Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
|
Highlander |
|
(from 2004 U.S./Canada DVD set)
|
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): The "Homeland" episode was partially filmed in Scotland, and we did that by actually sending a small crew over to Scotland at the end of the previous season while people were in Paris, which isn't that far away, and filming a bunch of exterior shots. When you watch the episode, it actually doesn't match that well. The Scottish footage is brown and sort of dead-looking because it was March, and when we moved to Vancouver, it was the height of summer, everything is beautifully lush and green, and there are these little bugs everywhere that were driving the actors crazy. And so when you watch the episode, you can really see the cuts, unfortunately; you can go "Scotland -- Canada -- Scotland -- Canada."
Clips from "Homeland":
Adrian Paul (Actor): {??} (something about a hat?) Man: [offscreen] You spent some time in Scotland shooting second unit for the show that Adrian directed. Jim Byrnes ("Joe Dawson"): Think about that. Yeah, it was fun at the end of, I guess, that was season three. We had wrapped the finale up there underneath the Eiffel Tower, and then they said they were going to go and shoot some second unit in Scotland, and I was able to convince Ken Gord into dragging me along, and so we shot some outdoor scenes and things that you know, you just cannae get anywhere else. So it was great fun for me, because the pressure was off. I just had to kind of walk through-- down a couple of paths and say a couple of things and talk with Adrian and enjoy the Scottish hospitality and the real ale, and-- which I enjoyed quite a lot of. Ken Gord (Producer): In "Homeland", everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and a lot of things went wrong that we didn't even know could go wrong. For example, our local driver Angus, who we ended up nicknaming "Wrong-Turn Angus"; the rain, which was nonstop. Do you remember the fur cape that Adrian was wearing during that sequence? Well, when we got it from Angels, which is a rental company in London, the thing weighed about probably five pounds because it was a big, heavy fur cape. After four days of rain, the thing weighed about somewhere probably in the three digits, and we had no time to dry it out because we were all going back to Paris, back home. It was the end of the season. We sent it back in a box. A year later, I ended up speaking to that fellow who worked at Angels in London, and he said it was the most disgusting return they'd ever had, so that's, you know, something. Tell's you a little bit about how that show went. Adrian Paul: I wanted to see this very big view of Scotland, and we had the camera in the helicopter, but the problem was that there was a lot of moisture in the air. So the shot was, which you see in "Homeland", is me riding away and seeing the stuff in the background. Well, the idea was that the horse was supposed to ride like this [holds right hand up], and the helicopter was supposed to come this way [moves left hand along beside right hand and then around in front of it], and come in front of the horse, and I said to the guy with the horse, I said, "I hope he's good around helicopters," and the guy goes, "Aye, he is today," and I went, "Oh, this is really reassuring."
Clip from "Homeland":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): I thought this one had the possibility-- I think it turned out to be a really good episode. Going into it, I thought it had the possibility of being our best episode. And it turned out to be good. Flashback, I thought, was fabulous. And I thought the woman who played Debra and that scene was she's bathing by the water. That could have been one of the sexiest scenes we've ever done on the show. I thought Adrian did quite a good job on the episode, which, you know, being the star of the show, he caught a little break. He went sixty or seventy thousand dollars over budget, but that was okay because he was the star, and the episode worked.
I thought Adrian was one of the best directors. He did ask for more, but every director asked for more, so we're used to that. We probably gave him a little more. He was well organized. He did his homework. He was totally professional. He didn't, you know, throw away the opportunity. He took it and he did a great job. He was talented in every respect. Jim Byrnes: What was funny, when we came back-- Now Scotland in March can be pretty cold. And so we were dressed for it when we did the show. I was wearing a sweater, a sports jacket, a leather coat, and had an overcoat over that, a hat and a scarf and all this stuff all wrapped up. And then we came back and we had to shoot the close-ups from some of these scenes here in Vancouver up in the Greater Vancouver Regional District up Mount Seymour there, in the dead of summer. And dressed and all, we had to match all this stuff. And you can see the scene where-- And the bugs were absolutely unbelievable. We had to, in between takes, we had to wear like the beekeeper's hats to keep the bugs off. And you can even see in the close-up, you know, bugs in your nose, because they were just absolutely everywhere. It was like a weight loss clinic wearing all these clothes and it was ninety-five degrees outside. So these are the fun things in filmmaking.
Clip from "Homeland":
F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): "Homeland", yeah. There were actually four sword fights in that episode. One was the Scottish village one, but the main three were done with Viking weapons. And there were a lot of misconceptions about the way Vikings fought, because we're always looking back at the old movies of the '50s and the '60s. I thought it was a good opportunity to try and show Viking weapons used as they were supposed to be used. So I had, for instance, one scene where Carsten Norgaard's character of Kanwulf is wearing the shield on his back while he is using the axe with both hands. And then taking parries by turning his back into the blow, which was done on occasions.
Roger Bellon (Composer): "Homeland" was a very interesting, fun show to do. It was Adrian Paul, the star of Highlander's, first directorial debut on the show. So consequently, he and I got to dialogue quite a bit about what he perceived the music should do, which was pretty rare because in most series and episodic television, the composer and the director don't really talk that much. He and I got to talk extensively and he had some particular views which helped me in defining the style of that particular show.
Clip from "Homeland":
Not only were they working in an ethnic Celtic way, but they were working in a dramatic, emotional way as a film score. The other interesting thing about this episode was it was the first time that the song 'Bonnie Portmore' was introduced. And in relation to Highlander, 'Bonnie Portmore' is, I guess you might call it a signature or a hit, or if there is a theme -- not reoccurring -- that may be it. It's a very popular song with the fans. I myself get hundreds of emails literally about the particular piece. Where can it be found? Who sang on it? How it was used? Why it was chosen. I don't quite remember why we chose it. I just know that I think it came from Bill Panzer. And I was given some lyrics. And I think a piece of sheet music that was found in a UCLA University of California archive. And I then had to recreate it. I had to cast a singer. I had to find a particular singer that could sing with that sort of angelic, Celtic voice and tie all these things together. So that this particular piece, 'Bonnie Portmore', not only told the story of the show in its lyrics, but gave off an interesting, romantic, yet dramatic aspect to the movie. Ken Gord: The Quickening on "Homeland"... I mean, you're limited when you're planning a Quickening; you've got to use what's there. And what's there is the location, for starters, and then you build on a location. So if you're in a place like a vase factory, obviously, you could have a thousand vases exploding and that's what you're going to get, and there's a lot to work with.
