Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 3, Episode 5 - Making Manhattan - full transcript
NARRATOR: It's an explosive conclusion
to the Doctor's New York story.
But going out on a high wasn't easy.
Join Confidential as we strip
the Big Apple to its core
and show you how
the Doctor Who team made Manhattan.
It's hard to do 1930s New York
in Cardiff, let's be honest.
The big challenge in the episode
was making it feel authentic,
and making it feel like New York,
so obviously to go over there
and shoot plate shots
and be able to blend the real New York
with bits of Cardiff,
it makes that episode
just feel that bit more epic.
It's actually easy to go
get a shot of the real city,
where the shape of the city,
the grids and the angles
you need to see it from actually exists,
then paint that picture to
look like the 1930s.
So we ended up sending an effects crew
and the director, James Strong,
and Confidential over to New York,
where they got the right angles.
They just got beautiful, clean shots of
the Statue of Liberty,
shots of Central Park,
that sort of stuff.
It's like Doctor Who, in New York,
in 1930. Brilliant.
It's ambitious
to set a story in New York.
It's deliberately ambitious,
and I didn't know how far we could go.
But again, with this design team
and this effects team,
you set something rolling and off
they go, they grab it, they run with it.
NARRATOR: Travelling stateside,
the Doctor Who production team
are in Manhattan
to marvel at the New York skyline.
Certain that if they can make it there,
they can make it anywhere.
CAMERAMAN: Do you want to leave that
building in the background just black?
-Which one?
-Well, I don't know if you want it...
-No, see the smoke that's against...
-Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
We've come to Central Park,
which is kind of where
we're saying where Hooverville
was based at the time, and so we've...
Obviously, it's not here any more,
so we've had to shoot plates
of Central Park and buildings.
If you look around,
the kind of period buildings, a lot
of which haven't changed since the '30s.
And we're gonna construct
a kind of collage, if you like.
Essentially, we're painting out
the modern buildings
and leaving the "30s buildings and
then adding the Empire State Building"
into the shots.
Most important thing about today
is kind of getting the buildings
coming up out of the trees.
So, we've got to be quite specific
about which places we've picked
to film our plate shots today.
We want the trees
so that we can kind of cut around them
and put the Cardiff trees
in, essentially.
Some of the foreground buildings
are period,
so we'll cut those out
along with the tree line.
And you can do that,
what, because they're straight lines?
-So you can quite easily cut them out.
-Yeah, very easy to cut out.
-Okay.
-I mean, we'll use the tree line,
wherever we film,
we're gonna film in Cardiff at a park,
we'll paint these trees
and these period buildings in.
Behind me is the beautiful
Sheep Meadow of Central Park.
So, actually, we'll have
all of our action taking place
and the Doctor and Martha
walking through,
and it'll look like it's part of
this massive landscape behind us.
It's gonna work, Dave, isn't it?
Tell me it'll work.
We're gonna put the Tardis
right the way in the middle of the lawn
in Cardiff.
And then
it's gonna be magically put here,
in front of the Statue of Liberty.
Because we only have a limited number
of special effects shots,
we have had to find a piece of wall
up in Cardiff which matches
the base of the Statue.
We'll film David and Freema
against green screens,
and then put them in,
and when we're finished,
it'll look like
the Tardis really has landed here.
Manhattan's over there,
the most beautiful view
on a really gorgeous sunny day.
I'm sitting here thinking how are we
gonna match this in Cardiff in November?
But, hey. We need a lot of luck.
NARRATOR: But luck was on their side,
in a small town called Pennaf,
and the Welsh weather is perfect.
JAMES: We're a month later now.
It's a month since we shot
those plate shots in New York,
and the weather is exactly
the same today as it was that day.
It's kind of gobsmacking because
it's been raining for two weeks here.
This is actually a fantastic match
for the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The brick on the wall here
is almost identical.
