Highlander
Transcripts:
DVD Extras
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Highlander |
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(from 2005 U.S./Canada DVD set)
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Clip from "Avatar" (opening 'previously on' montage):
David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): "Avatar", of course, is the natural extension of "Archangel". MacLeod has been forced into a corner by the demon and has inadvertently killed Richie.
Clip from "Avatar" (opening 'previously on' montage):
In a sense, we see the demon succeeding. MacLeod withdraws from the world to a monastery in Kuala Lumpur--
Clip from "Avatar":
--and for a year, tries to understand what happened to him, meditates, practices martial arts, and in a sense, has to recover. He abandons everybody he knew and cared about in the outside world -- Joe, Methos.
Clip from "Avatar":
But, in a sense, he hasn't really abandoned them. He's gone-- That's certainly what they think, but he's gone off to try and prepare himself to face this evil. In a sense, this was not a show one had to research. What we realized, and what I realized, though, was that we were really writing, in many ways at this point, a supernatural show.
Clip from "Avatar" (opening 'previously on' montage):
It had elements of, oh, The Exorcist, and God knows what in it. But certainly, the rules had changed. We had a demon who could make the dead walk, who could bring people back to life, who had near-godlike forces. And it was, in many ways, immensely more powerful than MacLeod could possibly hope to be.
Clip from "Avatar":
The only way MacLeod could face and had a hope of defeating this demon was by using the power of good in some way. In a sense, this is really uncharted territory, but we were really lucky, in that Dennis Berry was directing the episode and had a great sense of how to use horror elements, and there were certainly a number of those in the show.
Clip from "Avatar" (opening 'previously on' montage):
I think we had a great choice in casting the role of Sophie Baines, a young girl who dies early on in the episode, and is brought back to life and has to face the fact that she is really dead and that the demon has offered her a chance at regaining her life if she'll only help him defeat MacLeod.
Clip from "Avatar":
Through her knowing about the force of MacLeod's goodness, or recognizing it, she realizes she can't help the demon defeat MacLeod, and returns to death.
Clip from "Avatar":
And in fact, choosing that over accepting this evil offer.
Clip from "Avatar":
Hal Beckett (Composer): In sixth season, what we did... Because Roger had written so much great music for the show, we cataloged and organized all his music. And for sixth season, it was decided to reuse some of the music that Roger had written.
Clip from "Avatar":
So a lot of the scenes that you see in season six use Roger's music that may have been written, or that was written, for other scenes in previous episodes in previous seasons. So the approach we took was that wherever we could use Roger's music, where it was appropriate, we did.
Clip from "Avatar":
So I had to... Again, because we had-- all his music was cataloged -- I was able to go back and find music that I felt was suitable for the scene.
Clip from "Avatar":
I treated it as if I was composing the scene and thought, if I was going to write music for that scene, what would I write? How would I treat it? And then I'd go to the archive and look for a piece of music that Roger had written that sort of fit my sense of what music should be in that scene.
Clip from "Avatar":
But of course in every story and every show, you can't always track it with existing music. There's always unique situations, like Roger Daltrey playing the clarinet, like a demon with a beautiful vocalese behind it, like, you know, Rossini's "Thieving Magpie". There's always going to be unique situations in every show that need to be scored. So what I ended up doing was cutting in Roger's music wherever I could, and then Don Paonessa and I would decide what scenes needed new treatment, that didn't exist in the archive and needed to be scored originally. And so I got the opportunity to write those scenes, and again, very thrilling for me to be able to do that. It was a lot of fun.
Clip from "Avatar":
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Jim Byrnes ("Joe Dawson"): "Armageddon" -- we were dealing with the devil himself, you know. And, in fact, it's really-- "Archangel", "Avatar" and "Armageddon" are a trilogy. I mean, almost, they're almost like a movie if you put them all together.
Clip from "Avatar":
When we finally got to doing "Armageddon", once again, David A. phoned and said, "Listen, we've got this... We want to do this sort of 'temptation of Christ' scene. Are you up for it?" thinking I might say, "Well, no, it's just getting too down and dirty inside myself." But I thought, "No, let's go for it."
Clip from "Armageddon":
So they wrote what I think is a great scene, but what really makes it work was, you know, Peter Hudson, who played my brother-in-law, James Horton -- a terrific individual, a terrific actor, and a very, became a good friend. And we had one afternoon, we just sat down over a pint of beer and talked about the scene. And we made a couple of little adjustments to it, but just to give it the emotional depth that we, that I hope we were able to put into it.
Clip from "Armageddon":
I started out in the theater, I didn't start out in television, and I love theatricality, and I love theatrically trained actors, and I love working with actors who know what to do on stage and who have those-- have that technique, and Peter's got it in spades, and so just to have him to work with, to provide that, just that evil, but the quiet, modulated tones, the little smile on the face, the dismissive glances, and it's so beautifully encapsulated there.
Clip from "Armageddon":
Richard Martin was directing, and we had a closed set, and luckily, you know, we'd all been-- everyone on the cast and crew had really been working together a lot, and we all trusted one another and knew one another well enough to really... because, you know, you're exposing yourself emotionally in a way that you really-- usually is something you only do with yourself, and to do it with a whole bunch of people around can be a little bit intimidating.
Clip from "Armageddon":
If you're going to do it, you can't do it halfway. You have to really go for it and find that thing, and that's why the conversation that we'd had with Peter, and, you know -- just imagine that the impossible happened and this unbelievable dream, and what would you, in fact, give?
Clip from "Armageddon":
I don't know that I would have made the same decision that Joe Dawson did, because boy, would be sweet to be able to put your toes in the sand at the beach. And so you imagine it, and make it real, and [snaps his fingers] taken away from you, because you've got something more important to believe in.
