Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
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Highlander |
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(from 2004 U.S./Canada DVD set)
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David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): The story "Prophecy" was really a collaborative effort, you know, one of those ideas where... It's hard to explain, but when you get three writers in a room or two or three writers or four writers talking, somehow an idea sparked, and before you know it, you have the beginnings of a story laid out. And at that point, I think people take more specific roles of working out acts and scenes and so on. So for this particular episode, I can't recall how the idea came up. But suddenly, there we were talking about MacLeod, really having a deeper purpose in his life than just being an Immortal.
Clip from "Prophecy":
For years, many seasons and many episodes, we dealt with his immortality. And we thought, well, what if there's a deeper purpose to all of this? And I think "Prophecy" was our chance to start laying that out by going back to MacLeod's childhood and suggesting that he was maybe something a little more than just a really great Immortal.
Clip from "Prophecy":
Cassandra, played by Tracy Skoggins, who did a great job as the Witch of Donan Woods, where we got to play a young MacLeod, a thirteen-year-old MacLeod. And I can't tell you what difficulties they went in trying to cast that part. But I think they did a great job because the young actor we got really did sell himself as young MacLeod. You can actually believe he was the young Duncan MacLeod as a thirteen-year-old, finding himself in a position of meeting the Witch of Donan Woods, played by Tracy Skoggins, Cassandra. And he's seeing her naked, which was a pretty interesting part of the show. I think for young MacLeod, it was a first. And for the show, it was perhaps not a first, but almost a first.
Clip from "Prophecy":
Adrian Paul (Actor): I would have preferred to have kept the show more grounded than this particular episode. We started going into fantasy. Yes, Highlander is fantasy, but it was grounded in reality because of relationships and factual events that we always went to.
Clip from "Prophecy":
In the "Prophecy", the events were a little bit more fantastical. And I like the idea of him being the One, which I told everybody that years ago, there can be the only one, and it was, you know, Duncan MacLeod, what can I tell you? But it kind of became, you know, a little more of a fantasy when we did that episode. And I think we could have possibly lived without it. But, you know, it's great to see him as a child.
Clip from "Prophecy":
Rex Raglan (Production Designer): In the "Prophecy", when you ask about stumbling, there was, I think our very first day on the "Prophecy" was the day that we were shooting the magic witch's hut in the woods. And it was to appear, disappear magically.
Clip from "Prophecy":
And I was on the way to set with the construction coordinator. And we missed the turn on the highway. And took the next turn. We couldn't do a U-turn, so we took the next turn, got to a parking lot as close as we could, and ran full-tilt stumbling through the woods for about fifteen minutes to get to the set. At call time, we got there just as Dennis, our director, was just about to flip out. Because he didn't know how the hut worked, how the magic was going to work at all. But it worked out okay. We got there just in the nick of time, and it worked beautifully. It worked great. But it was kind of a hairy beginning for the first day of the first episode on a new series like that. I know the, uh -- Steve Geaghan pretty well. I've worked with him before. I understand his style. And so I kind of put myself in his shoes to begin with, and just took it from there. And of course he-- there were still a couple of standing sets of his so that it wasn't such a jarring shift from one season to another.
Clip from "Prophecy":
I just really thought, well, to make this seamless for the audience and for the producers, I thought, well, I'll just be a bit like Steve Geaghan to start off with. And then we'll just see how things roll from there. So actually it was fine. It really felt quite seamless and an easy thing for me to step into. My approach is so simple. I just, I read the script and I just get pictures when I read the script. And I think, okay, well, and I just try and translate those pictures into drawings and then into the sets. I'm an architect by training. So there's an element of that in there too. I understand the way the materials go together, I understand history of architecture. And I combine that with the images that I get. And a lot of the images sometimes are based on dream images. I think film and television is in a way a lot, can use the same kind of imagery as appears in dreams. Dennis Berry (Director): "Prophecy" in season five, I did try very much to find a fairy-tale kind of style. In other terms, I wanted to shoot the process a little bit like I would memorize the films I saw as a kid. They were fairy tales. I wanted the forest to look like a studio forest, a false forest, an invented forest, not a real forest. It was hard to mix those scenes with the more naturalistic scenes in the present. I do hope we pulled it off.
Clip from "Prophecy":
I am much more of a cinematic story teller. I try to tell the story through camera instead of letting the story be told through dialogue. At the same time, I must say, I'm very, very-- I'm probably overly camera-oriented and it was nice to have people like David Abramowitz help me in walking through certain aspects of dialogue so that we could also tell the story through pieces of dialogue that are very beautiful.
Clip from "Prophecy":
Often the moral dilemmas and the ethical dilemmas of MacLeod are told through dialogue that Abramowitz wrote that I'm very fond of. I mean, obviously there was a lot of other writers involved and David was more like the creative supervisor of all these Highlander episodes. At the same time, I do feel that it's Abramowitz's sense and search in his own life of an ethical stand that brought a lot of the ethical stands that you can find in Highlander that I find very interesting. I believe he was very close to Bill Panzer whom he had a very good creative relationship with, and I believe Bill Panzer is a man of honor who also, with the character of MacLeod, was looking for a way to bring to an audience moral standards, ethical standards, a sense of civilization, a sense of culture, a memory of the world that is more than what is brought normally to American television, and in that sense both these men of culture are trying in a way to bring a richness to the American audience of TV that is different than what you usually get, and those men in that sense made a great contribution creatively in each episode. Besides the fact that Bill Panzer is the man who developed and discovered Highlander.
Clip from "Prophecy":
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Clip from "The End of Innocence":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): There's a lot of different story elements going on in "End of Innocence", but the aspect of it that's the most personal for me and that I love about this episode is the... the maturity -- the right of passage, really -- of realizing that your mentor, your father figure, someone who you idolized and trusted to keep you safe, really, someone who you believed could keep the world organized for you, disappoints you completely. It's what happens in the flashback when Graham Ash just doesn't live up to what Duncan thinks of him, and it's the story in the present that interests me the most, is Richie realizing-- It's not a question of realizing that Duncan is after him or evil just because he tried to kill him in the previous season, it's more the question of realizing that there is no one controlling the world, the world is just too big, and it is-- I think it's a normal part of growing up, for mortals as well, when you look at your parents and you realize that they are at the mercy of the world. It's not like when you were a little kid and your parents could just fix whatever was wrong. And I think that that's a great growing-up moment for Richie when he realizes that he can be friends with MacLeod, but he can't turn to him and expect him to have all the answers anymore. He's realized that he's just a guy struggling with the world like anyone else.
