Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
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Highlander |
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(from 2003 U.S./Canada DVD set)
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Clip from "They Also Serve":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Talking about the Watchers in general, I think it was a great idea to have somebody who is what the audience is, you know, in a way, is very interesting, because then you ask the questions that the audience would ask, from the show's standpoint. So I think it's a great device and we were able to utilize it very, very well throughout the length of the series. And "They Also Serve" had, you know, some interesting questions to it. We had Barry Pepper in it, who has now gone on to do, you know, huge things, which is great, and it also had a very interesting relationship between immortality and humanity.
Clip from "They Also Serve":
Stephen Geaghan (Production Designer): The first problem that we had with that show was Mongolia. We would always try to find a different environment for MacLeod in these flashbacks, utilizing what we had regionally here. They wanted to do China. I think that was what had been talked about, and I'm thinking, 'We can do China, but only limited.' "What about Outer Mongolia?" and they said, "Can you do that?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I've got a place in mind." So we went down to an area called Delta and looked at some of the flatlands that were essentially right on the water, and in the vista you had distant mountains and something that looked desert, if it was a nice bright, calm day -- when in fact it was water on the Strait of Juan de Fuca looking toward the San Juan islands. And this was also a flood plain. Well, we took a look at the tide tables and figured out that, yeah, we could do Mongolia here. So what we did was we got in a mess of little, sort of, ponies and dressed up the people as Mongolians, and I built yurts. I built a village of yurts. Thankfully we made the yurts very light, because all they are is just bent sticks of wood covered in canvas, because as the day changed and got to late afternoon, the tide would come in, and we have to get the crew to lift up the yurts like dead turtles and carry them along the flood plain to slightly higher ground, and so this village would move several time during the day to keep from getting inundated. It was a very interesting shoot. The sunset was very beautiful, and we had bonfires, and it was one of our more successful, very alien, environments. Christina McQuarrie (Costume Designer): It's a lot of research, and I remember coming up with some wonderful visuals, but there was a lot of historical accuracy. I mean, it wasn't sort of winging off in a sort of a totally odd direction, so you know, I mean, that's how you do create the feeling for the time and that. Because a lot of people do know what samurai looked like and they do know what 1880s western North America looks like, so you are kind of aiming for something that's at least acceptable to the eye. If it creates the right feeling, I mean, that's what you're hoping for. I mean, how you go about it is... magic? [laughs] Well, we did it in seven days because we focused on the very sort of few important pieces that perhaps we could not find or that we wanted to make very special for the show, so you'd focus on building them from scratch, yes, you know, with finding materials and finding pieces that will kind of work together. There were the more rustic costumes, which had raw silks, and did dying and quilting as I remember, we did at that point. And then there was the robes that he wore and the woman wore. Stephen Geaghan: An interesting side light to doing villages and these environments was that by year three, maybe year four of the show, we had discovered that no environment anywhere in the world that MacLeod had traveled actually really got bigger than twenty feet across. And we're thinking, 'This is really interesting. I wonder why this is.' And we realized, much to our amazement, that that was the area that a single fire could heat at its maximum. It condensed the size of our sets. So we knew we never had to make anything bigger than sixteen feet across for an ancient environment. Christina McQuarrie: If you can find the elements of a particular period, it kind of draws you into that period. You know, it kind of takes the viewer down a period path that certainly created a beautiful feel for the show. |
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Gillian Horvath (Executive Script Coordinator): The original common story line of the Highlander series, going back to the first season, was that Duncan would run into an old enemy and he would kill him by the end of the episode. In season two we developed something of a twist on that where he would run into an old friend and realize that the friend had turned evil and reluctantly have to kill him. And the "Blind Faith" episode is a reverse twist on that, in which he's run into an old enemy and realized the enemy is no longer evil, and he has to NOT kill him.
Clip from "Blind Faith":
The concept that somebody who was truly a bad person and did bad things -- not one crazy weekend in college, but for centuries -- and then after a long absence -- and you witness these things -- and then after a long absence, this person appears again, only this time they're a spiritual healer, they're a force for good. Your first reaction has got to be, "This is a load of crap." And for us to overcome that in our short lives is probably easier than for MacLeod to have seen this -- these major atrocities. It would be like, I don't know, is it easy to forgive Hitler if suddenly he was Mother Teresa? Suddenly this guy is now a good guy, and MacLeod has to make a choice as to whether his redemption is really true.
Clip from "Blind Faith":
Is he really a reformed character? And because he was a bad guy for several hundred years, does that mean that MacLeod should kill him for the past, as opposed to giving him a chance to atone and to do good stuff for the next few hundred years? We filmed two different endings, and we thought that the idea of the possibility of redemption, the possibility of doing good, was the kind of thing that MacLeod would choose.
The idea of "Blind Faith" was one of my most favorite. I thought the episode was pretty good, and I thought it was acted well. Um, I could have broken the story a little better, and made it a little more exciting, but the core of the story was wonderful. It was: Is redemption possible?