Clip from "Armageddon":
When we finished, it was like, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" And I was okay. I mean, I cried real tears, but I was okay, I was fine. Because, I mean, I live with it every day of my life. And to imagine for that moment that you could have back what you lost... But the truth will out, and the truth is, it's not to be. So it was very good for me, just emotionally on a certain level. nd I think it's good for people to see that. I think it's good to not hide it, and not hide those emotions, and let people feel them. And by feeling them, you're washed clean, in a way.
Clip from "Armageddon":
Hal Beckett (Composer): In the episode "Armageddon", there was one cue, particularly, that sticks out in my mind, and it was a vocalese that I wrote. And... very passionate, if I do say so myself, beautiful melodic line sung by a singer by the name of Tania Hancheroff. She did a beautiful job on it.
Clip from "Armageddon":
The vocalese theme was used first of all in the confessional scene in the church. And then we reprised it in the scene where Ahriman comes and visits Joe and offers Joe his legs back. And, very dramatic scene, and Jim Byrnes did a fantastic job, obviously, on that scene. It's very gripping. And I had to be very careful of how I was going to treat that scene musically.
Clip from "Armageddon":
This vocalese played against the scene very, very nicely, and it's one of those instances where music playing against the action -- I mean, in counter to the action as opposed to working with the action -- worked very well. I mean, you might look at that scene and think, well, it should have dramatic, demonic music because he's being tempted by the devil. It's a classic Faustian scene.
Clip from "Armageddon":
Yet with this beautiful aria playing, it almost gave the demon Ahriman this god-like omnipotent quality, and to the preposterous offer that he was making Joe to betray Mac. So again, another scene that I really enjoyed scoring and will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Clip from "Armageddon":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Well, this one was interesting for me because what I looked at it as, was the clarity of light and dark [hold up his right hand and then his left hand]. And the sense that there is-- you have to be very clear. When you have light, there should be no shadow and no-- nothing standing in your way; whereas in this part here [motions with his left hand], you have a lot of things obscuring your view. So your mind and your soul had to be very clean and cleansed.
Clip from "Armageddon":
It was a question of not having an opinion on stuff, and trying to make MacLeod not-- to clear away all his opinions from the past, to clear away his aggressiveness, to clear away emotions that he had.
Clip from "Armageddon":
The idea was that in another dimension, the fight happened on a spiritual level, and when I was fighting Ahriman, there was on a spiritual level within my mind, and so that the mind had to be clear.
Clip from "Armageddon":
Through martial arts, I decided to actually create or work on the Chi Gung aspect of martial arts and create a form that would be able to be used as a shadow boxing.
Clip from "Armageddon":
It worked really interestingly because we actually choreographed moves that were moves that were fighting techniques, but that we did them in such a way that he would miss, and then I would hit him, and then he would, you know, it would be a constant movement that was a non-combative movement that took away his energy and dissipated the aggression that he had, and be very non-emotive, and seeing what he wanted to see at that point that he needed to be at, so that he could be clear enough and spiritual enough to fight this demon that was inside him. |
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Clip from "Sins of the Father":
Adrian Paul (Actor): "Sins of the Father", I wasn't in very much. I saw a lot of the dailies in it. I remember one thing, and it was watching the Quickening with Dara Tomanovich. And one of the things in it was like, what she was going to wear in the actual Quickening itself.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
There was a big discussion at the end, because she had no bra on, and they had this water, and it looked like a wet t-shirt competition, after she's doing the Quickening like this. [holds his arms out to the sides]
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
Not to say that I was disappointed watching the dailies on that, but I think the higher ups, as they were, thought they weren't going to be able to show that on regular television.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
I think MacLeod, playing MacLeod, was who he was in that last season, which was a guy that was a little less aggressive than he was in the previous seasons. However, the storylines really didn't support any through-line throughout the season. They were all separate shows, so they were really a little disjointed.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
I don't think that this show, "Sins of the Father", really determined anything to do with how MacLeod was played in the last season. It was a show that basically was to target the female Immortal for the spin-off, really.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
James Thorpe (Writer): In writing the women for the sixth season of Highlander -- the Immortal women -- each of the later episodes, like "Sins of the Father", was in some sense a screen test, a trial run. The characters that we wrote, those last few episodes, we were looking to find the character that would become the spin-off character, the one who would become Raven.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
I don't think it altered the way I wrote; I think it altered the way the scripts were read by the producers, because they were looking for something at the same time. Each of us was feeling our way towards what would become the Raven character. When you write a character, you write a character, whether it's for one purpose or another, whatever you do needs to be true to the character.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
So in writing those episodes, there was a little bit of an ulterior creative sense, ulterior motive in developing the characters, and we were sort of feeling our way towards what would eventually become the Raven character.
Clip from "Sins of the Father":
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Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
James Thorpe (Writer): Season six was the first season I was actually on staff. So when you're on staff, the staff comes up with the stories as a group, as a whole. So you're basically one brain. So when we were given the challenge to come up with stories that didn't feature Adrian so prominently, we, you know, we all get in a room, we hunker down, and we spitball. And with David in charge, we always came up with an idea that was great.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
In "Diplomatic Immunity", I think I was just dealing with the actors that were around me, and I don't think I was dealing a lot with his character. The only thing I was really dealing with when I was working on it was the fact that he... I was trying to be very specific about not being the MacLeod of old, which is very easy to do.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
But there's still an element of who he was from the past, but that he has a much more clarity of mind. Instead of grabbing somebody now, he was much more into... He was trying to engage them mentally rather than physically, if that makes sense.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
He was, you know, in a position where he was... If he says, "Okay, let's go," he would just say, "Let's go," instead of grabbing somebody and saying, "Let's go," which is the old MacLeod. So that's where the difference was in his physicalities.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
"Diplomatic Immunity" was a sixth season episode where we had Adrian for less days per episode than usual, so he couldn't figure as prominently in the script. So the challenge to the staff was to come up with a show that would, you know, honor the Highlander world, franchise, and yet still be Adrian-light, if you will.