We looked at every piece of wall and
brick in Cardiff, really, to find this,
and then there's the grass in front,
and so when we jump back
and paste this into the real plate shots
of the Statue of Liberty,
it's gonna be
a fantastically easy match.
And action.
Anywhere else in the universe,
I might worry about them.
But New York?
That's what this city's good at.
Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses
and maybe the odd Pig Slave-Dalek
mutant hybrid, too.
-The pig and the showgirl!
-The pig and the showgirl.
Just proves it, I suppose.
There's someone for everyone.
There's a bit of ill feeling
around this morning
because everybody's really annoyed
that we got to go to the real place
and here they are in Cardiff,
trying to recreate
the magic of New York.
Sorry! Sorry! Can I just point out
our lovely producer, Phil,
and our director, James,
and our visual effects man, Dave,
and some of
the Doctor Who Confidential crew,
all got on a nice weekend in Manhattan.
We are in a car park
at the Pennaf Leisure Centre.
Draw your own conclusion.
That was James.
And a local dog just wee-ed
on the Tardis.
To make matters worse,
we've got a mix-in overlay monitor
with all our plate shots
of the real Statue of Liberty.
We put our actors against green screen
and then we put the real view behind it.
So it looks like they're really
standing and looking out over Manhattan.
All the stuff we shot with David
and Freema today will match exactly
what we shot in New York,
so it couldn't be better,
it couldn't be more perfect,
it's brilliant.
Our sets tend to
fall into two categories.
Sets that we build from scratch
and, you know, that the carpenters build
and set decorators paint the walls of
and install the electricity into, etc.
Or locations that we go to
and transform into something,
and that's the perfect example of that.
NARRATOR: Back at Bute Park,
home to Hooverville,
there's a charged atmosphere
for what promises to be
a very explosive night ahead.
This is called a quick det cord.
It's a highly explosive igniter cord.
But what we do is, we wrap it round
petrol and when it goes off,
it just creates a really clean,
nice, big fireball.
Like any high explosive,
it obviously sends a shockwave
and it's very dangerous.
The secret of special effects is timing.
Now, this back mortar box
is gonna be a big ball of flame.
Angled straight up. No, no, no,
we're going to build some fire up.
-Okay.
-With petrol.
Firing straight up in the air,
debris pushing towards
that camera over there.
-Okay.
-And over there as well. All right?
And as well as that,
we've got this shed,
which is just gonna blow outwards.
There may be a fireball
behind it as well, timed in,
so it looks like
the explosion pushed it forward.
Guy's gonna be starting about here.
So on action, Guy's gonna be running,
running, running.
Kim and Anthony
can take their own timing,
soon as Guy's on here, bounces up.
-Then I'm gonna hit the button.
-Danny, you det then, yeah?
Camera's gonna be here.
Explosions there.
-And the Daleks up in the sky.
-Yeah.
(MIMICS EXPLOSION)
And then our stuntmen
will fly towards us.
So we'll have yours
locked off, obviously.
And then we'll have
two other cameras on it...
-Yeah.
-...elsewhere, getting the full...
MAN: You see Daleks in the sky.
MAN: Ready!
The humans will surrender?!
MAN: Okay!
(ALL WHOOPING)
Okay, fire's out.
Everybody stay where they are.
(PEOPLE MURMURING)
MAN: It was brilliant.
That went bang, didn't it?
I'm happy with that. That was good.
Very good.
Thankfully the weather's been great,
so it's been a clear night
and it's gone all right so far.
We've got all the explosion stuff
out of the way and it went really well.
NARRATOR: Cardiff and New York
have been on an exchange like no other.
And for two episodes, the Doctor Who
team have faced extraordinary challenges
bringing the Big Apple
to the small screen.
I'm incredibly pleased with the way
they turned out.
I think they do look epic. I think
you feel as if you're in New York
and I think you feel
as if you're in a world
unlike any other that we've visited.
