Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 2, Episode 2 - Fear Factor - full transcript
(HEART BEATING)
GATISS: Are you sitting comfortably?
Then we'll begin.
(GROWLING)
Just to remind you all this is an absolute
terror and your stomach's churning,
your bladder's loosening.
It's just giving you the willies, okay?
The screams, just
give it your all this time.
Okay, here we go then,
nice and quiet, please.
I think Tooth and Claw has very simply
the essences of a scary story.
It's an old house. It's
creaking in the wind.
It's a full moon, you're on moorland.
A monster in the cellar.
Everyone's tied up,
you're trapped in the house.
If you step outside the house,
you get shot by a monk.
Not often that happens but once you write that
in, once you trap them in an enclosed space,
then it's very classic storytelling.
It's classic Doctor Who in many ways.
Action.
One, two, three, pull!
-One, two...
-Cut it. Thank you.
The most regular device I can think of
in terms of scaring kids,
or scaring the audience, is actually the
monster is already here, just that moment,
that monster is already in here with us.
All of you, stop looking at him.
Flora, don't look, listen to me.
Grab hold of the chain and pull!
The anticipation of the arrival of the monster
and the realisation you're no longer waiting,
it's here, it's right among us,
it scares me just to think about it.
So he'll look up and open his eyes and then
two beats after that we'll open the doors.
Tooth and Claw ultimately is very scary.
I think the transformation of the werewolf,
which, of course, has all been added
and augmented in post-production,
is pretty horrific.
In a very good way.
I think there's an advantage to werewolves. They
come with a whole history of fear and terror.
You don't actually start questioning it.
The moment the moonlight
starts hitting it, you think,
"Oh, lovely, it's going to change "
It gives you a lot of room, actually, to
sort of say you know what the monster is,
so you get to tell the story as opposed to
going into too much detail into the monster,
which allows you to have more fun, I think.
With monsters, it's all to do with
the success of the effects really,
whether you can suspend disbelief.
I think with the werewolf
you've got something really sort of ...
frightening and ravenous.
I think kids will really love that.
It starts off as a character called
The Host who turns into the werewolf.
In order to perform a transformation,
we will be filming The Host
in the cage against a green screen.
So all you need to see then is the
face and the hand from my point of view.
Yeah, great.
Change.
Cut. Excellent. Well done, Tom. Very good.
We'll also film various elements of the
cage lifting up with a guy in a green suit,
so that we can, you know,
rub him out and put a werewolf in.
During the scene, Tommy is going to
change into the werewolf.
So at a certain point we have to lose Tom
and replace him with a kind of
half-changed version of Tom.
And to do that we've scanned Tom's head
into the computer and we'll combine that
with our werewolf model.
Just to sort of have those kind of
intermediate stages of the werewolf as it pops,
you know, changes.
The blue ball thing on
the stick on Josh's head
is the werewolf's head,
and it may look comical but just remember
you're absolutely terrified of this thing.
When you do CGI stuff
and green or blue screen or whatever,
you don't always have something
just as helpful as Josh was today.
It was a huge help for all of us
to focus on the one place.
And it also gave it a sense of scale, which
I think we wouldn't otherwise have had
because he had that extension on
with the ball at the top
to give us a notion of what height
the creature had become.
It was in our brief that we discussed with
Russell was that we wanted the scale of it,
it was nine foot tall, quite a
big build set. It felt menacing...
When we started drawing it,
we realised that the head was wolf,
the hands were wolf hands,
the feet were like wolf claws
and then all around the middle bit
was more human.
GATISS: But do all these effects
push the fear factor too far?
As we were making it,
we were getting a bit worried,
you know, "Is this going to be
stepping over the line
“for a show that goes out at 7:00
for the whole family to watch together?"
I think when he finally watched the whole thing
come together it just hits the right balance.
I'm not qualified to know whether
it's a good or a bad thing
that children like scary things,
but it's an undeniable,
unquestionable fact that they do.
They like scary stories,
they'll tell scary stories to each other,
they'll play games that are
specifically designed to scare them.
It's a natural human appetite.
It's something we do. Children love scary.