[with a grin] Duncan-light.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
So we came up with this character who was an immortal shyster and would run these scams.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
Of course it goes horribly wrong.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
This happy-go-lucky, kind of wacky little guy is suddenly this monster out for revenge.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
It was not as dark as Highlander usually is, but there were still elements in it, where this cute little guy basically turns ugly and becomes a killer.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
Well, we never begin a script without an outline. There's always an outline. And that's usually fifteen single-spaced pages.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
By the time you've done the outline and are ready to go to script, any problems that-- most problems that would have come up in script can be dealt with in the outline. It's always easier to rewrite fifteen pages than it is sixty pages.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
The approach was not any different in the sense that I was actually looking at him in a slightly different point of view. That he was, you know, a slightly different character. I think if there were-- if some of the other shows had happened prior, I would have approached them slightly differently than what I've done -- MacLeod of Season 1 or Season 2.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
Writing is always painful, especially for me, because it's always a confrontational moment when you begin.
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
For me, it's always about fear, actually. The way I approach any new project, especially a writing project, is fear, is that I'm somehow going to be inadequate to the task, and this next script is the script where they're all going to catch on. That up till now, I've been a fraud and a phony. And, you know, I've faked it up till now, but this is the one where they're going to go, "Ah, you know, sorry. We caught you. Goodbye."
Clip from "Diplomatic Immunity":
You know, once I get into the script, and once I get into the characters, and the pages start to come, it's fine. I blaze through it, and after it's done, I can look at it and say, you know, 'that's a good job', or 'that's a pretty good job', or, you know, or 'I need to start that again'. But every project's like that. |
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Clip from "Patient Number 7":
David Abramowitz (Creative Consultant): The first thing you try to do with an episode, I think, is not make a stinker and to create a story that works and to have it play. This story didn't have a-- We had lots of episodes that didn't have a great immortal question. I thought that technically this episode really worked. The difference with this episode and other episodes are you could have taken this episode and dropped it on La Femme Nikita and it would have been a great La Femme Nikita episode. There was nothing that made it singularly a Highlander episode, but I still think it was a good episode. I still think it played, it paced. I think Tynan wrote a good script. It was the box, it was the box of the episode, and I think after all the years that you do a show, some of the episodes are going to play better than others, and some of the episodes are going to be about Talmudic questions, you know, like how long do you have to keep a promise or what's the difference between honor and vanity. But I wasn't good enough or bright enough to do that every week. What happens when you're writing shows like these is you come up with an idea that works and you want to bow down on your knees and go "Thank you God, thank you God, you gave me one. I can get rid of another one now." Because you just try to get the job done and you're under incredible time pressure, because every seven days, every seven shooting days, every week and a half, you need another fifty-five-page script, and that machine keeps turning. And sometimes you come up with great ideas and sometimes you just rely on execution. This one was, this one was a very well-executed piece of material. It wasn't nearly as bad as some of the stinkers we had, or some of the attempts at comedy like "The Ransom of Richie Redstone" -- or the "Richard Redstone" -- or "The Zone" or some of the other woofers we put on. Hal Beckett (Composer / Music Editor): Don came up with this great idea of "The Thieving Magpie" by Rossini which was, you might remember that piece from A Clockwork Orange. On the surface, it's a very light, fluffy orchestral piece, little waltz. It's really, like again on the surface, not much to it.
Clip from "Patient Number 7":
But you dig a little bit deeper, and there's this warped quirky angle to it, which is, I think, why-- one of the reasons it ended up in A Clockwork Orange.
Clip from "Patient Number 7":
And again, it worked because it was in a historical flashback again and there was this tongue-in-cheek love scene in bed with-- full of double entendres about the size of swords, and it was a sword comparison and we put this music from Rossini's "Thieving Magpie" behind it.
Clip from "Patient Number 7":
Now, it wasn't a lift. What I had to do with that is go back to the original operatic score of Rossini and transcribe the orchestration and to be able to realize it with orchestral samples, and of course then arrange the music to fit the scene. It's not-- you can't just take a piece of music and cut it in and expect that it's going to work with the scene. It needs to be molded and changed, and following the action and the comedic notes within the scene. So I got to do that with Rossini's music, which was again a lot of fun to do and very satisfying.
Sometimes it was harder in the sixth season because we only had Adrian for a set number of days. He could only work a set number of days, so you had to work the script and work the show around the star's availability and that sometimes was difficult. You have to understand that no one sits there and says, "Let's do an average show." You spend the same amount of time. Part of you says, "Let's make something that works." And then you hope that it's great. Every script that we put out, we thought 'magic can hit this one.' At least, every script that BEGAN, we thought 'magic can hit this one.' But you never know. No one gave up, in any of the years. I won't comment on Adrian's performance in the last year. Was he tired? Did he want to go on to something else? Maybe all of that's possible, but I certainly can't judge him, you know. He began to think, "I'm a star." Which is what he thought. And he was a star. And he was a star in this world, and he was a star in the world of Highlander. What happens for all of us is we think that this is the way it is, therefore this is the way it's always going to be. And we caught a great role with Highlander. You know, it was a great pleasure to work on. It was a great struggle, and that it worked for all those episodes and all those years are testimony to Adrian, Bill Panzer, and the writers. |
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Richard Martin (Director): In the "Black Tower", the fantasy was that it was, you know, in one set. That's what they said. We know, Richard, it's very big, but it's all in one location, which was an office tower. I said, well, yes, it's in the basement parking lot of the office tower. It's in this stairwell and that stairwell and the foyer, and the second floor, and the fourth floor, and over here and there, and everything, so it's actually quite a lot of moving around. Yes, we never had to move across town, but getting around an office building can be pretty tricky, too.
Clip from "Black Tower":
It was kind of a monumental situation, because it was the last of the Highlander series, and it was kind of a very emotional time, and it had its lightness and everything.
Clip from "Black Tower":
"Black Tower" is quite different from "Valkyrie" because it's kind of this Action Jackson wall-to-wall action show. So, it doesn't quite have the kind of moral dilemmas and that kind of writing. It's a very different show, but a good lark, lot of fun.
