Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
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Highlander |
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(from 2004 U.S./Canada DVD set)
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Clip from "The Blitz":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): "The Blitz", okay, first I want to say that "The Blitz", of all the episodes that I've been disappointed in, this is the one that I've been most disappointed by, you know. I thought the script was okay, I thought the concept of the story was great. In this episode, you know, the audience knows she's dying. And the audience knows MacLeod is not, so they're keying on him. They're watching and seeing his grief. They're watching and seeing his pathos. Now, on one hand, this is the price you pay for immortality. On the other hand, you go walking out the door the next morning. So, the guilt, and the pathos, and the pain, and-- that's what we wanted to show.
Clip from "The Blitz":
It just didn't play with the kind of depth of spirit that I wanted it to play with. And the kind of poignance that I wanted it to play with. But I had great hopes for it. You know, I had great hopes of doing an episode where someone you know is dying. And they think this is the moment when they're not dying alone. And so all the things they're facing, they're facing with you. And you know in your heart that you're just going to sleep and you're going to wake up again and they're not.
Clip from "The Blitz":
I thought that, wow, what a great opportunity for drama, what a great thing to play.
Oh, "The Blitz" was one of those episodes that, you know, there's a no-win situation. You know, when it came down to it, I mean, knowing that she was going to die, and knowing he would die but survive, was heart-rending for him.
You know, I thought the episode was pretty emotional. I thought MacLeod was pretty emotional.
The only way he could make sense of it was to make her passing as gentle as possible.
Clip from "The Blitz":
If it was written better, or if I oversaw the script in a tighter manner, or I played more emotional moments, or I hit that harder on the nose.
I think if it had been just a flashback, it would have been awesome, I think, because it was a great flashback story and the look was great. And I think MacLeod in that era was very dashing. And I think it would have been interesting to see a much more elongated version of that flashback in the past. Not to say that the present one wasn't necessary, but the present one was a little bit more confined because it was in a tunnel, and there was nothing you could really do. Whereas the flashback was allowed to go out and see the times, the air raid, the romance, the tunnel itself, there was so much to tell of a story in that flashback.
Well, we ran parallel stories because you need something to kick off the flashback. You need something that says, "Ah, this reminds me of the time when..." so that you can go into the flashback, and we thought it was logical to go into a parallel story where Anne was pregnant and delivering a baby, and her life was in danger due to the cave-in at the subway station. And we thought-- I thought it all should have worked.
The problem with the flashback was that it was cut with the present day. Because you can only have a certain amount of time, which is forty-two or forty-eight minutes, to tell that story. And when half of that time is taken out, then you don't see the development between the characters. Therefore you don't care as much about them because you're not invested as much with them when you're watching the show. So if it had solely been a flashback, it would have probably been able to be developed more, and MacLeod and the audience would have been invested in it much more.
This was one of the problems that we faced with Highlander, is that when we did episodes that didn't have Immortals in it, that didn't have villains that were just popping off the charts, they didn't have a villain that you could say, "God, how are we going to face him?" The episode played down a little bit.
Clip from "The Blitz":
I met some guy who was a political speech writer. And he said to me that the episode that convinced his-- that he convinced his girlfriend to watch Highlander on was "The Blitz". So maybe it was just me, maybe it was the moment, maybe it was the sex scene that we cut out of the episode that was so hot and heavy.
Clip from "The Blitz":
I loved the flashback in this episode, it was fun to play, it was all Bond, it was all that class, and the style of the forties.
Clip from "The Blitz":
Stephen Geaghan (Production Designer): In "The Blitz", the tubes we did in a derelict building downtown in Vancouver that actually had a set of stairs that led down into a subway tunnel. And conveniently, it had fairly high ceilings that allowed us to put all of our debris bags and baskets above it and remotely trigger them so that when the actual event happens of the bomb collapsing the roof and it falling in on the stairwell, it was quite a credible look, and I was very, very pleased that we were able to do that. The present-day version of that, which was the collapse of the subway, we did in that same building. We had escalators that existed, a lot of exposed concrete beams and existing elements that we simply took and clad with our smashed elements, and then we dropped in a huge, huge number of, I think they were like three-foot by five-foot simulated concrete beams that were made out of styrofoam, carved styrofoam, that were dropped in, and a tremendous amount of debris. The other side of that show was-- I think we did our store first, our present-day store first, then took a lot of that debris into the subway tunnels, because debris is debris. |
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Clip from "Something Wicked":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): You know, I would like to say that there was a great grand plan for the show and that I knew a year in advance as to what episodes we were going to do the following year, but that wasn't the case at all. Basically I was pulling it out of my ass, I was winging it as best I could and trying to make it work.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
Why did we want to take Duncan evil? Well, we were in the fourth season and we'd done a lot of the storylines that were available to us in terms of Duncan, our hero.
Adrian, as an actor, was getting tired of playing the same character every week, and everybody loves to play a villain. You know, because villains are generally more interesting than heroes. They're neuroses, they're craziness, they're paranoia.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
We had become-- to see signs that he was not a simple character.
We needed to expand it, we needed to give it some life, we needed to do some things differently.
He's a hero, he has a moral center, but at the same time, he takes violent actions.
