? Bob Anderson, who -- the sword master on this, season one -- we've talked many times about how he was on 'Captain Blood', he was the head of the Canadian Olympic team, and one of the great swordsmen and sword masters who ever lived and probably who still ever live. And he... Yeah, it's 'Star Wars' and all, I mean, the guy is fantastic, but the most wonderful thing about him for television, which he had done almost none of, was that he is given an actor every week who either has some stage-sort experience or has some kind of martial arts experience or has nothing. It'll be like presenting him with me, saying, 'okay, you've got twenty-four hours and this guy's gonna have a sword fight with Adrian Paul', who is a brilliant swordsman. And Bob would assess your ability, choreograph the fight so that you could do a few things. He'd teach you like three or four things. Three or four moves. That was it. You'd get to be where you looked as though you were competent with that. The rest of the time it would be done by a stunt guy. In this case, with Nguyen, he had somebody who was a martial arts expert who could fight with swords, and so he put in a great deal of sort of athleticism in the fight that we didn't always have. And so there were the back flips and there was the jumping over this and jumping over that. And Adrian is very athletic, and between the two of them, you ended up with a different fight from any that we'd had before and that we-- It would be a while before we had one of those again. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: "Innocent Man," the story of a man almost convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Two incredibly great performances: John Novak as the sheriff, one of our really good bad guys, and Vincent Schiavelli, who we were fortunate enough to have come to us directly from his fantastic performance in, uh, "Amadeus" and, I mean, brought such pathos and such humanity to the poor, brain-damaged character that was, uh, we thought, wonderful to watch. A story of injustice, and who better to tell that story than the director, Jorge Montesi, who himself had spent many years as a political prisoner in jail in Chile. And he gave us some wonderful moments in the fight scene, using wide-angle lenses so we could look up the blade of the sword and at the actor, something we hadn't done before, and his decapitation was one of the very best we ever did. I mean, he, it was -- even though you saw nothing, it was so brutal that when we all were watching it in the dailies, everybody simultaneously went, "Ugh!" |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: The idea that somebody is falsely accused of a crime is always a good premise. The idea that the guy who is falsely accused of the crime is kind of, uh, I don't know, simple-minded, somebody who's not quite in our world anymore, makes it even more poignant. And then you tie it together with a really bad sheriff and some vague attempt to tie this to the crime of the first episode. This comes from a feeling that we had that the outside world should be an additional threat to Immortals. Rather than just getting your head cut off, you could have had the fear of discovery. She was a clever investigator, just as we had in Highlander I. And this ran for pretty much the entire run of the show in Vancouver, and gradually it kinda ran out of gas -- we just realized that that was not the focus, what the focus of the show should be. John Novak was one of our better bad guys. It was another one of those shows we were out in the country a lot, which is not my favorite thing, being kind of an urban guy. But the the moral issue was strong, the moral issue resonated, and sometimes we had those moral issues early on and sometimes we didn't, and gradually in the succeeding seasons, we discovered that that was what made the show special and wasn't a cop show, wasn't the, you know, there weren't cops, there weren't reporters, it was a separate world of Immortals. Those few people who knew about him, it made it more special, less derivative, riskier, edgier, and that's what carried us for six years. The fight at the end was pretty cool. I mean, it was-- I don't know whether it's true or not, but Jorge told me that he had seen a fight like that when he was in prison in South America, so I don't know if it was coming from life, but it was one of our more graphic Quickenings without-- you didn't really see anything. I mean, the beheading was very visceral, you kind of went 'Eugh' when you saw it, even though you really didn't see it, but it was very convincing and very strong and that was the kind of stuff that we were pushing, that envelope of responsible violence -- whatever that euphemism means -- to increase the drama of the show without, you know, wanting people to wander out with a souvenir Highlander sword and try and cut somebody's head off. When... We all bring past experience to our present-day reactions to situations. Now in this case, MacLeod's past experience is the Civil War a hundred and fifty years ago. So when we have a guy who is, who he believes is innocent and is about to get railroaded -- does -- he recalls himself being convicted and executed -- hanged -- for something that he didn't do. And only-- This was also kinda surprising for TV. I mean, you didn't hang your hero, you know, even though he was immortal. That's not the kind of image that people like to see, was that guy hanging there. But then he was buried and he was dug up by Lucas Desiree and... So he had the full experience of what it's like to be falsely accused, falsely convicted, in his case executed. And he could have laid in that grave for a century. So it's that kind of resonance, you know, that you have when you've had not just an experience kind of like the experience in the present day, but something at least as strong, that you realize that you've got to do something about it, you've gotta make a difference. I mean, you're not just here to keep your head from getting cut off. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: In the first Highlander movie, we kind of started, uh, we kind of had an idea that rock-and-roll was a good thing for Highlander, which is why Queen was so closely involved in the scoring of the picture, and some of those songs, of course, we used in the series, and they've become kind of like Highlander anthems -- "Who Wants to Live Forever," "Princes of the Universe." So in the series, we thought it might be fun if we had, every once in a while, a rock star to play a friend of MacLeod's, a baddie, whatever. And the first one was Joan Jett. Now Joan is like hard-core rock-and-roll. Great, great lady. And all of the actors and people who come up and work on Highlander in Vancouver would generally get a choice of staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, a great hotel; the Pan-Pacific, another great hotel; the Viva Towers, an apartment complex that was also quite lovely. Joan didn't want to stay in any of these places, and she said she'd let us know when she got here, where she was going to stay. So we get a phone call and go over to see her at this hotel. Now, this is not a hotel that we would have ever thought a rock-and-roll star would stay in. And Joan said, "No, no." Uh, we're sitting in a bar that you probably would never want to go into in your life. And she said, "No, no. I talked to the band, and they said this place was cool." We said, "You know, Joan, you could stay at one of these other places." And she said, "No, No. This is cool. This is -- I'm happy here." And, I mean, it was like no pretension, it was just, it was fun. And we got to shooting the final fight scene between her and Duncan MacLeod on the beach at night. And when you -- when you're shooting during the day, we have an expression that you're 'losing the light', which means that it's a day scene and the sun goes down and it's over. Well, with night shooting, obviously, it's the reverse. You, uh, you're shooting at night, and 'losing the light' means when the sun is coming up. So with the sun coming up, uh, the director just managed to get what he needed to tell the story of the scene, and when Don Paonessa and I looked at the stuff, we said, "Maybe this would be fun to turn this into kind of a rock video," since we had -- you know, it was Joan, and we had music and, uh, so we really stylized it and did a different kind of fight scene than we had done up until that date. So, thank you, Joan. |
(I'm in awe at the *spin* he puts on this. Reading between the lines, the fight scene was crap and they realized the only way they could make it work was to turn it into a music video.)