David Abramowitz: The only thing that disappointed me was the casting of Kanwulf, the bad guy in the episode. He didn't pop with a kind of luminescent presence. He was kind of there. So I thought all the rest of the episode was great, I thought, and we shot part of it in Scotland, which was incredible. We had cranes and helicopters and all these things. It was a big episode. The flashback was incredible. We got to see Duncan with his family, with his mother, with his father. We learned who he was and why he was who he was and with this beautiful woman. It's not that I-- I still consider it a wonderful episode, but it's kind of like... Going in, I thought we were going to win the lottery. We did win the lottery. There were just a hundred and fifty other people who won at the same time. So what you got out of it was a lot less than what you thought, but it was still nice to win. |
|
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
Charles Wilkinson (Director): The Vietnam scene that we shot for "Brothers in Arms", within the context of this series, it was kind of a triumph of planning and preparation and extraordinarily good screenwriting, extraordinarily good casting. You can't go into a situation like that unless you've got a crew that you can depend on and all of those elements in place. But all of that having been said, that was, I think, the most challenging day that I've spent on the set of Highlander.
That had some great difficulties, considering where we were shooting. We-- After a long and exhaustive search, we found an area of grassland south of Vancouver. It had all of the elements that we needed for the scene. There was the road, there was the water, there was a river, there was the cove and an area to put the village. And we matched the architecture, the Vietnamese architecture, to a lot of research.
There was no shortage of expertise on the Vietnam end of the thing, F. Braun had served over there. I was over there, I think one of the genny ops, and so the look we got, there was a lot of great research done. It's-- On so many of the episodes, the research always blew my mind, how they would get things right in terms of the look and the feel and the proper equipment and the purple smoke and the green smoke. Charles Wilkinson: Three cameras; you're running constantly. You're saying, okay, we're covering this piece wide. I want to have a medium camera in here. I want to go really, really long here. This one's slow motion, and so on. And you just go, go, go, go, go. And you don't have these niceties where you can stop and say, 'okay, well now, I think what we'll do is this.' You're just, you're racing the entire day. Stephen Geaghan: The little touches that we did, where we needed patty boats. But you can't get Vietnamese patty boats here in British Columbia. So we went to the local Coast Salish tribe and bartered with them to rent their dugout canoes. And just with extensive research and photography that was available to us, we managed to piece together all the elements that became the village. Charles Wilkinson: There was just so much going on. Some of the acting was as intense as any of the acting gets.
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
That's emotionally really draining, for me, for the entire crew. Stephen Geaghan: I went over the terrain with the director, with Charles, and we figured out where we were going to put things, where we could shift things, what more we needed, uh, whether we could build a couple more fronts of hooches to-- for background scene. And this we did. We managed to get pretty much everything that the director needed to shoot a show. Charles Wilkinson: Then to go and blow stuff up like that for hours and hours on end... There are safety concerns...
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
As safe as we do these things they are pyrotechnics. I mean the potential for hurting somebody is a lot greater than if you're doing a sitcom on a stage.
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
So to get all of that stuff in, into one day, is really challenging, and the safe way to go about doing that -- and I'm not speaking about safe from a point of view of hurting people, but safe from the point of view of a director's point of view -- would be to pull back and shoot sort of wide masters of everything and hope that you were getting the story told, just in terms of joining one thing to the other, and then you know you're gonna get your day and so on and so on. That's not an approach that I have any sympathy for or any affection for, and thankfully the guys in Highlander, from producers right on down, they're not interested in that approach either. Their idea is they would give me as many tools and as much ammunition, within reason, as I could use intelligently and then just say "Go get it." Jim Byrnes: I thought Ken Gord did a great job in casting the fellow to play the young Joe Dawson. I talked to him a bit about that, the initial... when you first find out that you've lost your legs and the sort of pain you're going through emotionally.
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
To make it real, you go into your own emotional life and what you've experienced in those situations that you found yourself in that are intolerable but unavoidable. You either find a place at the center of your being that can deal with it or you get lost, and so you have to really dig down deep into the core of not only what the character is, but what you are to make it real.
Clip from "Brothers in Arms":
So it was great, because in so many episodes-- It was an episode where I really got to dig deep and do some work as opposed to just being exposition in the story. I approach the music the same way I sort of approach acting. It's on an instinctual, emotional level. I'm not so much a technical actor, although -- as like in playing the guitar -- you need technique. You can play a note, but it's not the note you mean because you've got-- you have to have the technique. Hit that spine and to make it ring or to make it do that-- And it's really-- I think you do that with emotions, too. So there-- Technique is-- Well, I think the best music lesson I ever had was from a guy named Wyatt Ruther. He was a bass player from Pittsburgh, and so we were doing this show together and kind of improv-ing on a tune one night. And not in a heavy way, but Wyatt kind of took me aside -- we were sitting on the break -- and he said to me, "You know, the trick to improvisation is to, like, KNOW that song, to know just like it's written on the page and the book. You know, you get the sheet music and you learn it just like that, and when you know it just like that, you can't make a mistake. You can improvise anything; you can play anything and nothing is wrong, because you know it, it's part of you. And so that's-- I mean, you need that technique as an actor and you need to develop that, but I don't want to see it. You know what I'm saying? I don't want to-- That's-- You don't want to get caught out acting, and so you learn to-- It becomes a second nature to you, and then you can go with your instincts and your emotions and you know that your technique will not fail you. Charles Wilkinson: I've never had a higher stress day on set than the day that we shot the Vietnam scene. I've had days as stressful as that, but I've never felt every single aspect of every brain cell-- Everything that I've got going for me in the whole world was firing on eight cylinders that day. The entire crew as well. Not one misstep. Everybody did as best we could with what we had, and it turned out to be something I think we're all pretty proud of. |
|
Clip from "The Innocent":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): When we were creating this story, one of the things that weighed most on our mind, was Mikey, like Lenny in "Of Mice and Men", is a tough part for somebody to play. It looks easy, reads easy, words of one syllable...