And Adrian loved playing evil, you know, he just ate it up.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
It really was great fun to turn the world on its head and have the characters who had always relied on Duncan as their moral center. They were satellites around him, both in terms of the show -- he's the hero of -- and in terms of their "real lives", if those existed, that they trusted him to be what he had always been. And when Duncan changes, it changes everything. And I think it actually would have been fun if we could have to keep him on the other side for more episodes and have more chance to explore how do the other characters have to change and step up to the plate and become the heroes when the hero is incapacitated.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
Stephen Geaghan (Production Designer): There are some shows and this was one of them where the story takes precedence over everything else. And in this one, all we had to do -- I say 'all we had to do' -- was provide the background to tell this really powerful story about good and evil. And we tried to keep a kind of differentiation between darkness and light through the whole thing, without letting the visuals predominate and go beyond what the story was. And there was nothing terribly significant about what we did design-wise in the show, except making sure that the environments were very appropriate to telling this very powerful story. So when it came down to doing the Indian village, we had to keep it simple, without getting involved in darkness or light. When it came down to the 1950s, the beat scene, we did our research, looked at beat clubs, put in the appropriate earmarks, and there were very simple things that we did -- apropriate ash trays, lighting took a precedence in that -- because they were really very simple environments, basements, storefronts that had been blacked out. We just wanted to sort of duplicate that without really drawing an awful lot of attention to the environment.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
Gillian Horvath: The concept of the Hayoka, the character who absorbs evil from people who are suffering under the weight of evil, actually came from a seminar that I had gone to aimed at television writers on accurate representations of Native American cultures. So I had learned about the Hayoka, which is a genuine holy man, and thought, "This is perfect for Highlander. It has the mysticism and the symbolism that we love to incorporate into episodes."
Okay, given that someone can do that, at what point does that evil that they take in overcome their own natural goodness, no matter how good, no matter how kind? We thought that this was an interesting concept to deal with, especially if you have a character who MacLeod knew and liked very much in the past, and who was basically good, and now was truly, truly evil. And in MacLeod taking his Quickening, through his own sense of hubris, or his own sense of honor, or his own sense of heroism, took that evil upon himself and thought perhaps that he could overcome it, and he couldn't. It's kind of like a super moral man looks in the mirror and says, "I would never do evil." That creates a great opportunity for fall.
Clip from "Something Wicked":
Stephen Geaghan: The Dark Quickening was tough to do because it had to be an extremely large event, and there was a lot of discussions about how to do this, and we did it underneath one of the bridges in Vancouver. The city engineers were extremely concerned about the extent of the explosions, and they wanted to make sure that there was sufficient water that was around. So we put water pipes up the sides of the columns of the bridge, the supporting structure, and charged them from the hydrants. We had an awful lot of propane that was involved in this, and propane pipes laid around the columns and up behind Adrian when he was doing his Quickening, and then we had a lot of pipes buried just beneath ground level, and they went back quite a distance, so, god, forty or fifty feet behind the actual post -- the supporting structure of the bridge. So when all this stuff went off and you got the fire going up, it went up a good sixty feet, nearly to the bottom of the bridge, and at that point, once it was reaching there, we turned on the water to start cooling off everything, and it was a big event. We knew it was a big event then, and when I saw it finally on film, when it was all edited together, it hit our expectations dead on. David Abramowitz: This and "Deliverance" were two of my favorites. |
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Dennis Berry (Director): MacLeod now is going into a territory that he has never been in before. He's not just only a good character, a good man looking for virtue; he's a dark character fighting his own demons inside him. I believe that the evolution of Highlander unavoidably was going towards there because every episode up until then was exploring step-by-step more and more of the darkest aspects of the human soul.
Clip from "Deliverance":
And I was always looking for cinematic moments. When is movie-making coming through, being inscribed on film?
I'm glad we had Dennis Berry to do these episodes, because he had done so many episodes for us before that and was so familiar with our stories and our cast. I think that another director, even one as talented as Dennis, who wasn't as familiar with our characters, wouldn't have been able to draw out the nuances of our Duncan hiding behind the evil Duncan.
It was very interesting to try to explain to Adrian Paul that you cannot act a bad guy and a good guy in the same moment. You can't be full of hate and want to kind of {??}ously kill somebody or humiliate a woman and at the same time say, I'm a man of honor, I will not invade your space.
Clip from "Deliverance":
I told him, "You would go back and forth from being the MacLeod full of virtue to the MacLeod that has invaded by ugly, dark demons," and that when you would choose to do something ugly, you have to go all the way, and then you choose to become MacLeod again and you have to go all the way. You can't act two things at the same time.
It just worked, you know, it went right to character. Everybody was larger than life. It had wonderful parts for Adrian to play, for Methos to play.
Clip from "Deliverance":
This gave him an opportunity to play all these things and kill some good guys.
Clip from "Deliverance":
It's a great moment when MacLeod kills his friend, Sean Burns, because you're sure he's not going to, as an audience, and he does. That's great. David Abramowitz: You know, we put ourselves in a box and say, "Okay, we created this great character, we made him evil. How the hell will we get him out of here?" And we didn't want to make it so that it was really simple, so simple. This was such a major occurrence for the lead character in a series to basically commit murder and almost rape and be evil and dark and then not totally redeem him but give him the opportunity to fight his own dark side.
Clip from "Deliverance":
The ending of "Deliverance" came about because David Abramowitz, our head writer, had gone on a location scout to France to look at the places where we were planning to film our big two-parter. And when they took him to the place where that Holy Spring is located, which is a real chamber on the grounds of a monastery, he came back saying that he had felt something spiritual in the place, that the place had a real energy to it, so it almost inspired the story point of, if you can get to the right place, nature will help you. Nature will help with your cleansing process.