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: "Free Fall", I mean, what am I gonna say? "Free Fall"... "Free Fall". Who can even remember what it was? Joan Jett. Joan Jett was cool. She showed up in Vancouver, no entourage, ready for whatever wardrobe we might come up with, and she got right into it. I mean, she was staying in this funky hotel. We had to talk her out of staying in this hotel and put her in some place nice. She had never held a-- I don't think she'd ever held a fork in her hand, let alone a sword. And she was, uh, she was very, very game. You know, we said, 'okay, we're gonna take the clothes off and you're gonna walk through the lobby of this hotel in, uh, pantyhose.' It was like, you know, fine, blam, she dropped the trou and off she went. The idea that she had been such a bad guy in the past, really bad -- killed a kid, killed, you know, the kid's mother, I mean like, bad. This was again pushing that envelope as far as we dared to do it and farther than people wanted us to push it. So then she shows up on the top of this building, which was a major building in Vancouver, and off she goes, and the impact of her landing on top of the car, you know, and the windows blow out and all this, I mean it was like a-- It was violent. It was violent for TV; it was violent for anything. But everybody thought it was so cool that we managed to get them to keep it in. At the same time, we were sort of starting to earn the title of the most violent show on TV. I went on radio and here in LA and did interviews talking about how we WEREN'T violent. But I mean, let's be honest, that was pretty cool and, uh, that was sort of like movie violence, that level. But it was something that also, you had to believe that she died. You know, 'cause we didn't know she was immortal. And her seduction of Richie and her fighting MacLeod at the end... Don Paonessa had an idea. He said, let's make this, since we've got a rock star, since we've got her song, let's make this sort of an MTV, like a rock video. I mean, let's try and do that. Something different. Let's mix it up. Let's throw black and white. I mean, they're fighting in the sand, which was not so easy. You know, Joan was not one of the most skilled swordsmen we ever had, but very game. And when you cut it together with the music and with, you know, all the the action, the excitement of it, it was -- you know, the light was changing, was getting light in the morning -- it was bizarre. But somehow, she came out as a memorable character that we all, you know, we all got a kick out of her. Hey, her name is Joan Jett. Who would have thought that Joan Jett would -- rock star and guest star on a TV series -- would end up playing on the Highlander volleyball team against The X-files. She was a game girl. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: Pacific Central Station, Vancouver (not episode-related) Bill Panzer: Every once in a while, when shooting episodic television, for some reason the bean-counters decide you need to do a show in six days instead of seven days. What we look for then is something called a 'bottle show,' which means the whole thing can be done in one place, minimum number of actors, and you can shoot it in six days... or most of it. So "Bad Day at Building A" was, uh, that was how it came about, and it actually happened. We shot the whole thing in and around a courthouse -- a structure that looked like a courthouse -- and we managed to get the stuff done 'cause it was so contained. The other... the thing that, though, that we always try to find in a Highlander episode is something that could not happen if the hero was not immortal. So the Immortal element in this is, of course, is MacLeod making sure that he becomes the sacrifice. That he becomes the one who's killed on television. That he becomes the one, because he's -- he's of course not going to die; he is going to come back and save the day. And that's what... you know, you try to find that element in each episode that separates it just from a traditional action-adventure, romantic series. This could not happen if we were not dealing with a man who is immortal. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer: As you'll hear more later, there are moments in episodic television when you need to pick up a little budget money, you need to save some money, and the best way to do that is to have a show that takes place in one location. And we did this once in Vancouver this year and then we do it later in Paris. Now these are called bottle shows, like 'ship in a bottle', and the idea is to shoot them for one day less. So in Vancouver that meant we shot for six days instead of seven days. And in Paris we shot for seven instead of eight days. But the notion here was that-- What is there in a situation that only an Immortal could deal with? What could happen to this group of hostages that only an Immortal could solve? And the idea was that MacLeod would have to be the guy who made sure that he was the one who was executed. Now we know he's coming back, uh, but they don't. It's almost like an old Agatha Christie kind of story in that there's-- you think the person is dead, but they're not dead, and they're killing all the other people in the story, kind of like in Ten Little Indians. So the entire thing was shot in something that pretended to be a court room. And again we had the reporter, and she's starting to tweak to the fact that something, you know, MacLeod is in these odd situations. And the notion was that she would build on this, and we didn't know whether we were ever gonna have her find out that he was immortal or not find out that he was immortal. And we gradually felt that we should just drop that story line, as we became more involved with the Immortals themselves. Andrew Divoff played Bryan Slade, the bad guy, with his own twisted sense of honor. And under the heading of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, we were so pleased with Andrew Divoff's performance that he later got to come back in a show called "Little Tin God". Sometimes, early days, everybody obsesses about 'why would somebody do something'. So in this case, even though the entire story is about 'they go to the courthouse', which really is enough -- I mean to tell you, who cares why -- but in this case there was pressure from above, why did they go to the courthouse, so we had to go out and do a second unit scene to talk about the traffic tickets, to talk about-- to show this whole thing so we'd know why we were going to the courthouse, as opposed to just sort of showing up at the courthouse. Sometimes television is like the snake that's eating its own tail. Jorge was a guy very much like Dennis Berry, who liked to get out there with that camera, fly it around, move it around, do long walk-and-talks, really free himself of tripods, and he'd love to just-- to move it around. So of course, not only do we give him a bottle show where he has one day less to work with, but we say, "And in addition, you're gonna work in all these small rooms where there really isn't gonna be an opportunity, either in terms of time or in terms of the space available, to do the kind of shooting that we hired you for in the first place." And we had a lot of sort of spirited conversations in the famous bar in Vancouver that we all used to repair to in the evenings. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Highlander is first and foremost a romantic action-adventure show, and this episode, we thought, captured the idea of the romance, because the guy who kidnaps Tessa falls in love with her. We thought there was action and adventure in the Canadian Rockies, because one of the great things about this part of Canada is that the terrain is so beautiful, so incredibly varied, and we tried to take advantage of it wherever we could. And finally, we have the Immortal component, which is really, uh, in two ways. One is that because MacLeod has been alive for so long and lived in much rougher times, he was able to survive in the wilderness in a way most people never could. And then, because of course he's immortal, it was possible for him to take that header off the cliff and fool the guys, the kidnappers, into thinking that he was dead and he gets to come back like Rambo. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - So here we are at episode seven, and the revolving door that had become the writer's writing staff was continuing to turn, and all of a sudden there are, like, no writers. And we had exhausted all the pool of reasonably talented people in Los Angeles, when out of nowhere, riding on a white horse, comes David Abramowitz, a man prepared to forsake any reasonable living in Los Angeles and head up to the frozen north to join the first American, Canadian, Japanese, French, German, Italian co-production. David Abramowitz - I needed the job. You know, it was, uh-- BP - Talk about being happy to see somebody. DA - Well, I was happy to have the work, you know. I'd always been in network television and I had applied three times for this job of Highlander and they rejected me twice, and the third time I guess was the charm and they-- BP - They cut your rate. DA - [laughs] Um, so they hired me and I came in thinking, uh, syndication, co-production, it'll be six weeks', twelve weeks' work and I'll pick up a paycheck and be gone. And it lasted for six years. It was just incredible. And when I came in, it was a little strange because it was like coming into Death Valley of writers. I kept expecting to see the bones of writers left out on the desks in front of their word processors. BP - This was in Canada. The bones were removed every night. DA - Absolutely. All the time. So I came into this episode and I remember the first shot I saw was MacLeod jumping off the cliff and then the sound effects of his bones knitting together, you know, the [makes noises] and it was-- I thought, my goodness, this is something really different. This is really strange. BP - Well, the whole suicide issue, even though we know he's immortal, we know he's not gonna die. He's doing it for a good reason. Yet it raised flags both in the U.S. and overseas about the concept of showing somebody committing suicide even though everybody knows that he's immortal and he's not gonna die. DA - Right. There were big things. I remember that suicide was impossible and even mentioning the word 'abortion' was impossible. In any of the countries where the Catholic church had any power, it was just taboo. So we had to be very careful when we were dealing in immortality. But what's interesting was it was perfectly alright to cut somebody's head off with a sword. BP - In a tasteful way. DA - In a very tasteful way. That's what we were. BP - Part of the fun of an Immortal, and something we tried to bring to a number of episodes, is the idea that experience from the past helps him survive in unique situations in the present, and in this case, because he had hundreds of years of experience surviving in the woods, fighting wars in various countries, taking care of himself in difficult environments, he, unlike you or me, adapted himself to being on his own in the woods. DA - I really like this episode. It was about love and obsession, and I thought that Marc Singer, who was the 'Beastmaster', did a great job in the fight sequence and conveying the anguish of unrequited love at the end of the fight, and I thought both of them were-- both Adrian and Marc were great physical specimens, and to have them fight in the water, it was one of the few times that-- in the series that I actually believed that Duncan might really lose the fight. It worked pretty well, I thought. I had worked with Marc, um, about eight years before that on a show called V. He did better work in this than he did in that, I thought. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: north end of Pacific Central Station, Vancouver (not episode-related) Bill Panzer: Again, you know, when you talk about the difference between movies and television -- movies, you just have a lot more time, and when you get to something like stunts, which no matter how simple or how many times you've seen them or done them, always have an element of real danger involved, time is something that can make everybody a little nervous. And when MacLeod gets run over by the car, we only had the time to do that one time, and the stunt guy threw a little extra something in it, and I don't think anybody has ever been hit by a car better than that guy. And we all thought that -- we all thought he was hurt, and... to the best of my knowledge, he seems to be fine. The character of Amanda -- the character of RANDI, played by Amanda Wyss -- who was an ongoing character in the first season, was something that we tried to do as a continuity from the first movie. The idea of taking a reporter who -- or, in the movie's case, a policeman, an investigator -- who kind of gets into 'what's going on here; things don't seem to add up,' and in the case of the series, being thrown into events in which MacLeod participated in kind of an odd way, was a terrific idea for us, and it kind of helped give a sense that we were continuing with the Highlander universe as it existed in the movie, because really, that's all the universe there was at that time, and then gradually, as we got into the other seasons, the character became a little bit limiting, had said pretty much, we thought, about all that she had to say, and we gradually phased her out. |
(...'as we got into the other seasons' & 'gradually phased her out'? She was in six of the first 13 episodes of season one, then MacLeod & Co. head for Paris and she's never seen again. That's not exactly what I would call 'phasing out'.)
