Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 4, Episode 10 - Look Who's Talking - full transcript
Good luck, studio.
(ALL LAUGHING)
NARRATOR: For the first time
on Confidential,
we hear from the sound teams
who put the hullabaloo into Doctor Who.
A day trip to disaster
leaves the Time Lord lost for words.
But thankfully, behind the scenes,
an army of audio engineers
are speaking the same language.
The horror of what is happening to him
is doubled,
simply because we know
he is not in control of events.
The Doctor is possibly more scared
than he would be
facing a legion of Daleks.
-She's driving me mad.
-She's driving me mad.
-Just make her stop.
-Just make her stop.
-Stop her staring at me.
-Stop her staring at me.
-That's impossible.
-That's impossible.
(ALL TALKING AT ONCE)
-666.
-666.
You stop!
Stop repeating!
The unsung heroes,
and I have said this many times,
of Doctor Who is the sound department,
both the on-set recordists
and the post production.
It is an immensely complicated process.
Action.
I'm telling you to stop!
There were slightly different challenges
on a story like this
and they involved different departments
in ways that they hadn't before.
Usually the challenges are about
how are we gonna blow up that Cyberman
or how are we gonna hang
off that spaceship or, you know...
It's quite good to give the sound team
some things to worry about.
You know, put them to work. Not that
they don't work hard enough already.
On Doctor Who,
we have a team of sound editors.
They lay up, on average,
about 70 sound tracks on a Doctor Who.
It comes to me on this screen here.
And then they come into
a bunch of faders on the desk.
That will be dialogue, sound effects,
music, Foley.
My job is to mix them all together,
produce a coherent soundtrack
for transmission on the telly
that pleases everybody.
They slave away on this programme
and it's a big, old, noisy programme.
It's like we push them and nag them
to fill in every sound.
Never be dominant
on a close-up of someone else.
-That's the thing.
-It's very confusing.
-Absolutely.
-Marvellous.
NARRATOR: Once the pictures
have been perfected,
the sound team lend their ears
to those 70 tracks.
This episode is quite different to
other episodes of Doctor Who
because there's not many
monster noises to design,
and there's not lots of
crowd effects etc.
But it's a psychological one.
This is something that we haven't really
touched on in a Doctor Who before.
Normally we got to do a werewolf,
or a beast, or something like that.
But this one,
because it's dialogue driven,
that's why it's quite difficult
and quite different.
-It's your idea.
-You thought of it.
Professor, help me!
When I first read it,
I was just thrilled by it.
Just that we were doing
something that different
and really quite bold, I think,
in Doctor Who terms.
I also remember reading and thinking,
"How on earth are we gonna shoot this?"
You got a character
who repeats everything.
BOTH: Bananas.
The Medusa Cascade.
On first glance,
Sky gets dragged into repeating
the words of every other character
and I didn't know how on earth,
A, we could film that,
or B, how it was going
to be possible to learn.
TENNANT: It's more of
a psychological horror
than you traditionally get
in Doctor Who.
From that sense,
I think it's quite a grown-up script.
It's scary in quite an adult way.
I'm just travelling.
I'm a traveller, that's all.
-Like an immigrant?
-Who were you talking to?
Before you got on board, you were
talking to someone. Who was that?
TENNANT: Yeah, there's an interesting
study of human behaviour in there.
This whole idea that
you're gonna look for a scapegoat.
If you're in a situation that scares
the living daylights out of you,
you're gonna look for an explanation
and then you're gonna
look for someone to blame.
-Doctor, you've been loving this.
-Oh, Jethro, not you.
No, but ever since all the trouble
started, you've been loving it.
I think it absolutely taps
into human nature, really.
I think it is that we are pack animals.
And I think if we're threatened,
we do gather together.
You do seem to have a certain glee.
All right, I'm interested, yes.
I can't help it.
NARRATOR: Over the next few weeks,
the Doctor Who cast and crew
will cram themselves into this
claustrophobic Crusader 50 set.
That's enough to drive anyone crazy.
Action.
What did they say? Did they tell you?
What is it? What's wrong?
Oh, just stabilising.
Happens all the time.
I don't need this.
I'm on a schedule.
This is completely unnecessary.
Back to your seats. Thank you.
It's really claustrophobic,
it's a small set.
It's even smaller
when it's full of a crew.
And that all helps to feel hemmed in.