Yeah, in "Deliverance" and the end fight, that was probably one of the most difficult locations we've ever shot in. I think all the gear had to be like lowered down from some kind of opening in the earth because it was an underground cellar of some kind. We had to build the water there for the, you know, the sort of baptismal scene.
This dealt with all the great myths. I mean, Joseph Campbell would have had a field day with this episode. It dealt with death and rebirth. It dealt with the Jungian aspects of the dark side within us. It dealt with the symbolism of the baptism in the water and then the cleansing, the ritual cleansing. You know, we all have, we all have shadows within us. We all have dark sides. And if you don't recognize that, you get your ass in a lot of trouble. And it's when MacLeod recognizes his own dark side and does battle with his own dark side, with his worst instincts. That's what heroes do. That's one of the most heroic things he's done in the entire series. Fighting himself, this was his greatest opponent.
Clip from "Deliverance":
Fighting yourself means you have to have a double, and a double has to look exactly like you, and it's complicated to film because you're fighting yourself. So everything about it was very, very, very complicated.
Clip from "Deliverance":
David Abramowitz: And who but Methos would understand this? Who but a character we have learned-- that we later learned had his own dark side. |
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Clip from "Promises":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): "Promises" harkens back to the "Warmonger" episode from season two, which is another case where MacLeod swore to do something unwisely, and then felt like his honor was wrapped up in keeping his word, and really had to come to terms with the idea that sometimes keeping your word only matters to you.
Clip from "Warmonger":
Eli Jarmel in "Warmonger" told him it's vanity to worry so much about what you said, because that's only about you being proud of yourself or doing what you would say you would do, as opposed to doing what actually is the right thing to do and needs to be done. And that's what's going to matter more to the world around you.
Clip from "Promises":
One of the things about making a promise is that it may sound like it's convenient when you make it, and it may sound like it's going to always be easy to stick to when you make it. And then if, for you and me, if a year from now that promise is called in, circumstances have changed, it's not convenient, it's not easy. Maybe I don't even want to do it.
Clip from "Promises":
Now hundreds of years have gone by. MacLeod has always viewed himself as a man of great honor. And there is always that thought that somewhere there can be a confusion between honor and your own vanity. And keeping a promise can sometimes lead to a bad situation. And-- Could we just end it at 'honor and vanity'?
Clip from "Promises":
MacLeod looks at it that his word isn't as important as his actions. That as much as he is wrapped up in the idea of keeping his word and doing what he said he would do, he can't bring himself to do something he doesn't believe in just because of words. The fact that he turns out to be wrong is just his continued naivete, really. That he made this promise, then he doesn't want to keep it because he thinks that's not... I'm not an assassin. I don't kill people without having a good reason. And then when he realizes that the guy actually "needed killin'", as they put it, he's...
MacLeod's vanity, possibly clouds his judgment a little bit. And his drive to keep the promise keeps him from seeing what the reality of the situation is.
Clip from "Promises":
I think the underlying theme of "Promises" is... just because Duncan MacLeod is the hero doesn't mean he's always right or really that smart in every situation. That he is just trying to get through things as the best as he can to the best of his judgment. He doesn't have all the facts. He doesn't have the luxury of knowing what's going to happen or seeing behind the scenes or into people's hearts. He actually says that to Richie in one episode. He says to him, "Did you see into his soul?" And so MacLeod is basically making his best guesses at all times. When he makes the promise to Kassim in the flashback, it seemed like a good idea at the time. When he refuses to kill the guy for Kassim, it's because at that time he feels like he's doing the right thing. And by the end of the episode, he realizes he made the wrong judgment call. Then he makes another judgment call to then go through with pushing the guy out a window. And that may or may not be the right call. I mean, I think that's the real message of this episode, is just because Duncan does something doesn't mean it's necessarily the right thing to do.