Clip from "Black Tower":
I felt very much a part of the family in the Highlander thing. I think I brought a little bit of freshness to it in the fifth season, maybe, you know, things were getting a little bit predictable. And I think I brought a little spark to the whole situation, which I think people really appreciated. And I got some good scripts, some solid stories, some great cast, and, you know, living in Paris and doing that kind of thing, it was just a marvelous life experience for me.
Clip from "Black Tower":
Adrian had a slightly different kind of attitude in a lot of season six. Had just come on the heels of the controversial killing of Richie and things were changing and it was time for-- to move on. And so all the-- every episode kind of was leading up to that, you know, moving on, where the Highlander was going to go into the mist and into myth, basically.
Clip from "Black Tower":
It was a challenge. And I'd done some action features. And so we just had to really approach it carefully on our schedule. It was the only time I ever had a twelve-page day. And if you know in television, like six to eight pages, and a twelve-page day is quite substantial. And so I just had to go through. I spent three days in prep at the location, just wandering around it all day, plotting with the kind of the moves, like a military operation. And then it paid off. We were able to move and keep it moving and finish it. Or we'd still be there shooting it. [chuckles] |
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Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
Adrian Paul (Actor): Well, "Unusual Suspects" was probably one of my favorite epi-- well, it WAS my favorite episode in year six, because it was so different, and working with Roger was always so much fun, that it lightened everything up for the last season. And it gave us the chance to really kind of play, you know, real comedy. Working with Roger is easy. I mean, separating him from being The Who, I couldn't do it anymore because, you know, I knew who Roger was. And to a point, he WAS Fitzcairn. Roger-- there are certain elements of Fitzcairn that are definitely in Roger Daltrey. And that's great to see because of who he is. And, you know, the things that we found in that episode... I mean, sometimes I think we were laughing harder in watching the actual take that day than we did in dailies, or in the actual show itself, because we were having a laugh making it.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
First, I have enormous admiration for Roger Daltrey. I am a great Who fan, and he still sings with great chops. He's a normal guy who happens to be a rock star, and also happens to be a pretty damn good actor. Roger Daltrey showed enormous comic flair. Such that I think that Adrian actually got a little jealous, because Roger's sense of comic timing was just amazing. He could play a bumbling idiot with the best of them, that Adrian decided that he wanted to play the bumbling idiot too, and trip a couple times, and do these pratfalls.
If there was any competition between Roger and I, it was always between the characters. And that's what made it work, was that, you know, "okay, he's doing that role, you know, I won't get upstaged by that," as MacLeod or as Fitzcairn. And that's where we would play off of each other; if there was an upstaging, it was between characters, not between actors.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
Hal Beckett (Composer / Music Editor): We have Roger Daltrey, who was entertaining his friends in his mansion, in the parlor of his mansion, and Roger played clarinet. So what we wrote was a-- I took an old nursery rhyme about a bumblebee, and set it to sort of a 1920s jazz flavor, and we've got a small combo, and did a pre-record on that. And the whole idea of pre-recording is recording with the band first, and then that's played back on set for the actors to mime to.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
Roger was mimeing beautifully to the track that Tom Colclough played. But his wife had poisoned the reed in the clarinet. And so as he's playing this fabulous cadenza and reaching the top, all of a sudden he chokes and falls down in a heap and dies.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
And to pre-plan out how the music was going to arc and peak, and then how the clarinet melodic line was going to disintegrate and fall apart as somebody's choking and couldn't breathe anymore. And so all that had to be planned out ahead of time before cameras rolled. And so that was a lot of fun to do that.
We always improv-ed. Roger and I always -- we were like me and Stan. We found that some of the best stuff happened when we did improv. I always have this vision of Roger being in that suit of armor, you know, when I was actually talking to him in the suit of armor, and then when he'd fall down the stairs in the suit of armor and trying to pick him up, it was just...
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
And pulling him by the leg. That was all improv. A lot of the pulling by the leg and stuff, you know, dragging him off. And Dennis Barry, I think, directed that and he had a ball directing this. I was always seeing him in there going-- [makes quiet snickering noises] He was always chuckling like a little bear in the corner watching the monitor.
"Unusual Suspects" was a lot of fun. Roger Daltrey was very, very, very fun to work with. And the style is different, because the way you move the camera is more based on something that-- you stage comedy inside of frame instead of trying to find comedy through a lot of editing and cuts. Whereas when you do dark... dark kind of introspective moments, where a man is going into a church to find out from a priest if he's going nuts or not, or he finds out the priest is evil and he has to kill him, you then have to move in closer, do more tilted shots, do kind of like below shots where the person is bigger than life, with wide lens that crush people from a set here. It has to be more like the set is a backing that you always have to see and people are moving into it and reacting in kind of like a theatrical way, moment to moment to moment.
Roger was magic as the bumbler and as Fitzcairn, and as a kind of character who you loved, who was an imp, he was an elfin creature. He was such-- he was so incredible in everything that he did.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
Anytime Roger stepped in an episode, you knew the episode was going to be fun. And the only comedies we did that worked were episodes that Roger Daltrey was in. And that was because of Roger Daltrey, it was not because the writing. The writing staff was the same, everything was the same, but Roger was different. He had an ability for the audience to look at him and have him play the fool, have him play the guy who thinks he's King Kong and really is a mouse, but he's a mouse who believes he's King Kong. He just has great chops and he's a great comic actor.
Clip from "Unusual Suspects":
I don't know where it came from, because I know he didn't train as an actor, but somehow he got the chops and he was great for us, forever he was great for us.