Clip from "The Innocent":
You know, it seems like you just need kind of a big lumbering guy to be able to do it, but in order to-- for you to see the layers within the character, to see that really he does know who he is and what he is, takes an actor of particular skill.
Clip from "The Innocent":
Pruitt Taylor Vince was the perfect guy for this part. And once we had cast him, it removed a huge load from our shoulders, because we all felt that the script was pretty well written. And the show eventually turned out to be pretty well directed, but without his performance, without his ability to let you see the character within the character, it never would have worked.
Clip from "The Innocent":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): You know, we wanted to do an episode. where we, again, didn't have a run-of-the-mill Immortal. We wanted to say that Immortals come in all sizes and shapes. We did "The Lamb" where we had Kenny, who was a kid. And we wanted to do an episode where, you know, where an Immortal wasn't the smartest guy on the block. We thought it would be a great opportunity for Richie to step up to the plate--
Clip from "The Innocent":
--and become something more than what he was. To grow up and not be a kid anymore, and to assume some of the responsibilities of Immortality.
Clip from "The Innocent":
I hadn't had a chance to really take care of somebody else. I was always the character on the show that was being taken care of by MacLeod or by Joe Dawson, or whoever at the time.
Clip from "The Innocent":
It was a nice opportunity to provide that role for another character. And, of course, Pruitt Taylor Vince, who played Mikey, who's gone on to great success since then, was just a fantastic actor and a great individual to work with.
Clip from "The Innocent":
It was an opportunity for me to play off what he was giving me a lot in the moment there. And I don't think that Richie, or for that matter myself, had had a lot of exposure to people with serious mental problems, and it made me sad to watch him.
Clip from "The Innocent":
Was this the beginning of the maturing of Richie? Sort of yes, sort of no, because the mature part was choosing and offering and being willing to take responsibility for Mikey. The part that showed that he was still young was that he didn't fully understand that this was not right for either Mikey or for the world.
Clip from "The Innocent":
So while he was willing to step up, he also hadn't gone completely through the situation the way MacLeod had to see what the end result would inevitably be.
Clip from "The Innocent":
David Abramowitz: You know, Immortals are human. And a good Immortal, a kind Immortal, would react to someone who's immortal and helpless in the way a good human being reacts to someone who's immortal and helpless. Well, MacLeod, he didn't know whether this was a con or not. He didn't believe. As being the one who's lived longer than Richie, he's seen lots of cons. And he'd also gotten suckered by Kenny, who was an eight-year-old who played helpless and then beheaded people. And he-- you know, it was possible that everyone does what they-- Part of his belief was, everyone does what they have to do to survive. And MacLeod wasn't so sure that this wasn't just what he needed to survive.
Clip from "The Innocent":
Stan Kirsch: It was sad to see this guy struggling with just normal moment-to-moment life. And when we got to the stuff at the railway, with the railway cars on the train tracks and the tunnel, it wasn't hard to get to that level of emotion because Pruitt was so real in what he was doing and so impactful that I just sort of had to be there and look at him. And he has this wonderful face and I really felt for him. I bought into what he was doing.
Clip from "The Innocent":
You know, I think he knew he did something bad. And I think that he had to pay. You know, there are, for everyone -- and I mean everyone -- you have an obligation to pay for what you've done. You don't get a free ride. Mikey doesn't get a free ride. And at the end, we thought we gave him dignity by allowing him to make the choice.
Clips from "The Innocent":
Stan Kirsch: This was a different kind of a thing. And even from the first meeting, there was something different about the show. Again, it was the first show of the season for me, so I had been off for a while. And I came in with a bit of a fresh attitude and it was a very different kind of an experience, that particular episode. And I enjoyed playing more of the older brother, of a father figure to somebody else. And it did enable me to stretch and I had a really good time with that.
Clip from "The Innocent":
|
|
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
Stan Kirsch ("Richie Ryan"): I don't really know why *I* took it so personally, you know, or why Richie took it so personally. But I did go with it and I did love the intensity about it and I loved-- That's where we did the sequences with the fire escape.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
And I had a lot of fun with that. Although even to this day, like why I was so personally, or why Richie was so personally attached to getting this guy, other than the fact that I was involved in the incident as well.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I think on some level that that's what it was. And then I think it was also a way to begin to express this rage and this anger and the violence that we would later explore with the Richie character. So I-- on that level, I got it. Or that's how it made sense to me.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I think that in the eyes of Adrian, in the eyes of MacLeod and Joe, I guess their maturity and-- kind of what we were seeing at the end of the "Haunted" there. He understands the impact of-- He understands that two wrongs don't necessarily make a right. And two killings don't necessarily make it better.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I don't know whether we ever intended Richie to become Mac's equal because, you know, first of all, the show is called Highlander, not Richie. And Mac has dealt with the idea of revenge and when or if to take it. And Richie hasn't. So this is his first time. It's another coming of age thing for him in the Immortal world.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I'm still in a more youthful and innocent place, thinking that revenge is something that's going to satiate me and make me feel better or make him feel better too. And I'm not really understanding the potential residual effects of going out and killing somebody and then having to live with that for the rest of my life.
Here's somebody who killed Tessa, our favorite person, next favorite person, Richie's mother. I mean, there's a terrible thing. And now, again, in that gray world that we loved so much to live in, here he is with a chance to revenge her death. But this is not the same guy anymore. And this guy now has a family himself. And what am I accomplishing by doing this and sort of having the power of life or death over a mortal? Richie the Immortal and Richie the Human Being chooses to not do it.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I think that in some way, and I don't know that this was necessarily planned out, but I saw some of the character of Richie in this other guy. And a lot of the way he was costumed and presented as a character and what he sort of represented at the time, I remember thinking this is reminiscent of first-season Richie. And maybe this is my doing, but I saw something of that guy in him, of Richie in him and didn't want to go through it at the end. Bill Panzer: Levitating House. After you've done three years of a show, you're in your fourth year, whatever you've done before, you kind of think, well, that's old-fashioned and I'm tired of that, so -- whether the audience is tired of it or not tired of it -- you decide "well, we're going to have to shake it up and change it a little bit."
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
I take the blame for the levitating house. Is that somehow I believed that we could kind of have a Steven Spielberg moment on a $8,000 special effects budget, you know. So I somehow thought we could do it. And the fact that we came pretty close to pulling the thing off, I think is amazing. But it was like, "Let's make the house fly," and everybody goes, "Great, we'll figure out a way to do it." That's kind of the sort of spirit that was on behind the scenes in Highlander all time.