Clip from "Blind Faith":
At its best, Highlander answered these questions in a, um, action-adventure kind of way. And we didn't want to -- I don't know, to tell you the truth, whether redemption is possible. It depends on the day. It depends on who I'm pissed at and who I'm not pissed at. If it's someone -- if it's an executive from the studio who's giving me notes, and I don't like them, I would say redemption is NOT possible; they should burn in hell. But, if it's someone who likes the script, and they've only p*beep*ed on my work yesterday but they like the work today, then I figure, 'Okay, you know, they don't have to burn in hell. They can be redeemed.' But you know, the truth is, this was one of the great questions -- this is one of the great questions of the age. And whether of not redemption is possible in all instances, I don't know. Part of the story came from -- I study Talmud, on occasion, and there was a part during Passover where there's a line in the Passover Haggadah, which is the book of Passover, that tells a story that said 'God hardened Pharaoh's heart.' And that always troubled me, because I said, "You know, why is God stacking the deck? If Pharaoh wants to let the Jewish people go, why is he stopping him here? You know? Why isn't he being fair here?" And then someone very wise once said to me, "There are some sins that are irredeemable." You know, and depending on my day and my mood, I believe that, and other times I don't. Which is why at the end of the episode, Duncan lets Kirin live but doesn't forgive him, because I don't even think Duncan knows. He can only react as a man only can react and says, "Listen, I'm still pissed at you, I don't want to be your friend, but I won't judge you," because I don't think Duncan knows how.
Clip from "Blind Faith":
I think Duncan truly believed that Kirin was redeemed in some way. That doesn't mean -- just because you're redeemed doesn't mean you're not guilty, doesn't mean you don't have to pay for what you did, you know? If you're a nice guy now, and you're an a*beep*hole yesterday, you're still an a*beep*hole to some people. Or you may have changed, but it doesn't matter.
Clip from "Blind Faith":
Why doesn't he kill him? I think because it really is the reverse of realizing that a good man is now harming the world, that all his years of being a good man don't count if he's now doing damage to other people. And I think that in this episode, the flip side is true -- or that's how Duncan sees it -- that if a person is now ameliorating the state of the world and helping people, then all their years of being evil aren't what matters. What matters is their effect on the future.
Clip from "Blind Faith":
Well, at some point you just have to take it on blind faith. |
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Clip from "Song of the Executioner":
Stephen Geaghan (Production Designer): The saga of "Song of the Executioner" started off with reading the script and determining that there was a tremendous amount of material in a medieval European monastery. And our budgets were limited, but there was some flex in them. And in talking with Bill Panzer, he said, "Can you do this? And what will it take to make sure that this is going to be an authentic look for a medieval monastery?" And I did some square footage estimates and came up with a figure that Bill found acceptable. At that point, then I was stuck with that figure and had to make it work. So what I did was we designed a fairly sizable space with a colonnade down one side, and the colonnade had intervening areas that we would plug with wild walls -- double-sided wild walls -- and they would come in and out. We had other cubicles that could fit in.
That set was -- I was very surprised when they did it, because for them to build a set as elaborate as that, which was also able to be used in several different ways...
And this whole area had to become the entry to the abbey, several different hallways, the church, the dining room--
Clip from "Song of the Executioner":
--a scriptorium, a side chapel--
Clip from "Song of the Executioner":
--and there was one other set -- oh, there was a bedroom, or a couple of bedrooms that were side by side. And we did this by very carefully organizing the changeovers with the first assistant director, to make sure that as one thing was shot, and we were approaching a lunch hour or a night changeover, that's when we would do it. So that there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the shooting crew to make their days, so we could make our changeovers happen. That was pretty much how it sort of evolved. But the actual structure -- we did our research, looked for a standard, reproducible, medieval hexagonal column that could be easily manufactured. The more you get involved in doing compound, complex curves and pendentives for support, we knew we couldn't afford it. But we could build massive amounts of walls and structure if they stayed in essentially two dimensions and right angles, and that's what we did. So we cheated our curves by using simple, cost-effective materials like large, soft foam were laid on and carved, so we could get our -- we still had right angles, but we also got our dimensional look with fairly cost-effective materials.
Oh, the monastery was an awesome set that they built. I was very surprised, actually, because it was very -- it was a very large production, and -- which we actually kept and used later on in "Homeland".
Scale plays a very strong part in all of this. We tend to look -- as creatures, we look horizontally. The wider you make something, the deeper you make something -- it's a lot more forgiving. Something like Duncan's dojo is very deep and very wide. Rarely do we ever see the ceiling. But it has a tremendous volume to it, even though it's not a big space. The same thing happened in this monastery that we built, where we had a tremendous amount of width. We only went up so far, and then the supporting structure stopped at about twelve feet, so we never actually saw above that. Where the camera was going to shoot off it, we hung tapestries down. That was our cheat, which allowed us to have a structure that was only built halfway and still look, as far as the mind was concerned, the eye was concerned, as if it was a full, dimensional, high, medieval structure. Adrian Paul: Oh, I think having a story line that went straight through several episodes was one of my favorite things about Highlander. I actually wanted to push for more two-part episodes and ones that had more story content like that. The only problem is, is that with a syndicated series, they were always shown out of sequence, so sometimes you would have the latter one being shown before the original story line had been already told. But I thought it was a good idea, that "Song of the Executioner" was a strong concept, and I think it set the grounds for the relationship between MacLeod and Kalas for the rest of the season.
Clip from "Song of the Executioner":
David Tynan (Executive Script Consultant / Writer): Well, "Song of the Executioner" represented what was really sort of a trilogy of shows that focused on the relationship between MacLeod and Dr. Anne Lindsey. In "Shadows", that relationship was kind of obviously at a loggerheads as MacLeod could not tell her what was happening in his life. And in "Song of the Executioner", at the end of the piece, Anne Lindsey actually sees MacLeod die. He falls from an overhead balcony to avoid the sword of the Immortal, Kalas, lands on the seats, breaks his neck, and she's a doctor -- she examines him; she knows he's dead. The reason we took that turn is I think we had to find a way to get MacLeod away from Anne -- and over to Paris, to start with. The other thing was we needed to take that relationship to another level. So rather than just end it, which I think was on our minds as, you know, writers and producers on the show, we thought we would have MacLeod die, then have him reveal his Immortality to her in the next episode. And once that had happened, draw her into that dangerous world, and then have her decide to leave it.