-Don't let them touch you.
-What happens if they touch us?
You're looking at it.
I think Doctor Who's expected to be scary,
I think a lot of people come to it
looking for scares,
and I mean younger viewers as well.
I don't think it should be so terrifying
that you're traumatised.
I don't think there are limits
on how scary Doctor Who can be.
I think there should be limits
on how graphic it can be.
I mean, you look at the Christmas special
and the Doctor's hand is sliced off,
but there's no blood, so rather
than becoming absolutely terrifying,
you're kind of reassured by that,
and then the Doctor grows another hand
and everything's all right.
Witchcraft.
Time Lord.
You want to make them sort of feel scared,
but perhaps in a reassuring way.
This new hand, it's a fighting hand.
GATISS: The battle for the Earth
doesn't just happen overnight,
with every strike of the blade
planned out from the start.
Everything's fine,
just got to rejig this hit.
-This first hit across the face?
-Yeah.
-Just so they can catch it there.
-Up there?
-Yeah, 'cause it's just...
-Morning.
I like that sort of stuff. You know, I've done
sword fights in various other productions,
down the years. And it's, erm...
They're hard work,
but they're great when they start working.
It's like a dance
and you have to build it up, literally,
by working the moves out very methodically
before you can start to act
and dance with it a bit, really.
When we were choreographing the fight,
we had to take into account
the role model of the Doctor.
Basically, kids are going to follow him,
So we can't make him out to be
an absolute fighting lunatic.
The Sycorax leader, he can be that,
that's not a problem.
It really starts working that fight
when it goes outdoors,
and suddenly it's got
a size, a scale to it.
It's epic. It's truly epic.
Then you come to the fight at the
top of Tooth and Claw, and you think,
"Well, we've got to
make that different now."
We're going to shoot on high-speed camera,
so it's going to be slow-mo anyway.
And it's the grace of the flight
of the monks, that move is about.
We were very lucky to
have got in David Forman
who had kind of been working on
the Batman Begins movie.
And he'd got lots of experience in,
I think, the Hong Kong street fight thing
and martial arts.
So, finding him and bringing him on board
was a key decision.
Euros, our director,
wanted these monks to be very slick
and something that the farm hands
had never seen before.
This is crazy stuff, you know, these are
peaceful monks who are beating up the old man,
you know, it's just mental.
I chose a mix of fighting arts.
One was wushu, which
is very good for stick work.
And the other fighting arts were just a mix of
lots of different martial arts put together.
Two against one, yeah?
We drew lots of influence from things
like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon...
Action!
...Brotherhood of the Wolf
and martial arts movies
where the fighters have
a certain magic quality,
where they can fly, basically.
So I did watch lots of them
and tried to steal all the best ideas.
We also wanted to combine it with something
which was more British,
so it's kind of got lots of elements
of things like 28 Days Later,
so it's got a very fast shutter speed
so everything's kind of very flicky,
and there's lots and lots of cutting in it.
So this has got high-octane,
adrenalin fight sequences.
It's not often you can have the
nerve to do that on a schedule like this,
but the whole day was devoted to one page.
They've got wires in a courtyard,
it's an extraordinary setup but it works.
It's the best episode
opening you'll ever see.
What is it? What's under the canvas?
Father, answer me, what's in there?
May God forgive me.
One of my favourite moments in Tooth and Claw
is that he's delighted to see the werewolf.
He runs into that cellar
and everyone's in danger.
This supernatural wind
is blowing through that room
and he's so pleased to see a werewolf
in front of him!
Where the hell have you been?
Oh, that's beautiful.
I think that's just brilliantly perverse,
but that's why he travels the universe,
that's why he does what he does.
Which is for new experiences, and here he
gets to experience one right in his face.
This is a man who becomes an animal.
A werewolf?
That's what sets the Doctor apart from your
standard hero, is that enjoyment of trouble.
He must enjoy it.
Well, what do we do?
Now leave my world and never return.
I propose an institute
to investigate these strange happenings
and to fight them.
I would call it Torchwood.
The Torchwood Institute.