Clip from "Leader of the Pack":
|
|
Clip from "Double Eagle":
David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): I think "Double Eagle" was one of the most enjoyable writing experiences I had in the five and a half seasons that I wrote Highlander episodes. We knew we had Amanda, Elizabeth Gracen for it. And I think most of our stories, even when we had humor in it, centered around very serious themes of death, revenge, mercy, forgiveness, things like that. But there's-- Probably a little known fact is that inside every dramatic writer's skin is a comedy writer dying to get out, and the writers at Highlander were no different.
Clip from "Double Eagle":
"Double Eagle" has got to be one of our best comedy episodes. This was an episode that we had the fun of premiering at a convention, and the comedy episodes work so great in a room full of people. Usually when you make television, you don't get to hear people's response like people who make plays get to do. And it was wonderful to have seven hundred people in a room watching this episode for the first time, reacting to it. Christina McQuirre (Costume Designer): In "Double Eagle", we were actually able to make these two very gorgeous dresses for Elizabeth Gracen. And there's is very, very, very talented cutter that we have here who created this beautiful sort of Victorian dress for her. And it just fitted and, I mean, I was very thrilled with it because I thought she looked absolutely spectacular. And it was very satisfying, you know. I think she really enjoyed wearing it. And it was one of the-- It was a period that I really loved as well, you know. So I wish we could have made more, that was one of our, you know, special ones, I thought.
Clip from "Double Eagle":
David Tynan: We'd always loved doing comedy and were seldom able to because of what was essentially an action adventure show. But in this case, we were encouraged to really throw caution to the wind in a sense and write a show that was really all light, all funny. I think having Amanda and MacLeod together really encouraged that, because Adrian Paul loves doing comedy and always liked those comic aspects to the show. Elizabeth Gracen had the same sort of instincts, and both of them had a great sense of comic timing. As did -- and we weren't sure about this, or I wasn't sure about this when I wrote the episode -- Stan Kirsch, Richie Ryan, had a great sense of comic timing.
Clip from "Double Eagle":
We were still discovering really Elizabeth Gracen's amazing comedic talent. And Stan Kirsch as well, he shined in the comedy episodes, which is something we would not necessarily have expected until we saw it come together. For Elizabeth, it became kind of a curse. She was so great at comedy episodes that, more and more, when Amanda was coming in for an appearance, it turned into a comedy episode to play to that aspect of her character, and we had to remind ourselves, she can do the drama too, don't waste her, don't only do comedies.
Clip from "Double Eagle":
Christina McQuirre: Stephen is a very involved production designer, which is quite wonderful from my perspective as a costume designer, because you feed off each other, you sort of, you know-- He had wonderful ideas for the look of the show and was very interested and concerned about how the costumes worked with the set design or the general production design, and color and, you know, just the texture. So it was a very wonderful collaborative situation, and he was always there to answer questions or to kind of lead you if you needed advice or some inspiration.
Clip from "Double Eagle":
David Tynan: In writing this, we used everybody's comic talents to the fullest extent we could think of. We also had Nicholas Campbell, who you now see in Da Vinci's Inquest, playing Kit O'Brady, a gambling addict, come back to MacLeod's life and trying to buy a race horse that he involves MacLeod in the purchase of. I think that, and the fact that we spent a long time in the flashbacks in this episode, when Kit was the owner of a gambling saloon, and MacLeod was, I think, his partner, or at least his friend in this enterprise in the past, really gave it some scope, and we spent, I think, more time in flashbacks in this episode than we had in virtually any other Highlander episode. |
|
Clips from "Reunion":
Ken Gord (Producer): I think if you're going to do a show like Highlander, I don't think you could ask for a better place than Vancouver. I mean, the diversity was really incredible. And it blew my mind every week because, you know, whether the show called for, you know, a desert in Mexico... [stills from "The Revolutionary" flashback] A rice field in Mongolia... [stills from "They Also Serve" flashback] A desert island...
Clip from "Reunion":
From a thousand years ago... [stills from "Song of the Executioner" flashback] to ten years ago... [still from "The Revolutionary" (not in episode); still from "Line of Fire"] Every country in the world... [stills from "Shadows" flashback; stills from "Testimony" flashback] Somehow we managed to find it. And not just find it, but make it look really, you know, great and realistic. I don't think there was-- I don't think there were any flashbacks that you could watch and say, you know, that doesn't really look like the time or the place or that looks kind of cheesy or whatever. It was always done really well.
Clip from "Reunion":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): The thing that I think this episode did for us is it made Amanda human. We saw a different take of Amanda. The gay thief, you know, from... one we almost see her in a Pink Panther movie. The comedic character was given the opportunity to actually love something--
Clip from "Reunion":
And to actually feel maternal, which I thought was interesting, because it's so out of character with the character of Amanda. It played really, really well for us.
Clip from "Reunion":
It also was one of the few things that could pit Amanda against MacLeod.
Clip from "Reunion":
There is nothing stronger than a woman protecting her child. Nothing on Earth. You don't want to get in the middle of that. So I thought that this gave Amanda a great opportunity to play something else, other than the smiling, happy, go-lucky thief.
Clip from "Reunion":
David Abramowitz: Elizabeth Gracen is a wonderful, wonderful actress. She had great comedic timing. She was beautiful. She was sexy. You know, she worked the crowd really well. And she was wonderful as Amanda. And there was great chemistry between-- always great chemistry between Elizabeth and Adrian.
Clip from "Reunion":
With the character of Anne, you know, we tried to make, create chemistry, and tried to create sex and tried to create heat and tried to create lust. But the truth is, if that passion isn't there, it's just not there. It wasn't magic between them, even though we wanted it to be.
Clip from "Reunion":
There wasn't the heat. You know, there are a couple of characters where there was great heat. There was Nefertiti. There's Amanda has great heat. And there was Cassandra. You know, I mean, I still remember the scene where Cassandra was kissing Adrian in the middle of a scene and it went on and on and on and on and on. Until finally she said, "Cut -- if this goes on any longer, I'm going to need birth control." That's what you wanted. That didn't happen with Anne, you know. We tried to make it happen, but it just didn't happen. But she's a wonderful actress and she's beautiful. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. |
|
Clip from "The Colonel":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Well, you know, as they say, I'd rather be lucky than good. So I'm glad that Joe did come to my rescue at that particular time. Every character, every hero has to have a moment of luck. Or a moment where something pays off that he's done in the past. And I think everything we do is going to come back to us one way or another. So what MacLeod has done in the past with Joe has come back to him.