Clip from "The End of Innocence":
Stan Kirsch ("Richie Ryan"): "The End of Innocence", well, I think the title really says it all. It was... I was able to bring the character to a different level at the time by virtue of what I was given on the page, but that was right at a time when I had spent a lot of time off the set, worked on myself quite a bit -- physically, mentally. I had gone through a large period of growth and it was one of those times in which the art and what we did on the screen really manifested what was going on in real life. I think Adrian and I hadn't, at the time, weren't doing so much stuff together. We hadn't played a scene together because I hadn't done any of the Paris shows the year before. We hadn't played a scene together since, you know, maybe nine months. And when we got to that scene in the alley there, there was a lot of what was really happening between us going on in the scene, and it was... it was nice to be able to use that.
Clip from "The End of Innocence":
F. Braun McAsh (Sword Master): Well, in "End of Innocence", we have a different Richie than we've seen in previous episodes. At this point, he hasn't really been an Immortal long. He's still trying to reconcile himself with this. He's also trying to establish a certain amount of independence from MacLeod. And when he goes after Carter Wellan, who is the companion of Haresh Clay, we see things that Richie hasn't done previously. When he gets in close, he tries to mobilize the weapon. He's using his knees. He's using his elbows. There's a lot of slamming going on in the fight. It's not clean. It's not pretty. And again the whole idea of a fight scene in a script is "What's its story?" You know, what does the fight tell us about the character that the script maybe suggests but the lines don't say? The fight scene is always a way of the character exploring new venues and new inroads to the character and showing things that we haven't seen before. So it's not a particularly pleasant aspect about the character of Richie. He's basically attacking somebody to sort of establish his own territory, establish his own limits to his own ability, you know, he's testing himself as well as the other Immortal. So the death of Carter Wellan is totally unjustifiable, which then has consequences that impinge on MacLeod. MacLeod must now protect Richie from Haresh.
Clip from "The End of Innocence":
Stan Kirsch: I really enjoyed doing that show. I also really enjoyed working with Gérard Hameline, even though he had come from a lot of commercials at the time and I think wasn't used to the pace of a television series and we got hung up sometimes on some of the small details of things. I remember when I was breaking into the museum to get the sword there and there was that little bit where I'm picking the lock. And we probably did like eight, nine, ten takes on the picking of the lock. It looks really good in the movie, but I think that that was his detail as a commercial director. But I learned a lot of little things from him about those details. He said on that scene -- because I was playing it and doing this [mimes looking at lock as he picks it] -- and he said "hear it", you know, "don't see it, hear it", and I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." Again, another way of looking at something. And then he came to me a few days after... after we were into the shoot, and I guess he'd spent some time with the dailies, and he had a lot of interesting things to say to me personally about-- which corroborated a lot of what you, Don Paonessa, have been telling me for years about my work, and I learned a lot and I appreciated the fact that a director who came in so late in the show really took an interest, and what he was working with me in order-- he was working with me on composure and staying in the scenes and not showing so much, which of course is sort of the staple of film acting. But I grew so much on the show that, you know, I had to do a lot of it on camera. I unfortunately made a lot of mistakes that a lot of people saw.
Richie was kind of my avatar for a while there. Stan and I had a great relationship and I was the kid in the writer's office. It was my first big writing job, and so Richie as a character and I as a person were going through a lot of growth and change in that period of becoming our adult selves. And I mentioned in "Methuselah's Gift" how my father's bout with cancer affected that story, and the same thing happened in "End of Innocence". It's a story about realizing that your mentor can't handle everything in the world and realizing "if they can't do it, how am I supposed to do it?" And I really liked being able to put those stories that were tough for me in my real life and give Richie a chance to deal with them and it seemed to help settle them in my real life. This is because Richie was in a way an extension of my growing up -- we grew up together. That's why I went up fighting for him when the end of season five came and he was on the chopping block. I really tried to keep him around because I felt like that was the end for me too. F. Braun McAsh: When I'm choreographing fights, as much as is possible -- and it isn't always, unfortunately -- but ninety-nine percent of the time, the production meeting is the time to really start to figuring out how the director wishes the fight to be shot. Now Gérard Hameline uses storyboarding an awful lot, more than most episodic television directors that I've seen, and it gives you a very very clear idea of how he envisages the fight through the lens of the camera. In this particular instance, he wanted one section of the fight to be a long tracking shot. So we had this immense dolly shot set up, and of course now this basically means that that entire portion of the fight has got to be shot as essentially a master. You really can't cut it otherwise. What's the point of doing a long tracking shot? So it puts certain demands on the actors. They have to be able to sustain a long piece of action at a certain speed with, you know, both drama and safety. Réal Andrews, who was playing Haresh Clay, did an extremely good job of it. Also, we were using a completely different fighting style than previous episodes, again because of the cultural background of the character -- he's Moorish, he is using a very curved scimitar. So we were able to, you know, do a lot more interesting things. Again, the character of MacLeod in this particular fight is simply trying to protect Richie and, of course, protect himself in the fight. It's not a fight about hate. It's a fight about the character of Haresh needs some kind of retribution for the death of Carter Wellan, and if he can't get it from Richie, he'll get it from MacLeod. But he doesn't hate MacLeod for it. It's just necessary. "I don't have him. I will now take it out on you; after all, you are his mentor." And it's-- in some cases in the fight, there is a fair bit of honor going on. It's not a hot fight. It is a fast and furious fight, but it's not a hot fight like Richie and Carter, so it was... I would hesitate to say 'more beautiful', but the differences in fighting styles and the differences in the level of the expertise of the characters made it a more complex fight, and the way that we shot it also, especially with that long tracking shot, made it a more open and presentational fight than the one with Richie and Carter. Stan Kirsch: I learned a lot, as well as enjoying making that show, and by the end, when I had the scene in the bar with Jim Byrnes and Adrian and myself and there's a little handshake at the end, it was kind of nice because at that time I knew I was going to be on for five or six shows at the time, and like I said, we'd spent a lot of time apart from one another at the time and he knew I wanted to grow. He knew I wanted to do more of my own thing, either on the show or off the show, and it was sort of a way of sort of, like, respecting the fact that I wasn't always going to be his sidekick and it was-- Again, even at the end of the show, there was something that reflected where we were at as individuals and friends and brothers, basically. We were, you know, both of us, we were all we had, really, during that time. And spend a lot of time with somebody, you develop a lot of trust, hopefully, and we did, but you get on each other's nerves plenty too and it's like a family and we-- It was a nice piece of growth in the course of our relationship.