You know, there actually is
the feeling of a lack of oxygen
and a lack of space and nowhere to go.
You know that out there all there is
is the darkness and the danger.
Day three in Crusader 59,
the crew and the cast
are still talking to each other.
It's the entrance. Can it get in?
LINDSEY COULSON:
Well, I feel quite claustrophobic now,
as an actress,
having been in there for a week,
'cause I'm taken from a hotel,
in the dark,
brought here in the dark,
spend all day in the dark,
in this claustrophobic thing,
and then driven home in the dark.
Got no idea what Cardiff looks like.
In the script itself
it's built that way,
we all feed off of each other's tension.
And so the more nervous
one person gets, it's infectious.
Claustrophobia is very, very infectious
and so, yeah, inevitably,
it's gonna end bad.
NARRATOR: Making all the right noises
is sound effects editor Paul Jefferies.
I'm the sound effects editor
on Doctor Who.
Midnight was an interesting one
for us sound guys.
There's lots of
different things going on.
But we've got something outside,
we've got a monster outside,
and imagination runs wild,
we don't know what it is.
It's the soundman's job
to try and feed the imagination,
and try and satisfy
the imagination as well.
If it sounds slightly wrong,
the illusion's broken
and nobody cares
what's outside any more.
So now we come to the crescendo.
The monster's getting closer and closer
and now, instead of
being like a heartbeat,
it's more like footsteps
getting faster and faster, running.
Get out of there!
(ALL SCREAMING)
It all goes bang.
ADR stands for
Automatic Dialogue Replacement
and it's a necessary evil.
NARRATOR: It's no secret
that David Tennant
is rather reluctant at recording ADR.
In fact, you could say
he's quite vocal about it.
I don't enjoy doing ADR,
which is no secret to the people
who have to record it with me.
I find it difficult and frustrating
because you're not there,
you're not in that moment any more.
You're not looking
that other actor in the eye.
You're not experiencing that story
in the way that you experienced it
on the day that you shot it.
And actually, what you're trying to do
is recreate something artificially.
What happens is you record sound on set.
Obviously, you have microphones on set,
you have sound recordists there.
And they will get
the best possible recording
of the sound on that day
that they possibly can.
But there are a number of reasons why
that sound might ultimately not work.
There might be a plane going overhead,
which you just...
And you didn't have time
to do another take.
Hello.
You know, if you did, on the day,
you did some strange
way of saying a...sentence with
a funny little pause
that you put in on that day
because that felt right at the time.
But if you're then in
a recording booth, six months later,
trying to.. .recreate...
the.. strange.. pauses that you did
and trying to match it to your own lips
that you're watching on
a screen at the time.
It's a curious process.
And the cold and the diamonds.
On an episode like Midnight,
because so much of it's to do
with overlapping dialogue,
dialogue that has to be simultaneous
with another character's dialogue,
there inevitably will be
a bit of that necessary.
But I do get a little bit grumpy
sometimes when I do it,
when I'm recording.
The more we talk, the more she learns.
Now, I'm all for education,
but in this case, maybe not.
Let's just move back.
Come on. Come with me.
Everyone, get back, all of you.
As far as you can.
It's amazing how lacking in authority
the Doctor becomes in this episode,
because his words
don't feel like his own any more.
He says all the things
the Doctor normally says,
all the speeches that normally
take control of a situation,
all the speeches that normally
win people over, and they don't work.
And they don't work because someone
else is saying it as well, behind him.
-My name's the Doctor.
-My name's the Doctor.
-Okay, can you stop?
-Okay, can you stop?
-I'd like you to stop.
-I'd like you to stop.
It was very funny when
Russell sold this idea to me,
when he first talked to me about
wanting to write this kind of script.
You know, he said to me,
"Okay, ask me a question."
I said, "What's your name?"
He said, "What's your name?"
I said, "What?" He said, "What?
I said, "Oh, I see.” "Oh, I see."
It's a thing that kids do.
You say, "Go to bed,"
they go, "Go to bed."
"Shut up.” "Shut up."
He carried it on for about four minutes,
and after four or five minutes,
I was like, "Look, stop now."
"I'm freaked out."
And you know when someone
keeps doing it, it drives you mad.
When a kid really sustains it
for like five minutes.
Five minutes is enough.
It drives you bonkers.
It's like a dripping tap,
and I think, for a sense,
for those 45 minutes,
the people in that cruiser go mad.
I think he drives them all mad.