Clip from "The Colonel":
It's actually made a man who is hell-bent on rules and lives by a code -- and a secret code, at that -- it's allowed him-- it's made him actually break those, which is a big deal for him.
Clips from "The Colonel":
So it's an honor in a sense for MacLeod to actually have that happen to him. And I think, you know, sometimes there needs to have those-- you need to have those moments so that, that vulnerability of what would have happened if he hadn't been there.
Clip from "The Colonel":
The colonel was not very happy with MacLeod, because he was one of those guys who, back in World War I, was hell-bent on his own glorification.
Clip from "The Colonel":
He was very much like a lot of the British colonels and generals at the time. It mattered nothing, the cost of human life. But it mattered more about winning or losing.
Clip from "The Colonel":
And MacLeod wasn't that. He'd seen so much death that he knew that it was not right to send these men into battle, knowing that the peace agreement had already been signed.
Clip from "The Colonel":
And had him incarcerated. At that point, Killian swore revenge, and said, you know, "When I get out, I'm going to get MacLeod." Which, you know, if you've lived in incarceration for that amount of time, I'm sure you'd be kind of wanting to get your revenge to the person that did this to you. IF you were able to stay as young as Killian did in that amount of time that you last in jail, because usually by the time you've been forty years in jail, you're-- or sixty years, I'm not sure how long it was actually. It was a very long time. But you'd be an old man by that point, or dead. But he didn't, and nobody, I don't think, questioned the fact that he was still the same guy as he was that many years before.
Clip from "The Colonel":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): You go into an episode of Highlander, or any show that you write, and you don't, in the beginning when you start, think, "I'm going to make this one complex and difficult." You go in, and you try to make it work as best you can. And the story takes on life, and leads you in lots of different directions.
Clip from "The Colonel":
What sometimes may seem like a difficult episode, in terms of the layering of characters and the intermingling stories, sometimes they come easier than the simplest clear cut lines. It's like, until it's revealed to you-- and I don't know how the creative process works. I have no idea. I still think it's part of its magic. But until it's revealed to you how a story should actually go, it's all hard. It's all difficult. You don't see anything. You don't know what you're doing. You're stumbling blind until you actually see it. So this wasn't that difficult. I don't remember it as being a particularly difficult episode to do. What was difficult was fitting everything in, in a single episode. Maybe we tried a little too much. David Abramowitz: We wanted to create a sexy young woman so that we'd have a young woman to play off Amanda.
Clip from "The Colonel":
"The Colonel" was actually filmed two ways, and it must have been during a period when we were worried about how dark the show was getting, because in the original script, the character of Melissa actually gets killed by the colonel.
Clip from "The Colonel":
And it was filmed that way, but it was also filmed in a version in which she gets almost killed. And so the scene where she comes gasping into the dojo and dies or almost dies in Amanda's arms was filmed twice. And the tag was also filmed two ways with Amanda either saying "She got killed because of me," or "She almost got killed because of me." And in the final edit, it was decided to let her live.
Clip from "The Colonel":
The whole structure of the show really is written as though she died, especially Amanda's extreme reaction to it. The fact that she leaves town because of her heavy weight of guilt. And yet we had just had a run, I think, of dark episodes that were depressing people, and we just didn't want it to be such a downer. So that we gave her a last-minute reprieve, which doesn't feel organic to the episode, because her death would have been more organic, but it keeps it from being too depressing for the family hour. David Abramowitz: What I liked about this episode was I liked the flashback. I loved the flashback. I thought the World War I flashback was incredibly well done, and it's one of my favorites. When you go through the trench, and you see all the people there, and MacLeod comes out of the trench and is running towards the barb-wire fence. I mean, you're there.
Clip from "The Colonel":
You have to understand that in doing Highlander, we had only two-thirds -- and that was a lot -- we had two-thirds of the money that network shows had to deliver the same kinds of material, sometimes half the money. And they don't have to do flashbacks to World War I, and somehow we managed. And a lot of that is thanks to Ken Gord, who was our line producer at the time, or he would say 'creative producer', sorry, Ken.
Clip from "The Colonel":
F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): The environment dictates the moves an awful lot of times. It seemed to be much more restrictive when you were looking through the lens of the camera than it actually was, because that area around the sort of underground vault that Killian had locked MacLeod in was a long corridor with partial walls coming out like this, so you sort of got an arrangement that looked like a horse stable with the doors taken off, so you had all of these little alcoves. So when you were looking at choreographing in the fight, you not only had this long barrel shot down the corridor, you also had the ability to go in and out and in and out between the wide areas in between the little semi-dividing walls, which is what we did. So I was looking at the way the scene was going to be lit, mostly like shadows and silhouette figures fighting, and as a result, because we could swing overhead and sideways with the full arm, was how to create this visual aspect of things coming in and out and back and forth. So it was actually not quite as restrictive as it looks. The time when it got really claustrophobic was when we took it out of that hall and we took it into this other area that had these massive concrete girders over top of it. The character of Killian now has very little room to swing the sword, so again the environment dictates the moves, and it became sort of the vertical version of the area that we had just shot in. Instead of having space this way [moves hands back and forth to the sides], every couple of feet, now you have space this way [moves hands up and down], every couple of feet, so it became more of a tracking shot for the camera than just shooting down this corridor. For me, the important thing in this fight scene was the reason for the fight. The big driving force behind this is revenge, revenge, revenge, so it's-- regardless of the physical parameters and the moves, this is very, very much a fight driven solely by character.
Clip from "The Colonel":
Gillian Horvath: I've always had the theory that when you think you have too much material to fit into a script, that's when you have enough material to fit into a script. That if you have just enough story, in the final analysis, it's not quite enough story and you'll have some scenes that drag or that are unnecessary just to fill out the time, and when you have what seems like enough material for two hours and you fit it into one hour, you have something that paces well and that really leaves people wanting more. There are some episodes in which the domestic version of the show, which is only forty-four minutes long, is the better version of the show because that's how much story material we had.