That was a great episode to do. |
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Clip from "Justice":
Donna Lettow (Assistant Creative Consultant): Of the spin-off episodes, "Justice", I think, is my favorite because Duncan's not an observer, as he is in some of the other spin-off episodes. That there is this parallel theme of Duncan basically losing his own child -- or in his case, killing his own child with Richie -- so that it plays into the whole arc that was going through season six of him trying to distance himself from the world and putting away the sword and that sort of thing, so that his relationship with Katya made it seem more like a show about Duncan with a really strong guest star. Hal Beckett (Composer / Music Editor): A lot of the scenes that you see in season six use Roger's music that may have been written, or that was written, for other scenes in previous episodes in previous seasons.
Clip from "Justice":
So the approach we took was that wherever we could use Roger's music, where it was appropriate, we did. So I had to... Again, because we had-- all his music was cataloged -- I was able to go back and find music that I felt was suitable for the scene.
Clip from "Justice":
But of course in every story and every show, you can't always track it with existing music. There's always unique situations, like Roger Daltrey playing the clarinet, like a demon with a beautiful vocalese behind it, like, you know, Rossini's "Thieving Magpie". There's always going to be unique situations in every show that need to be scored.
Clip from "Justice":
So what I ended up doing was cutting in Roger's music wherever I could, and then Don Paonessa and I would decide what scenes needed new treatment, that didn't exist in the archive and needed to be scored originally. And so I got the opportunity to write those scenes, and again, very thrilling for me to be able to do that. It was a lot of fun. Donna Lettow: The overall search for what I termed the spin-off chick was difficult because we were looking for such a unique combination. I mean, we needed a good actress, but a good actress with physicality, who not only could move -- I mean, she didn't have to be a sword expert, but she had to be able to move -- who didn't look silly with a sword. And it's funny, but a lot of women -- and a lot of men, really -- you put a sword in their hand and it just doesn't look natural.
Clip from "Justice":
Then the parallel problem was: and then what kind of character can hold her own show? What can we create? And the first two that we did -- "Sins of the Father" was sort of, well, biker bitch from hell. And "Patient Number Seven" was, she was a bodyguard, so she came with a certain amount of outside physical strength. For the third one, we tapped into a different kind of strength. More possibly specifically female strength, which is the mother's passion and the mother's love.
Clip from "Justice":
For the purposes of the one episode, I think it worked well. I don't think that could have been turned into a series, because at the end of the episode she opens a private detective agency? I mean, she can't be avenging her daughter's death every week. |
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Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
Bill Panzer (Executive Producer): When we really believed that Highlander was winding down, primarily because Adrian thought this was time to stretch a little bit before he became known forever and forever as the Highlander. He thought it was time to take a look at some other avenues of creative expression.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
Okay, what are we going to do now, he said? And we thought about a way of spinning the show off with a female character. And we were using various women during this short season as kind of like screen tests to see if there was somebody that we felt would be right for the next show, The Raven.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
I don't think it altered the way I wrote; I think it altered the way the scripts were read by the producers, because they were looking for something at the same time. Each of us was feeling our way towards what would become the Raven character. When you write a character, you write a character, whether it's for one purpose or another, whatever you do needs to be true to the character.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
We were looking to find the character that would become the spin-off character, the one who would become Raven. So in writing those episodes, there was a little bit of an ulterior creative sense, ulterior motive in developing the characters, and we were sort of feeling our way towards what would eventually become the Raven character.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
I think it's possible that it did affect how we perceived the shows. Because you were certainly concerned with telling a good, traditional Highlander story.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
I mean, we would come up with a character who was a character, like every other episode, and once we decided what the immortal female character of that episode, who she was, then she was that for the episode. I mean, it's sort of-- any new character you come up with, you define the parameters of the character, how they fit inside the story, and then you keep them consistent within that story.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
We didn't have Adrian in all the episodes, and so the focus would kind of shift toward the woman as a-- not just as a lead in the show, but as a prospective lead in the spin-off for the following season.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
When an actor actually brings more to the words than was on the page, it's a quality of the actor. And our regulars were always outstanding and could be depended upon to deliver anything. It's just that when you write a guest character, you're not always sure who they're going to cast, who you're going to get, especially when you're casting {on a bureau}.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
Watch the dailies that come back from the shoot, and you hear your words being spoken. It's something more than you ever imagined and more profound than you ever imagined, and it just blows you away. It's a gift, actually, for a writer.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
I'm not sure that it didn't get things a little unbalanced and make for less of a traditional Highlander season. Somehow I think that the woman issue overshadowed what I thought for the most part were good stories. But you take Adrian out of the show and it becomes something completely different.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
I don't think we had anything to work toward. Every episode that was in some way a preview or a test of the Raven scenario, we would be feeling our way closer toward the end goal. But it's not like we knew really where we were going with the character or the relationship.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
If that's a shift in focus, if-- whatever that was, I don't think we anticipated that his absence would have as strong an effect as it did on the audience and on us.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
This was another year of employment, so I loved the idea. I thought the spin-off was a great idea.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
Working on Highlander, I think was the-- is still my best working experience in town. It was a great way to start. It was also the worst way to start, because it spoiled me for everything that came afterwards. And the things I've worked on since then have not been as spectacular as Highlander, and not just in the final product, but in the whole working relationship, the way that a writer is allowed to work and inspired to work, and it was just incredible.
Clip from "Deadly Exposure":
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Clip from "Two of Hearts":
James Thorpe (Writer): "Two of Hearts" is, what I would say is the closest we came to an audition show for Raven, in that it had a mortal man and an immortal woman, and they were in a relationship, and the woman's immortal history would bring her into conflict with the mortal policeman, and he wouldn't understand her motivation. She wouldn't understand his motivations. There'd be conflict, there'd be some sexual heat, and so it worked out-- for what it was, it worked out very well.
Clip from "Two of Hearts":
Some people say that this show is kind of like Moonlighting meets Highlander. You know, I guess there's a little truth to that. Our intention -- and I thought this was a very neat idea -- that as opposed to MacLeod and Tessa in the early days of Highlander, where, yes, they were in love and, yes, they had fun together and, yes, she knew his secret... here, the whole thing was a lighter tone, a lot more banter between the mortal and immortal character. I mean, that was the intent for The Raven, and it did come from this episode.