-Why's she doing that?
-Why's she doing that?
-She's gone mad.
-She's gone mad.
-Stop it.
-Stop it.
-I said, stop it.
-I said, stop it.
-I don't think she can.
-I don't think she can.
Why is it so annoying
when someone does that?
And I think it robs you of something.
It's sort of ..
We are our voices and somehow
it's like it's taken away,
and it's mocked somehow.
Action, Lindsey.
VAL: Stop talking, do you hear?
Stop talking.
Action, Lesley.
Stop talking, do you hear? Stop talking.
I'm standing behind a monitor,
so basically, my head,
I've never been a monitor before,
is a monitor and
when I do my first little section,
she then repeats
so she gets the same intonation
and the same rhythm and pattern.
VAL: Biff, don't just stand there,
do something.
SKY: Biff, don't just stand there,
do something.
VAL: Make her stop.
SKY: Make her stop.
-Great.
-Like that?
There's no room for error
because you have to say
exactly what someone else is saying.
You can't make any slip-ups.
Put a "the" in at the top of a line,
or an "and" where it shouldn't be.
It has to be absolutely precise.
And doing that all on your own,
I think it probably would have
driven me mad.
-Hush, now, hush.
-Hush, now, hush.
-She's doing it to me.
-She's doing it to me.
Just stop it.
All of you, stop it, please.
The most difficult sequences to shoot
were the ones where I had to be
absolutely in sync with David.
-Sky, is it Sky?
-Sky, is it Sky?
We're almost there.
DIRECTOR: Pick it up, please.
Russell rather kindly gave us
the square root of pi to learn,
to 30 decimal places.
For someone who scraped through
their maths Higher...
You just start by learning it,
that's the first obstacle to get over.
-726148...
-726148...
-Wow.
-Wow.
(TENNANT SNORTING)
The square root of pi is 1.77...
BOTH: The square root of pi
is 1.77245385...
It's 1.7724538
50905516
027298167483341,
and so on. So I can, but the thing is,
on recall, I can get it
at a certain speed,
but David and I had to do it like that.
And I had to really, kind of,
keep going through it in my head
to make it come out quickly.
BOTH: ...8167483341.
Wow.
Sorry.
(ALL LAUGHING)
(ALL LAUGHING)
NARRATOR: For the first time
on Confidential,
we hear from the sound teams
who put the hullabaloo into Doctor Who.
A day trip to disaster
leaves the Time Lord lost for words.
But thankfully, behind the scenes,
an army of audio engineers
are speaking the same language.
The horror of what is happening to him
is doubled,
simply because we know
he is not in control of events.
The Doctor is possibly more scared
than he would be
facing a legion of Daleks.
-She's driving me mad.
-She's driving me mad.
-Just make her stop.
-Just make her stop.
-Stop her staring at me.
-Stop her staring at me.
-That's impossible.
-That's impossible.
(ALL TALKING AT ONCE)
-666.
-666.
You stop!
Stop repeating!
The unsung heroes,
and I have said this many times,
of Doctor Who is the sound department,
both the on-set recordists
and the post production.
It is an immensely complicated process.
Action.
I'm telling you to stop!
There were slightly different challenges
on a story like this
and they involved different departments
in ways that they hadn't before.
Usually the challenges are about
how are we gonna blow up that Cyberman
or how are we gonna hang
off that spaceship or, you know...
It's quite good to give the sound team
some things to worry about.
You know, put them to work. Not that
they don't work hard enough already.
On Doctor Who,
we have a team of sound editors.
They lay up, on average,
about 70 sound tracks on a Doctor Who.
It comes to me on this screen here.
And then they come into
a bunch of faders on the desk.
That will be dialogue, sound effects,
music, Foley.
My job is to mix them all together,
produce a coherent soundtrack
for transmission on the telly
that pleases everybody.
They slave away on this programme
and it's a big, old, noisy programme.
It's like we push them and nag them
to fill in every sound.
Never be dominant
on a close-up of someone else.
-That's the thing.
-It's very confusing.
-Absolutely.
-Marvellous.
NARRATOR: Once the pictures
have been perfected,
the sound team lend their ears
to those 70 tracks.
This episode is quite different to
other episodes of Doctor Who
because there's not many
monster noises to design,
and there's not lots of
crowd effects etc.
But it's a psychological one.
This is something that we haven't really
touched on in a Doctor Who before.