Clip from "The Colonel":
There are other episodes where there was so much material that even the longer foreign version has scenes left out of it, and "The Colonel" actually is one of the latter. There are scenes that didn't make it into "The Colonel" because we had so much material, but it means that the episode itself, in this longer version, really works well. There's no fat on it, there's nothing that doesn't need to be there. |
|
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): Revenge over time is something that we experience as mortals. Obviously on a grander scale if you're immortal.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
MacLeod is facing this issue. He saves the guy's life, but the guy's wife is accidentally killed.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
He then realizes who the killer is and won't testify against him because he wants personal revenge as opposed to justice for the guy's wife.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
But he can't tell our store owner this, because he can't tell him that he's immortal.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
Now the shopkeeper puts tremendous pressure on MacLeod to do this, and Richie puts pressure on him.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
The FBI agent appears to be putting pressure on him.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
And then when we find out the surprise that the FBI agent is shtupping the bad guy, Kinman--
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
--and that the shopkeeper had borrowed money from a Shylock and was in terrible trouble, that MacLeod finds a way to take care of his personal revenge and at the same time find justice for the dead wife.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
And manages to just kind of let the guy know that this has happened.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
It was an interesting and somewhat complex moral process.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
Bill Panzer: Well, Neill, who was supposed to direct the episode, directed most of the episode, and then had a car accident, without shooting -- I forget -- the last couple, three scenes, whatever, he couldn't do them.
Our dear director got hit by a truck -- or a car, I believe, no, he got into a car accident -- and cracked his sternum, I think it was. He turned green on set and was like [wheezy voice]: "I can't continue." So somebody said, "Adrian, would you mind just stepping in?" I said, "Sure."
Usually in this situation, what you would do is you would have the guy who was prepping the next show -- which is going on simultaneously -- you'd have him step in and do the last day or whatever it was. In this case, we decided to have Adrian do it.
I am never a 'reluctant hero', I am always there, ready and willing -- and sometimes able -- to participate in anything that had to do with Highlander. It was actually kind of interesting to, you know, I was on the spot. I knew the choreography of the fight.
Clip from "Reluctant Heroes":
The scenes were scenes that he was totally involved with. It was an action scene.
Having experience in, what, four years prior, three years prior, of doing these fights and seeing directors and watching directors and seeing their whole way of doing, it was really useful for me to be able to do something on the spur of the moment, if you like. We were shooting that day in this meat locker and, you know, to look at what you want to set it up as, it was difficult to do, and it was really a matter of getting the job done and making sure we came in on time rather than creating artsy shots, although I tried as hard as I could to create that. But, you know, given a little bit more time and thought, I probably could've come up with a few more interesting angles.
And directors sometimes have a funny thing about showing up and doing, you know, mopping up somebody else's work, even though this was for, you know, a perfectly legitimate reason. So sometimes they, you know, they can be a little slow, they can have a point of view that is inconsistent with the rest of the show because they will not have seen it. And the guy has a certain style, and you want that to be finished. And Adrian seemed very amenable to all of those issues. Plus, he was actually going to be on the set anyway, so why not use him?
It was fun because, you know, I kind of-- that was my first chance to really sort of set something together, although I hadn't really planned it because I had no preparation time, really. I just went in and sort of knew what the fight was and thought, "What would be the best shots to use," while we were shooting. Because I think as I got to do it more, I got to understand the process more and I got to create more. And I think that happened throughout my directing career, was that I actually got better as I went along. |
|
David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): "The Wrath of Kali" was a strange show in that it was one of the ones that wasn't inspired by us in a sense. It was Production Designer Steve Geaghan, who had always been pestering us as writers to do a show set in an exotic locale, even more exotic. We said, "Well, how exotic do you want?" He said, "India." We thought, "It can't be done. Elephants, tigers, you know, exotic costumes. How can we possibly do India?" Well, Steve kept it up. He never let it go. Well, finally, one year, we decided we'll do India. We'll give it to him, and if he can put it on the screen for the cameras, then we can write it.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
"The Wrath of Kali" origins were kind of interesting because what we started to do was the writers kept writing all these neat stories about the Highlander being here or there, and we didn't really have a timeline fixed until maybe it was year two or so, maybe getting into year three. It was like, "Oh my God. We're getting-- he was in such and such a place in 1632 and such and such a place in 1650, but how did he get from here to there?" And it was at that point where we started mapping out where Duncan MacLeod was in certain-- in each era. And I'm looking around through this era one day, and I'm thinking, well, he's in China at this period, and Japan here, and Mongolia here, and I said, you know -- and I was talking with David Tynan -- I said, maybe, you know, we can do India here, you know, because I'd been looking at the Orpheum.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
The Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver is a marvelous varied environment. Its architecture is indescribable because it is no one era or no one style. What it does have is this kind of strange, mogul, Indian, 18th century look to certain areas of it, which is really kind of unique. I've never seen anything else like it either, you know, in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. It's an unexpected kind of twist here to find such a place in Vancouver, which is why it became one of our central locations in "The Wrath of Kali".
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
That involved a lot of, actually a lot of research. We had to understand a little bit about -- as much as we could for the sake of the story -- about the religion involved. We had to understand about the goddess Kali, about the various forms. Kali can take the destroyer, the mother, the, you know, as it turned out, the more we read, the more I read, the more complicated it seemed. We realized we couldn't go into it deeply, of course, because we had just over forty minutes to tell a story. But we had research about the Thuggees, the 'Tuggies', as they're called in the show, the cult of Kali worshipers who were murdering mostly British soldiers in India at the time.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
Fortunately, we also had a number of actresses, Canadian actresses who were of Indo-, Indian origin, and they confirmed that we were sort of on the right track as far as the historical research went. As far as staying in the past, once we'd created India, once we had a lot of extras with a lot of costumes, we had tigers, we had built temples, and a goddess, Kali, or a Kali god, which had cost inordinate amounts of money, we really wanted to use those forces in the film and really keep our audience in that flashback for as long as we could sustain the story in India.