Well, I think Dr. Anne was a, um -- it was a great concept, I just don't think it worked quite as well as the Tessa/MacLeod relationship. The idea of setting MacLeod up with somebody that saves life where he was taking lives was a really interesting idea. It just somehow didn't quite hit its mark as a chemistry between the two characters. I think having MacLeod die in front of her caused him an obstacle, which was great to try and overcome, because he did feel something for her and he -- to put that obstacle in front of him then gave us much more willingness to see what happened between them later on. So to see him die in that way was kind of interesting, to see what was going to happen in the future -- whether he actually was going to be brought back to her, or she was going to be brought back to him or back into his life. It was something that we were hoping that the fans would want to see. I think sometimes what happens -- you can like a person offscreen, you can have a great time with them or whatever, but sometimes it's what is in the soul and what is inside somebody, whether you have a connection with them or whether there is some sort of chemistry between you -- whether it's good or bad, whether you have an animosity towards them or a love towards them, there is something that is happening between you. And that, I think, is something that is intangible in anybody that you talk to and that -- you can't tell until you actually get it on screen to see whether that's actually working or not. |
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Clip from "Star-Crossed":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): Why did we kill Fitz in this episode? In order to add power and some meaning to an Immortal life, they can't all just kind of skip down the highway together forever. Sometimes a good guy has to die.
Clip from "Star-Crossed":
We also knew that since he was -- since Roger was very popular with us and very popular with the audience, that there was no reason that he couldn't continue to return to the show in flashback and see more of that buddy relationship that he and MacLeod had that we liked and the audience liked as well.
Clips from "Star-Crossed":
DM - Oh, no.
Ken Gord (Producer): Working with Roger Daltrey was, as usual, fun. He's just a great guy, he's a down-to-earth guy, he's a regular guy, and he tells great Keith Moon stories, and he's professional.
Clip from "Star-Crossed":
I was stunned by how human and normal he was. Growing up and being a fan of The Who, and seeing sort of him and Mick Jagger, you know, in this one spot, um, I was a little nervous, and I do remember, there was the first or second day that he came to shoot -- again, Adrian's busy -- and he says, "You want to grab dinner?" And I say, "Just you and me?" And he says, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Sure." I felt like I was on a date. I was like, 'What am I going to say? What are we going to talk about? What do you talk to Roger Daltrey about?"
Clip from "Star-Crossed":
He was just the greatest guy, nicest guy, and instantly turns to us: "You guys are the pros; you help me." And immediately the walls were broken down, and he empowered me, and I don't think that he wanted people around him thinking, 'Oh, he's Roger, he's great, he's this, he's that.' I think he wanted to learn, and I think he wanted to grow. And he had such reverence for us that immediately the disparity in our... celebrity was kind of broken down.
Clip from "Star-Crossed":
I also remember being -- Adrian and I went to England at one point on a weekend, and we took a train back from London to Paris, with Roger. And so the three of us are sitting together on this train, and these kids are coming by, and they're asking Adrian for his autograph, they're asking me for my autograph, and they're looking at him like, 'Who's the old guy with the blond hair?' You know? And I remember thinking, 'This is just too bizarre.' But he, I think, really enjoys his life now, and I've seen him since, and I think that he's happy being an actor, because to be an actor, for him, is to have a normal life, you know, and I think that he's -- I think he's just a normal guy underneath it all and he's got a great attitude.
Clip from "Star-Crossed":
So it was like a win-win for us. We got to have the emotional jolt of a character that everybody liked die at the hand of what was turning out to be probably, you know, our major villain. At the same time, we knew that it would be a surprise for the audience the next time Fitz appeared, and it was in the past -- and we had four hundred years of past to stick him in. So it was great. We loved it.
Clips from "Star-Crossed":
Flashback - Verona, Italy, 1637 - piazza
Flashback: Florence, Italy - 1639
Flashback - Verona, Italy, 1637 - piazza
Flashback - Streets of Paris
Flashback - Outdoor cafe beside Seine
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Peter Wingfield ("Methos"): Methos. Power. It's all kind of bizarre. One of the things that I got lucky with Methos. He's five thousand years old. There's no way of playing that. What I opted for was to try and give the sense that he was very kind of low-key and just said stuff, you know, stuff about, "Yeah, yeah, I've been on stage with Caesar and the Rolling Stones, it's no big deal." I wanted to suggest that he was saying things, but he was also not saying a whole load of other stuff. That there was just so much history that he had that all the details were kind of casual and trivial and not that big a deal.
With Methos, we had no idea what we had. And then Peter showed up. And he played the intense scenes with incredible intensity. He played the human scenes with incredible humanity, and he played the funny scenes like a comedian. And once we saw this guy, we said, "God, we gotta keep writing for him," because writers like to write for people who they think can really act. They don't like to write for lame people who deliver wood on camera. Methos was never wood, Peter was never wood. He always acted, he was always wonderful. He didn't do a bad episode for us.
I tried to not play anything very intensely, which then left him open as a character that as things developed both on the page and between the rest of the cast and me, you can actually bring in lots of things because I hadn't defined him. It's one of the things about TV. You don't start playing the character, knowing all the information. There is a sketch, there's a suggestion of who the character is and where the character might go if you get picked up for the second season.
