Doctor Who Confidential (2005–2011): Season 4, Episode 8 - Shadow Play - full transcript
Right, you lot.
Let's all meet the Vashta Nerada.
NARRATOR: Shh. This week
well have "Silence in the Library".
So come quietly with Confidential as we
shadow the Doctor Who production team.
It's certainly not like reading
as we go behind the scenes
for the filming of another page-turning
Doctor Who script.
It's kind of cool.
-Donna.
-Yeah.
Stay out of the shadows.
That's no darkness down those tunnels.
This is not a shadow.
It's a swarm. A man-eating swarm.
What if shadows themselves... What if
the darkness itself could get you?
'Cause wherever you sit,
wherever you go at night,
the one thing you're definitely
gonna see is a shadow.
There is danger involved in this world.
Dark danger.
The Vashta Nerada,
a perfect Doctor Who monster
because they are the shadows.
I mean, technically,
they are the dust in the shadows.
But they are moving shadows
and Doctor Who is about shadows
and darkness and gothic corners
and what's out there in the dark.
Run!
What an individual
Vashta Nerada looks like...
Vashta Nerade? Vashta Neradi?
What a single one looks like,
we may never know.
Which I suppose is unusual in that
there's not a prosthetics creation
or a computer-generated creation.
But I guess it allows you to imagine,
you know.
They're described as
the piranhas of the air.
Where there's meat,
there's Vashta Nerada.
You can see them sometimes if you look.
The dust in sunbeams.
As David said to me today, in character,
"The dust in the sunbeams."
It suddenly resonated how scary
this episode is, really.
Everybody out. Go, go, go.
Move it. Move, move. Move it.
You want people
lying in their beds at night,
pulling the sheets close and saying,
"I don't know what that shadow is."
-Every shadow?
-No, but any shadow.
It's a great idea
that it's not every shadow,
but any shadow could have your leg off.
And it can clearly work
at a ferocious pace.
They can strip
flesh off the bone in milliseconds,
and yet you can't quite see them.
You can't quite put your finger on them.
You wouldn't want to put your finger
on them, they'd have it off.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, good. Pick it up.
Picking up, please. And action.
Out here, every book ever written.
Whole continents of Jeffrey Archer,
Bridget Jones,
Monty Python's Big Red Book.
Brand new editions, especially printed.
DIRECTOR: Cameras cut. Thank you.
Steven's written these two episodes
and set them in the biggest library
in the universe.
It's a whole planet made of books.
This library planet idea
has been around for years.
After Steven Moffat wrote
The Empty Child for series one,
and I just said to him, "What else do
you wanna write? We'll have anything."
"Please, anytime. Thank you."
I proposed a couple of ideas,
the first of which was the library.
I think at some point we've been
going to do that story every year.
I think.
That's why I feel...
And it's magnificent.
I feel we've waited a long time
to arrive at this library.
TENNANT: The library is something
terribly futuristic.
It's something from the far, far future.
And yet it's full of books,
which are practical,
material things,
which are almost old-fashioned now.
You know, they're not downloads,
they're not on a screen,
and they don't exist
in any kind of digital form.
They're real tangible things.
And I think that collision
of sort of antiquity with technology
is very appropriate to the world
of the Doctor, I think.
We're near the equator, so...
This must be biographies!
I love biographies.
You read that script, you think,
"Blimey, we're gonna have to travel
"a long way away."
You know, it was hard.
We couldn't find a lot of buildings
in Cardiff,
and then literally an empty library
on a huge scale in Swansea,
just before it's pulled down or sold,
was sitting there.
It was like the episode was handwritten
for the most perfect location.
It was gobsmacking, really,
because we'd never be able
to ordinarily go into a building
like that
and close it down
for the length of time we needed.
I mean, we were in there
for almost two full weeks.
And, you know, we needed to completely
take over that place.
We'd never have been able to do that.
I think it would have cost us...
We would probably
have had to build all that as a set.
We wouldn't have been able to get
the kind of scale that we get in there.
The levels and the beautiful dome.
And just everything
that location offered to us.
If we set-up for two wide shots,
one high one and one lower one...
-Yeah, fine.
-So, again, maybe playing
kind of foreground,
something in foreground,
-and just a bit of creepiness.
-Yeah.
In the episode The Library,
to give the impression
of more than one room, we're changing
the colour, the background colour.
We go from blue,
we go to yellow, we go to red.
So we only have one location,
but we kind of gave the impression
that it's more than one room.
Our design team have done
a really great job, I think.
And when we came here on a recce,
the Swansea Council
were taking all the books out,
which is the opposite of what we wanted.
We wanted this place full of books,
and fair play, the art department
have filled it
with a mile long of fake books.
There's not a single page
behind these covers.
They're all pretend,
but I think they look great.
I think most people
at one time in their life
have been scared of the dark.
There is no monsters in these episodes,
so the monsters are the shadows
and their own imagination.
So my particular fob
is to try and translate
what is written and the director's
wishes into that, really.
Hence, there's the matter of
making shadows that move.
I put lights on high stands
and lower them
so the shadows get shorter and longer.