Clip from "Two of Hearts":
We thought that, as opposed to trying to replace Adrian with another MacLeod -- even a younger MacLeod -- was not fair to us, you, and especially not fair to Adrian, because he was such a unique powerful force for six years that just to say, well we yank him out, we throw somebody else in and everybody will go along with it. We didn't want to do that and that's why we chose this path.
Every episode that was in some way a preview or a test of the Raven scenario, we would be feeling our way closer toward the end goal. But it's not like we knew really where we were going with the character or the relationship.
Clip from "Two of Hearts":
Working on Highlander, I think was the-- is still my best working experience in town. It was a great way to start. It was also the worst way to start, because it spoiled me for everything that came afterwards. And the things I've worked on since then have not been as spectacular as Highlander, and not just in the final product, but in the whole working relationship, the way that a writer is allowed to work and inspired to work, and it was just incredible. |
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Clip from "Indiscretions":
Jim Byrnes ("Joe Dawson"): "Indiscretions" was a great amount of fun. It was the last thing that was ever shot. We shot sort of out of order, and Adrian and we had said our goodbyes, and he was off to his life.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
There was a real difference on this set because Adrian was quite a presence, and he was the star of the show. And not to have, you know, that sort of -- there was always a certain amount of focus that went his way, no matter what story we were telling or what we were shooting. He was always on everyone's mind. And so, him not being there just really did change kind of the tone of things on the set. A little more -- we got a little more anarchic, I think.
There was a very surreal quality to -- I mean, really, to the whole second half of that. It was season six. The show was ending. Everyone knew this was the final episode. Adrian wasn't part of it. He'd finished shooting a couple of weeks before. It was Jim and I, in Paris, shooting what became a road movie.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
The road movie aspect to it is just fantastic. Once we get in that car, and we're on the road, it was just-- Oh, we had so much fun.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
We were zipping around in traffic. I had a big replica gun, but man, it looked real. And Peter didn't have a driver's license, and we're driving around in Paris. If we had been pulled over, it would have been a pretty bizarre situation.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
Pete and I had a great time. We had established over the years of doing the show, I think, really a tremendous rapport, our characters had.
Clips from "Indiscretions":
There was great mutual respect and love. But they also kind of got at each other and nagged, and they were kind of edgy and bitchy with each other. But there was a great strength and solidity to that relationship.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
Incredible amount of revelation about the guy's character and where he had been and what he had done. And Joe is a pretty devious character and is good at keeping things hid, until they're just dragged down to the open. And you know, okay, yeah, this is the truth. This is the truth. So it was fun to find out, to find those things to drag out into the open and put in the light of the day and see what they look like.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
The frustration that Joe always felt, that here was this guy that I knew from hanging around in Paris drinking beer with and being kind of a pal, and all of a sudden he's been pulling the wool over my eyes for all this time I've known him. And he's this incredible individual that I still remember as being my little drinking body. And so there's always that constant sort of banter going on because he knew how to push my buttons and I sort of knew how to push his buttons, both character-wise and in our own relationship that we had off screen as well.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
It was a good solid story. I felt I understood where it came from, what it was about. And there were some great lines in it.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
There were just lots of really good moments that were fun to play. And there were little ad lib bits that we threw in in the course of filming that felt like they came from a good place.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
The show was always, it was always very relaxed in that sense, that people, once you got one decent take in the can, you could try things. You could change what you were saying. You could see what, if I did this, how would that affect people? Lots of the time, it went down a blind alley. But it also had the possibility of creating something interesting that wasn't originally intended. And Jim and I were always very comfortable with that. And this whole episode, there was a lot of stuff that wasn't originally in the script.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
I can't say that I consciously thought differently about it. I mean, you get the shooting schedule, you see what days you're working and what scenes you're playing, and then you prepare those scenes. I didn't feel any great pressure that Jim and I were carrying the show. I didn't think differently about what we needed to do, except tell the story.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
I played the stuff the same way I would have, if this had been a backstory and if Duncan had been off killing some Immortal somewhere else. But it was a nice way to end in a sense.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
I never felt I was playing second-fiddle to Duncan MacLeod. [laughs]
Clip from "Indiscretions":
To get a chance to really go for it, as we did in the "Indiscretions" episode, was a challenge.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
There's a certain chaotic quality in the way we shot this show, sort of by on the seat of our pants. And there were a couple of-- there was a stunt that almost went really bad where there was an explosion, and it was not taken care of afterwards, and there was further-- there was another explosion that wasn't supposed to happen that took place.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
Directors all have very different approaches. Some tell their-- they all have their way of telling a story, and their way of lining the story up.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
We may have been kind of arguing over, oh, the way we're shooting the scene, or taking all this time to set up this one shot, when it's really what we think, you know, we want to tell our story and get our coverage, to tell our story when time's being wasted elsewhere, or we feel that it is. But at the same time, all that said, I think there's a certain chaotic quality that really gives the show an edge that it needs.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
It doesn't get bogged down because it's always-- you don't know what's going to happen next. There's a real quality of, wow, this is a mess. And which, really, I think, worked in terms of the story and what we were trying to tell.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
It felt like it had the possibility of, if the show was going to ever come back in a different guise or go in a different direction, that this actually was a very realistic possibility as a format. Joe and Methos, with this whole separate life going on, that could be kind of the backbone of them chatting to each other about, you know, Methos telling stories about Immortals that he'd met, which would then allow you to go into almost a flashback, that could be other people. It could be people that did several episodes, a character that had an arc of several episodes, or an Immortal that you saw once, you told the story about it, and never referred to them ever again. That it would give the possibility for lots of different directions for an individual episode to go in, and yet still anchor it to that Highlander world.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
The pressure was off. You know, we knew we were all going to be going home in another week, and I think there was a certain celebratory mood about that, and we celebrated in the script and the fun that we were having, and the few little ad-libbing we were doing here and there, joshing each other and pushing each other's buttons. At the same time, you know, we knew we were coming to the end of something, so I think we really, we went for it on all the levels that we could go for it on.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
It was the most fun I had, I'd have to say. It was just, it was so free-wheeling, and you know, I'd put it right up there in, you know, my own-- one, two, three, somewhere up there, in my pantheon of Highlander episodes, but it would make the top five, for sure. Definitely on my hit parade.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
"Indiscretions" was a lovely episode for lots of reasons, but for me, one of the real, anchoring, defining moments was at the end of the episode, Methos has the line "Just because--"
Clip from "Indiscretions":
That was what Methos is about. Don't underestimate me. Don't take just what you see on the surface.