As a human being, he was also always so pleased with the part, because the character was one that kept surprising us, and the reason he was a character that kept surprising us was because the actor could play everything we wrote for him, and that's such an enormous pleasure to write when you can really write for someone who can play everything. And Peter Wingfield's one of those guys.
The first time we see him in the Methos episode, he's a very ordinary kind of guy, and you can see how he's survived all this time. He's very unobtrusive. Then Kalas finds him and they fight and Methos manages to get away, but he is convinced that Kalas is going to take his head. And he decides that he, Methos, will sacrifice himself to Duncan MacLeod.
Clip from "Methos":
Yeah, it's a strange thing for him to do, isn't it? I mean, in retrospect, you kind of look back and you think, I mean, did he really mean it? Or was it a very high-risk gamble? At the time when I was playing it when I was first given the script, I absolutely assumed that he meant it, that he was willing to sacrifice his life. My rationale was that this guy's been around for thousands and thousands of years. He's seen and done everything, as we later learn. But yet he's been invisible, he's disappeared for a long time, and I just thought maybe he's just bored and tired. Maybe he's just had enough that he was ready to go, that it made sense this time. Okay, if I'm going, let's give my spirit, my essence, my experience to MacLeod, because he is the great hero figure. After a couple of years of playing the character, I now look back at it and I think, wow, yeah, there is always that way of looking at it, but...
Clip from "Methos":
I never believed anything else that he did was as simple and clear as that. He's a Watcher, he knows about all the Immortals. He knows their stories, he knows their predilections, their strengths and weaknesses. He would know MacLeod very well. He would know MacLeod wasn't going to do it, so... I don't know. And that's what made him such a great character, is that you never... I never trusted him, I never knew... I never knew what he meant. I never knew how serious he was about anything. Chris Ainscough (Composer / Sound Mixer): The piece of music for the Methos episode, yeah, "Racing with the Devil". Well, Keith and I have known each other for years and we had actually worked on another song for a previous season of Highlander, so I think we talked about this episode, that it'd be really great to have a song to go through all this motorcycle stuff. And so I called Keith up and he was home from the road for a while and -- a couple of weeks -- and he said yeah, he'd love to do it. It was a really tight turnaround. We weren't actually going to be able to see the pictures before he could write this, so I told him basically what we needed and that kind of thing, and he sent a tape over two days later and I listened to it. "Wow, this is great." I had a few comments timing-wise really about taking out a couple of choruses and things because I don't think it ran more than a minute and a half or so and he had this great four-minute song. If you ever had a chance to hear the whole four-minute song, it really, really goes. So he delivered over this multi-track tape, which we took into the studio and mixed it, I think, the night before mixing the episode and I think it laid in there really beautifully, and it really worked aggressively with the motorcycle sound and that sort of thing. That was a lot of fun. Peter Wingfield: My first connection with Highlander, I got sent these pages for an audition. My agent said, "They're shooting in Paris, a couple of days' work. Do you have any interest in it?" I looked at it, I had no idea what it was about. It just didn't make any sense. There was some crazy nonsense about sacrificing my head, having my head chopped off, and some other garbage about being onstage with Caesar and then onstage with the Rolling Stones. I didn't know what any of it meant, I had absolutely no clue. Got the job, went out there, filmed that stuff under the bridge in Paris with all the smoke. This guy Adrian Paul -- didn't know who he was, meant nothing to me -- came over and introduced himself. He seemed to be wearing a sleeping bag. It was all kind of bizarre. I now look back at it and it's changed my life so profoundly. I mean, I now live five thousand miles away. I have a child who will grow up with an accent that is completely unrelated to my own, at the bottom of a mountain where we will go snowboarding next to the ocean where the orcas swim by every year. And my acting, my craft is so totally altered by my work, my experience on Highlander, the places I've had to go with the character of Methos. I am profoundly changed by it. I mean, it's this strange little show about immortality, and here I am five years after we shot the final episode, still talking about it. It's a show that will not die. |
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Don Paonessa (Post Production Consultant): Take back the night was a show that we shot in Paris and Ken Gord brilliantly cast this kid whose character was named Paulo. And Paulo looked great and he was a great little actor.
Clip from "Take Back the Night":
The problem was that you couldn't really understand what he was saying because he's French and he was speaking in broken English. So there was a decision made that the only way that we're going to be able to utilize his performance was to bring in an actor in Vancouver and revoice him.
Well, we just did casting in Paris and he seemed like the best little kid. And I think we revoiced him, which was pretty normal.
So we ended up revoicing him with a woman who was great at sounding like a fourteen-year-old boy. And it turned out to be brilliant and it was very good. And I think it really made that whole performance just stand up and it was really a lot of fun to do. Ken Gord: Setting up the schedule in "Take Back the Night" was probably no different than setting up the schedule for any other show. I don't think it had anything specifically problematic about it. F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): Any time you have a lot of swords swinging -- and we very often did battle scenes with swords and like weapons -- part of the danger is not the opponent you're facing, but the people who are fighting around you, because once they're out of your peripheral vision, that's pretty much it. Every time you wind up with a weapon, you have to remember that it's three feet in front of you in this way. [points in front of himself] It's also three feet behind you this way. [points over his shoulder] And one of the dangers in a battle scene is choreographing the movement patterns to make sure that nobody walks into a weapon that's being prepared. So, say if I have two pairs of fighters going this way [slides his hands past each other in opposite directions], crossing each other. As soon as they get within range, this pair [motions with right hand] will only take their windups to the right and overhead, and this pair [motions with left hand] will only take their windups overhead and to the left, to make sure that as they cross each other for that brief two or three seconds, nobody is swinging into anybody else, either impeding their weapons or whacking each other over the head. So, battle scenes like this are problematic, safety of the actor as well as the visual aspect. Ken Gord (Producer): Setting up the flashback for "Take Back the Night"? Again, I don't think it was problematic. I think, as I remember, a day with a bunch of soldiers, Roman soldiers and barbarians fighting.