And if this Doctor should return,
that he should beware,
because Torchwood will be waiting.
GATISS: Are you sitting comfortably?
Then we'll begin.
(GROWLING)
Just to remind you all this is an absolute
terror and your stomach's churning,
your bladder's loosening.
It's just giving you the willies, okay?
The screams, just
give it your all this time.
Okay, here we go then,
nice and quiet, please.
I think Tooth and Claw has very simply
the essences of a scary story.
It's an old house. It's
creaking in the wind.
It's a full moon, you're on moorland.
A monster in the cellar.
Everyone's tied up,
you're trapped in the house.
If you step outside the house,
you get shot by a monk.
Not often that happens but once you write that
in, once you trap them in an enclosed space,
then it's very classic storytelling.
It's classic Doctor Who in many ways.
Action.
One, two, three, pull!
-One, two...
-Cut it. Thank you.
The most regular device I can think of
in terms of scaring kids,
or scaring the audience, is actually the
monster is already here, just that moment,
that monster is already in here with us.
All of you, stop looking at him.
Flora, don't look, listen to me.
Grab hold of the chain and pull!
The anticipation of the arrival of the monster
and the realisation you're no longer waiting,
it's here, it's right among us,
it scares me just to think about it.
So he'll look up and open his eyes and then
two beats after that we'll open the doors.
Tooth and Claw ultimately is very scary.
I think the transformation of the werewolf,
which, of course, has all been added
and augmented in post-production,
is pretty horrific.
In a very good way.
I think there's an advantage to werewolves. They
come with a whole history of fear and terror.
You don't actually start questioning it.
The moment the moonlight
starts hitting it, you think,
"Oh, lovely, it's going to change "
It gives you a lot of room, actually, to
sort of say you know what the monster is,
so you get to tell the story as opposed to
going into too much detail into the monster,
which allows you to have more fun, I think.
With monsters, it's all to do with
the success of the effects really,
whether you can suspend disbelief.
I think with the werewolf
you've got something really sort of ...
frightening and ravenous.
I think kids will really love that.
It starts off as a character called
The Host who turns into the werewolf.
In order to perform a transformation,
we will be filming The Host
in the cage against a green screen.
So all you need to see then is the
face and the hand from my point of view.
Yeah, great.
Change.
Cut. Excellent. Well done, Tom. Very good.
We'll also film various elements of the
cage lifting up with a guy in a green suit,
so that we can, you know,
rub him out and put a werewolf in.
During the scene, Tommy is going to
change into the werewolf.
So at a certain point we have to lose Tom
and replace him with a kind of
half-changed version of Tom.
And to do that we've scanned Tom's head
into the computer and we'll combine that
with our werewolf model.
Just to sort of have those kind of
intermediate stages of the werewolf as it pops,
you know, changes.
The blue ball thing on
the stick on Josh's head
is the werewolf's head,
and it may look comical but just remember
you're absolutely terrified of this thing.
When you do CGI stuff
and green or blue screen or whatever,
you don't always have something
just as helpful as Josh was today.
It was a huge help for all of us
to focus on the one place.
And it also gave it a sense of scale, which
I think we wouldn't otherwise have had
because he had that extension on
with the ball at the top
to give us a notion of what height
the creature had become.
It was in our brief that we discussed with
Russell was that we wanted the scale of it,
it was nine foot tall, quite a
big build set. It felt menacing...
When we started drawing it,
we realised that the head was wolf,
the hands were wolf hands,
the feet were like wolf claws
and then all around the middle bit
was more human.
GATISS: But do all these effects
push the fear factor too far?
As we were making it,
we were getting a bit worried,
you know, "Is this going to be
stepping over the line
“for a show that goes out at 7:00
for the whole family to watch together?"
I think when he finally watched the whole thing
come together it just hits the right balance.
I'm not qualified to know whether
it's a good or a bad thing
that children like scary things,
but it's an undeniable,
unquestionable fact that they do.
They like scary stories,
they'll tell scary stories to each other,
they'll play games that are
specifically designed to scare them.
It's a natural human appetite.
It's something we do. Children love scary.
-Don't let them touch you.