Clip from "Promises":
Bill Panzer: Any time you're burning something in a movie when you're not really burning it, there are ways of doing it with gas jets and with smoking tires and oil-soaked rags and a whole bunch of tricks that the special effects guys have to make something look like it's burning when it's not burning because you need to use it next week. In France, just as everyone's heard before, it's very hard to fire off a gun with a blank in it. It's very hard to do anything that upsets the French quality of life. So getting permission to do this and figuring out how to do it within the time frame and within the budget was much more complex than it would have been in Canada or in the United States... or in Ethiopia, but what we did was, you just pretend to be burning part of the boat and cut cleverly and it looks like the boat is burning, but it was harder to do in Paris than it would have been to do elsewhere. |
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Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
Peter Wingfield ("Methos"): One of the great joys of playing Methos was that he kept doing unexpected things. *Really* unexpected things. And that, for me, was where "Methuselah's Gift" came from. I think he fell in love. I think he absolutely, genuinely, uncontrollably fell in love and was willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to keep Alexa alive.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
And this is a guy that must have fallen in love many times, seen humans go through their entire lifespan and disappear and never come back. And then, have it happen to him over again, over and over again, to have his heart broken over and over again. But he doesn't become totally cynical and jaded about it. He's still open and alive enough that he can let it happen.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
That was a very appealing quality in him, that there was-- in spite of everything, there was a child-likeness about him, that if he was touched and genuinely touched, that he just, he had to do what he had to do.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): In "Methuselah's Gift", there's actually, there's a little homage to my dad in there. My dad had had a bout with cancer that year and that really affected what I was able to put into this episode in terms of Methos's reaction to losing someone he loved. It really informed my writing.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
The reference to Santorini in his big speech is actually, my dad had been in Santorini working on a documentary the year before and he'd had a wonderful time and one of my favorite pictures from him is from there. So putting that reference to Santorini in there was like my little nod of saying, this is about my dad as much as it is about Alexa. Which, by the way, he recovered and he's fine. Ken Gord (Producer): The opening, probably Highlander's -- of all the shows, probably Highlander's biggest stunt -- was pretty well impossible for us to do time-wise because it was a night sequence, a night in Paris, and you need permission to, you know, very far in advance to do, and which in television you don't have. And because the stunt was very, very, very big, which was involved, someone swinging from an electrical cable from a neon sign from the top of like a ten- or twelve-story building onto the ground, which is pretty big for a television show. We did it and one of the ways we did it was that we got-- someone in the French production department got the company Hennessy to basically pay for the sign. So it was a little product placement. We shot it over three nights, I think, because you can't do an all-nighter, because you can't turn your schedule around to days. So we shot, I think, one night on the roof and one night on the ground. So it was problematic and it got done. And Adrian, of course, you know, was right there wanting to go for it. You certainly can't call him shy. So he did a great job. I mean, it was a great stunt and one of our biggest, and he did it really well. The ending was also really, really big. And there's a bunch of people on a bridge and there's a face-off and you've got cars exploding and big 'shoot them up' and lots of characters to worry about and a little thing going over into a river and bodies going into a river. And that's a lot for one day. I ended up managing to get to set, I think, about one or two hours before a rap. I drove right up and Adrian saw my face because he was still on the bridge, still getting ready to do the big explosion. And I knew that that should have been done probably two hours before or we were in big trouble. So he read my face as soon as I walked on the set and started laughing and said, "Don't worry, it's all going to get done."
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
He did the big explosion, it worked out really well. And he had a three-page dialogue scene to do after that, which he basically set up and shot in an hour, wrapped on time and it looked beautiful. And once again, Adrian proved himself a really good director who really used everything that was given to him, because some directors ask for all that stuff and then don't have the time to use it, which is kind of irritating. But he used it all and managed time really well and gave a good product.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
Peter Wingfield: The whole idea in that, that there was this possibility of immortality, that yeah, it wasn't like him and MacLeod and Richie and Amanda, that yes, you couldn't convey that on somebody, but maybe there was some kind of magic, some kind of hocus-pocus-nonsense story that had a grain of truth to it. It was worth trying.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
I thought it gave him great breadth as a character, that someone who could be so cynical about some things could be so vulnerable about something else, that was a fairy tale.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
Gillian Horvath: "Methuselah's Gift" is actually an example for me of the perfect balance of a Highlander episode between a standalone story and our continuing storylines that go from episode to episode and season to season. There's a lot in it that plays off things that had come up before. It's really, it's a sequel to "Legacy" because of the crystals. It's a sequel to "Timeless" because of Alexa. But at the same time, if you turn on the television and you see this episode and you haven't seen those other two, you can follow the story and you can care about it. And to me, that's the perfect mix.
Clip from "Methuselah's Gift":
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Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Donna Lettow (Script Coordinator): "Cimoli" had an interesting birth in that in Season Four, we had a program of having native French-speaking writers suggest stories for the show. They weren't able to write the entire scripts because they didn't know English well enough, but they were French screenwriters who had some good ideas, so David Abramowitz went to France and spoke to them, and so Sophie Decroisette -- pardon my French -- suggested the circus story.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
And it married very nicely to something that David had wanted to do, which is this Damon Case character, who I hesitate to call the bad guy because all Damon Case does is play the Game.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
He is the living embodiment of what is sometimes a clichéd phrase on Highlander: "It's what we do." So the two stories, I think, came together very nicely.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
It was the first time that director Yves Lafaye had worked on the show, and I think in the end it came together very nicely.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Season Four, especially the latter half, was so emotionally packed that sometimes I think "Cimoli" gets overlooked, because there's not a lot of angst and there's not a lot of big drama. It's just a story about immortality and a kind of light-hearted one without actually being one of the comedies.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Donna Lettow: There's so many episodes that I think would just not have worked at all without the casting. As a matter of fact, the woman who plays the mother--
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
A little tiny woman, who is actually in the show in Season Two -- she did an episode, the episode called "Legacy", and she was the housekeeper of Valjean, one of Rebecca's students, which came back here to play the mother. And she was, I mean, she was a delight.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Donna Lettow: What I find interesting-- There was a line in the script that -- I don't remember whether it was removed or filmed and edited out -- that spelled out that Danny Cimoli was adopted, going on with the foundling theory that, you know, all Immortals are foundlings, so it's not in the show. But I think if you look at Lena Cimoli and her son together -- Crispin Bonham-Carter is well over six feet and I think the woman playing Lina is well under five feet. I don't think there's a doubt that there's the foundling theory going on here. That's an adopted child.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Donna Lettow: I think Amanda really wants to be a mother. I think it was-- It comes out in the episode "Reunion", where she meets up with Kenny, the child Immortal, again, but for all her supposed flightiness and not caring about anyone but herself, she really has a nurturing side that makes her a good teacher.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Elizabeth Gracen ("Amanda"): The main thing I remember about the episode is the Wheel of Death, obviously.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
Being strapped to that wheel -- that's hard to do. I mean, you have to hook your feet in and hang on. You're not just sort of secured on there, or at least I wasn't. Very difficult. I didn't like it at all.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
I think that was the last day of shooting on it, and I'm in my trailer having glitter applied all over my face and my little circus outfit, and I hear this *bam-bam-bam-bam* on the door, and Adrian is there like this [holds her arms out to the sides], with his silver sequined outfit on, like this, and I said, "You have to make your hair bigger." And so then he comes back and he has this bouffant. I said, "You have to look like Fabio or this is not gonna work." And we just, you know, it was great. Donna Lettow: The end is interesting. As written and as filmed, there is actually a sword fight between young Cimoli and the mysterious dark Immortal in Vegas, who I like to envision as an Elvis impersonator, but the decision was made in editing to just go out on them meeting, and we all can assume what happened probably better than those two could probably sword fight, so I think it was a good decision, but that footage does exist.