Clip from "The End of Innocence":
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Peter Ellis (Director): We're talking about an episode in season five called "Manhunt" and I had two guest stars, Eric McCormack and Bruce Young. It really was a joy to work with them. It was something that-- when you have two actors of that caliber, you really can demand more because they want to rise to the occasion and they both did.
Clip from "Manhunt":
I think we were given a little extra time on this episode, because I know that I remember we did a lot of storyboarding for the flashbacks and we wanted to coordinate the post-production and have it be as effective as the production itself. And so we planned this episode quite meticulously. And then people like Eric and Bruce, they just bring an added element to a show that just lift it up a stage, I think. And of course, my brilliant direction. It was a fun episode to do, it really was. David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): Putting "Manhunt" together -- which is the story of Bruce Young playing Carl Robinson, a free slave who was an Immortal who had eventually worked his way up to becoming a baseball star in modern times -- was interesting because it dealt with, I guess, what's a continual theme in Highlander in some ways. We hadn't always explored this, but it was: what happened to an Immortal who had established a life, reached a certain point that he'd been striving for, and then had to leave it all behind because he was an Immortal. I think we wanted to use Bruce in this particular episode, and we saw him really just as an Immortal who had achieved a lot against terrible odds, odds of racism, having achieved a certain status in society and losing everything. I think that was the general framework. We blocked out pretty much the basic scenes in the show, and then I went to town and worked on it. As I was a Canadian and know more about hockey than baseball, I think David Abramowitz threw me a few baseball terms to put in. Baseball wasn't my native game, but it was for Carl, and I think the show as a whole was very successful. Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): We're in Season Five, we knew the show couldn't go forever, and this character of Matthew McCormick was my idea of who might make a great hero for the next Highlander series, which is to say the FBI's "serial killer guy", as he describes himself. He would have access to a lot of interesting stories, week to week, because he'd be a cop of sorts. He'd have things to investigate, he'd have murderers to catch. Some weeks it would be Immortal murderers, and some weeks he'd be solving regular mortal cases, and it would mean that he would have the opportunity to travel around the country to wherever there was a string of beheadings, and do something about it. I thought that was a good premise for a guy, and if he's a law man, you know from the top that he has this built-in sense of honor and ethics. And Eric McCormack, who played Matthew McCormick, of course now is a giant star, he's Will on Will and Grace, so I like to think that if he'd done the new Highlander series, he would have been a big star for us too. He's a very talented man. We'd written the part of Matthew McCormick specifically for Eric McCormack. He'd been working on the Lonesome Dove TV series, which I had had some meetings at that show, and actually almost went over to work on it, so I'd seen a lot of his work, and he had done a great job on that series of playing an antagonist who doesn't know he's the villain. He's a villain who thinks he's the good guy, and he played the part with great commitment to the idea that he's the hero. "I'm doing the right thing, and I don't understand why everyone's treating me like a bad guy." And we really were impressed with him, and so we specifically wrote this part for him, which he didn't realize, even though the guy has the same last name as him. I remember he came into Dave Tynan's office on the first day of filming and said, "Isn't this a funny coincidence? This guy and I have the same last name?" And here Tynan was, sort of snickering into his hand, going, "Yeah, Eric, 'cause we wrote the part for you. Welcome aboard." Peter Ellis: Yeah, I think we discussed, as I say, in the pre-production and the boarding of this and so on, I remember having a conversation with you, Don, about how we were going to make this look in terms of period. And, I mean, yes, we had costumes, we had certain props and so on. But I think we talked about a sepia effect that we, in fact, introduced finally, and it worked very well for both sequences. It had a really interesting sepia turn to it, which sold the period, I think, very strongly. Again, in episodic, and in something like that, you've got to sell an idea quickly to the audience. You've got to give them something that they can instantly see that it's a flashback or whatever. And I think it was you who came up with the idea of sepia, and I think it was a brilliant idea. As I say, I steal people's ideas, and, you know, lay claim to them all the time. And I certainly lay claim to that one. It was brilliant. Rex Raglan (Production Designer): Yeah, well, on "Manhunt", it was, I thought it was going to be difficult to find environments in and around Vancouver that could actually evoke the old South. And so what I really was looking for was not to find something that is exactly the old South, but find things here that didn't have anything wrong in them, first of all. So just by process of elimination, we narrowed down a few options for locations. We wanted a river, we wanted a field. We were scouting for fields, and we came across this-- I don't think we were even heading to this particular one, but we came across this field that had-- it was just full of grass. It was a couple of acres, it was about... The grass was like six feet high, and it was uncut, and I just thought, this is just fabulous. We've got to stop the car here, check this out, and look around, and nothing around that area would say that we're not in the old South, and we're not in the time period that we wanted to be. And so that, plus the actual grass itself, I just thought it would be so wonderful to have gangs of slaves working in these fields as though they're cutting this. And the possibility of a chase through this tall, tall grass, I just thought was a wonderful opportunity. So that was one set. It's a completely contemporary setting, and yet because there was nothing in that that said it wasn't the old South, we could believe it was there. When we put in a few wagons and the slave boss and the slaves, it just worked wonderfully well. In the river, again, it did almost the same thing on the river, found a place where there was a view that there was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing incongruent with the story we were trying to tell and what we actually saw there, and those things just kind of fell into place. I was just looking for things that weren't wrong to start with, and we lucked out in a way that we found some really quite evocative places. And you couldn't look too far, you couldn't look too far down the river or up the river, or you'd start seeing power poles and the airport and the city and the mountains and all that kind of stuff. But if you just were able to hold this view in this angle, then there's nobody could say that it wasn't the deep South. Peter Ellis: Well, again, that's all a part of the planning. I mean, as I say, I have a plan. And I think I also pretend to have an eye. And I think if you have an eye, then it's a big help in terms of being able to tell the story. And the elements were there. I had the props. I had the carts. I had, you know, the actual scene itself, which was, I think it was Bruce killing the plantation owner, shooting him and then running off and being shot himself. And you're given a piece of equipment, like a crane, and again, it's all a part of being able to tell a story. If you pick your moments, as we've been discussing, it's a tool that can really help. I had a wonderful design, a production design on that, Rex Raglin, who was, again, completely on board in terms of the visuals. And it's just a joy when you're in shorthand with somebody on a project. And you know that you can say one thing and he immediately picks up and makes it look like ten things. And we had those elements.