The show was much more expansive than what I had imagined he would write, where the flashbacks, by year -- I guess it was three and four -- became a very major portion of our shows, and a lot of time and money was spent on making sure that they were really interesting. And this one was one of the most interesting ones that we did.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
Stephen Geaghan: What I've found over my career is that whether a director chooses to shoot a set or not, may have nothing to do with his ability or inability to shoot the set. It comes-- It's whim. And I say that guardedly. If the director really likes the set, then he'll open up and he'll want to see it, and he will design his shot to suit that. If he's really feeling pissy or doesn't like it, he'll move right in on that face so that literally, what you've done as a designer becomes fuzzy out-of-focus spaces behind an actor's head. And that's when you take a deep breath, it's like, oh, well, maybe next time, because there's nothing you can do. Unfortunately, we do need actors on these sets, and these sets are about actors and they're about story and revealing a story. And if the director chooses not to show the environment, in my opinion, he is taking away from one aspect of his ability to tell the story, because in that environment is the story.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
David Tynan: We were really lucky in having cast in the role of the British attache or envoy's wife, Molly Parker, who I was vaguely aware of at the time. I did not have a part in her casting, but I was delighted when she was cast. Molly has a face like a character out of Sense and Sensibility.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
She also has a simmering sexuality under the surface. That's been very evident in many of the things she's done since then. And the part was written very definitely to create her as a character who had a boring husband who had little or no sexual appeal.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
She was a young, frustrated, young lady living in India without any sensual or sexual outlet. So it seemed, until MacLeod came along.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
So in the picnic scene, which placed Molly Parker, Adrian and Molly's husband, the stiff British guy, out in the Indian Outback, it was definitely intended that there would be a simmering sexuality that Molly would give off and that MacLeod would respond to in some way. I think none of us were quite prepared for the amount of sort of sexual energy that came out of the scene.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
There is a little part there where MacLeod slides his hand up her leg. And some of that's off camera, but you can see from Molly's expression that she's singularly close to reaching some state of Nirvana under MacLeod's caresses. While her husband is a few feet away.
Clip from "The Wrath of Kali":
That was not scripted, but it was brought out brilliantly in the direction and by the actors. |
|
Clip from "Chivalry":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): This was during the period when pretty much everyone and their brother was showing their backside on network television. So I think the fans had basically just been waiting for it and couldn't believe their good luck when it finally came along.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Ann was a very interesting lady. She was very passionate about doing Highlander. And she was the one and only female Immortal that saw MacLeod naked. You know, coming out of the bath was the first time I think anybody actually saw MacLeod's butt. And she probably saw a lot more than that.
Clip from "Chivalry":
She has said that she thinks she got the best view. To give Adrian credit, he was really kind of the instigator of this. And this episode is the one that was filming while we had the Highlander convention in Denver. And so the writing department had already flown to Denver, and we were in a hotel room there working on a script actually. And we got the phone call from the set. And it was Adrian calling David to say, well, we're about to shoot the bathtub scene and I'm getting my butt powdered and I'm ready to go. Which actually explains why he wound up with a cold for that convention. And in fact, if you listen carefully to some of the scenes in the episode, you can tell he caught a cold sitting in that bathtub.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Gillian Horvath: Ann Turkel was actually a great guest star. She loved Highlander. She loved having the chance to come do the show. She brought her own outfits. She had better outfits than we could possibly have afforded for Kristen, who's supposed to be a fashion designer. The costumes in that episode were better than we deserved. Not only did we have Ann Turkel bringing her fashion along for the modern day, but the flashback costumes were the Oscar-winning costumes from Restoration that we rented for the week. And so everybody just looks fabulous and it makes a difference.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Gillian Horvath: Methos's return. This episode was the birth of a lot of things that would pay off in Methos later. That he starts showing the signs of having a hidden agenda that he's not being completely straightforward with MacLeod about.
Clip from "Chivalry":
That came as a combination of what was in the script plus the way Peter chose to play it, which was more ambiguous and mysterious than we'd seen it. And at first we were shocked. What's he doing? He's really putting a level of almost, you know, this mysterious maybe nastiness under this. We thought, well, it works.
Clip from "Chivalry":
And it creates this question of what has he got against Kristen? They haven't met because she doesn't recognize him, but it's clear, I think, from the way he delivers it, that he has reason, beyond just what MacLeod knows, to know this woman is trouble.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Methos is totally unfazed by the whole thing. And he's quite clear and determined about: she's bad, she's dangerous, you whack her. It's not complicated.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Whereas MacLeod, there're all these complex arguments that he's, "Oh, but, you know, she's a woman, so I should treat her differently. She's-- I have a history with her, so I should treat her differently." It's all these things, and Methos is very pragmatic about the whole thing.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Methos has no problem. I mean, Methos has no scruples, for goodness sake. I mean, look at him, you know. He never had scruples in the first place. Lie to me about being a horseman of the apocalypse, for Christ's sake! You know, what can I tell you? I mean, he whacked her. He was like, oh, yeah, sure, fwwt, off it came. But, you know, MacLeod's got a whole code of honor. It starts from "The Samurai" and way back to his father.
Clip from "Chivalry":
That made sense to me, that a guy who's been around five thousand years, he's seen it all, done it all. He's not impressed by theories, by ways of looking at the world, by modes of thought, that don't stand up to the test of time and don't stand up to the fiery furnace of life experience.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Adrian Paul: I think MacLeod hated being the executioner of somebody who was a teacher of his, but somebody that also, it would reflect on him, because if these people were good at some point in their lives and eventually got seduced to the dark side, if you like, then what does it reflect on him?
Clips from "Chivalry":
Peter Wingfield: She's a girl, she's a boy, she's a woman, she's a man, none of that stuff matters.
Clip from "Chivalry":
What matters is what's going on. She is dangerous, she's going to kill you, get in there and strike, or she'll keep coming back. One of the things I liked about playing the character was that he had a simplicity in difficult situations. And he also had all the best lines, I mean I loved the end of that one, chops the head off and just goes, "Someone had to do it." [throws his arms out] Aaah!
To that point, Methos had been played as this, unassuming graduate student who you wouldn't expect to enter into -- much less win -- a sword fight. So it really was something of a turning point for the character.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Adrian Paul: Poor Richie, he was always getting involved in these women that he shouldn't be getting involved with, which, you know, is unfortunate, but I'm sure he enjoyed every moment of it.