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - The guy who is in charge of the show's writing, the creative side of the show, is called a showrunner, and by episode eight we had been burning through showrunners at an alarming clip. And finally we found this guy, David Abramowitz, who arrived in time to set us on the path that we followed for the next five and a half years. David Abramowitz - So I came into "Deadly Medicine", which was show number eight. It was three days into prep. Generally, shows get seven days into prep and six weeks to write. The script was in not-great shape and needed to be completely rewritten. And I was totally new to the show and trying to figure out what it was about while writing it. Four days later-- four days BEFORE that, I had been in Montana with my wife on my tenth anniversary when I got the call to come down immediately, and I came down and was immediately totally over my head. There was work to be done, I was five weeks behind on the scripts, and there was this show "Deadly Medicine" in front of me, which was a show about an Immortal with only one Immortal in it and there wasn't much there to look at, so-- in the material. So I started writing, and that's when I had my first assistant, and she quit after two days because she wouldn't stay 'til midnight. And then my second assistant quit after three days because she wouldn't stay past eleven thirty. And we worked really hard and finally turned out an episode. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't one of our best. It was a bit scattered, and it was before we really learned that Immortals are really best -- our show -- when they're facing other Immortals, not crazed Frankenstein kind of doctors. But Joe [Pantoliano] did a great job and it was my entry into the learning curve. BP - Whenever you're doing a stunt, no matter how many times you do that stunt or the stuntman has done it and the crew is prepped and ready and everybody's very careful and incredibly safety-conscious, every once in a while, the stunt guy throws a little extra something in it, which he did, uh, which he did this time. I mean, pretty much, you know, he really took a solid whack, and we all came racing over to see whether he was alright and it's-- I don't think anybody's ever been hit by a car any better than that. DA - No, I thought it was a great shot. A great shot. In hindsight, I kind of wish I had re-written the script better-- BP - Hindsight is dangerous, David. DA - Absolutely it is, it is. Luckily, we got better as we went along. BP - That's right. We had the opportunity today to comment on these. DA - Absolutely positively. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: seawalk NW of Granville Bridge Bill Panzer: One of the great challenges of making Highlander in Vancouver is that it is very different -- difficult -- to do a flashback without just shooting it in close-up and trying to, you know, create something out of wardrobe and a few props. Our production designer, Steve Geaghan, was continually amazing, because every time we'd ask him, "Steve, can we do this?" he would say, "Yes." Well, we said, "Steve, we need to do kind of a World War II period, Eastern Europe / Russia, something like that, with a hundred refugees going onto a... being exiled, uh, supposedly rescued by MacLeod and being kind of betrayed. Uh, can we do that?" And he said, "Yeah. Plus we'll have cars driving up and we'll have a whole thing. You can even have a wide shot." And sure enough, four days later, when we arrived at the location, everything had been dressed, everything had been organized, I mean, and it looked like, as you've seen, it looked like Eastern Europe in that time period. The other interesting thing, I think, about this episode is that we had to deal with what happens when an Immortal is decapitated by something other than the sword of the Immortal he was fighting. And, you know, because in this case Voshin gets chopped up by the propellers. So what we thought was, as long as an Immortal is present, he gets the Quickening, and if there is no Immortal present, then the Quickening just goes to 'the source'. And finally, the issue of -- one of the issues of immortality that is intriguing is why does somebody choose to spend their mortal life with someone who won't grow old and with whom they can't have children. And it's one thing to have this as an intellectual conversation. It's another thing when you're put in close proximity to a child, and for Tessa, when she comes in contact with the little girl and starts to kind of fall in love with the little girl, it brings home in a very powerful way what exactly she's giving up to be with MacLeod. This is a story that could only be told in the context of Highlander. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - When "Sea Witch" got rolling, we made an astonishing discovery -- that we had another writer, David Tynan. David Abramowitz - It was like a gift from God. I came into the show-- This is, I'm into the show now two episodes, there's nothing in prep, there are no stories approved, and as a writer and a showrunner, I'm dying because I don't know where we're gonna shoot the next episode. And I'd never heard of David Tynan, and I awaited his script thinking it would be like the rest, where I would have to do a page one re-write, and then Tynan's script shows up and I began to think that I found someone. I finally found someone who not only gets the show, but who's a human being and who understands the material. David turned out to be a writer of my dreams. He then went on staff and stayed with us for three or four more years. DA - The episode turned out to have a clear, consistent story line, it worked well for Tessa, it made a great deal of sense, and I thought Steven Macht did a great job as a villain. So much of Highlander, and so much of the success of a show, depends upon the strength and the ability of the villain, because it's through the villain that you measure the strength of your lead character. And I thought Steven did a great job for us. BP - We had one of those Highlander-like questions which was at the end, when Steven Macht is beheaded by the propeller of the ship. We agonized a little bit about this, I mean, does this count? Is this fair? Is this part of the rules? Where does the Quickening go? And it was the beginning of our feeling that if an Immortal was present, that they would in fact get the Quickening in a sort of accidental non-sword beheading. But like that, many things evolved over the course of time in the series when we were forced to confront questions that we never had to do in the movie. And it made for a richer and a fuller experience for the audience and it expanded the legend to where it allowed us to do six seasons of television. DA - And what's interesting, you know, people ask, was there any great divine plan, did you come up-- did you spend nights and nights doing this, and mostly the truth is that we were all winging it, and if it worked, we used it. BP - The idea that Tessa had to confront a reality that she had, which was that she and McLeod could not have children, as no Immortal can have children, and she found herself becoming involved in an internal way with the little girl. And this put some heat on their relationship, and this is one of the colors that would come up from time to time with her. You would-- Having once stated this and seen this, it was a layer in her performance that was always there until she left the show. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: So it was time for another person from the rock-and-roll world, and we were really lucky that we got Vanity, you know, fresh with her triumphs of Prince, and she came up to Vancouver and learned to use a sword. That was something else, you know, most of these people -- most of them... NONE of them -- really had ever used a sword before, and the swordmaster had -- Bob Anderson, in this first season -- had... you know, he may have taught Errol Flynn, and he may have taught Connor MacLeod, but having a day, maybe, to work with these people and have them produce a credible sword fight was not so easy. But Vanity was game, and, uh, she gave Adrian a pretty good tussle. But then we came to the Quickening -- running out of time, same story, only this time we're outside. Outside is not great for Quickenings. Outside during the day is not great for Quickenings. Quickenings like night. Quickenings like the special effects they can do. Quickenings do not like blowing up flower pots. This is something we learned from experience here and we never did it again. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - "Revenge is Sweet". Revenge is an ongoing theme in 'Highlander'. The idea that if revenge is a driving force for human beings who live seventy or eighty years, imagine what it's like when the revenge takes centuries to unfold itself. The emotions grow greater, the hatred grows greater, and the climax is more intense. David Abramowitz - Especially when you're dealing with a good-looking female protagonist like Vanity. What was interesting in this episode, and it was the beginning of-- We started thinking about, and we've always thought about, the police, and there are basic questions in 'Highlander' that you deal with, like what about the police, what happens to the bodies, where does the sword come from, and in trying to design a show that was somewhat realistic, we thought we had to have police in it, after all, because people are dying, and that we need police investigations, and that became an enormous pain in the ass because after a while, you know, Duncan McLeod shows up and is heard about, where all these beheadings are and where people are dying, and he never really gets arrested. So we just decided that what we needed to do was slowly phase out the police. And it's one of those things, like where swords come from -- where does a sword come from -- that you have to suspend belief about. Or where do the bodies go? Um, that if you buy into the conceit of the world of Immortals and sword fighting that people don't see, and all those other things, that you'd buy into the fact that there's no major ongoing police investigation looking for a serial killer who cuts off heads. We just thought we'd just try to begin to push it under the rug. Even though we had a great actor named Tim Reid, who played Sergeant Bennett in the episode. After-- This comes after "Sea Witch", which was where we began, and the writing staff, we began to get some legs, we began to breathe a little bit, and I thought this script was better and worked pretty well. I wish Vanity was a little better with a sword, but she sure looked great wielding it. BP - Yeah, that was always an ongoing problem, is that if an actor brought some sword skills to the show, it was-- they, in the short period of time, the one day they had to practice, they ended up doing a better job if they didn't know anything about sword fighting. But if they didn't know anything about sword fighting, it was very difficult even for Bob Anderson to teach them, and you had to do it in a lot of cuts and you had to have stunt people do it, and on a television budget that was not so easy. And just again to talk about the cops and the newspaper people, part of our financing and distribution group were still a little under the spell of the first movie. So they kept wanting things to be a little more literal and a little closer to that and wanted those kind of investigations going around to harass MacLeod and his immortal buddies, and it took us a little while to kind of outgrow that. DA - I remember having meetings with the French, who said, "We understand what the show is. This is about a crime fighter with a sword." And then I went to the Germans, and they said, "I know what this show is about. This is a sword and sorcery show. It's a show of mysticism." And then we would get notes from the Japanese which were, um, "Where are the rock stars? I thought Mick Jagger was gonna be in the show?" BP - Well, we had-- Come on. There's Vanity, right there. DA - I know, absolutely, there's one. So we gave them a rock star. BP - Absolutely right. DA - So it was the kind of thing, I'm trying to please very, very many people; very, very many countries, and somehow we managed to pull it of. BP - We did our best. DA - We did. BP - We would always try to do the Quickenings at night. It's easier to make lightning dramatic at night. It's easier to have car lights explode, street lights explode, windows explode at night. It looks better, especially when you're on a television-sized budget. And we almost always succeeded, but every once in a while reasons would pop up why we couldn't do it at night. DA - Yeah, well, things, you know, things-- bad things happen at night. Things go bump in the night. You know, the darkened corner, the shadows and the moon. Um, those things are always more dramatic. But the biggest reasons why you don't shoot at night, why we couldn't shoot at night for many things is that, cost. Highlander was done on a limited budget, and we would first put out our scripts and we'd do chase sequences or we'd do skulking or we'd do many other kinds of scenes that would play at night, which normally would be better at night, and we'd get them back from production that we'd have to change them for daylight, which they would lose some of their dramatic effect, and there were always trade-offs, because generally, for each page that you can shoot at night, you can shoot three pages during the day. So the cost is three times as much. And the cost-- BP - And you also would have to, something called turnaround. The crew, to change from shooting at night to shooting during the day was a penalty, because the crew must have a certain amount of hours before you can bring them back to work. So to change, once you start on nights, you kinda wanna finish on nights and then try and have that turnaround time over the weekend, if people go along with that. DA - And then if you shoot too many nights, you have a tendency to burn out your crew for the next director who comes back and complains that 'you've given me a dead crew, I can't work with this, this is impossible.' So, even though it loses something dramatically, we shot most of Highlander in the bright sun except when we could steal a night or two over a weekend. BP - Because it is, it's half a year of shooting. And more than half a year of shooting, and you've got to pay attention to not blowing these guys out of the water. DA - Right. And you've got to pay attention to the budget, which is what we always had to do. BP - Yeah. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Brian Clemens had an interesting idea -- that a present day mortal, uh, psychopath would be killing women in the same way that, seventy years ago, an Immortal psychopath had killed them. He was copycatting them, not knowing anything about the immortality, but MacLeod, of course, did know about it. So in order to kind of get a sense of what -- of the time difference and to set this thing back into the twenties, we decided we'd try and make it look a little bit like a silent movie. And we had -- we shot at the Orpheum Theatre, which is a wonderful, great old theater here that's, that has been used -- we've used any number of times for any number of things. And in order to make it seem a little more authentically of that period, we changed the color timing so that even though we shot it in color, we made it, uh, on the screen in black and white. Now, this was something that we like to do, is to give the flashbacks a slightly different visual look, although black-and-white is a little more than 'slight'. We try to get a little different visual look so you can get a sense of both the period and to separate it from the story in the present. And because this was a real theater, and a real OLD theater, doing the Quickening in there was a little hairy, because any kind of pyrotechnics were -- the kind that we used outside are dangerous, they're... they're flammable, they're fireworks. And we had to use a whole new system of pyro to accomplish this safely inside, and believe me, everybody was kind of happy when we walked out of the theater without burning it down. And because MacLeod was not -- because this guy in the present was not an Immortal, uh, you know, MacLeod's sense of justice was certainly, uh, outraged, but somehow it took Tessa to step out of her characteristic role and be the one who dropped the axe on the guy. And this was, as you can imagine, in television, this was kind of an unusual idea, and the -- there was a subject of a lot of meetings with David Abramowitz and myself and occasionally people from the various networks, domestic and foreign who were involved, but at the end, we did it, and we're glad we did. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - Just one of those Highlander-universe coincidences is that the writer of this episode, Brian Clemens, was the co-story creator of Highlander II. You can make of that what you will. David Abramowitz - [chuckles] I think in all the years we did Highlander, this is probably my least favorite episode. BP - Why could that-- How could that possibly by? DA - Well, I tell you, it was, you know, writers generally-- head writers generally don't like it when a script gets presented to them and says 'make this thing work, we're shooting this,' and they don't like the story. And this was a story about a copycat killer who makes believe he's immortal by mimicking a killer many years in the past, and he kills people by scalping them and the people who he scalps for the most part are women. And I just didn't like the story. And it was already-- the script was already written when I came aboard and we just had to make it work. BP - Yeah, that was the-- A typical Highlander danger is the fact that you have this woman who can be in jeopardy. You don't wanna do that too terribly often, but she is mortal, she is a woman, and in this case I thought we were very clever in that we gave her some very important stuff to do with the story, including the fact that she's the one who kills the guy. DA - Right. I, yeah, I think, politically and personally, it's important not to show women as only victims, and that was sort of a way to make the story more morally acceptable to everyone, I think, involved that-- so there at least was-- it wasn't a happy ending. It was an ending that ended in some sort of justice. BP - It may not have been the best show, but the ending was very right. DA - Absolutely. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: near science dome Bill Panzer: Well, this script was from one of our favorite writers, David Tynan, who gave us a great deal of ideas, quality scripts, and also was around on the set for a lot of these things to polish the dialogue when occasionally the actors would have a dispute. The science center, which is a Vancouver landmark, served as the backdrop for the Quickening in this episode. The director had time only to shoot part of the scene, only to shoot the close-ups of the actors fighting and, uh, exchanging dialogue and, you know, just the stuff with the principles. Some weeks later, we realized that the close shots did not a Quickening make, and we sent ever-trusty Don Paonessa out in the field to shoot wider shots of the science center. Also, to shoot the lamps getting allegedly chopped off, blown off, by the actors when they were fighting and by the lightning from the Quickening. And the lamps were pretty real and were a little bit dangerous and everybody's wearing masks, and somebody -- people were getting a little exuberant in the way these things were rigged to fly off the poles, and there was a line of parked cars and, I don't know -- seven or eight cars had their windshields pitted, had to be replaced. It's another example of how, without people coming behind later, after the scene has been roughly put together, to kind of mop up and add shots that are required, uh, you just don't have a chance to get these things done on a television schedule. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - The directors on Highlander come from a lot of different places, and during this first season, we tried a lot of different people. And we started with Tom Wright, who did half of the shows in Vancouver, every other show. And we gradually experimented with other guys until we got to France, and we used Ray Austin for this episode. Ray was -- you know, they come from a lot of different places -- Ray was Cary Grant's best friend. Ray had just-- had worked as a stuntman on Tom Jones. I mean, he kinda came up through the film business and a lot of different things before he ended up as a director on Highlander. David Abramowitz - And he was an incredible shooter. He could always get the job done. You could always depend on Ray, you know. If you needed work done in a short period of time and there was no bullshit around, you went to Ray. I liked Ray. He was a character and he always delivered for us. BP - Yeah, absolutely. DA - This episode was basically Tessa's episode. When you do a series, even though it's called the Highlander, you try to feature your various actors and actresses in a couple episodes a year so that the episode is around them. So artistically the actor doesn't feel as a secondary person and as an afterthought in the show. So we gave Tessa this episode and built it around her and and create a circumstance that was similar for Tessa, the character of Tessa, and create another woman who was killed because she knew of the secret of an Immortal. So it gave Tessa a lot of reflection upon what it was like to live with a mortal and viewed her own mortality through it. BP - Sometimes you end up getting lucky in productions of this because you're forced to find clever ways to achieve fairly grandiose shots, and somebody came up with the idea that if we were gonna blow up a house, the best thing we should do is find a house that's about to be demoed and then in the midst of Canadian bureaucracy allow them to allow us-- convince them to allow us to literally set off pyrotechnics and blow the house up. And totally, fortunately, we managed to find a house that was being scheduled to be demoed the day after we were scheduled to shoot the scene. So sometimes it works out. DA - And sometimes it's good to be lucky. BP - Something happens during the first season of a TV series. You are continually experimenting to find the right look for your ongoing characters. And Richie in particular... Stan used to end up-- I mean, you'll see as you watch these episodes that Stan would have different hairdos, Stan would have completely different wardrobe concepts, not just like a different jacket, but just suddenly we would all decide that Stan needed a make-over and he would get one and it-- like this whole other character would show up for the episode. DA - He would kinda go from like a young Ron Howard to a young Elvis Presley. And you'd try to get a sense of who the guy was and, um, I think of all of the characters, in some ways, Richie was the least defined. I remember it in some episodes where he wore this dew rag around his hair, you know, and trying to play Richie, which occasionally we did, as this street tough. You know, it's just Ron Howard... Stan... I don't-- No matter what you do to them. BP - Well, he grew up like, you know, he was a street kid, only it was like the streets of Beverly Hills. DA - Right, the streets of-- exactly, the streets of Beverly Hills, right. He was from the bad side of the {shocks}, the bad side of the streets in Scarsdale or some place like that, you know. BP - But you stay with the series, he does find his look eventually. DA - He does, he does. And uh, and then I killed him. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: When you arrive in a new city to film a TV series, and you know you're going to be making twenty-two one-hour shows that year, you go on a general scouting tour of the town to kind of just get a sense of what's available. And sort of in the middle of the second day, we're driving around by the harbor, and we see these two piles, uh, yellow piles, maybe eighty, ninety, a hundred feet high. And it's like, 'what's that? These are great!' And they said, well, it's piles of sulfur that they... I guess they manufacture it and then they ship it out from the harbor on boats. And it's sort of almost always there, in some size, and we said, well, one day we're going to have to use this because it's really a terrific location. And the... the, uh -- so the pyrotechnics that were rigged for the -- for that final, that Quickening, were the most elaborate that we had ever done. And it was all one take, and after, uh, the two guys were fighting, 'cause they did all their own stuff, but by the time they were finished, it was raining. Sulfur doesn't smell so great in the rain, and when they finished, they looked tired, they WERE tired, and then when the pyrotechnics went off, uh, it was shot in slow motion, and so the actual take, the wide shot, was two and a half minutes long, and it was, still, it was probably one of the most amazing Quickenings that we'd ever had. And "Band of Brothers" also, for all of us on Highlander, introduced Darius. Great character, an Immortal that, you know, had given up being a great warrior to live a life of peace on holy ground, and was somebody that Adrian had met during the Battle of Waterloo, which was also kind of fun, in that it's easier to do certain period flashbacks in Europe than it is in Canada. And the Canadian producer, Brent Clackson, said, "We can do the Battle of Waterloo," and he was determined, he was going to show the French what the Battle of Waterloo looked like. So the day before, it all got set up. We must have had every old cannon and, you know, artificial horse and wagons and costumes that they possibly had for that period. And we left that night about seven or eight o'clock after having set it all up. That night, it snowed. So the look was, you know, it was unbelievable, it was absolutely unbelievable, and sometimes, you know, you need a little luck to pull these things off, and we certainly got it. And, on the other side of luck is bad luck, and Darius, a wonderful character had, unknownst (sic) to all of us, had a brain tumor, and he died. And we miss his character, but most of all we miss Werner Stocker, the man. |
(While a snowy battlefield might have looked lovely from a cinematic point of view, it sucked lemons for historical accuracy -- Belgium apparently suffered a freak mid-June snowstorm in this interpretation of events!)