Clip from "Indiscretions":
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David Tynan (Exec. Script Consultant/Writer): "To be or not to be." We knew that the series was finally coming to an end. These would be the last two shows. And we desperately wanted to do something big. We knew the show had to go out in some big way. And we also knew that somehow we had to give our audiences more. They'd been with us loyally for almost five and a half seasons. And we were at loose ends about how to do this. We were really racking our brains for weeks. And I was sitting in my office, racking my brain, when David Abramowitz burst into my office and said, "We've got it."
Clip from "To Be":
"Not To Be", and it's partner "To Be", actually came from my idea. Wow, It's a Wonderful Life, what an original idea. Originally, what we were trying to do -- we knew we had to have something big and important for the ending. But in season six, Adrian had limited availability, especially towards the end of the season, so I had actually originally pitched the idea for, like, episode eleven, something where we only had Duncan -- or Adrian -- for a day or two. I didn't presume to pitch the finale. And it was Bill Panzer who looked at the idea for doing, basically, It's a Wonderful Life -- showing what would have happened to all the other characters without Duncan around, and went, no, this is how we tie it up.
We all like to think, when we're at our cheeriest, that we are, in some way, as we go through our short journey, making a difference to the people with whom we come in contact and this planet where we live. And at our darkest moments, we despair and say, "Who cares? Why am I here? What's it all about? What did I ever do? Nothing would change without me. What a waste." And stretching it out over centuries, and dealing with people that MacLeod had been close to, he got to see how he affected them, as hopefully, we all get to see how we've affected the people around us.
Well, you know, the thing about "To Be or Not To Be", it was really interesting to show people, or us as humans, that our life matters. And doesn't matter what we do, we affect other people's lives. And Duncan MacLeod being the man that he was, might have taken it on himself that it was his fault that Richie died, that it was his fault that Fitzcan died, that all the things that happened to him or to other people were because of him.
Clip from "To Be":
And I was thunderstruck. It's a Wonderful Life with James Stewart, of course, is one of the great films, and it was one of my favorite films, certainly my favorite Jimmy Stewart film. That same afternoon, I flew back to Vancouver to begin writing the script. And I was sitting in the LAX waiting room, the lounge, staring up at the television, thinking about It's a Wonderful Life. And there before me on the screen was James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. James Stewart had just died, and they were playing a tribute to him. It seemed to mean something at the time. I can tell you that the hair rose up on the back of my neck. I thought, "Oh, my God, either we're supposed to do this or we're not." But I did go back to Vancouver and the next day started trying to write the show.
"To Be" started out as a regular episode. And it's because we needed a way to get into it that had some credibility. So we create this regular episode.
Clip from "To Be":
And then people die, MacLeod goes through some guilt, and he wishes that this had never happened, and just like Jimmy Stewart, we give him the opportunity to see what life would be like if he never existed.
I thought it was a great idea, actually, because it allowed a kind of retrospective. It meant that we could look at the characters that had been the strong features of the series over the years, without it just looking like a show of clips, you know, Highlander's greatest hits. I thought it worked really well.
I'll give you a category. Some of my favorite flashbacks were when MacLeod was with Fitzcairn, played by Roger Daltrey, because the two of them got up to ridiculous hijinks. We had great fun writing it, and the two of them played marvellously off each other.
Clip from "To Be":
It was a neat challenge, I mean, because it showed the size of, say, if Joe had not had that beacon of MacLeod's virtue to look at, the despair that he might have been lost in.
Clip from "To Be":
It was neat to be able to take a character that you had developed over a period of time and turn him in a different direction. And so, from an acting standpoint, it was a lot of good fun.
And we wanted to bring back the actors, some of whom were no longer alive as characters, so that we give some sort of resonance to the end of the year.
Clip from "To Be":
When you walk down the street, you see these homeless people and people in desperate circumstances. And sometimes you're annoyed or you're this, you're that and everything. But there's always that moment that I remind myself that this was somebody's baby and this could be me. And so it really kind of gave me that reminder to be real with everyone.
It allowed a lot of scope. There was humour, but it also did give the chance for both MacLeod and the audience to look at it and say, "Yeah, there was-- the way I behaved, there were negative consequences. There were bad things because of choices I made. But there were also-- good things happened."
Clip from "To Be":
That in a way is the heart of the show. It's "What are the consequences of what we do? How do we carry ourselves? What is it to be a hero? What is it to be a good man?" So I thought it worked really nicely. I liked it.
I think it's Peter Wingfield taught me an interesting phrase. It's called a 'walk down', which is from British pantomime. And at the end of the panto, all of the characters walk down to the end of the stage one at a time and say some kind of line or do a movement that they did during the performance and everyone gives their applause. And I really do think that "To Be" and "Not To Be" was a pretty good walk down for all of the characters. |
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Stan Kirsch ("Richie Ryan"): Well, first of all, the storyline for "Not To Be", I thought was great. It was really well thought out, and I liked watching the two-parter. I thought it was very well crafted.
It was great fun to play, great fun to conceive. I thought the episodes were okay. I would like-- I don't know why they were just okay. I had these dreams of them being colossal, of them being stupendous.
It was exciting too, because as an actor, you take the same character, but make his life experiences in the last six years completely different. I could erase the entire series from my mind and pretty much start fresh.