Details come out and the images are fleshed out as we're driving around in the van. That's actually one of the most productive times often. And we start talking, the director and I and often a producer and location manager in the van, about what we're looking for. And we sort of bounce ideas off of each other. And sometimes the director has a -- hopefully -- has an idea of where he wants to go with this. And sometimes I can get a sense of that and often offer some other solution or suggestion of a way to achieve that, but doing it somewhat differently. And it's a fun process on a good day that we can end up with something that's often-- takes us to a place that neither the director or myself would have really arrived at individually, but together it's-- with this kind of collaboration, we're able to find something that's actually better than either of us started out with.
I think that's what filmmaking should be. It should be something that you take, and you are able to produce something that's ten times bigger than the original. There is no one vision, I don't think. I mean, I think it helps for me to have a vision, but ultimately at the end of the day with anything, and in particular with episodic television, it's very much a group effort. |
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Clip from "Glory Days":
Donna Lettow (Script Coordinator): As time went on, we tried to give Jim more and more scenes or shows that showcased him as a person, as an actor, and not so much as the computer spitting out the information: "he was born in Portugal in 1692." And he handles it so amazingly well. Again, the cast of Highlander was just phenomenal.
Clip from "Glory Days":
We had trouble casting Betsy, Joe's girlfriend, because the script pointed out that she was a still-beautiful woman in her late forties. And I just thought, Marcia Strassman was, I don't know, inspired casting. You can imagine the two of them together when they were young.
Clip from "Glory Days":
And what's interesting about Joe, I think, in "Glory Days" -- Joe doesn't have a problem sharing his situation with people that he's meeting, people who can know him as he is now, but he had such a problem with the idea of going back that he can't overcome the image of the football player.
Clip from "Glory Days":
Well, here's a guy who was, you know, the glamour boy of the class, the star athlete, all of those things that were so incredibly important back then, and suddenly he loses his legs. He can't face it. And he just vanishes from the life of, you know, the queen of the hop, the-- his equivalent in school.
David A. phoned me and said, "Listen, we're thinking about using this as a plot point, and would you--" and got a little input from me, and it was, "Oh, that'd be great, I'd love to do it." 'Cause once again, it's an opportunity to do a bit more work and to have, you know, expose another side of the Joe Dawson character and see more of who he is and what has made him.
Clip from "Glory Days":
Once again, we're confronting the disability issue in a very, very real way. And so it was not hard to get to that situation because here were these two who had been this idyllic couple and their, you know, their high school, their glory days.
Clip from "Glory Days":
You go through your life and you do what you have to do, but there comes that time when you really confront that, man, I really am, you know, disfigured and different. And how does that-- how do other people see that?
Clip from "Glory Days":
There are a lot of people who think that the sixth season episode "Armageddon", where we actually do see Joe without his legs, is all an optical special effect, that Jim Byrnes just has a limp. And they're amazed to find out that, you know, he's had -- and Joe, in turn, has had -- such an obstacle to overcome, and to overcome so well.
Clip from "Glory Days":
It's hard not to feel, quite honestly, somewhat diminished and broken in a way that you're sort of ashamed of. It's not your fault or whatever, but there's a certain-- and you have to deal with it, and you overcome it. But I think it's as much about, really about that, about finding, in yourself, the strength, and the good things that help you go on, and not seeing the scars and what you've overcome, and not letting that overcome you. It was a nice way to approach it, through the angle of the love story.
Clip from "Glory Days":
He finally ends up telling her, and you know, it's a huge, huge thing, and he realizes that she still loves him, that this doesn't matter.
Clip from "Glory Days":
And then, of course, we find out that she's married, and what is keeping them apart has nothing to do with his legs, and, wow, wouldn't your life have been different, if you had just gone back and said, "Hey, here I am. I don't have legs, do you still love me?" But then again, maybe he wouldn't be running Joe's.
Clip from "Glory Days":
It's really about self-knowledge, and respect for yourself, and learning to retain and remain respectful of yourself. And in that way, you can't really hurt anyone, if you just, you know, if you really deal with him in a honest way.
Clip from "Glory Days":
I wanted to show some of that hurt, but also the fact that all of us deal with it on some level, whether it's a physical level, like mine, or some sort of emotional level. I think everyone at some point has to confront their hurt and look at the scar and say, what does that mean? And be able to be proud of it, as opposed to being ashamed of it. Donna Lettow: "Glory Days" is very similar to an episode called "Timeless", where Methos gets a girlfriend. In this case, Joe gets a girlfriend. You can't really make the show about that. Look, a secondary character gets a girlfriend. That has to be the B plot. So they have these covering plots. So the whole Johnny K plot and the flashback to the twenties, to me, are just the window dressing around trying to get Joe's shirt off.
Clip from "Glory Days":
Rex Raglan (Production Designer): "Glory Days", in a way, it's a similar process with all the period pieces. First of all, we need to find an environment where there are not too many offensive things. I mean, things that really say we're not in the period we want to be. So that's the beginning point. This is an urban setting in "Glory Days". So we went to the old part of town, to Gastown in Vancouver, which is a logical place to start for a show set in the twenties.
Clip from "Glory Days":
There's a lot of things in that alley now that weren't there in the twenties. And that's part of where we go to work and either obscure them, remove things that are removable. And that's just all kinds of modern signage, modern lighting. And sometimes we can remove them with things that actually contribute to the set that we're trying to do. For example, a big period billboard that's evocative of the times. And then it's really just smaller things. Automobiles are an obvious trigger for defining a period, since automobiles were rolling; from any photograph, you can tell pretty accurately what period of time the photograph was taken. So that's what we try and recreate, is the things that we do see in our limited piece of old Vancouver are totally consistent with the time frame that we're trying to portray there.