Normally we got to do a werewolf,
or a beast, or something like that.
But this one,
because it's dialogue driven,
that's why it's quite difficult
and quite different.
-It's your idea.
-You thought of it.
Professor, help me!
When I first read it,
I was just thrilled by it.
Just that we were doing
something that different
and really quite bold, I think,
in Doctor Who terms.
I also remember reading and thinking,
"How on earth are we gonna shoot this?"
You got a character
who repeats everything.
BOTH: Bananas.
The Medusa Cascade.
On first glance,
Sky gets dragged into repeating
the words of every other character
and I didn't know how on earth,
A, we could film that,
or B, how it was going
to be possible to learn.
TENNANT: It's more of
a psychological horror
than you traditionally get
in Doctor Who.
From that sense,
I think it's quite a grown-up script.
It's scary in quite an adult way.
I'm just travelling.
I'm a traveller, that's all.
-Like an immigrant?
-Who were you talking to?
Before you got on board, you were
talking to someone. Who was that?
TENNANT: Yeah, there's an interesting
study of human behaviour in there.
This whole idea that
you're gonna look for a scapegoat.
If you're in a situation that scares
the living daylights out of you,
you're gonna look for an explanation
and then you're gonna
look for someone to blame.
-Doctor, you've been loving this.
-Oh, Jethro, not you.
No, but ever since all the trouble
started, you've been loving it.
I think it absolutely taps
into human nature, really.
I think it is that we are pack animals.
And I think if we're threatened,
we do gather together.
You do seem to have a certain glee.
All right, I'm interested, yes.
I can't help it.
NARRATOR: Over the next few weeks,
the Doctor Who cast and crew
will cram themselves into this
claustrophobic Crusader 50 set.
That's enough to drive anyone crazy.
Action.
What did they say? Did they tell you?
What is it? What's wrong?
Oh, just stabilising.
Happens all the time.
I don't need this.
I'm on a schedule.
This is completely unnecessary.
Back to your seats. Thank you.
It's really claustrophobic,
it's a small set.
It's even smaller
when it's full of a crew.
And that all helps to feel hemmed in.
You know, there actually is
the feeling of a lack of oxygen
and a lack of space and nowhere to go.
You know that out there all there is
is the darkness and the danger.
Day three in Crusader 59,
the crew and the cast
are still talking to each other.
It's the entrance. Can it get in?
LINDSEY COULSON:
Well, I feel quite claustrophobic now,
as an actress,
having been in there for a week,
'cause I'm taken from a hotel,
in the dark,
brought here in the dark,
spend all day in the dark,
in this claustrophobic thing,
and then driven home in the dark.
Got no idea what Cardiff looks like.
In the script itself
it's built that way,
we all feed off of each other's tension.
And so the more nervous
one person gets, it's infectious.
Claustrophobia is very, very infectious
and so, yeah, inevitably,
it's gonna end bad.
NARRATOR: Making all the right noises
is sound effects editor Paul Jefferies.
I'm the sound effects editor
on Doctor Who.
Midnight was an interesting one
for us sound guys.
There's lots of
different things going on.
But we've got something outside,
we've got a monster outside,
and imagination runs wild,
we don't know what it is.
It's the soundman's job
to try and feed the imagination,
and try and satisfy
the imagination as well.
If it sounds slightly wrong,
the illusion's broken
and nobody cares
what's outside any more.
So now we come to the crescendo.
The monster's getting closer and closer
and now, instead of
being like a heartbeat,
it's more like footsteps
getting faster and faster, running.
Get out of there!
(ALL SCREAMING)
It all goes bang.
ADR stands for
Automatic Dialogue Replacement
and it's a necessary evil.
NARRATOR: It's no secret
that David Tennant
is rather reluctant at recording ADR.
In fact, you could say
he's quite vocal about it.
I don't enjoy doing ADR,
which is no secret to the people
who have to record it with me.
I find it difficult and frustrating
because you're not there,
you're not in that moment any more.
You're not looking
that other actor in the eye.
You're not experiencing that story
in the way that you experienced it
on the day that you shot it.
And actually, what you're trying to do
is recreate something artificially.
What happens is you record sound on set.
Obviously, you have microphones on set,
you have sound recordists there.
And they will get
the best possible recording
of the sound on that day
that they possibly can.
But there are a number of reasons why
that sound might ultimately not work.
There might be a plane going overhead,
which you just...