(ALSO, the brain tumor explanation of Werner Stocker's death, I've since learned, is a COMPLETE fabrication. The truth is that he died of HIV/AIDS complications. The brain tumor story was given due to the anti-AIDS prejudices of the times, to deflect the stigma associated with the AIDS epidemic (and homosexuals) in the nineties. But we are now, relatively speaking, much more open-minded about both AIDS and homosexuality, so here's to setting the record straight.)
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - When you're shooting a show where you shoot uh, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen episodes in Vancouver and the rest of the episodes in Paris, there has to be a show every season that it gets your characters to Paris. There has to be a reason for them to go. In this case it was a-- It was just Tessa was getting a job in Paris. So they went to Paris. Later on it became that we would do multi-part episodes. So the one in Vancouver would end and the one in Paris would begin, but it would be the continuation of the same story. In this case, while we had Werner Stocker present for the flashback to the Battle of Waterloo, uh, we wanted his half of the opening conversation of the next episode to take place in front of his church in Paris. So we shot that when we got to Paris and the other angle of that, the guy who's coming down the street and gets killed in front of the church, was shot in Vancouver, and I defy anybody to tell that they weren't both in the same place at the same time. David Abramowitz - "Band of Brothers" was probably my favorite episode of the first year, or one of my favorite episodes of the first year. I thought James Horan did a great job as Grayson. I thought the end fight and the sequence and the sulfur pits in Vancouver was stupendous, and I thought, you know, the character of Darius was always a favorite of mine, and even though Darius was only in for a couple episodes, because Werner died, his spirit and soul carried on throughout all of the years and he became a fan favorite. Darius was a warrior who was showed a great act of kindness at the gates of Rome and he threw down his weapons and swore never to take life again and went into the church where he was safe on holy ground and taught non-violence. I remember when the character was written, he was written as someone who was physically repulsive with a great heart, sort of a hunchback of Notre Dame kind of character, whose beauty was solely from within. And then I remember going to Paris the night they were shooting Werner for the first time, and I looked at him and and it was a very attractive German guy. It wasn't the hunchback of Notre Dame, it wasn't an ogre with a heart of gold, and I wondered what was going on, why he was cast like this. And what turned out was that the Germans who had been putting money into the show didn't want a major German character to be physically ugly. So they cast Werner for mostly political reasons. But it turned out to be a great choice because his charisma and his quiet dignity popped off the screen, and as I said, even though he was only in a couple episodes -- a few episodes -- he left a lasting impression over five and a half years of the show. It was very opportune. BP - When we got to Vancouver, you do kind of a general location scout to see what Vancouver looks like and see what possibilities there might be, with nothing specific in mind. As we drove past the harbor, there were these giant yellow piles, and it was explained to me that these were sulfur piles and they were frequently there, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, and we kinda put it on the checklist and said, I don't know what we're gonna do with this, but some day we're gonna shoot there. It was a... raining, as you can see, it was-- Sulfur, as you could probably imagine, does not smell so great when it's wet. It's also somewhat corrosive, to the extent that when we wanted to get Adrian's shirt back, the one that he had worn in that shot, to be able to auction off at a charity auction, they said both of the shirts that the good guy and the bad guy wore had been completely consumed by the sulfur and not even a thread-- All that was left were the buttons. DA - But it's a small price to pay for a great fight in a great location. BP - A great-- Yes. One of the longest single takes we ever did was the master shot of that, of those things blowing up. And in the uh-- The battle of Waterloo had been completely prepped. You know, we'd used every fake dead horse and cannon and musket and all the costumes we could possibly find, got the whole thing laid out, went home, got there in the morning and it was snowing, and it gave the thing such an incredibly wonderful, wonderful look and production value, because it's real snow, you know, I mean, it just-- it looked fantastic and we got lucky. DA - Nature provided. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: What would you do if you were immortal, if you were going to live for hundreds or even thousands of years? Most people, believe it or not -- or so we say in Highlander -- will pretty much do the same thing. Some make a lot of money. Some become bullies and like to fight. Some become great lovers. Some, like Duncan MacLeod, become righters of wrongs. And some, like Kuyler, the bad guy in this show, become like the best killer in the world. And from the time MacLeod meets him, he is... he's a killer. And he uses the same trick of distraction to kill people, and he continues to use it today, to where he's the highest paid, most successful assassin there's ever been. But with an Immortal like Duncan MacLeod, you... once you've hurt him, he doesn't forget. And Immortals have a long time to remember, and sooner or later, you WILL cross his path. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - Because this was a complicated co-production, we shot this episode and the subsequent episodes for this season in Paris. We had never shot a TV series in Paris. The French concept of how TV series work is very different from the American concept. So to ensure that we'd have some continuity, while we found our French sea legs, we brought Ray Austin over to do what was uh, you know, what was gonna be our first fully French episode. David Abramowitz - Well, Ray, um, comes-- BP - While we were gone. DA - While we were gone, Ray had himself knighted. So he comes into this hotel we were staying called the Lutetia and there was a whole flurry of activity and people were bowing and scraping and champagne was there and flowers were there because the management was celebrating the arrival of an English lord, and it turned out to be Ray Austin, our director. We didn't know we were working with nobility. BP - They gave him a suite. DA - It was a bigger room than ours. But this was our first complete episode that was shot in Paris and it was in an entirely different world. The story was about a killer mime, which is kind of strange in its own ring. We had to employ many French actors as part of the co-production and their English wasn't particularly good, which my French isn't good. And we had this one line where the French police detective winds up getting his arm shattered by a bullet and he's worried that his career is over, and the line was, you know, "I'll never be police commissioner because the French people like their police commissioners whole," which is W-H-O-L-E, which is complete, you know, not injured. So there was this great tizzy, they stop shooting, and the actor comes over to me along with the dialogue coach and they're in a frenzy, and they don't know what to say and they're insulted, and I go, "What's wrong?" And they turn to me and they say, "Why do the French people like their police commissioner with holes in them?" And it was at that moment that I realized there that I was in for a hell of a ride and this was gonna be a great education and cultural understanding for me. But I think the episode by and large turned out pretty well. I loved the mannequin factory. I thought it was a great location. I thought the fight sequence was good. And for our first full show in Paris, I think it turned out pretty well. Um, at the time there was a thought that whenever MacLeod solves a crime -- this was in other notes from one of the broadcasters -- that it should be because of what he had learned in the past, which would separate out our show from other detective shows, because he learned about it in the past, and the way he tracked this guy was he was a drinker of absinthe. You know absinthe is that drink made with wormwood, which originally if you drank it for a number of years, if you drank it consistently, you would first go blind and then you would go mad. So that was the clue of how MacLeod found the bad guy in the present day, which is he found out who was the supplier of absinthe and there hangs the tale. BP - Now you can buy absinthe in any liquor store. DA - Yeah, but it doesn't make you crazy and blind. BP - I haven't been drinking it long enough. [DA laughs.] |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: Roland Gift, star of the Fine Young Cannibals, and now star, rock-and-roller, in a Highlander episode. One of our great bad guys: hedonistic, nasty, cruel, greedy, vindictive. We liked him so much that we brought him back for another show, and answered once and for all, we hope, the question of what happens when an Immortal loses a body part other than his head. It does not grow back, does not regenerate. All it did in Roland's case was really tick him off. On a more technical side, one of his themes throughout all of his various crimes was using gas. So in the World War I flashback, we de-saturated and kind of 'blued up' the actual battle scene so that when he released the mustard gas, the yellow became kind of the dominant color. |
(Presumably, most Immortals that found themselves missing a hand/arm/leg would be at a severe disadvantage and either be hiding on holy ground or shortly thereafter killed, but if Immortals' body parts don't regenerate, it seems to me that there ought to be at least some portion of the Immortal population wandering around with visibly missing fingers or ears, at least, considering they are fighting each other with swords and sustaining the sort of wounds one might expect. Another thought: if one got their heart cut out in an Aztec ceremony, and body parts don't regenerate, do they stay dead?? If not, if a heart can regenerate, then why not an appendage? I say we retcon this: that regenerating body parts takes a longer time and Xavier just didn't have enough time for us to see it happen before MacLeod kills him a year later.)