Clip from "Glory Days":
Bill Panzer: It was fun to write the song. The other time I had a chance to write a song for Highlander was in Highlander II when we were standing outside of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in the pouring rain, and Stewart Copeland, the composer, came up to me and he said, "Where's the chant?" And I said, "We don't-- what chant? You're the composer." He said, "We need a chant. We've got ninety-five voices in a choir showing up here in fifteen minutes. They're going to sing the chant. You've got to write the chant." I said, "What kind of a chant? Like 'Ooba Gawa?' He said, "Exactly." He handed me a yellow pad, a piece of paper. I wrote, like 'Oomba Gawa', 'Oba Gawa', whatever, handed it to him, they did it. He said, "By the way, now you have to join BMI to get all these vast residuals that are going to pour in." And Roger [Bellon] turned to me and said, "Somebody needs to write a song for 'Glory Days'. Wouldn't it be fun to have a song in here?" So he said, "So why don't you do it?" 'Cause he had heard my chant. [laughs] So I said, "Okay."
Clip from "Glory Days":
And out of it came "Everything a Boy Should Be". Kind of an ironic counterpoint to what a little bum this character had turned into. And it was thoroughly enjoyable. I got my last royalty check from BMI just a few weeks ago. And it was for forty-seven cents for the last quarter. And this is great, being in the music business.
Clip from "Glory Days":
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Clip from "Dramatic License":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): "Dramatic License" was one of our other attempts at doing comedy, which we did -- sometimes we did well. We did well when Roger Daltrey was in the episode. Other times we didn't do quite as well. But for this episode, we hired Sandra Bernhard.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
She's a wonderful comedian, and I remember how excited we were and also how terrified because of her reputation as being difficult to work with, as being someone who-- you didn't quite understand or know what she was going to do at any given moment. So I went up from Los Angeles to Vancouver to sort of babysit the set, and be with her. And when we were flying up, who's sitting next to me on the plane but Sandra Bernhard. She didn't know who I was, so we got to talking, and she turned out to be incredibly bright, articulate. She had a copy of the Kabbalah, which is basically a Jewish book of mysticism, that she was studying. And we talked about things metaphysical and spiritual all the way up.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
She was pretty good in the episode, and it worked out well for us. But I'll never get over the initial terror of "You hired Sandra Bernhardt?! How are we going to control her? How are we going to deliver the show? How are we--? How are we--?" And it turned out to be pretty good.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
Peter Ellis (Director): Sandra was terrific. She really embraced the whole concept. She and Adrian were... There was a good counterbalance between the two of them. But the counterbalance that was great in that particular show was between Elizabeth Gracen and her.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
They just, the first day of shooting that they had together, we shot a scene outside, I think. And it was a one, what we call a one-er. And it was a steadycam shot that we had to do maybe three or four times. And the two of them, just each time they did it, it got better and better and better.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
It was really interesting to direct someone who's not officially an actress, but very accomplished in that area. And, you know, she brought a certain element of craziness to the situation that really helped the dynamic of the story.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
She is an actress. I mean, she really does have an ability to portray larger-than-life characters, I think. That's the best way to describe her.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
Having someone like that on set and being able to direct someone like that is-- You really do have to keep it loose, because if you restrict people-- and it's true, I think, in any direction that restricting actors is, for me, is not a good idea. When I'm blocking a scene, I come in with an idea and a plan, but I will let the actors move freely within the framework of the scene and the framework of the area that we have, so that they feel comfortable. And then you can adjust that to whatever you want, because your actors are feeling comfortable. And therefore, if you have any sense of angles and so on, you can nudge them so that they actually end up being where you want them to be.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
She's extraordinary, Elizabeth. I really love working with her. She, again, was able to bring all of her qualities to that and to take a light moment and a beat later turn it into something that was very serious.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
It's so nice when you have a relationship with somebody like her. At a point, there's a sort of shorthand, which is a fabulous place to reach. I've managed to achieve it with a lot of actors, actually. And there's a great thing when you almost hardly need to say anything. And sometimes it's the best thing to say nothing. Even when you want to, it's very difficult to sit on your mouth and tell your hands to be quiet. Elizabeth is one of those. And Adrian was, as well. I mean, Adrian is definitely instinctually-- he was perfect casting for the Highlander, he really was.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): Alastair Duncan, who played Terence Coventry in "Dramatic License," apparently was up for the role of the Highlander when the show was originally casting. How would the show have been different with that guy in the lead? Well, someone else who tried out originally was Derek de Lint who later went on to star in Poltergeist, the series. And I think either of those men would have been playing a character closer to Connor than what Duncan became. Something more European and a bit more of an almost ethereal look, a slenderness, not just of build, but of the way they pass through the world. And Duncan is a bulkier character. I'm not just talking about his broad shoulders, but he has a little more of a new world style to him. And I think Alistair Duncan would have been more old world, more like Connor.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
Gillian Horvath: "Dramatic License," this is an episode that for whatever reason came up short after we'd filmed it. We actually had to write and film the lakeside walk-and-talk between Duncan and Amanda that's at the end of the episode later and add it in, because we were so short. And that's also why there's such a long flashback to the "Homeland" episode in the middle of the scene in the loft. Originally, that was supposed to be a brief mention of the episode, but we had to do something to get this up to time.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
Peter Ellis: I plan everything. I mean, I'm a firm believer in planning everything that I do. And then I also plan to throw that plan out. And that's the joy, is being able to say, hey, this is a better idea. Let's go with this idea, or let's go with that idea, you know? Or no, that's a terrible idea. So I think if you can stay loose-- the thing is, I have to have a plan at the beginning. I may never use that plan, but I have to have it. Because going into a day, if I've got a plan, then I'm okay.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
They had a sword fight, which took place inside this house. We tried to make it as swashbuckling as we could. And for instance, we did some clichéd classic moments with three candles being sliced in half and them reacting to the candles being sliced after the event. And various other antics that they got up to. So there were moments. There were beats that you had to get shooting-wise to punctuate.
Clip from "Dramatic License":
It was a really interesting experience, and I'm not accomplished or experienced in comedy at all, and so it was a brand new experience for me and extremely satisfying. |
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Clip from "Money No Object":
Elizabeth Gracen ("Amanda"): That's one of my favorite episodes, because it was real fantasy. I mean, I think people -- mainly the women who watched the show -- and having done many conventions, and I've gotten to know so many of the true fans of the show. I mean, it's the fantasy aspect. It's that wonderful escape. It's like reading a wonderful romance novel and you know it's all gonna turn out all right in the end.
Clip from "Money No Object":
And you just, you know, women loved Amanda because she, of course, was with MacLeod -- that was the main reason -- but they just wanted to be her. I loved being her. Because, first of all, you can't really die in the normal circumstance. But just the life experience and the great fun and the devil-may-care aspect to her, make it easy to ground yourself in it.