Clip from "The Immortal Cimoli":
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David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): It would have been okay if some executive would have said to me, "Are you insane?" "Through a Glass, Darkly" was an interesting episode for us, you know. It played dark, but this was a clear rip-off for us of Rashomon, and this was hit and miss.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
This is a Rashomon story where Cochrane and MacLeod have different memories of the same events. The fun thing about that I think is that it throws doubt on every flashback in the course of the series that you then have to wonder, we've seen these other flashbacks, we've assumed that they're what really happened, but I guess there's now the possibility that we're seeing them through Duncan-colored glasses, and that if you got someone else's opinion on some other events, it wouldn't quite match up.
I'm not Kurosawa, and our directors were good, but this was for me an episode where the hope of the episode was much greater than the execution of the episode. I think we outsmarted ourselves a little bit by trying to do something that was really different, and that would interest the fans and keep them guessing and so on and so forth.
"Through a Glass, Darkly" came out a lot darker, I think, than we originally envisioned it.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
I think we liked the idea of an Immortal who had gone through a terrible trauma and was in denial about his own immortality.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
Well, it's an interesting idea, can an Immortal get therapy? I suppose if he has enough money -- because it takes us so long to peel away all the layers that cover up whatever we are inside, it probably takes a lot longer -- or a better therapist or an Immortal therapist to do that, and that's maybe sort of what MacLeod is doing in this show.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
It made a nice opening to explore the idea of would you or would you not want to be immortal. It's not all fun and games, there are terrible tragedies, and if you were an Immortal, would there be a temptation to not want to remember all the years of your life and all the things that had gone wrong in it?
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
He's trying to make Warren realize, "Forget about it. Your mind is blocking out what really happened when we went back to see Bonnie Prince Charlie." He was a scatter-brained drunk living in the past, totally ill-equipped, and nobody, including Warren, was willing to sit there and say that the emperor had no clothes.
The other advantage to doing the flashbacks the way we did was that -- in theory, at least -- it was meant to save a little bit of money, that if the flashbacks were filmed twice slightly differently, you only had to get one set, one location, one camera set up, and get twice as much footage for your time.
Side-by-side comparison of clips from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
I mean, it worked pretty well. I think, again the issue was, the villain really wasn't the villain and it was a psychological drama, and I don't know if that lent itself particularly well for what Highlander was at its core. I think it was interesting from an intellectual standpoint. But as an episode, it didn't pace or pop like I wished it would.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
I think that the plot with Cochrane and his student perhaps got too convoluted and too depressing, so that some of the issues that we had hoped to explore weren't as fully realized as they could have been.
You know, we tried to take the Rashomon thing pretty far, but when you're dealing with notes from executives and lots and lots of different countries, which we were on Highlander, what you wanted to do was make a show that was understandable. And I think people were afraid that if we didn't make clear exactly what was happening all the time that we'd lose people.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
And then they do the terrible thing of going, click, and turning off the show because-- and saying things like, "God, I don't get it." Highlander was complicated enough with all the backstories of all the characters, then to try to do an episode where you're taking that back story and showing that back story from different perspectives.
Clip from "Through a Glass, Darkly":
How would I have done it better? I think I would have made the story lines a little clearer. I think what was very important would have been to spend more time with the director, to know exactly what was in his mind when he was shooting all those scenes of different perspectives, so it was really clear from an audience standpoint and they could tie the thing together as 'this is the exact same scene happening from a slightly different psychological perspective'. I think all those parts could have been clearer, and if I was on the set, I could have been in the director's ear saying, "No, that's not the vision; this is the vision." |
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Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): It's always difficult in episodic television to have your hero meet and hang out with women who we all think he belongs to be with. And especially after we had started the series off with such an extraordinary relationship with Tessa. When she went away, it was never easy to find somebody that the audience would enjoy him being with on whatever level.
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
So when we ran into Agent Delaney, from the first little teasing moments that they had in the first episode they were together...
Clip from "Unholy Alliance, Part 1":
There was always kind of an attraction, certainly more on her part, but he was kind of interested, because she was a little goofy, she was kind of funny, she was sweet. You know, you had a feeling that sometimes you'd have to make sure she didn't trip down the stairs.
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
This is an FBI agent. I mean, FBI agents are not like the people on Law and Order. So for her to run into MacLeod, this really hunky, handsome, nice, funny, interesting, 'something going on behind the eyes' guy who has apparently traveled all around the world, speaks languages, is incredibly sophisticated and wonderful and seems to like her -- it's kind of a lot for her to handle.