Clip from "Take Back the Night":
I didn't think it particularly worked that well, that show. I don't know why. I thought the script was very good, and I thought Kathy Ulrich was very good, and I thought the rest of the cast was very good, and I don't know why, but for some reason, the show, to me, didn't come together. But it's like baseball, it's all got to come together and who knows why it didn't. Just two words that you don't want to ever see when you're producing a TV show. The two words are 'village' and 'montage'. Both of them strike fear into our hearts. 'Village' generally means, on our budget, one or two huts that we can somehow magically attach to something else, or it would be nice if we could, like, do crowd multiplication, you know, do hut multiplication. We did actually get pretty ingenious at making pretty good villages and stuff through our time. But it's not easy to build a village and a village is an expensive thing.
Clip from "Take Back the Night":
It sounds pretty simple when you're in your office in Los Angeles. It's not so easy to find it or be able to build a village on a one-hour episodic television show, especially when you have to build it in, like, two days. |
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Lara Mazur (Editor): I think one of the interesting and challenging things about working as an editor on Highlander was that each one of the directors had a unique approach to the material. And a lot of times they would be chosen because they had done their own independent films or that they didn't necessarily come out of other television experience. What that presented to us as editors was that every episode would be like approaching, working on a small feature, because there wasn't a particular style. There wasn't particular way in which action sequences were shot. There wasn't a particular way in which scenes were covered. And as well, each episode would have a flashback that would give you an opportunity to work in a totally different period in history. So the art direction of each scene was unique. Each episode had its own unique look to it. F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): "Testimony" had this very large village scene where Cossacks raid this village and basically lay waste and havoc. A lot of fighting. MacLeod is in there trying to save as many people as he can. Some of the combatants, like Kristov, are on horseback riding through, whacking people on either side. And the village is being set on fire, so we have fire bars. We have areas that are basically free burning, because we have a fire truck standing by. And a lot of the horses don't particularly care to come very close to these things. So even horses that are trained for film and television, they are still shying. And at the very end, the character of Kristov gets sort of piked off his horse, and the horse has to go up into a sustained rear to allow the stuntman to fall off. And of course, the actor playing Kristov has got to pull the horse up into a rear just to get that close up. And again, that's very dangerous when you're working around fire or anything like this, because there are so many factors that distract the animal. Philippe Guégan, our stunt coordinator, when we were in France, is very experienced with horses. The actor playing Kristov was a rider, so again, fortunately, we had a lot of things working in our favor, but just so much to try and watch at the same time. David Tynan (Executive Script Consultant/Writer): In "Testimony", I think we decided to turn the usual fight at the end of the episode on its ear. Normally MacLeod faces an adversary from the past, someone who has a grudge against him or someone who's enmity he's earned by being, usually by being a moral guy, I think. And in this case, MacLeod confronts a number of the evil Immortal Kristov's henchmen, and while he's doing that, Richie confronts Kristov. And I think it was just our wish to do something different for a change. In every episode, virtually every episode that had a Quickening in the end, it was MacLeod's Quickening, and it was MacLeod's victorious battle with his famed katana over the evil Immortals. In this case, Richie does it, and he does it off camera, so that MacLeod doesn't know, first of all, who won and who died, and I think that gave the audience a little bit of a thrill, because it could have been Richie.
Clip from "Testimony":
Stan didn't have too many fights on the series, unfortunately. One of the things that I had problems with was, first of all, when I came onto the series, it was the beginning of season three, and I simply didn't get to choose an awful lot of the weapons for the other characters like Stan and Amanda and whatnot. The sword that was chosen for Stan was what's called a sword rapier, a rapier hilt, with a much wider blade that would have been used for battle combat as opposed to dueling. It was basically a sword that had been designed to be a wallhanger, even though we were using aluminum blades in it, the way the hilt was put together and what the hilt was made out of, which was basically glorified pot metal, didn't stand up well to the percussive nature of repeated take after take after take. So Stan's weapon had this nasty habit of, every now and then, just flying apart, or in some cases exploding like a grenade. So it was difficult to choreograph for the weapon because, first of all, it hurt the hand to hold, which was not nice for Stan, and also you never knew from one take to the next, is this the one where the sword's actually going to blow up on us. Stan, of course, using a single-handed weapon with a double-cutting edge and a thrusting point, the choreography is demonstrably different from MacLeod's sword. Choreography always fits the design and style of the weapon and things of that nature. Stan worked very hard on that fight, as he did on all fights, and I think it very definitely shows. Again, he was fighting against a person using a single-handed weapon, a Russian-style saber, so there wasn't a big difference in terms of weight disparity or the amount of force that can be put into a two-handed weapon, which shouldn't, but sometimes occurs. So, the choreography was demonstrably different from the MacLeod fights. Again, also, the character of Stan brings a different emotional quality to the fight scenes, especially towards the end when it very much appears that Kristov is going to win. As a matter of fact, we never actually see the killing blow. MacLeod sort of rushes in, seeing the Quickening, pretty sure that he has lost his best friend. And the last thing we see of Richie is this blow descending down on him, as he's throwing up a parry, and then we cut to MacLeod. So it was purposely nebulous, because at that time the character of Richie had not had that many fights, and his skill as a character -- not as Stan and his ability as an actor -- was still supposed to be a little bit in doubt with the audience.