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - So continuing our pursuit of rock stars as guest stars, we corralled a great one, Roland Gift, Fine Young Cannibals. So he came to us and did a fantastic job, was so arch, so dry, you know, with a-- David Abramowitz - And so good looking. BP - Yeah, not a bad-looking guy. DA - And the guy could really act. It was amazing. It's amazing when you cast a rock star and you expect a piece of wood and-- BP - Why would you expect that? DA - Well, because, you know, it's different, people acting who they are, than all of a sudden being on camera and saying, you know, here are lines-- here's someone else's lines for you, you know, be alive and be energetic and play the part. And the guy could actually act. It was really pleasant to see, and we brought him back again and again in a number of episodes. We did that with anybody who could act. BP - In the fight that was devised, we came up against something that we hadn't dealt with before, which is the idea of whether or not, if you chop off an Immortal's hand or any other appendage except their head, what happens? You know, the question of regeneration came up and it was another example of how, as the series progressed, we were forced to expand the legend to include the opportunities that came up. So his hand is still somewhere in that river. DA - Waiting to be found. But you know, the thing that I really liked about this episode was the flashback to the first World War. I thought it looked incredibly authentic and the bang that we got for the buck was great. BP - And the way-- In post-production, the way Don Paonessa chose to treat the color in the scene both gave it a period feel and at the same time heightened the yellow poison gas color so that it resonated both then and in the present. DA - Highlander -- we'd dealt with a lot of different issues. In this particular episode we had Darius hearing Roland Gift's confession and we had to deal with the sanctity of the confessional booth, where Darius couldn't tell MacLeod what was going on because he heard it as a priest. And I think this was the beginning for us in some ways of thinking of expanding the Highlander universe. So it wasn't just about the bad guy of the week. We could also deal with some pertinent moral and ethical questions. Like when does a priest have to disclose what he's heard in the confessional? BP - And moral and ethical questions that are heightened by the fact that they take place over centuries. DA - Right. We had a subplot in this episode where Richie falls in love with an older woman, with a French woman, and which is every North American male's, I think, young male's fantasy and we decided to play into it. BP - Speak for yourself. DA - Well, you know, I'm no longer young, anyway. And he falls in love with her and Tessa has to counsel him on the ways of life and the ways of women, and I thought it was kind of fun and kind of interesting, and of course at the end of the episode the woman does dump him and Richie learns an important lesson. BP - And Tessa, who always has kind of a quasi mother relationship with Richie, once again tests her own lack of children and in her heart probably speculates about what it would be like if she were raising Richie. DA - What do you think Richie thought of Tessa? BP - Babe. DA - Absolutely. positively. What a babe. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: One of the tough things about shooting in Paris as opposed to Vancouver is that Vancouver, for the most part, is happy to have you film there, and in Paris they make it INCREDIBLY difficult for anybody to film anything anyplace. There's a little woman who sits at the mairie, the, you know, where you get your permits, who -- you have to have a permit ten days in advance to shoot anything in Paris. Now, unfortunately, the scripts are generally not finished until seven or eight days before we start filming. So, it's -- and when it comes twelve o'clock, she closes for lunch and it doesn't matter who's standing there. However, one of the great things about shooting in Paris as opposed to Vancouver is that Paris is a flashback, and a lot of things were easier to do there. And one of the rare moments of French cooperation was when we got permission to film inside the Paris Opera, on the roof of the Paris Opera, and in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera. Nobody had ever filmed on the roof of the Paris Opera, let alone a fight scene on the roof of the Paris Opera. And as most actors won't usually get involved in doing sword fights and martial arts on the top of a mansard roof, uh, but Adrian was a very game guy, and although we were nervous, we said, "Hey, he's immortal, so it'll be fine." The catacombs underneath the Paris Opera connect to the catacombs that run under almost all of Paris and was incredibly difficult -- hot, sweaty, smoky, dusty -- place to shoot, but I think in the end you get a look out of those things that makes the series kind of leap off the screen. At least, we hope so. Translation: mairie - city hall |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - One of the great things about Paris, difficult though it was to physically film there, was that any place you pointed the camera, it was Paris. And because we were partnered with Gaumont, which was the largest film company in France, we would get access to places where-- that most film companies never could, especially for television, which was kind of looked down upon. It wasn't quite as dramatic as the feature business. However, on this episode, we had Daniel Vigne as the director, and he was a very famous director in France. He did The Return of Martin Guerre and the other feature films. So he brought a little prestige to this episode. Everybody really kind of kicked butt and we got permission to film inside, on the roof of, the Paris Opera and down in the tunnels which run like a rabbit warren beneath it, which were very hot, very uncomfortable to shoot in, but which the prop guys turned into the catacombs. David Abramowitz - This episode was one of my most favorite and one of my least favorite episodes. The reason it was my most favorite episode, one of my most favorite, was I got to walk and got a private tour of the Paris Opera House, which was a great thrill for me. You know, I used to sing, and after touring the entire opera house, when no one was around, I snuck down to the stage of the opera house and I started singing. So from now on I can tell the world that I sang at the Paris Opera House. And while I was there, there were some dancers practicing a ballet, and everyone in the room went silent when I started singing because everybody knew exactly what I was doing. And after I finished singing, they all applauded. It was just one of these great moments for me. Now the troublesome time I had on this episode was -- originally this episode was written kind of as 'Beauty and the Beast', but it was written with a twist where the beast was actually good and beauty was a conniving killer. So it was written for this giant hulking Andre the Giant kind of character and nineteen-, twenty-year-old, eighteen-year-old ingenue opera singer. And then the day before shooting, I get this list that says they cast Dee Dee Bridgewater. Now Dee Dee Bridgewater is a wonderful actress and was-- BP - A great jazz singer. DA - A great jazz singer. BP - I mean, a star, a real star in her world. DA - A real star in her world. Though she wasn't exactly my idea of what an ingenue is when we wrote the script. And I was told this wouldn't be a problem. And then four hours later I got notes from Paris that said 'This script doesn't work. This character doesn't fit Dee Dee Bridgewater.' Well, it would have been easier for me if they would have told me that five days ago. So we did this frantic rewrite to make it fit. It put me through, uh, some changes. BP - That's why you got the job. DA - It's true. That's why I got the job. And believe me, I needed the job. BP - To get to-- We were and still are to this day the first film company to ever shoot an action sequence on the roof of the Paris Opera House, and there was no CGI, there were no-- there was nothing fake about it. It was the two guys up there actually having a fight in a, as you could see, a fairly dangerous slippery tricky environment, that I thought came out great. DA - Yeah, it was really slippery. I mean, it was-- I don't know what they call that stuff on the roof tiles, where like, it was like walking on-- it's like walking on ice. BP - Yeah, well, a lot of it was copper and-- It was great though, it was terrific, and-- DA - Yeah, it was. It really was. BP - That's Paris. DA - [to audience] And you got to see Paris. BP - It's wonderful when, on a limited budget, you can take twenty extras and guys from the crew, stick them in monks' habits, throw a Gregorian chant in the background, stick 'em at an old abbey that's inside of Paris, and in a half an hour create a very emotional and moving sequence for the end of the show. DA - Yeah, that was the great thing about Paris, you know, as Bill said before, anywhere you pointed the camera it was magic, and it will always be a magic city and one of the characters of Highlander, you know. It was a living, vibrant character. BP - And gradually as the years went on, we all came to love Paris and we all came to really look forward to that half of the season when we were over there. DA - Absolutely, and I think by and large, overall the shows we shot in Paris were our best shows. BP - No matter how many writers you have, it seems like you never have enough writers, and finding writers who stay with the show and start to get the hang of what is required in an often ever-changing universe is very, very difficult. And we treasure those men and women who hang in there. DA - Sometimes writers have disagreements. The writer of the script, "The Beast Below", disagreed with some of the casting, and he blew up and sort of walked off the show in the middle of it, leaving me alone as the only writer on staff. So I would play this, sometimes this foolish game with myself, having to re-write the script and not having a wall to bounce it off of it. 'Cause I would sit at the head of a table and I would talk to the empty table and say, 'Well, what do you think about that?' Then to keep myself sane, I would move to the other chair and I would answer myself. Luckily, in the end of the next episode, the writer came back and we were a small but unhappy family again till the end of the year when he was replaced. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: For Duncan MacLeod to be present for the birth of a child probably happened many times in his four hundred years of life. However, this time when we saw it with Grace in the past, it was particularly moving, I thought, and raised for him that issue of 'this is something that I will never have.' And part of the effectiveness of that scene was that we got to use the music, the song 'Amazing Grace'. Now, in television, buying songs for, and getting performances by, good people is very expensive, very difficult and doesn't happen in syndicated television that often. However, our accountant at the time, Nicole Forest, had a friend who was a first-class opera singer, and she volunteered -- for what I suspect was a very modest amount of money -- to sing 'Amazing Grace' for us. And so we got, you know, through a -- it made a wonderful, resonance in that scene, and it was one of those wonderful coincidences that happen when a bunch of like-minded people get together. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