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
And when they got to Paris, she gradually let her, you know, inhibitions go away entirely and she's ready to make the move on. I mean, he--
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
--slips away. Charles Wilkinson (Director): "Double Jeopardy" was a lot of fun. It was a remarkable experience. It's unusual for a series to have episodes, you know, on the other side of an ocean. And I'd been to Paris before, I spent a fair amount of time there, and I speak enough French that I can get by as a Canadian, because we all do that, right? Because nobody speaks French here. [laughs] And, uh-- I'll start that again. And I love French people, love French food and all of that. And I love the city. It's an incredible place. I remember I was having a conversation with one of the other series directors and he said to me while we were there, he said, you know, there's probably not one thing in the world, not one situation that a person can be in that's better than to be a working director in Paris.
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
And I thought, you know what? You're right. There are a few things in this world that are better than that. So for me, it was like an incomparable gift to go and just shoot there. And it's true. I mean, we were treated so well and everybody's excited and people are in Paris are excited anyway all the time about everything, about lunch, right?
Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
Obviously, it was a lot different. It's much different working there than it is working in America. The attitude towards work is different and there's some translation of ideas, that's for sure. Here's an interesting cultural difference. Working in America, if I say to the first AD, we've agreed that after lunch, our first shot up is going to be looking that way down the river. So we're going to take all those production vehicles and put them over there. I don't even have to tell him. But if I think maybe I should remind him or if there's been a change, I'll tell him, it's done. Like, midway through the morning, as soon as we're not, you know, needing those vehicles anymore. They're all there. So by the time we get finished with lunch, the camera's already set up. We're looking that way. It's done. In Paris, it doesn't work that way. You tell the AD that that's what's going to happen. He'll go tell everybody else and they'll do it or they won't do it. It just-- Things happen 'cause. Now, I noticed with other directors that the way you get stuff to happen is you scream a lot. And I noticed that people would shout a lot to each other. Now, that's kind of this Gallic thing, like, you know, Canadians are so terminally polite. There's this old joke: How you get a Canadian to apologize is you hit them. And that's pretty much the way that it is. We're so polite. So I would really never scream in anybody. But kind of, I got the sense that people were waiting for me to yell at them to do stuff. So it was a bit of a difficulty. I remember, there's one particular situation where we needed the horse that belongs to one of the characters, and he rides a black horse. He's evil. I called for the horse, you know, in two or three shots down the road because you plan ahead because you don't want to stop, right? And they said, "Fine, it'll happen." So time came to do the shot. Out comes a white horse. And we go, "What-- His horse is black." "Oh, yeah, but this one was closer to being ready." And I went [rolls his eyes] "I guess, what, spray paint?" So yeah, working in Paris was a trip. Charles Wilkinson: Any place that you've got those kinds of icons like the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Trocadero, the Seine, the Baton Rouge, all that stuff, it's just incredible. The crew would frequently smirk when I'd request that we'd stage a scene against the Eiffel Tower. It's like, oh, you Americans, you're so-- you think all there is to Paris is the Eiffel Tower. My answer would be, well, should we make it look like Boise, Idaho? I mean, there are lots of places in Paris that look like Boise, Idaho, right? But the thing that looks like Paris is the Seine, Trocadero, Arc de Triomphe, the Tour d'Eiffel, all that, that's what you shoot. So I kind of held up for that, so the episode looks like we actually shot it in Paris. |
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Clip from "Double Jeopardy":
Little Known Factoids: Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): "Double Jeopardy" has kind of a checkered broadcast history. It was the lost episode of Highlander for a while. Toward the end of filming season four, we got the word that the budget was going to be cut for season five, and instead of our usual twenty-two episodes, we'd only be able to film eighteen. And after a great deal of consultation, what we decided to do was instead having a season of twenty-two episodes and following it the next year with a season of eighteen, we would pull two episodes from season four and save them for season five, so it would be two years of twenty episodes each. One of the episodes that was moved was the season finale, "One Minute to Midnight", so instead of having the season finale spread over two weeks, we aired the first part and we had a summer-long cliffhanger and you didn't get the second half until the next season. And the other episode that was moved was "Double Jeopardy" because it was a free-standing episode. It wasn't really connected to any of the ongoing storylines and it didn't need to air in a particular order, so it was saved and it aired during the Paris section of season five, even though it had been filmed with season four. |
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Clip from "Till Death":
Gillian Horvath (Associate Creative Consultant): "Till Death", while it definitely qualifies as one of the comedy episodes, is as romantic as it is funny. It's not so much a belly slapper as it is just a really sweet love story.
Clip from "Till Death":
The fact that no one dies in it, basically. They say that about Shakespeare, that the difference between his comedies and his tragedies are whether everybody dies at the end. With Highlander episodes, it tends to be the same way. If nobody's head comes off, it qualifies as a comedy episode. It just has a light-hearted tone to it.
Clip from "Till Death":
Yeah, "Till Death", that was one of the comedy episodes. A couple, a married couple of Immortals, who-- they'd been together thousands of years, and he wants to rekindle the flames.
Clip from "Till Death":
We fake his death. I set up a fight with him, and I kill him, and she sees him die, and that makes her feel all the old feelings for him.
Clip from "Till Death":
I think everything's over, and then I'm hanging out on MacLeod's barge, and she swings by.
Clip from "Till Death":
Is not best pleased to see me. Yeah, that was-- I remember that as being quite a fun episode. There were some jolly things in that.