-What happens if they touch us?
You're looking at it.
I think Doctor Who's expected to be scary,
I think a lot of people come to it
looking for scares,
and I mean younger viewers as well.
I don't think it should be so terrifying
that you're traumatised.
I don't think there are limits
on how scary Doctor Who can be.
I think there should be limits
on how graphic it can be.
I mean, you look at the Christmas special
and the Doctor's hand is sliced off,
but there's no blood, so rather
than becoming absolutely terrifying,
you're kind of reassured by that,
and then the Doctor grows another hand
and everything's all right.
Witchcraft.
Time Lord.
You want to make them sort of feel scared,
but perhaps in a reassuring way.
This new hand, it's a fighting hand.
GATISS: The battle for the Earth
doesn't just happen overnight,
with every strike of the blade
planned out from the start.
Everything's fine,
just got to rejig this hit.
-This first hit across the face?
-Yeah.
-Just so they can catch it there.
-Up there?
-Yeah, 'cause it's just...
-Morning.
I like that sort of stuff. You know, I've done
sword fights in various other productions,
down the years. And it's, erm...
They're hard work,
but they're great when they start working.
It's like a dance
and you have to build it up, literally,
by working the moves out very methodically
before you can start to act
and dance with it a bit, really.
When we were choreographing the fight,
we had to take into account
the role model of the Doctor.
Basically, kids are going to follow him,
So we can't make him out to be
an absolute fighting lunatic.
The Sycorax leader, he can be that,
that's not a problem.
It really starts working that fight
when it goes outdoors,
and suddenly it's got
a size, a scale to it.
It's epic. It's truly epic.
Then you come to the fight at the
top of Tooth and Claw, and you think,
"Well, we've got to
make that different now."
We're going to shoot on high-speed camera,
so it's going to be slow-mo anyway.
And it's the grace of the flight
of the monks, that move is about.
We were very lucky to
have got in David Forman
who had kind of been working on
the Batman Begins movie.
And he'd got lots of experience in,
I think, the Hong Kong street fight thing
and martial arts.
So, finding him and bringing him on board
was a key decision.
Euros, our director,
wanted these monks to be very slick
and something that the farm hands
had never seen before.
This is crazy stuff, you know, these are
peaceful monks who are beating up the old man,
you know, it's just mental.
I chose a mix of fighting arts.
One was wushu, which
is very good for stick work.
And the other fighting arts were just a mix of
lots of different martial arts put together.
Two against one, yeah?
We drew lots of influence from things
like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon...
Action!
...Brotherhood of the Wolf
and martial arts movies
where the fighters have
a certain magic quality,
where they can fly, basically.
So I did watch lots of them
and tried to steal all the best ideas.
We also wanted to combine it with something
which was more British,
so it's kind of got lots of elements
of things like 28 Days Later,
so it's got a very fast shutter speed
so everything's kind of very flicky,
and there's lots and lots of cutting in it.
So this has got high-octane,
adrenalin fight sequences.
It's not often you can have the
nerve to do that on a schedule like this,
but the whole day was devoted to one page.
They've got wires in a courtyard,
it's an extraordinary setup but it works.
It's the best episode
opening you'll ever see.
What is it? What's under the canvas?
Father, answer me, what's in there?
May God forgive me.
One of my favourite moments in Tooth and Claw
is that he's delighted to see the werewolf.
He runs into that cellar
and everyone's in danger.
This supernatural wind
is blowing through that room
and he's so pleased to see a werewolf
in front of him!
Where the hell have you been?
Oh, that's beautiful.
I think that's just brilliantly perverse,
but that's why he travels the universe,
that's why he does what he does.
Which is for new experiences, and here he
gets to experience one right in his face.
This is a man who becomes an animal.
A werewolf?
That's what sets the Doctor apart from your
standard hero, is that enjoyment of trouble.
He must enjoy it.
Well, what do we do?
Now leave my world and never return.
I propose an institute
to investigate these strange happenings
and to fight them.
I would call it Torchwood.
The Torchwood Institute.
And if this Doctor should return,
that he should beware,
because Torchwood will be waiting.