Clip from "Money No Object":
I've had a lot of bad wigs. For this particular one, when they put this sort of red flapper bob on me, and I had a kind of a carnival costume on and great costumes for that. Driving the old cars, stripping the gears.
Clip from "Money No Object":
You just immediately transport yourself. And I did love Bonnie and Clyde. And, you know, holding the, the Tommy guns -- is that what they were? -- all of that. You just sort of immediately go there. And once again, the writing for Amanda, allowed for so much magic to just flow into a moment with her.
Clip from "Money No Object":
Because of her carefree, living in the moment, living for the thrill, you know, you can-- it's easy to key into that. And once again, Adrian's always game.
Clip from "Money No Object":
And Nick Lea was playing Cory, and he got it too. And we just had fun. I mean, you just run with it. When everyone's sort of, "All right, we're on the same page and let's go."
Clip from "Money No Object":
James Thorpe (Writer): That script is, you know, burned in my brain for a number of reasons. The most important probably is because it's the first script I ever did for television. And I remember walking in the door to the Highlander offices that day, and meeting David for the first time. And, you know, usually when a writer does a script for television, they pitch several ideas. And they work with the staff, and they come up with one of those ideas, and he goes off and does that script. And in this case, I walked in the door and David handed me a fifteen-page outline and said, "This is the story we want you to write."
Clip from "Money No Object":
And he said that, you know, a bit of a cartoon, a bit more humor than we have had in the past on Highlander, but we want to keep the relationships real, keep the characters true. And so it would have the spirit of Highlander, but yet be a little more broad, a little more, you know, pushing the envelope with comedy than they did before.
Clip from "Money No Object":
Luckily, I think I was able to do that. You know, I have a twisted sort of innate sense of comedy anyway. And, you know, that plus understanding drama, I think I was able to do what he wanted.
Clip from "Money No Object":
I would say I'm naturally drawn to comedy and maybe even a little bit of dark comedy, because I find that most dramatic situations have a ludicrous flip side to them, if you look at them closely enough for what they are.
Clip from "Money No Object":
You know, even in the midst of some death-defying act, it can be a little ridiculous if you just shift your focus a few degrees to the right.
Clip from "Money No Object":
And by highlighting some of those moments, you can actually make the dramatic action, dramatic sequence seem a little more real, a little more true, a little easier to take. You know, if you've had a lot of heavy scenes, it helps defuse it a bit, gives people a breather.
Clip from "Money No Object":
I had a ball writing for Highlander, after I got over my initial terror about writing at all, because the staff experience on Highlander was unique, I would come to understand in later years when I got out in the real world.
Clip from "Money No Object":
It was a very protected environment. David created a great space to work in, because there was, you know, no fear, no bullshit. People were free to make mistakes. They were free to come up with ideas that were off the wall.
Clip from "Money No Object":
He was such a nurturing influence, creatively, personally, professionally. Just someone you really trusted, and when you are in an environment like that, you can really, you know, create freely. You can kind of put your fears aside and just let fly. And sometimes it comes up, you know, you lay an egg, and sometimes it comes up and it's magic.
Clip from "Money No Object":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): I loved this script, and I love Nick Lea who played Cory. But something happened in the filming and editing of this episode that when I saw it, it didn't live up to the way I pictured it, at least. And partly that has to do with, this is one that also came up very short after it had been filmed. I think this might have to do with the comedies, that the dialogue is delivered at a faster pace than in the serious episodes.
Clip from "Money No Object":
And then when you finished filming the script, you discover you don't have as many minutes as you thought you would have. And therefore, the flashback in the twenties was extended to great length, and the storyline of it was actually changed somewhat. Our original premise of it was that Cory and Amanda drove off, and Duncan was left standing there wishing he'd said, "Don't go, I want you to stay."
Clip from "Money No Object":
Which played as a parallel to in the present when he couldn't manage to say to her what she wanted to hear, which was, "I want you to be with me, not him." He kept saying, "You should do what you want," which wasn't what she wanted to hear.
Clip from "Money No Object":
And that parallel, I think, was lost, because what the flashback turned into was the idea that he followed them around from town to town, digging them up over and over. And I didn't think that worked for his character or for their characters, and so to me, it just sort of pulled the episode down.
Clip from "Money No Object":
Gillian Horvath: I actually love his Dennis Barry impersonation. I think the Dennis Barry impersonation is a classic of all time.
Clip from "Money No Object":
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Stan Kirsch ("Richie Ryan"): In the "Haunted", I had the opportunity to be a little bit more mature. And while I was still, for all intents and purposes, maybe making somewhat juvenile mistakes, I was coming from a more mature place. And I was consciously trying to deal as Richie with MacLeod on a more equal footing. I think the script lent itself to a lot of that, but at that point I had had this story line of doing things, and looking at things in a slightly different fashion. I think I was able to bring more-- I had grown as an individual, and I was able to bring more of that to the table too. But I understood a little bit more about how to handle the scenes, and put myself on an equal footing and not just play into the sidekick character and the "Robin" character, for what that's worth.
Clip from "Haunted":
On a purely acting level, I think I started to look at things as not so black and white, a little grayer. I was looking a little bit more for the nuance in things. You tend to play, on a series, a lot of the scenes-- A lot of the scenes are the same over time, with different words. And you have to find a way yourself to make it different.
Clip from "Haunted":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): An integral part of the Highlander legend is that when you take someone's head, you have a Quickening, and you get their knowledge, their power, their essence, their good, their bad.
Clip from "Haunted":
And this show is the first time we dealt with the other side of this transference through the Quickening, that you take the essence of the other person. You take their self, you take their personality, you take some intangible something that allows a person who is close to that person, a brother, a mother, a father, a wife, to not know why they are attracted to you. You get a sense that there's something of the other person in you that they see, they feel this other person, they feel a connection that they have no right to feel on such an immediate level, especially since they don't know that you're the one who killed the person they love. We thought it was a really interesting idea, and it was the only time that we'd ever done that.