It's just real. You think,
"My God! They're really there "
It's lovely, really lovely.
to the Doctor's New York story.
But going out on a high wasn't easy.
Join Confidential as we strip
the Big Apple to its core
and show you how
the Doctor Who team made Manhattan.
It's hard to do 1930s New York
in Cardiff, let's be honest.
The big challenge in the episode
was making it feel authentic,
and making it feel like New York,
so obviously to go over there
and shoot plate shots
and be able to blend the real New York
with bits of Cardiff,
it makes that episode
just feel that bit more epic.
It's actually easy to go
get a shot of the real city,
where the shape of the city,
the grids and the angles
you need to see it from actually exists,
then paint that picture to
look like the 1930s.
So we ended up sending an effects crew
and the director, James Strong,
and Confidential over to New York,
where they got the right angles.
They just got beautiful, clean shots of
the Statue of Liberty,
shots of Central Park,
that sort of stuff.
It's like Doctor Who, in New York,
in 1930. Brilliant.
It's ambitious
to set a story in New York.
It's deliberately ambitious,
and I didn't know how far we could go.
But again, with this design team
and this effects team,
you set something rolling and off
they go, they grab it, they run with it.
NARRATOR: Travelling stateside,
the Doctor Who production team
are in Manhattan
to marvel at the New York skyline.
Certain that if they can make it there,
they can make it anywhere.
CAMERAMAN: Do you want to leave that
building in the background just black?
-Which one?
-Well, I don't know if you want it...
-No, see the smoke that's against...
-Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
We've come to Central Park,
which is kind of where
we're saying where Hooverville
was based at the time, and so we've...
Obviously, it's not here any more,
so we've had to shoot plates
of Central Park and buildings.
If you look around,
the kind of period buildings, a lot
of which haven't changed since the '30s.
And we're gonna construct
a kind of collage, if you like.
Essentially, we're painting out
the modern buildings
and leaving the "30s buildings and
then adding the Empire State Building"
into the shots.
Most important thing about today
is kind of getting the buildings
coming up out of the trees.
So, we've got to be quite specific
about which places we've picked
to film our plate shots today.
We want the trees
so that we can kind of cut around them
and put the Cardiff trees
in, essentially.
Some of the foreground buildings
are period,
so we'll cut those out
along with the tree line.
And you can do that,
what, because they're straight lines?
-So you can quite easily cut them out.
-Yeah, very easy to cut out.
-Okay.
-I mean, we'll use the tree line,
wherever we film,
we're gonna film in Cardiff at a park,
we'll paint these trees
and these period buildings in.
Behind me is the beautiful
Sheep Meadow of Central Park.
So, actually, we'll have
all of our action taking place
and the Doctor and Martha
walking through,
and it'll look like it's part of
this massive landscape behind us.
It's gonna work, Dave, isn't it?
Tell me it'll work.
We're gonna put the Tardis
right the way in the middle of the lawn
in Cardiff.
And then
it's gonna be magically put here,
in front of the Statue of Liberty.
Because we only have a limited number
of special effects shots,
we have had to find a piece of wall
up in Cardiff which matches
the base of the Statue.
We'll film David and Freema
against green screens,
and then put them in,
and when we're finished,
it'll look like
the Tardis really has landed here.
Manhattan's over there,
the most beautiful view
on a really gorgeous sunny day.
I'm sitting here thinking how are we
gonna match this in Cardiff in November?
But, hey. We need a lot of luck.
NARRATOR: But luck was on their side,
in a small town called Pennaf,
and the Welsh weather is perfect.
JAMES: We're a month later now.
It's a month since we shot
those plate shots in New York,
and the weather is exactly
the same today as it was that day.
It's kind of gobsmacking because
it's been raining for two weeks here.
This is actually a fantastic match
for the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The brick on the wall here
is almost identical.