There is a moment in the show where we cut to a commercial break, and Adrian isn't sure whether-- He sees the results of the Quickening, but he's not sure whether or not Richie has been killed, or Kristov. And as it turns out, it was Richie who won the fight and killed or beheaded, Kristov and had the Quickening, and it was kind of a moment of growth for Richie, because he was now becoming a more mature Immortal in receiving this Quickening. And in a sense, he's sort of an unlikely character to achieve that. He's sort of not necessarily the heroic character. |
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David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): Well, you take a character -- for a mortal to commit murder -- you see things on television all the time, which is, you know, a guy picking up a gun and shooting somebody to save somebody. The act of killing someone is an incredible emotional and metaphysical and -- and you see so many times there's no repercussions. No one feels the guilt. Very rarely do people have the nightmares. So we wanted to just create a character -- I wanted to create a character that would have -- that an act in childhood would reverberate throughout his life.
Clips from "Mortal Sins":
Anne - ...terrible story. Such a little boy, killing someone... and-and having it haunt him his whole life, and then seeing him come back alive again. It's terrible. You know, it was an episode where we needed to end the relationship with Anne, Dr. Anne.
Clip from "Mortal Sins":
We wanted to give her an out with some dignity. We didn't want her to die, you know, because all Duncan's lovers die. We didn't want her to run away and hide. So we wanted her to see the Quickening, we wanted to see him kill, and I think one of the best lines in the show was 'It was not because you killed him that I'm leaving you. It was because I wanted you to.'
Clip from "Mortal Sins":
This played against the core of who she was, and she chose the core of who she was over her love of Duncan, which played her out as a very strong woman, and a woman of her own sense of integrity. Ken Gord (Producer): Yeah, "Mortal Sins" was a kind of a firecracker of a show. Mario is a firecracker of a director, and he is -- he's one of the best. He knows how to tell a story as good as anybody. But he's also very opinionated. He's very -- he's strong. He's a big personality.
I think Mario Azzopardi is a great director. He's also a major pain in the ass. We fought incredibly over a number of things. So I think he did a wonderful job. This episode cut and paste and worked. Just from an episode standpoint, it's as good as anything we'd ever done. And it looked great. Production values were wonderful. But we had this major fight.
He really took offense to a priest in the church having a gun.
Clip from "Mortal Sins":
He and I were on the phone with David a few times and conversations became pretty loud and they became pretty rough. And, you know, there was threats back and forth and--
Clip from "Mortal Sins":
It was quite actually intense and I -- Mario -- Mario's brother's a priest in Malta, and he was really, you know, didn't want to offend his brother, he didn't want to offend the church. And, you know, David just wanted to tell the story.
There was a scene where the priest is at the altar, and by the altar there's a glass of communion wine, and I -- and when -- there's a sequence that happens -- the wine spills; it's symbolic. I wanted it to be red wine. He said, "No, it's definitely white wine." Well, white wine doesn't show like red wine shows, you know? White wine's like -- red wine's like blood and it plays better dramatically. And I didn't think it was a big deal, and he freaked out. And I -- then I got pissed, and I said, "Listen! It's gonna be red wine!" And he said, "No, no, no." Then I called up the catholic archdiocese in Los Angeles, and they said it was red wine. And, well, then in some diocese in France, it was actually white wine. So I said, "Who cares what it is. Let's do what LOOKS better!" But he got this bug up his a*beep*, and we fought and fought and fought and fought and fought. And to tell you the truth, at the moment, I don't remember whether it was red wine or white wine.
Eventually, you know, Mario did what the script said, but it was kind of like an international incident.
I would work with Mario again in a minute, crazy or not. And we could fight again, you know, because the bottom line is, the episode really worked. |
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Clips from "Reasonable Doubt":
Tarsis - You and me, Kagan, we've got a lot to talk about. [pulls out sword] We're gonna be raising hell forever. [hands sword to Kagan] Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): Immortals live in secret. Immortals are playing a Game about which almost all of us know absolutely nothing, which is the way they want to keep it. For MacLeod to step outside the Game and take action because he believes it's good for society, is something that is in his nature -- it's one of his great strengths as a character, but it is not a great strength as an Immortal.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
We just every once in a while thought that he should take that chance and not fade into the shadows and let life go on because it's really none of his business. I mean, in this case he had some past history with the guy.
Clips from "Reasonable Doubt":
We had a lot of fun shooting up the streets of Paris with machine guns, which was never very easy to do. And now it -- the guy is a bad guy, he's treating his pal's niece badly, and he just sort of decided enough was enough.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
Gillian Horvath (Executive Script Coordinator): Dennis Berry, as a director, was always entertaining from our point of view in the writers' office, in that when we received the dailies, they were always full of surprises. You never knew when he was going to take what seemed like a simple scene -- in a casino or a whorehouse -- and add to it these levels of carnival that made it look more like a feature film than like a television episode.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
I think that Dennis Berry approaches each Highlander episode as a mini-movie. In some ways, they had kind of a big movie feel to them. There were huge scenes, A and B cameras, all kinds of angles. Dennis always has a great sense of drama, and his material has kind of an epic and, you know, sometimes melodramatic touch to it.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
The directors were really given an opportunity to push the envelope, to experiment, and to try different techniques and different ways of covering material.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
Bill Panzer: So MacLeod knows this guy for a long time. He knows that he's a bad guy. His pal, Maurice, has entrusted his niece, Simone, to MacLeod's care, sort of, and then Kagan kills her. First of all, it doesn't make MacLeod a great bodyguard, and second of all, I think the only thing he can do is to whack the guy.