That was the trap, I thought there was, why does he fall for this woman, and in an episode of television where you've got to tell a whole story, there's not a lot of time to understand why the attraction developed in the first place. We know why it does for her, because she's sensing Alec in me. From my point of view, it just has to happen very quickly, and it's got to be taken off of her, and I just tried to build it from something other than, "Oh, she's hot." I tried to find things in her that were not simply physical, and be drawn to those kinds of things, as well as just what she looked like, so it doesn't come off so, "Oh, it's just Richie just wants to get laid," but to find things in her. And as a person, she, Kathy Evison, has a very real, wonderful quality about her, seems very genuine, so I think that that lent itself to that, and she was a different kind of an actress than a lot who had come on. She was a little bit more tentative and a little bit more guarded. I tried to ground it more in reality, but also within the fantasy that I have about this person, because I really don't know her, for all intents and purposes. Or Richie doesn't know her.
Clip from "Haunted":
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Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): "Little Tin God" was a story that I had actually been trying to get onto the schedule for over a year. I had gone to the Armand Hammer Museum, actually with Maureen Russell, to see an exhibit on the Moche, which is an ancient Peruvian tribe, who worshipped a god called the Decapitator. And the artwork of the Decapitator shows a little guy with a sharp blade in one hand, and his enemy's head in the other, and there's lightning bolts all around him, and he's got his arms out like this. [holds her arms up and out] I thought, "This is an Immortal! There was an Immortal there who came back to life, and these people formed a cult around him. I thought, "What a great story." Rex Raglan (Production Designer): I read the script, and I just had a vision of the Moche Indians and their civilization, and then the ruins and the crumbles of that civilization just had much more kind of pungent [poignant?] quality than it taken place in a little stone hut. And David, bless his heart, loved the idea, and so we were away to the races. Gillian Horvath: It's an Immortal who's got a tribe of people who believe that he's a god, and I always thought that would make a great storyline, and the trick was finding something in the present day to marry it with. What is that guy doing now?
Clip from "Little Tin God":
Rex Raglan: What if this took place in and around the ruins of one of these ancient pyramids at the base of which is a temple, and that temple then is the set where the action takes place.
Clip from "Little Tin God":
When this episode was being designed, I actually took the catalog from that museum exhibit and sent it up to Vancouver for the art department to look at and use for designing the show. They did a beautiful job. It looks great.
It was really quite a wonderful experience to create this little village marketplace, the densely populated residential area at the foot of the crumbling pyramid. It was a big job to do this. I mean, we had very little time and not a lot of money, but the crew, also my decorators and construction, paint departments, they all bought into this idea, and they just knocked themselves out to make this happen.
This show is, I think, both a challenge and a delight for the designers. I think the reason we were able to keep our great crew, we had top people every year, even though we only had thirteen episodes in Vancouver, and they were turning down jobs on other series where they would have had a guarantee of twenty-two episodes. And I think the reason is because every week was such an interesting challenge. They got to design really interesting things, and it was hard work, it was harder work, but they also had the chance to really shine and excel and be able to turn around and say, "I did that, and it looks great." Don Paonessa (Post Production Consultant): In the show "Little Tin God", we had to do some visual effects to create a Moche village in the GVRD, which is the forest outside of Vancouver. So Rex Raglan, who is our production designer, put together what he could, which was the steps of this temple and a few huts, but the fact is that on a limited budget, there was just so much he could do to create a village, so we had to go out there and shoot the village that he created, and then we shot the huts individually, and in post, we cut together and matted in the different huts to create an entire village.
We had the top of a temple rising out of the trees. We built the base, and the top of the temple actually was a photograph. The trees in between just looked like overgrowth over this temple.
I think it was pretty effective in creating that world that didn't exist before we shot the show. Ken Gord (Producer): Well, the only problem in making the show was Rafal Zielinski. No, Rafal is a dear friend of mine, he's a sweet guy, and he's really talented. We like to work with directors who were not known as episodic TV directors, per se. We tried to pick guys that had done some small films or some independent films or some other kind of work because we wanted to try to bring a little bit of, you know, a movie quality to each show.
Clip from "Little Tin God":
I think it's absolutely true that the episodes play like little movies, and I think it's because Bill Panzer and Peter Davis had been movie producers, and when people tried to say to them, "Well, we don't really have the time to do that kind of thing in television," or "In television, we do it this easier, simpler, less visually arresting way," they said "Forget that, we're doing it the movie way," and they got people on board with that, which is great.
Rafal was a perfect example because he's a guy that I don't think had done any television whatsoever. So, he wasn't going to be anybody's first choice to do episodic, but he was one of our choices because of that. He's fun to work with. He's also tough, he's very soft-spoken, and he's very nice, but he knows what he wants, and like any director, he's banging at your door like every ten minutes, wanting this and wanting that, and even after you say 'no' or 'we can't afford it' or 'sure, you can have that, but you know, you got to give up this' -- which is the normal sort of give and take of production -- he'd be back an hour later, and in your face all the time, and won't go away. But that's all for the show, and that's part of the process, and I think Rafal turned out a good show. |
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Clip from "The Messenger":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): "The Messenger." This was a story and a script that I was very excited about going into production. I thought that the story itself, about someone who was a pacifist, who would live his life as a lie to promote his pacifist ideal. And because Methos, even among Immortals, was a legendary character. After all, he was five thousand years old and somehow, how he survived, you know. Who better to be than a cult figure?
Clip from "The Messenger":
The fake Methos. The thing to remember is that up to this point, Methos had never had a flashback. So the possibility still existed that our Methos was, in fact, the fake Methos, just calling himself Methos. And I love that this episode played with that idea, that you could have been looking at a character for years and suddenly discover that everything you knew about him was a lie.
Clip from "The Messenger":
David Abramowitz: I was really excited when we got Ron Perlman to play the imposter. I thought that he was a guy of great presence, of great stature. I remembered him from Beauty of the Beast, and I remembered the way he spoke with the passion when he talked about life and about truth and about peace and about justice, and I thought if he could just take that and put it into this character, we'd create a character that we didn't care whether he's lying or not about who he was because what he said was so important and would have posed an interesting dilemma.
Clip from "The Messenger":
Unfortunately, I don't think Ron Perlman gave us his best in the episode. He's a wonderful actor. Maybe he didn't like the writing. Maybe he thought he had done network shows, and this was just a syndicated show. But I pretty much thought he phoned it in, and I was disappointed in it, and that's not to say he's not a great actor because he's gone on, he's great things before, and he's done great things after. The other thing I didn't like about the episode was the character of Culbraith in the present. I thought he looked ridiculous. I think they dressed him in this sort of safari jacket and this hat. And he looked like a seer safari suit run a muck, you know, it just didn't play, it just lessened the impact of what I thought the episode was going to say.