We looked at every piece of wall and
brick in Cardiff, really, to find this,
and then there's the grass in front,
and so when we jump back
and paste this into the real plate shots
of the Statue of Liberty,
it's gonna be
a fantastically easy match.
And action.
Anywhere else in the universe,
I might worry about them.
But New York?
That's what this city's good at.
Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses
and maybe the odd Pig Slave-Dalek
mutant hybrid, too.
-The pig and the showgirl!
-The pig and the showgirl.
Just proves it, I suppose.
There's someone for everyone.
There's a bit of ill feeling
around this morning
because everybody's really annoyed
that we got to go to the real place
and here they are in Cardiff,
trying to recreate
the magic of New York.
Sorry! Sorry! Can I just point out
our lovely producer, Phil,
and our director, James,
and our visual effects man, Dave,
and some of
the Doctor Who Confidential crew,
all got on a nice weekend in Manhattan.
We are in a car park
at the Pennaf Leisure Centre.
Draw your own conclusion.
That was James.
And a local dog just wee-ed
on the Tardis.
To make matters worse,
we've got a mix-in overlay monitor
with all our plate shots
of the real Statue of Liberty.
We put our actors against green screen
and then we put the real view behind it.
So it looks like they're really
standing and looking out over Manhattan.
All the stuff we shot with David
and Freema today will match exactly
what we shot in New York,
so it couldn't be better,
it couldn't be more perfect,
it's brilliant.
Our sets tend to
fall into two categories.
Sets that we build from scratch
and, you know, that the carpenters build
and set decorators paint the walls of
and install the electricity into, etc.
Or locations that we go to
and transform into something,
and that's the perfect example of that.
NARRATOR: Back at Bute Park,
home to Hooverville,
there's a charged atmosphere
for what promises to be
a very explosive night ahead.
This is called a quick det cord.
It's a highly explosive igniter cord.
But what we do is, we wrap it round
petrol and when it goes off,
it just creates a really clean,
nice, big fireball.
Like any high explosive,
it obviously sends a shockwave
and it's very dangerous.
The secret of special effects is timing.
Now, this back mortar box
is gonna be a big ball of flame.
Angled straight up. No, no, no,
we're going to build some fire up.
-Okay.
-With petrol.
Firing straight up in the air,
debris pushing towards
that camera over there.
-Okay.
-And over there as well. All right?
And as well as that,
we've got this shed,
which is just gonna blow outwards.
There may be a fireball
behind it as well, timed in,
so it looks like
the explosion pushed it forward.
Guy's gonna be starting about here.
So on action, Guy's gonna be running,
running, running.
Kim and Anthony
can take their own timing,
soon as Guy's on here, bounces up.
-Then I'm gonna hit the button.
-Danny, you det then, yeah?
Camera's gonna be here.
Explosions there.
-And the Daleks up in the sky.
-Yeah.
(MIMICS EXPLOSION)
And then our stuntmen
will fly towards us.
So we'll have yours
locked off, obviously.
And then we'll have
two other cameras on it...
-Yeah.
-...elsewhere, getting the full...
MAN: You see Daleks in the sky.
MAN: Ready!
The humans will surrender?!
MAN: Okay!
(ALL WHOOPING)
Okay, fire's out.
Everybody stay where they are.
(PEOPLE MURMURING)
MAN: It was brilliant.
That went bang, didn't it?
I'm happy with that. That was good.
Very good.
Thankfully the weather's been great,
so it's been a clear night
and it's gone all right so far.
We've got all the explosion stuff
out of the way and it went really well.
NARRATOR: Cardiff and New York
have been on an exchange like no other.
And for two episodes, the Doctor Who
team have faced extraordinary challenges
bringing the Big Apple
to the small screen.
I'm incredibly pleased with the way
they turned out.
I think they do look epic. I think
you feel as if you're in New York
and I think you feel
as if you're in a world
unlike any other that we've visited.
It's just real. You think,
"My God! They're really there "
It's lovely, really lovely.