Clip from "Chivalry":
The thing that I most remember about the episode was that the first scene that we did, the first morning of the shoot, was the love scene between Ann Turkel and I. And she was very bold and very brave and just got in there and did it and obviously had been familiar with that kind of filmmaking before and wasn't terribly self-conscious.
Clip from "Chivalry":
It was a little even overwhelming for me, but an awful lot of fun, and they asked her to do things -- I think there was this sequence where she's kissing me and just goes down and down and down and then eventually drifts off camera. And I think a lot of actresses maybe wouldn't have been up for that or would have seen it as inappropriate or whatnot. I mean, I don't think I was wearing anything at the time when we did that and she said, "Hey, it's no problem for me," and I didn't care, so... She was very bold and brave, so from the get-go, by the time we got to the second scene that we were doing, we were fairly well-acquainted.
Clip from "Chivalry":
It made it very easy to establish a rapport between her and I, having had that experience at eight-thirty in the morning the first day we met. And then throughout the episode, she was a very social kind of an individual and we hung out a lot. She wanted to sort of, you know, "Oh, can I come to dinner with you guys or can I do this?" And so we-- I think all of us spent quite a bit of time off camera together as well. I mean, Adrian and I were always sort of palling around here and there and she sort of jumped on the bandwagon. It was a lot of fun and she's got quite a history in Hollywood and movies and shared a bit of that, had a lot of experiences when she was younger, her marriage to Richard Harris. And she was a fun and an exciting woman to be around and very bold and very brave.
Clip from "Chivalry":
The disparity in the age between us, I think, was written into it to a degree, and what she brought to the table made it very exciting. It was fun to shoot all the time. She was very into sort of being very physical. She took the sort of, us, our relationship and toying with Adrian a little bit, she really went with that.
Clip from "Chivalry":
When we were in scenes, the three of us, she'd make a point of sort of touching me and getting close to me. And I could see his eyes sort of looking, and even though it was all fake, there was a sense of like, what's going on here? And she was very, very aggressive, and I thought that that was very effective and Richie was just a horny bastard.
Clip from "Chivalry":
Unfortunately, it was another case of the character of Richie being incredibly naive about the circumstances that he's in. So I sort of, you know, I was getting a little over that kind of a storyline. But given that we had to do it again, under these circumstances, it was a lot more fun. |
|
Clip from "Timeless":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): We got some letters actually about MacLeod in drag. We pretend it's historically accurate in the sense that men played the female roles in Shakespeare. But really, it wouldn't be men like MacLeod, it would be more boyish men. But the flashback's so much fun that it's worth the poetic license, I think.
Clips from "Timeless":
Walter, Jardine, the original episode was not as lighthearted as this. Karen Harris, who wrote "Timeless", had written an outline that's very similar to what you see in the episode. It had the same basic plot points, but one major change we made to it when we sent her off to write her script, we said, "Yes, do your outline just as you've written it. We love it. The only thing is at the end, Walter shouldn't die." Karen, who's a very experienced writer who we've worked with for years, just laughed at us, and she said, "Oh, that's just a minor change. Walter doesn't die. Okay." Because it really changes the entire tone of the episode. Even though it's only a one-sentence change to an outline, it means that the whole way that Walter's portrayed is as a guy who you like, who doesn't need to die, and they can walk off arm and arm at the end. And that makes the whole episode so much more fun to watch than if he was dark and evil and needed to be dispensed with.
Clip from "Timeless":
Gillian Horvath: This is one of those episodes where the question of which is the A story and which is the B story becomes a very, very open question -- that Claudia and Walter are the main guest stars of the week, but certainly this episode is remembered just as much for the Alexa love story.
Clip from "Timeless":
The "Timeless" episode, the casting of Alexa, I think, was crucial. On the page, you know, it says, "Methos meets this girl that he is attracted to in a very, very powerful way." It would have been easy to cast some kind of, you know, LA bombshell for that, but that-- I think that wouldn't have worked. That wasn't what it was about. It was something much deeper, much more, much more subtle than that.
Clip from "Timeless":
The casting of Ocean Hellman as Alexa, it kind of-- it said a lot about Methos as well as being an interesting dynamic between the physical difference between myself and Ocean, the, you know, that she had this kind of frailty.
Clip from "Timeless":
There are a couple of occasions in my life where I've met somebody, and right from the very first moment, you just know it's different. I mean, it's the subject of so many stories and movies and, you know, right throughout history, throughout literature. You know, it's this idea that there is a perfect match, there is a soulmate, there is somebody for everybody.
Clip from "Timeless":
It's a fairly common experience for us that there are some people we meet that are just, for no particular reason, they're just different. And I've experienced that a couple of times. I tried to tap into that. I don't know what it was that Methos saw in her, what it was that appealed to him about her -- her vulnerability, her humor. That, in a sense, wasn't important. What I was interested in was this territory where you meet someone and you just know that they are-- they're special. That in a hundred lifetimes, you would only meet one person like that.
Clip from "Timeless":
Duane Clark directed that episode. He did some very interesting things. He would let us play a scene, and then he would take Ocean off to one side and he'd whisper in her ear, and then he'd take me aside and he'd whisper some stuff in my ear, so that we would then play the scene again and we would be intently focused on each other, trying to see what had changed, trying to guess what he'd said to the other. And it created a great connection between us when we were playing.
Clip from "Timeless":
It's not just about, okay, it's my line, okay, it's your line, okay, it's my line. The two of you are actually living together in that moment because you don't know-- You know that something is going to be different but you don't know what it is. And it's kind of a trick to parallel reality where you don't know what's coming next.
Clip from "Timeless":
It was fun and there was a kind of game-playing to it. I thought he saw that there was a connection between the two of us, that we felt comfortable and safe with each other, and he kind of took that and played with it. And it was a neat trick and it worked really well.
Clip from "Timeless":
There was a great power to that story which just was an undercurrent. I'm amazed, looking back at the episode, at how little screen time there is for those two characters. So it's a handful of scenes, but there is that sense of whole worlds moving, of huge, huge things going on, and yeah, it kind of dominated the episode.
Clip from "Timeless":
|
BACK to Transcripts Page
| Home |
| Personal |
Tess |
TV shows |
Lord of the Rings |
Pern |
| Actors |
Buffy |
Highlander |
Transcripts |
Fanfiction Links |
| Check out my Sitemap for more 'updates' info. | Last updated: July 26, 2026 |