Clip from "The Messenger":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Everything in us affects us in our decisions that we make. And that moment in Andersonville, when MacLeod was trying to save the slave, just because he needed a knife--
Clip from "The Messenger":
--to cut the wound open and save him, and he didn't have the opportunity to do that, would have affected MacLeod in the present to say, okay, you know, now I have the opportunity to do it over again, what choice do I make this time and this time, you know, I have the ability to do it. So here's the ability to do it. I'm not going to step in myself, but there's your choice. I've given you the tools to do it. The rest is up to you, but at least this time I have redeemed the moment in time that I had in the past where I wasn't able to save somebody. And God only knows how many of us would love to do that in real life.
Clip from "The Messenger":
Ah, yeah, but rules are meant to be broken. In "The Messenger", you know, MacLeod brings Richie his sword and it's unfortunate. [chuckles] I know he did live by a code of honor and ethics, but I think there was a certain idea of fair play for MacLeod. You know, Richie didn't know what he was doing, for goodness' sake, and MacLeod had to help him out. But then he left him on his own, he said, "Okay, go ahead," you know, "This is as far as I'm going. I've given you this, but the rest of it is up to you."
Clip from "The Messenger":
There are certain things that, you know, you live by, and sometimes we all change our minds from time to time, given what the personal circumstances are. David Abramowitz: If the message is good, does it matter that the messenger is dishonest? I thought that was an interesting question to pose.
Clip from "The Messenger":
We were asking the question, is it the message, or is it the messenger? Is it what is said, or is it who is saying it? If a three-foot ten-inch dwarf would come along and speak great wisdom and be the greatest politician, could you get him elected president? Yoda. Could you get Yoda elected president, you know? |
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Clip from "The Valkyrie":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): I think "The Valkyrie" was successful because of the question that is asked. And the basic question is, is it all right to kill a hundred today to save ten thousand tomorrow? I mean, this is the question that presidents and prime ministers and military leaders have asked and lived with for centuries. And I think it's a great immortal question.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
I also think it was directed very well. I thought the woman who played the Valkyrie was wonderful. I thought Methos was in it in a perfect manner. I thought Adrian had a great emotional line where he had to at first protect and then attack someone he cared for a great deal. I thought the flashback to Hitler was excellent. And I thought Jan TrÃska's performance was really perfect and wonderful.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
All that aside, there are two reasons why I thought the episode was wonderful. One, because of the end sequence, which was doing all the cutting back to Hitler and the Third Reich in the instant before MacLeod and during the Quickening. I thought that was incredibly effective and just wonderful.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
And I think this was the first script written for us by James Thorpe... who I think is really an incredibly gifted and wonderful, wonderful writer. And there was one scene that Triska played, which had one of the best lines ever in any of the shows we ever did. This is after the episode where he thinks he's killed this woman, who he doesn't view as evil, but had to kill to stop her from killing someone who may become Hitler in five years. And he sits there and he takes a cigarette and he takes a puff of the cigarette. And then he says, maybe if I die--
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
I thought that was so profound, and I thought it was delivered so wonderfully and it was so beautifully written. It was the kind of script that you read and you look at and you'd sit there in the room and you'd have to go into other writer's offices and say, "look at this, look at this line, look at this scene, look at this, isn't this great, isn't this wonderful?" I was so taken by his skill and by his ability to put words on the page. James Thorpe (Writer): I first heard the story, the real story behind how I got hired, years later, it must have been five years later. David told me that when I walked in the door, it turns out it was, you know, some quirk of fate.
We had one opening and there were two spec scripts that I had read that I liked. One was written by James and one was written by someone else, and I didn't know who to hire. So I went into the middle of my office with all my staff there and I said, "Okay, we're going to flip a coin." We flipped the coin, and this is James and this is the other guy, and I looked at the coin and James lost. But thankfully, the other guy already had a job and was busy, so we couldn't hire him, and that was the first script that James Thorpe wrote for Highlander.
You know, it's hard enough to get a job in this town on the flip of a coin, but when you miss the flip of a coin and you still get the job, it just shows you what a long shot this business truly can be.
We've worked together for the past five or six years. He's become a good friend, and all on the flip of a coin that he lost.
Turned out to be one of the best deals of my life, and David and I began a working relationship that's lasted, you know, seven, eight years now, and I just think it's been marvelous.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
Rex Raglan (Production Designer): That episode took place right on the heels of "Little Tin God", and I don't know, I had this kind of leap of imagination where I thought I could use the basic structure of the sets of the "Little Tin God" to create the sets that we needed for Hitler's hideaway, his eagle's nest -- because we wanted something that was large and substantial, and because our budget was small and insubstantial -- changing the Moche Indian village into the drive up to Hitler's bunker and then using the interior of the temple again to create the interior of this bunker and to create the meeting room, and a key part of that room was the fireplace. I wanted this huge fire blazing behind Hitler, the little man with just the flames of hell rising around him. I was on set when they were shooting that and the special effects guy kept turning the flames down, you know, and I said, "No, no, no, we want big flames in this. You got to turn them up," and he said, "Yeah, but it's going to get hot." I said, "This is all about the flames, this whole set is built so that there can be flames here. So let's see the flames."
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
Hitler with these flames behind him, and the idea was-- of that image also came from an old historical photograph of Hitler in a darkened room studying maps, and we had these, in that photograph, there was a goose-neck lamp and a map and there was light bouncing off the map and up-lighting him, giving him this kind of evil up-light look, and I thought, this is the killer combination, with the flames behind him and this up-light, and it's a perfectly justifiable up-light here. It came together quite wonderfully, you know, and it was really fun to change the old Moche Indian temple into something absolutely different and yet it's still the basic same structure... with a fireplace added.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
Richard Martin (Director): "Valkyrie" was my first episode of Highlander and first of television.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
I really enjoyed making "Valkyrie" because the script was really solid. It had a great moral dilemma and I was discovering the whole world of Highlander while I was doing that and so it made it a good experience.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
It seemed like quite an ambitious project, but I kind of like to think that I approach all situations, trying to make a mini-movie, you know, whether it's three minutes long or three hours long. It's, you know, I'm trying to do something cinematic with it.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
"Valkyrie"... I'm not sure whether it was just the power of the script, of the moral dilemmas, or the feeling of it, or simply whether it was just my first, but it's always kind of remained special in my heart as one of the best.
Clip from "The Valkyrie":
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