Clip from "Till Death":
Peter Wingfield: Those are the kind of lines that a writer casually throws in, and they have no idea what the implications in the fan world will be. I've been at conventions where people arrive as-- dressed as one of my sixty-eight other wives.
Clip from "Till Death":
Gillian Horvath: Director Dennis Barry did this episode for us, and he was known, really-- He's the one who introduced the fog-bound dark, drear look to Highlander. So it's a pleasure to see that he could also work in the sunlight.
Clip from "Till Death":
"Till Death", at least to me, is very funny, and we did shoot in a little bit of a different style. I was very inspired by... It's strange to say these names, of course, and some people might not be aware of it, but by Cukor, Ophüls, and Lubitsch, that had a very strange way of shooting comedy with a flowing camera, with a lot of full shots, with flowing camera from space to space, very, very wide space, not often very tight, and the rhythm is inside the shot more than created by editing and a lot of cuts.
Clip from "Till Death":
Also, the lighting was a little bit more beautiful, a little bit more agreeable. It wasn't as contrasty, it wasn't as dark, and it was a lot of fun, and it was actually almost a collective need of the Highlander life, which is like a bubble you live in for months and months, to suddenly get out of the darkness and get into comedy.
Clip from "Till Death":
I haven't done much comedy in my life, and I was a little bit worried, and my producer Ken Gord was concerned about this, and he came up to me and he gave me one piece of advice that I thought was absolutely brilliant. He said to me, "Dennis, comedy is two-shot." I didn't even know what he meant.
Clip from "Till Death":
If you have a character do something funny, the other character with him has to be in the same shot and react. His reaction is what creates the audience to laugh.
Clip from "Till Death":
If you do a close-up on what's funny and a close-up on the guy's reaction, you lose comedy. Once Ken Gord explained that to me, I was home free to almost pull it off, I hope.
Clip from "Till Death":
Peter Wingfield: To make comedy work, you have to play it deadly serious. You have to take the situations as being absolutely as real.
Clip from "Till Death":
You play comedy completely straight in order for it to work. So it wasn't that huge a shift. But the important thing in making those things work is that the situations have a grain of truth, a resonance of truth. And that the situation, whilst being in one sense absurd, is actually quite believable.
Clip from "Till Death":
I thought it cracked along quite nicely. It was a lot of fun to do those. To be able to play real, deep, dark drama in one episode and then light comedy in another. Yeah, that's a good gig. Gillian Horvath: Roger Daltrey, what a pleasure. I have to think he really liked playing Fitzcairn, because this guy's a multi-megastar. He doesn't need to come do episodes of Highlander at our low-budget rates unless he wants to. And he always wanted to.
Clip from "Till Death":
Casting Roger came from our early-- One of our early financial partners in the show was a Japanese company who thought that we should have a rock-and-roll star in every episode, and who knows, we may have well told them that that's what we were going to do at the time in order to get the money. But once they dropped out, we felt less obligated to do this. However, casting Roger was an amazing stroke of luck for us because not only was he a good actor, does he have a great kind of comic presence and an ability to sell the most outrageous concepts, lines, scenes. Something that you can't plan is that he and Adrian had sort of innate, unpracticed, comic timing together.
Clip from "Till Death":
Put them together... If you could shoot the first rehearsal, which we gradually started doing. They, from the reading at the table before we would go out to shoot, when everybody would sit around the table and read and comment about the script. You could just see that this was just like this. [snaps his fingers, alternating hands] They got it, they felt each other, they moved well together. It was one of those things you can't plan. It was just an amazing, wonderful stroke of luck, which is why we kept bringing Roger back from the dead.
When I visited the set during the filming of "Till Death", he wanted to know if he could cut his hair differently and come back and play a different character since Fitz was dead. And I reassured him that it didn't matter that Fitz was dead. We'd still be seeing lots of him, as we did.
Clip from "Till Death":
Roger had such a great chemistry with Adrian Paul that you really believed from the first moment you saw those two characters together that they had been friends for hundreds of years. |
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Clip from "Judgment Day":
Jim Byrnes ("Joe Dawson"): In "Judgment Day", it was fulfilling as an actor because-- on a couple of different levels. Number one: really got to do a lot of work. Number two: more importantly, it just kind of showed that the production company and the writers had some faith in me that I could handle it, and that I could be there at the center, tell the story and make it work.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
There was a lot of flashbacks in it, and so it really reveals sort of the relationship, where it started with MacLeod and through all these various permutations and the good things that happened, and bad things that happened. And in this, I really have to confront that I have to deal with the consequences that I have really made [laughs] a mess out of things, in terms of having stepped across that line, but for what I feel were valid and important reasons.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
Peter Wingfield ("Methos"): I think it's actually much tougher for the director than it is for us. Because once you've done half a dozen shows, you're pretty secure about how it all works. And a director can come in with a vision of how to make that show his own, to give it a style, and be completely helpless because you're in there just doing your schtick. You know, Adrian's doing his stuff, Stan's doing his, Lizzie's doing hers. We have this dynamic already. It's actually tough as a director to come in and do one episode and shine in any way, which is of course what the director is interested in doing.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
It had a good time shooting the show because Gérard Hameline, who directed the episode, shot it in a very filmic sort of European filmic way. Much-- It really didn't look like ordinary television in lots and lots of places. And it was fun to use that-- the off-kilter, the skewed, the dreamlike world; they're all of a sudden dealing with all this reality in this very sort of surreal atmosphere. Gérard took the time to spend time with me and really talk about the script and talk about the character, and the faith that he showed in me as well, and just the respect he gave me as an actor, I think helped pull out some more stuff performance-wise in places I might not have gone without the sort of support that they gave me in that situation.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