[Bill Panzer and David Abramowitz are pretending to be asleep, leaning against each other, snoring. They 'wake' up with a jolt.] DA - Oh, yeah, we were on, um-- [looks at BP] BP - "Saving Grace." DA - "Saving Grace", right. "Saving Grace." Um, let me see if I can think of something memorable to say about this episode. BP - It was in color. DA - It was in color. MacLeod birthed the baby. BP - MacLeod birthed the baby. DA - Even though he doesn't know anything, nothing about birthing no babies. BP - Touching on the, again, Highlander issue of what's it like to birth the baby when you know that you will never have a baby. DA - Right. And the familiar theme of love and obsession and more love and obsession. You know, I wish we could say this episode was particularly memorable but um, no. BP - But it wasn't not memorable. It wasn't unmemorable. It was a good show. It just was a good show. DA - Yeah. It wasn't about all that much. BP - It wasn't about all that much. But there was the {band}. DA - There was the baby and there was Grace and-- BP - Georges Corraface. DA - Georges Corraface. BP - Who was a really good bad guy. DA - Right, he was a good bad guy. An interesting fight. BP - He did many beer commercial. DA - Yep. Mm. Well, that's about all I think we have to say about that one. BP - Except that 'Amazing Grace' was performed by the -- now, trivia fans, stay with me -- the sister-in-law of the assistant accountant on the TV series based in Vancouver. And if I recall, she did this for a very reasonable fee. DA - You know, I sing too. You coulda asked me. I coulda done a couple bars. BP - I did ask you. DA - You did? I don't remember. How quickly they forget. [sighs] |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: Vanier Park, Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival tents (not episode-related) Bill Panzer: For the most part, Immortals are very much like ordinary people. They have peo-- they have Immortal friends that they like; they have Immortals that they don't like, except from time to time, they fight, but aside from that, it's pretty much life in a shadowy world, making sure that after twenty years or twenty-five years, you leave the place you are, change your identity, because you're not getting older and people are going to start to notice. And from time to time, Immortals run into each other -- after twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years -- and we thought it'd be fun if MacLeod had a kind of, every fifty, sixty years, affair with Amanda, a zany, beautiful, funny, con-artist, international jewel thief kind of character who's crazy mad about MacLeod but also crazy mad about her own freedom. And when Amanda comes into his life, if he's free, they have a moment, and... she generally picks his pocket and slips off into the night. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - As the series started to evolve, halfway through the first season, we thought wouldn't it be fun if MacLeod, being sort of four hundred years old, had an immortal girlfriend who would show up every fifty years, and if they were both free, they'd kinda get into it again. And wouldn't it be even better if she were not just an immortal housewife, but maybe she was a con-man, she was a jewel thief, she was just an amazing fun person who always ended up getting MacLeod in trouble. David Abramowitz - She was Amanda, you know, and her ethics are always situational. And they were situational because whatever the situation, when it was good for Amanda, that's what she did. And we were very fortunate to cast Elizabeth Gracen in the part. You know, sometimes the magic works, and with her it truly works, because she could stop on a dime and turn drama into comedy and back into drama again and she was beautiful and she was sexy and you totally bought her in the part. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: One of the things that separates television from movies is a complete lack of flexibility in scheduling. I mean, you don't get it today, you don't get it. No second chances. So in this episode, the young lady who plays Richie's love interest on the show was a quite well-known Paris model who was contracted to shoot for two days of the eight-day Paris schedule. I think -- I mean, these schedules are carved in stone. So after the first day, she comes up to the producer, Gary, and she says, "Would it be okay if I didn't shoot tomorrow?" and he says, "What's the matter? Are you sick? Is there a -- what's the problem?" And she says, "Well, no, not exactly. It's just that I have a fashion shoot, and I can go tomorrow and make more money tomorrow than I'm making on this show. So--" and he's, like, dumbstruck, and she says, "So maybe, if, uh, if you could just postpone the shooting for a day, then I'll be back and we can finish up." Sometimes they just don't get it. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - I have a memory of that show where the gal who played the model that Richie is sniffing around is, was in fact a very top model in Paris. So she was hired to do two days of shooting, consecutive days of shooting on the show. And after the first day, she went up to the producer and said, uh, "Mister Goodman, would you mind very much? I've got another job I could take tomorrow, which would pay me more money than I'm making for the next day shooting with you guys. So couldn't you just slide the shoot one day, just give everybody the day off and and let me go and do my modeling and then I'll come back?" David Abramowitz - Gary said...? BP - He didn't say anything. He was dumbstruck by what she had said. DA - Yeah, this episode was interesting for us, because I think it was the first time -- well, one of the first times -- that MacLeod had to fight a friend of his. He had to fight and take the Quickening of someone who he knew for a long time and was a great buddy of who had turned dark, and that's very difficult for the actor and it was very difficult for the character, because MacLeod is a particularly loyal guy, but it was a choice between this old friend of his and Richie, who had become by this time like a younger brother to Duncan. And he finally chose Richie over his old friend. BP - Well, he kinda got forced into it, and it was not-- DA - The guy was gonna come and kill Richie. BP - The guy was gonna come and kill Richie... in spite of his wardrobe and his hair. DA - Yeah. [laughs] Well, Richie couldn't help himself, you know. He still-- He didn't yet know that he was a young Immortal. BP - True. DA - Right. BP - Over time, as directors work on more than one episode, you'd start to discover that they-- there's more to them, some of them, than just getting the setups done, getting the coverage done, and getting everybody home and in the bar at six o'clock. Dennis Berry has a point of view on life and on filmmaking that is unique to him. DA - Some would call it bizarre. BP - Some would call it bizarre, but we think of those-- Those people would be small-minded. DA - I'm occasionally small-minded. BP - Well, hopefully we've stretched that over the time, David. Dennis would... I mean, typical Dennis is when they're in that brothel when they're... and the poop hits the fan. I mean, there's a midget, there's a this, there's all of these bizarre characters that come stumbling around. They all just come out of there, and it's just like his Fellini-esque mind just says it's-- there's a normal way to do it and then, shouldn't we just have some interesting, amusing, different people in this scene? DA - I think it goes to the issue of value added. Whenever Dennis directed something, there was always value added. That value might be something you wouldn't ascribe to at all. BP - Isn't that a euphemism for value added and surprise. DA - And surprise, yes. BP - Those were always surprises. DA - Dennis is always full of surprises. BP - It was great, you know, and we would encourage that. One of the things you treasure about these guys is that they will surprise you. They will give you something that you didn't expect to see, and occasionally you wish that you hadn't seen it, but most of the time it's, you know, your face smiles, it's like 'wow, why didn't I think of that, isn't that great,' and you encourage them to do that. It's okay for them to fail every once in a while with these things, but you don't wanna ever turn off that creative tap. And I mean, Dennis's tap was like Boulder Dam. DA - Yeah, as a writer, you always hope that your director will somehow take your material and elevate it. And Dennis, by making some of the choices he did, often elevated material and took it to a place where no one who is involved with the material could possibly anticipate. Sometimes-- BP - You couldn't understand it sometimes, but it didn't make any difference, it was at least interesting and stimulating. DA - And sometimes I wanted to kill him. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Location: St. Paul's Anglican Church, 1130 Jervis St (used in 3x02: Line of Fire) Bill Panzer: Immortals... where do they come from? We don't know where they come from. Maybe they come from 'the source'. But one thing we do know is that they carry within them the seed of their immortality, which is triggered by a violent death. So what happens if you're a slightly deranged guy -- or extremely deranged guy in the case of Cahill -- and you're murdered? And when you wake up, you come back to life believing that the good Lord has saved you and sent you on a mission of murder. Who can argue with this guy? Certainly not Duncan MacLeod. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - If you don't import directors into France to shoot your TV show, you find there is a very small list of directors who speak English well enough to understand its nuances and who have the pace and the instinctive understanding of what makes television move, to do the show. And we were obligated to use a number of French directors and we were very fortunate to find two guys, Paolo Barzman and Denny Berry, who fit the bill perfectly. They both came from American parents, they were-- Both of their fathers had been blacklisted, and they were forced to move to France when they were very young. David Abramowitz - Paolo and Denny were not just good directors. They were good guys. They were easy on the crew. They could shoot quickly. Well, Paolo was easy on the crew. Denny wasn't so easy on the crew. But they could really deliver and they could really shoot the show. "Avenging Angel" is interesting because the story is about a man who is killed by a prostitute and dies in the shadow of the cross of a church. And when he comes back, there's no one to tell him that he's immortal or what his story is. So he believes that he is brought back to-- um, as a kind of a religious zealot to rid the world of prostitutes and gays and anyone he views as sexually out of the ordinary. When we sent out the story, one executive -- from a country that shall remain nameless -- sent me a memo, and in the memo what he said was, you know, "If all he's killing are gays and prostitutes, why is he so bad?" Well, I read the memo and swallowed hard three or four times and figured it'd be best not to respond, because what I was gonna say wasn't gonna be very nice, and we continued on. And the episode turned out to be pretty edgy and pretty good, I thought. And it was one of those things that showed you, in our world, that if someone doesn't have a teacher like Duncan did, and Connor did before him, that it would be very easy for a mortal to go astray. BP - Yeah, because without, you know, if it happened to you and you came back from being dead, it would be very hard for me to explain to you that you were immortal and not that-- you had not become a servant of God. DA - Especially me, 'cause I know that, working for you, that I really am a servant of God. [laughs] BP - Continuing our search, in particular in this first season, to have as many rock performers as we can in these episodes, we got Martin Kemp, who had not really done any acting before but was an incredible personality and had been with, uh, Spandau Ballet and was very, very successful, a terrific guy, very cooperative, and adapted to playing a murderer of pimps and prostitutes as any rock star might. DA - Yeah, but we never did deliver Mick Jagger, did we? BP - We never did. DA - No, but we tried. BP - Yes, we did. DA - But we got Roger Daltrey later on. BP - Yes, we did. DA - I always liked him better than Mick Jagger. BP - You'll get a chance to talk about that in two episodes. DA - Oh, good. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: A girl walks down a foggy, lonely country road, a guy in a nice car picks her up, and she's raped. She tells her father, he believes her, and he comes and he says he wants the boy for punishment. The father's an Immortal who knows MacLeod. The -- MacLeod has a problem with innocence and guilt because he remembers a time when he tried to save somebody, carrying the news that the guy was innocent, couldn't get to the firing squad in time. So he is... he is prepared to defend the boy, and in kind of an homage to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Dennis Berry, one of our favorite directors, creates a wonderful mood of, uh, of siege as the good guys try and keep the bad guys from coming in. But in reality, the bad guys are not the bad guys, either, and the thing resolves itself with a wonderful twist after a great fog-shrouded sword fight in the middle of the forest. One of our best. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - This episode is distinguished by many things, one of which is it says 'written by David Abramowitz', a long overdue credit and one which we were-- we would never see again, because the following season, which you will learn about, we became a content show. So David assumed the title of creative consultant and labored in the shadow world of consultancy. David Abramowitz - It was a dark place. I remember it very well. I had in my a contract that said the following year I was supposed to be executive producer and they said they couldn't make me executive producer because of the content show. BP - I was executive producer. DA - I know, but my contract said I was supposed to be executive producer too. No, that's what it said. I'm telling you right now that's what it said. BP - It was never in {??}. DA - So I said, "Well, that's not what my contract says. I don't know if I can be a consultant." And, uh, then they offered me a little more money. And I said, "Okay, for a little more money, you can call me anything you like." So they called me Executive Creative Consultant. BP - And we did. DA - Yeah, but I couldn't put my name on any shows anymore. But this episode was interesting because I wrote it in three days. And we're always behind the gun on Highlander, always behind because there wasn't a very big staff. The entire writing staff was two people. And one of them wasn't often in the room. And so I wrote this episode in three days. And it also had to be a bottle show, which is-- we were running out of money. It was the end of the year. So it all had to take place in one location. So I had this one house and this one front yard. And in order to make it interesting, I remember Denny decided that he needed a smoke machine. And it was so-- BP - At least one smoke machine. DA - At least one. There must have been three hundred smoke machines, because it was so dense that you couldn't see anything on camera. But that was Denny, always bringing something unexpected to the table. BP - But what a great fight that was, even with the difficulty that Don Paonessa had in trying to keep the smoke at approximately the same level from take to take, from shot to shot, from angle to angle. And I think in that, you know, Don and I talked at one point about the concept of rape. Rape was a tricky concept to have on television in those days anyway, especially a television series that had foreign partners who were a little more sensitive to this kind of violent act than we are. And I recall Don and I sitting in the bar at the hotel in-- which is where we did most of our top creative thinking, and Don's suggesting that we not really see the rape, and we sort of keep it in the gray area as to whether or not the guy did it, and then reveal slowly during his sort of interrogation that takes place over several, you know, several times during the episode, that in fact he did do it. DA - That it really was a date rape. BP - That it really was a date rape. And that-- this is one of my-- this is my favorite episode of this season because the-- nobody-- the guy who's wrong is the date rapist. The father, he's right. DA - And MacLeod is-- BP - Someone raped his daughter. MacLeod is right. "You can't do this." And the girl is right. And she kills the guy at the end. I mean, it was, I thought, so moralistic in the midst of violent carnage and people getting killed and the concept of MacLeod's recollection from the past of trying to stop an execution that was wrong and failing to get there. So he's bending over backwards to not turn the kid over. I mean I just, I loved it. Who wrote this episode? DA - Yeah. Well, it was written by me, but what was interesting, the fans didn't love it so much and I think one of the reasons the fans didn't love it as much was because it all took place on one location, and they were used to Highlander being this really open show which took place on the Seine and flashbacks in Italy and, you know, and there wasn't the understanding, unfortunately-- there wasn't a disclaimer in the beginning that said, "This one is a bottle show. We had to shoot it in five days to save money and, um, so please bear with us and just follow the drama." You know, I thought the script was pretty good, especially having been written so quickly, and I like the fact-- This was also when we were beginning to move the show and the entire first year I was trying to figure out and Bill was trying to figure out exactly what Highlander is and it needed to be more than just the evil bad-guy Immortal of the week. So I think we began and we started to move the show away from that. Because here you have a situation where everybody was right except for the guy who was-- who actually committed the rape, and MacLeod was forced to defend him. So it at least opened some questions about MacLeod's fallibility as a hero, which we played on later on in subsequent years. All in all, though, I think Dennis did a really good job. On the flip side of that, Dennis took so long to shoot this show that, from what I remember-- BP - It was a bottle and a half. DA - It was a bottle and a half, and it didn't wind up saving us any money anyway. We tried. BP - I know, but... it's allowed us a comfortable life in southern California as we tiptoe into our old age. DA - We tried. |
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(from 2002 U.S./Canada DVD set)
Bill Panzer: This was a very emotional episode for all of us, because Werner Stocker, who played the character of Darius, died before we started shooting -- JUST before -- which involved a tremendous amount of rewriting over twenty-four hours straight shot by David Abramowitz, because as we've discussed, in television, the schedule doesn't change. So the part of Hugh Fitzcairn, which was played by another one of our rock stars, Roger Daltrey of The Who, became enlarged, and where he was -- he was supposed to die at the end of the episode, and we decided to -- we liked it so much, we let him live. The Watchers Organization, which has been observing Immortals, recording their history but not interfering, for thousands of years, has remained very, very secret, and it was only recently that MacLeod discovered their existence, uh, through the character played by Jim Byrnes. And they have within them a group of Watchers that we call 'Hunters', and the Hunters have decided that Immortals are a bad thing, they are a scourge, they are a blight on the Earth, and they are unnatural and immoral and must be removed. And they have been killing Immortals, and in fact, they killed Darius. So this episode saw the birth of a wonderful character, Hugh Fitzcairn, and the death of another wonderful character, Werner Stocker. |
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(from 2004 French DVD set)
Bill Panzer - In "The Hunters", we expanded the Highlander universe by adding a mortal threat to the Immortals, from whom there was no protection by being on holy ground, who did not follow any of the rules that the Immortals follow to keep their combat somewhat honorable. You didn't know that they were there. And in fact, until this episode, nobody had a clue that they were out there. David Abramowitz - When this episode was conceived, Roger Daltry was a guest star and he was only gonna be in for a couple days, and the episode was to feature Werner Stocker as Darius. But eighteen hours or twenty hours before we were supposed to shoot, I got a call in the middle of the night, two o'clock in the morning, that said that Werner had taken seriously ill, and sadly he later died, and the episode needed to be shot in about eighteen hours. We couldn't use Werner Stocker, and there was chaos because we had to shoot something. I don't know if you know that, but every day you're not shooting and a crew is waiting, on a TV series like this, it's about thirty or forty thousand dollars a day in cost. I went to the office and started writing out of my head and increased the part of Roger Daltry from two days' work or two and a half days' work to six days' work, rewrote the script in about, oh, twenty-six hours straight. It went out and we shot it with our fingers crossed. He was wonderful and Fitzcairn became one of the most endearing characters ever. We were very lucky to have him and continued to be throughout the show. We also liked the villain Peter Hudson a lot, and we kept bringing him back also. BP - Yeah, even when we thought we'd killed him, we decided we'd have to fix that, and we had-- he had an ongoing part 'cause he was really a very evil character and a fitting mortal opponent for MacLeod. DA - And had great chops as an actor. The episode opened many doors for us in terms of the characters that we were able to play and, you know, I think in this case, emergency was the mother of invention. BP - Roger brought his love of pipes into the mix and we kind of liked it, and we would try to-- whenever you saw him -- because once we killed him, he could only come back in flashback -- and we would try and have the pipes of the period. We would have him looking at pipes, we would have him looking at drawings of pipes, whatever -- you know, signs outside of a pipe store -- we would try to keep that kind of thing going as a little character dig. BP - We embarked on this great adventure. I think we mostly had a good time. Everybody worked hard, everybody made a little money. We seem to have found an incredibly devoted, loyal, supportive, smart, funny, warm fan base who has been so incredibly important to all of us who've made the show. But really, after saying that, you know, it's just-- it's like another day in Hollywood. I mean, what's the big deal? What are we doing? We're making television. Thank you for watching. |
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