Clip from "Reasonable Doubt":
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Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
Gillian Horvath (Executive Script Coordinator): This episode actually replaced an episode that we had in development which was called "Dilemma", and "Dilemma" was an episode in which the character of Methos returned to the show and got killed. And when we were filming the "Methos" episode and started seeing dailies and saw the chemistry between Peter Wingfield and Adrian Paul and how well the character was working out, we decided we didn't really want to kill him, which was a shame from a story point of view because the "Dilemma" story was really kind of an interesting story in which Kalas kills Methos and then starts exhibiting some of Methos' personality traits, and Duncan's torn between killing his worst enemy and saving his newest friend. But in the long-term of the show, it worked out in our favor to not kill Methos because he turned out to be a great part of the next few seasons. And so "Finalé" was developed. We still brought the character back, but he managed to survive the two episodes and go on to the future seasons.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
"Finalé, Part One" and "Finalé, Part Two" -- the titles make them sound like a two-parter, but we always said that they were the last two episodes of a five-parter, which started in "Song of the Executioner" and continued in "Star-Crossed" and "Methos". And sometimes we would say that in fact they were the last two episodes of a twenty-two parter, which was the entire season.
The Kalas arc was three episodes in the middle of the season, and then we got rid of him for a while and put him in prison, because there really is only so long you can have a recurring bad guy without your heroes starting to look stupid for not catching him every week. So we put Kalas on ice, finished up the season with some regular stories, and then brought him out for the big 'Finalés'. David Tynan (Executive Script Consultant / Writer): This was sort of a further development in the relationship between Amanda and MacLeod. She'd always been a pretty selfish character. She was a hedonist, she liked pleasure for its own sake, liked MacLeod for, you know, a number of reasons--
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
But there was always a sense that Amanda was in things for herself. In this case she actually tried, for about the first time, I think, in the series, to do something totally selfless. To tackle this enemy of MacLeod's and to finish him off.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
Of course, Amanda being Amanda, she didn't take everything into account, Kalas gets out of prison in the -- I think in the teaser of the episode -- and she really starts a series of events that's going to put MacLeod, all Immortals, and all the Watchers in danger.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
In "Finalé", Amanda breaks Kalas out of prison with the idea of immediately whacking him as a gift for MacLeod, but, of course, it didn't work out that way, 'cause we had two episodes to fill. She didn't count on the fact that Kalas had made a little friend named Nino in the prison, and he used Nino as a weapon against Amanda and was able to get away, leaving Amanda in the spot of then having to tell MacLeod, which is one of my favorite scenes, I think, of the entire series.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
[laughs] Nino. Wow, we got really lucky there, because when you write a character who's off kilter like that, if the casting isn't good, it just comes off farcical. But that -- they played off each other so wonderfully that he just -- every time he's on screen, it adds a little extra zip to it.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
Gillian Horvath: One of the -- one of the things I think that makes the "Finalé" episodes some of our favorites are that so much of our recurring cast is present in them. The fact that Amanda is the one who lets Kalas out of prison and then becomes a part of the story and a part of this major climax to the season's biggest arc is really a nice touch. It's not something we were able to do that frequently, to have so many of our cast in an episode together, and I think it adds a lot to the story both emotionally and in terms of the humor, to have those characters together who work so well together.
"Finalé", I think, was one of the first episodes that brought all of our family together, or at least all the family except for Richie, you know. We had Joe. This is the return of Methos, who we never thought we'd see again, or there was a possibility -- he was only written for one episode, for the "Methos" episode, but we had all liked the dailies of that so much, we liked Peter Wingfield's performance and what he was doing with the character, that the decision was made to bring him back for the last two. And there was a distinct possibility he was going to die at the end of those two, but again, the character was so winning that he got a reprieve and we told a slightly different story than we might have told. But we also have Amanda. It was the beginning of... I guess what I call the 'Methos and Joe show'. There was some kind of chemistry between Jim and Peter that came across on the screen, and I think that developed both of their characters for the rest of the show.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
David Tynan: In "Finalé, Part One", just as Joe Dawson is going to step out of character in a sense, for Joe, and kill Christine, the wife of a Watcher -- Christine is about to go into the Tribune offices or Herald offices, I think, of a newspaper and reveal all about the Immortals and the Watchers to the world. And Joe, knowing that this can't be allowed to happen, is going to step in front of her and shoot her and commit murder to prevent her from revealing this fact to the world. MacLeod dives in front of Joe's bullet, takes the bullet, and Christine makes it into the offices of the newspaper. So at the end of "Finalé, Part One", we have the feeling that the whole cover for Immortals and for Watchers is going to be blown, and that in fact, the series as we know it could change utterly. This was done for two reasons. One is to give us a great cliffhanger, I think, and secondly, because that's the sort of thing MacLeod would do. He couldn't allow a murder to take place, even if it would save his life in some way or keep his cover from being blown.