Clip from "Not To Be":
Stan came back, which was nice.
The scenes were exciting. Of course, I ended up getting killed anyway.
And I killed him again, which they hated me for even more.
Clip from "Not To Be":
Some kind of irony there, I'm sure. If it wasn't Adrian, it would have been Methos.
Even in the alternative universe, in the Bizarro universe, I killed him again, and that was me just being mean-spirited and a little bit of a [bleep]. Ken Gord (Producer): Dennis Berry was directing it, which was fitting because I think Dennis probably did, probably a good twenty-five percent of all the shows over the six years. I think he was probably the most of anybody, and it was fitting that he did the last one.
"Not To Be" was very much inspired by forties melodrama and I tried to reproduce a little bit of the style of shooting of those days. We also found settings and the way we would have white curtain hangings flowing in the wind, with beautiful, beautiful, kind of huge living rooms that remind me a little bit of the beautiful Hollywood days of the forties, was a way to pay a little tribute to the great way directors used to shoot films in those days.
Clip from "Not To Be":
David Abramowitz: Yeah, well. She was so beautiful and she still is so beautiful and she's such an ethereal creature. If there was any character on the show, who I would have said fit the mold of an exotic immortal goddess, it was Alexandra Vandernoot. She was remarkable and remarkable as an actress.
I loved watching what would have happened to the other characters. I found it fascinating to see Jim in that light and Tessa and what would have happened to Methos. So I thought the idea was great and very well executed.
Everyone got to pitch in and be there for a few days.
Clip from "Not To Be":
I think in life, you don't get the opportunity to go back and do things a lot. When something is over, you look back and you sort of wish you'd done things this way or did it that way, and you sort of have to live with what you did at the time, especially in professional situations; it sort of was what it was and you can't go back. It was an opportunity to go back, and I knew beforehand-- I said to myself, "Really make the most of these few days, because this is it. You thought it was over but now you really have a chance to go back and shoot a few more scenes on this thing and make the most of it, because it's the end now." And it was very-- it was a lot of fun just to be able to go and do that. Adrian Paul (Actor): Unforgettable moment, knowing the show was over.
I think Adrian was going through the worst time of anybody, because he was the Highlander, and I think he was excited about not being the Highlander anymore, and I think he was also a little bit scared of not being the Highlander anymore.
Oh my god, this is the end, it IS the end, it is almost the end, and you don't really realise-- After having done this for so long and no matter how many bad times or emotional times or fun times that you had, it's the end, it's not going to happen again.
He was not his usual-- because he's usually a very, I'm not going to say happy-go-lucky, but he's a good guy to work with, he's a real professional and he's usually got a good sense of humor and he's a good guy. By that time, on "Not To Be", he was a little bit tense and I think it was definitely weighing on him.
The very last fight that we had in that show when we actually did it, I remember we were in this area which was like a train depot underground, there was all this dust and everybody had masks on. I remember Elizabeth, that was Elizabeth's last day, I think it was, and I was shocked, because when they said, "Oh, Elizabeth's now wrapped, everybody," I went, "You're wrapped?" and it kind of dawned on me that, oh my god, the show's finished.
Clip from "Not To Be":
"Not To Be" was kind of a-- it was a little bit scary and a little bit sad and a little bit relief, because it was the last show and everyone knew it was the last show.
It was very emotional for all of us, certainly it was for me as a writer. I'd had this privilege for almost five and a half years of being able to indulge myself in this great adventure, this great fantasy, this great world we'd constructed -- or that had been constructed and I'd been lucky enough to play in. In a very real sense it was probably the best job a writer could hope for. There were wonderful people working together, people who had become over the five and a half seasons, not just Adrian and Stan Kirsch and Jim Byrnes and Peter Wingfield and Elizabeth Gracen -- they'd all become like family to me -- but David Abramowitz, Bill Panzer, I think I spoke to them more than I spoke to my wife and kids for about five years. I certainly talked more about Highlander.
And to be in the world of the Immortals is, it was great fun. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons that the Joe Dawson character worked, was that I was like the audience. I was-- they knew we were all in on a secret of the world of the Immortals and some people were not in on it and so were missing a great part of existence and of history and all this sort of thing. And I think that people-- in that way, the character was sort of the everyman, that-- where we could all find our little place to relate and live in the world of the Immortals.
And so all of this was coming to an end, an era of television, in a sense, was coming to an end. This family that we'd sort of helped to create together was coming to an end, and in a sense our family, this family of writers and producers and people in post-production who had created this wonderful adventure for the audience, had all enjoyed it as much as the audience and maybe even more and that was also coming to an end.
It was fun to have everybody back for the last two episodes and I remember actually the way the original script was written was that we were going to -- me, Joe Dawson, I believe Amanda and Methos -- were going to toast the audience and say "Great," and I said no, this show to me is more than like a wink to the audience. It means much more. We've have five years of history, of drama, of comedy, of sadness, of grief, of all this stuff, and to end it like that is not how I think this show should end. And I said I think he should go off into an uncertain future.
When I finished writing this script, my pass on this script, because we all had some hand in it, I got to the end, the final page, and what every writer does and every television show in the world does is you write 'The End' on it. And I got to that page and I could not write 'The End'. I tried and it just wouldn't come, and I realized I could not end this myself and I wasn't going to. So I sent the script in without 'The End' on it.
After was post-production. Don Paonessa was able to come up with all these great images and which I looked at and we chose, to see what story we were telling for the end Highlander.
Clip from "Not To Be":
I think in some way we all hoped it would continue, in some way, somewhere.
What does he do? Where does he go? And I think what the idea was, for me, at the end was that he didn't want to put these people that were close to him in that sort of danger again. And so he was going to recede from the world and live his life, perhaps in a little more quieter way, perhaps somewhere that is a little bit more of a spiritual, where he might be able to find the true meaning of life. It was a great tribute to the six successful seasons of a great show.
It was a hell of a run. |
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