Clip from "Judgment Day":
Peter Wingfield: I wanted there to be a difference between Methos and Adam. I thought Adam was a kind of a bookish, a very, very soft, very gentle, almost a nerdy sort of character. And, you know, I look at that episode and actually he was ever so slightly camp as well.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
There was quite a different feel to him.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
Jim Byrnes: As an actor, it's about-- To me, it's once again, it's about the immediacy of the emotion, and my communication of what my feelings and what I'm trying to express to MacLeod or to the judges or to the tribunal or to my old friend, Jesse, it's about that moment. It's not about all this for me [makes expansive movement with his arms], and it's great in the long run when you get the great looks of picture. And that's why I'm on this side of the camera, because I don't have that same vision. For me, it is about that moment. And so I don't mind working that way. In "Judgment Day", in fact, I enjoyed working that way. That we were able to really get to the nitty gritty and stay with it and be right there and be focused and look you in the eye and say what you needed to say.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
Peter Wingfield: In the "Judgment Day" episode, there is a point where MacLeod and Joe are both being tried by a group of Watchers for their lives, for the treason of speaking to each other. And Methos has this idea of how to get them out, how to plead their case in front of the jury. And because there was quite a distinction between Methos and Adam, it allowed-- it gave me something that I could play that would-- that sort of gelled with the idea of, he wouldn't go in there with all guns blazing and try and beat people up and rescue his two buddies. He would just, he would be subtler and smarter about it, and he gives this impassioned speech about how so much knowledge will be lost if you don't let people like Joe go with their heart.
Clip from "Judgment Day":
It's actually a really nice, really nice moment, and it's totally useless because they convict them anyway and they take them out there and they put their gun against Joe's head... and then the real bad guy mows 'em all down. |
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Clip from "One Minute to Midnight":
Roger Bellon (Composer): "One Minute to Midnight" was an interesting show from the flashback standpoint, because there was a gypsy sort of flamenco aspect to the flashback, which was fun to do, and which found itself back into the present. The interesting part about doing this style of music is that it's rare to be able to get a chance to do flamenco or even gypsy music, because there's not a lot of shows that call for having gypsy music in it. So in order to do that and to tie it to a dramatic aspect of what's going on, allows you to take that style of music and not just write sort of a flamenco piece, but you're actually taking the flamenco style and tying it to the dramatic aspect of the show. So you have to make the flamenco music work to what's going on in the characters, but more importantly, to tell the emotional story of what needs to be told in the scene. The reason that there's music in movies and television and commercials and anything you want-- Music only serves one purpose and one purpose alone. It's to convey emotion. And if you notice, when you're watching a film, when music comes in, it's to heighten an emotion, to tell the emotion, to change the emotion. So when you're watching Highlander, the reason why the music is there is to either heighten the emotion of the scene or to tell a different emotion. A composer has the choice of either writing music to what's going on in front of you to actually underlining what you're seeing, if it's an action sequence and the guys are fighting and things are going on all directions. Does the composer choose to write fast music to go with that or does the composer choose to write music that goes completely against that and tells a different story? And what that will do is have a different emotional impact on the viewer. Now the viewers aren't aware of this, but the music tends to help them along through the movie and help the film maker tell the story that he or she wants in a more personal way.
Clip from "One Minute to Midnight":
Jim Byrnes ("Joe Dawson"): "One Minute to Midnight" immediately follows "Judgment Day". There is turmoil at the heart of the entire Watchers organization. But it's inevitable. It's change, it's evolution. And I think that it's really, when you look at the big picture, when you look at nature, when you look at human relationships, there come those times when there is going to be a great rending and things have to be cleaned out. And it's not always a pretty situation. It's not always swept neatly away.
Clip from "One Minute to Midnight":
Things break down and things explode and things fall apart and some things are never recovered.
Clip from "One Minute to Midnight":
My character is going through the situation in "Judgment Day" on to "One Minute to Midnight". I have to deal with reality. And this is the reality that we've created and I have to find a way to live with it.
Clip from "One Minute to Midnight":
Roger Bellon: When we come back into the present, the director actually shot the actor sitting down with a guitar playing it. But what the guitar player is playing is just nothing. He's just strumming a guitar. The job of the composer then is to have to put the music on top of that afterwards. And in this case, because you actually saw the actor strumming the guitar in a certain tempo with his fingers changing on the neck, that poses a particular problem for the composer, because the music that is added afterwards has to not only be in the tempo that he's playing, but has to match the hand movements. So in order to make it plausible, it has to be, like, perfect. Like the guy's really playing it. So in writing music for film, in these situations where you have people playing on screen that you have to match to it, the musicians are not watching the person playing on screen. The composer actually has to graph it all out in musical terms on a piece of paper, so that when it's conducted and it's all done, it all matches. And that's sort of a strange challenge sometimes. And I have to say that in specific cases, great directors, unless they really want it, will not shoot anybody playing anything because they realize what a problem it can be afterwards. And there are some cases in a movie where you need that, and invariably what happens is they'll have a musician on the stage or some type of music supervisor with the music already played back on a tape recorder, something that's playing the music back while the actor's actually trying, not necessarily to play the music, but to make the movements in the right tempo. |
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