And you didn't have time
to do another take.
Hello.
You know, if you did, on the day,
you did some strange
way of saying a...sentence with
a funny little pause
that you put in on that day
because that felt right at the time.
But if you're then in
a recording booth, six months later,
trying to.. .recreate...
the.. strange.. pauses that you did
and trying to match it to your own lips
that you're watching on
a screen at the time.
It's a curious process.
And the cold and the diamonds.
On an episode like Midnight,
because so much of it's to do
with overlapping dialogue,
dialogue that has to be simultaneous
with another character's dialogue,
there inevitably will be
a bit of that necessary.
But I do get a little bit grumpy
sometimes when I do it,
when I'm recording.
The more we talk, the more she learns.
Now, I'm all for education,
but in this case, maybe not.
Let's just move back.
Come on. Come with me.
Everyone, get back, all of you.
As far as you can.
It's amazing how lacking in authority
the Doctor becomes in this episode,
because his words
don't feel like his own any more.
He says all the things
the Doctor normally says,
all the speeches that normally
take control of a situation,
all the speeches that normally
win people over, and they don't work.
And they don't work because someone
else is saying it as well, behind him.
-My name's the Doctor.
-My name's the Doctor.
-Okay, can you stop?
-Okay, can you stop?
-I'd like you to stop.
-I'd like you to stop.
It was very funny when
Russell sold this idea to me,
when he first talked to me about
wanting to write this kind of script.
You know, he said to me,
"Okay, ask me a question."
I said, "What's your name?"
He said, "What's your name?"
I said, "What?" He said, "What?
I said, "Oh, I see.” "Oh, I see."
It's a thing that kids do.
You say, "Go to bed,"
they go, "Go to bed."
"Shut up.” "Shut up."
He carried it on for about four minutes,
and after four or five minutes,
I was like, "Look, stop now."
"I'm freaked out."
And you know when someone
keeps doing it, it drives you mad.
When a kid really sustains it
for like five minutes.
Five minutes is enough.
It drives you bonkers.
It's like a dripping tap,
and I think, for a sense,
for those 45 minutes,
the people in that cruiser go mad.
I think he drives them all mad.
-Why's she doing that?
-Why's she doing that?
-She's gone mad.
-She's gone mad.
-Stop it.
-Stop it.
-I said, stop it.
-I said, stop it.
-I don't think she can.
-I don't think she can.
Why is it so annoying
when someone does that?
And I think it robs you of something.
It's sort of ..
We are our voices and somehow
it's like it's taken away,
and it's mocked somehow.
Action, Lindsey.
VAL: Stop talking, do you hear?
Stop talking.
Action, Lesley.
Stop talking, do you hear? Stop talking.
I'm standing behind a monitor,
so basically, my head,
I've never been a monitor before,
is a monitor and
when I do my first little section,
she then repeats
so she gets the same intonation
and the same rhythm and pattern.
VAL: Biff, don't just stand there,
do something.
SKY: Biff, don't just stand there,
do something.
VAL: Make her stop.
SKY: Make her stop.
-Great.
-Like that?
There's no room for error
because you have to say
exactly what someone else is saying.
You can't make any slip-ups.
Put a "the" in at the top of a line,
or an "and" where it shouldn't be.
It has to be absolutely precise.
And doing that all on your own,
I think it probably would have
driven me mad.
-Hush, now, hush.
-Hush, now, hush.
-She's doing it to me.
-She's doing it to me.
Just stop it.
All of you, stop it, please.
The most difficult sequences to shoot
were the ones where I had to be
absolutely in sync with David.
-Sky, is it Sky?
-Sky, is it Sky?
We're almost there.
DIRECTOR: Pick it up, please.
Russell rather kindly gave us
the square root of pi to learn,
to 30 decimal places.
For someone who scraped through
their maths Higher...
You just start by learning it,
that's the first obstacle to get over.
-726148...
-726148...
-Wow.
-Wow.
(TENNANT SNORTING)
The square root of pi is 1.77...
BOTH: The square root of pi
is 1.77245385...
It's 1.7724538
50905516
027298167483341,
and so on. So I can, but the thing is,
on recall, I can get it
at a certain speed,
but David and I had to do it like that.
And I had to really, kind of,
keep going through it in my head
to make it come out quickly.
BOTH: ...8167483341.
Wow.
Sorry.
(ALL LAUGHING)