Well, the reason MacLeod takes a bullet at the end of the show, of "Finalé, Part One", is to save his friend the guilt of having killed somebody, of having taken somebody else's life and being, you know, the judge, jury, and executioner. The -- it was possibly a slight cliffhanger device because he could have done it earlier and we would have not seen what would happen next week, so there was that device in it, to actually make it a cliffhanger. But I think there was a real sense for MacLeod that he didn't want Joe to have that guilt in him, something he would have to live with for the rest of his life -- that he'd killed a woman and one that was the wife of a friend of his, because she was doing something that she believed was right.
I think it's very in keeping with Duncan that he's willing to risk, I guess, the hypothetical 'all the Immortals might be outed' to, in effect, save Joe's soul.
The choice of actually letting Joe divulge the secret of Immortals or save his own skin was an obstacle that MacLeod had to overcome, but, you know, what's the greatest thing a hero can do is save his friend and give his own life up, and in a way he's doing that, because he's giving up his own identity, or the other Immortals AND his identity to the general public, which puts them up for many different scrutinies that he doesn't necessarily want or need in his life, because he's lived for four hundred years with the secret of being Immortal and having to sort of hide that fact from everybody. And now, having it exposed to the world, he would then be subject to people wanting to kill him, to dissect him, to find out who they are, to interfere in something which is none of their business.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
Joe was perfectly willing to kill Christine and whoever else he needed to, to keep everything a secret, but Duncan could not allow that to happen to Joe. And I think it's interesting, from Joe's point of view, that he really didn't understand that. He just thought that Duncan was saving Christine. But it's Joe who was so important to him that he couldn't let him, you know, dirty his soul with murder.
Clip from "Finalé, Part One":
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David Tynan (Executive Script Coordinator / Writer): In "Finalé, Part Two", we'd set up an interesting show, where it was possible the world of Watchers and Immortals was going to come to an end, or something dire could happen. So we really felt we had to start the show off in a big way, and I think it occurred to one of us in the writing room, like, wouldn't it be great if we could have them go up on the Eiffel Tower and view the city, you know, see Paris spread out before them and really have some breath-taking views of the city. Someone said, "Well, why don't they dance?"
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
We thought, dancing on the Eiffel Tower -- on the railing -- could we possibly do that? And the word came back, "Yeah, you can do it."
Probably my favorite scene in my whole career as Amanda, was doing the tango on the Eiffel Tower. We had a great tape of two international tango dancers. We watched that and sort of picked the moves we liked and worked and worked and worked on that, after hours, you know, on the weekends, just trying to make it work.
I think it was one of those magical moments you could only get away with on Highlander.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
David Tynan: Once we knew we had Amanda -- that is, Elizabeth Gracen -- in the show, we knew we had to do something fun with her. Elizabeth always has a natural sense of comic timing, and in virtually every episode, with MacLeod, Amanda gets into some sort of trouble and gets in over her head.
Belly dancing. Ooof. Belly dancing 101. They found a belly dancer from the Pigalle area who came to my hotel, and I think I maybe had three lessons, and of course I'm very tall -- I think she came up to, you know, there on me [holds hand at chest height] -- and I just sort of learned the basics, and it was fun, a lot of fun, pushing the furniture back in the hotel room and attempting all of it. I liked my costume, I remember. Very broad comedy in all of that.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
There's like, six of us come in, I think, six belly dancers in the harem, and I'm at least four feet taller than everyone standing there. And I'm in red, and I'm, you know, look like -- it's just very funny to me. I'm sort of 'hmmm hmm hmm' [imitates arm movements], like I know what I'm doing.
She often has good intentions, but they usually go off the tracks and something bad happens.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
Pulling the arrow out of his bum -- very good stuff.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
It's all very silly. David Tynan: We actually created a kind of strange device, and that was to have Amanda once more try and rescue MacLeod by taking on Kalas.
She's very loyal to her friends. If it had been Joe or Richie or anyone, I'm sure she would have done the same. Maybe not Richie. [laughs] No, I think she would have.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
Amanda, as a character, is so impulsive. She doesn't really think things through that much when her temper rises, and, uh -- which we might have in common.
I think it was a measure of her relationship with MacLeod and what was, up until that point, an unspoken part of the relationship, and that was that she loved MacLeod. And that MacLeod, at some level, deeply loved her. In spite of their fighting, their bickering, their humor, their on and off again relationship. And that Amanda felt this to the degree that she was willing to go and give her life up to try and defeat MacLeod's enemy. But of course, Amanda being Amanda, it didn't quite come off.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
Yeah, she went after Kalas. Not one of my favorite fight sequences because I sort of looked like a little black fairy. She had to get by on her wit and try to outmaneuver someone, and so that's why we tried to do the cape and all of that. F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): Apparently we were the first, and probably the only, production company that's ever actually been allowed to film that kind of an action sequence there.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
The thing that I really remember about it is it was cold as hell! We're up three hundred and fifty, four hundred feet in the air, it is raining, the wind is blowing, and of course we're filming in the winter -- this is December. The fighters are being buffeted around by the wind, which of course is not good because you're on a metal grid surface -- with rubber-soled shoes, albeit, but it's still a wet metal grid. People are slipping and sliding around. And it was very spectacular, but, uh, just another one of these places where the physical environment is creating an awful lot of hazards you can't control.
Clip from "Finalé, Part Two":
Elizabeth Gracen: Well, I think if Amanda had her way, they would be together. I think she would go off for periods -- you know, they would have great separate vacations, but I think, you know, she's always propositioning him to, you know, go to a desert island. And I just think that she probably drives him a little crazy, and that's probably the problem. |
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