And moving flags in front of the lights,
so the light's in the static position,
but the flag might move,
thereby giving the impression
that the shadow's moving
towards the object, towards the person.
That shadow, it's gone.
-We need to get back to the Tardis.
-why?
Because that shadow hasn't gone,
it's moved.
Steven is so clever
because he comes up with a monster
that's actually invisible,
that's a shadow.
And then he somehow manages to
turn that on its head
and give you a skeleton
in a space suit that chases people.
Back! Get back!
It's great with those movements
in those suits
because you've got to have fun with it
and you've gotta be scary
at the same time.
I always think it will be a success if,
Monday morning,
there's some kid
in a playground somewhere
lumbering like poor Proper Dave after...
He doesn't have to put a suit on.
But doing that...
It's a classic zombie walk.
I know Ailsa came in
and it worked out for us.
And you need it,
you need that choreography.
The actors need that choreography.
The other actors need it to respond to.
But what could be better than
classic zombie lurching?
But this time, it's in a space suit.
I just think it's such a strong image.
And suddenly it comes out
and staggers slightly
in the transition stage.
Basically, yes. Or it's almost... Yes.
But don't let it go limp
because remember out of that,
you're suddenly becoming stiff.
AILSA BERK: The first input is
actually what the script says.
How they are, they're stiff,
they're standing awkwardly,
they move clumsily.
And so that is the essence
of the movement.
They've got to walk where they come up
and over the top of the foot
and then down, so it gives it
that slight juddered motion.
And it literally is... It's like a...
That's it.
I'm gonna do a bit of it,
the sort of beginning of it,
and then they've got a movement
artist to sort of take over.
It's sort of locked knees, a bit
zombie kind of movement, you know.
And action.
Doctor!
Please tell me some kids on Monday
are doing that, then we've succeeded.
So why's it got a face?
This flesh aspect was donated
by Mark Chambers
on the occasion of his death.
It's a real face.
It has been actualised
individually for you
from the many facial aspects
saved to our extensive flesh banks.
It chose me a dead face
it thought I'd like.
That statue's got
a real dead person's face.
It's the 51st century. That's basically
like donating a park bench.
It's donating a face!
The Nodes, I think, are gruesome.
They're a truly gruesome invention,
in that they're a dead face.
In having come up with the idea,
slightly randomly of
there's gotta be an information thing,
they've got to get some information,
I'll make it creepy, I'll put a real
face on a statue. That'll be cool.
Please enjoy.
As ever with Steven's ideas,
they sort of sound astonishingly simple
and brilliant when we read them,
but actually making them
turns out to be a nightmare,
'cause that's a prosthetic which. ..
They had to remove the rest of the body,
it becomes a piece of CGI,
then there's the build
of the actual real Node itself on set
to get it turning.
Very complicated, indeed,
but very simple at the heart of it.
It's a talking statue.
Having had the idea,
you've got to chop off
the front of the companion's head
and stick it on a statue.
That's just the way it goes.
It's nice to be a cliffhanger.
It's exciting.
I teleported Donna back to the Tardis.
If we don't get back there
in under five hours,
Emergency Program One will activate.
Take her home, yeah.
We need to get a shift on.
She's not there.
I should've received a signal.
The console signals me
if there's a teleport breach.
Maybe the coordinates have slipped.
The equipment here's ancient.
Donna Noble. There's a Donna Noble
somewhere in this library.
Do you have the software
to locate her position?
Donna Noble has left the library.
-Donna Noble has been saved.
-Donna...
How can it be Donna?
How's that possible?
I think the best cliffhangers
will present you with a situation
that there is clearly no way out of.
That's the worst possible thing
I can think of doing to Donna,
therefore I must do it.
Donna Noble has left the Library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
The faces on the Nodes
are the faces of dead people.
Clearly Donna's dead.
It knocks you, it winds you.
For Donna to be a Node,
you have to be dead.
It's like, gosh, Donna's dead.
Donna Noble has left the library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
I defy anyone at the end of episode 8
to know how episode 9 begins.
Donna Noble has left the library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
As ever with Steven,
it's so brilliant and classy.
The key to all this...
I can't tell you any more.
Donna Noble has been saved.
Hopefully, what you're asking
in episode 8 is...
How's it all tied together?
...what is going on with
that little girl? Who is she?
And what is her relationship
with the library?
What on earth has happened to Donna?
Is she dead?
You'll find out.
Let's all meet the Vashta Nerada.
NARRATOR: Shh. This week
well have "Silence in the Library".
So come quietly with Confidential as we
shadow the Doctor Who production team.
It's certainly not like reading
as we go behind the scenes
for the filming of another page-turning
Doctor Who script.
It's kind of cool.
-Donna.
-Yeah.
Stay out of the shadows.
That's no darkness down those tunnels.
This is not a shadow.
It's a swarm. A man-eating swarm.
What if shadows themselves... What if
the darkness itself could get you?
'Cause wherever you sit,
wherever you go at night,
the one thing you're definitely
gonna see is a shadow.
There is danger involved in this world.
Dark danger.
The Vashta Nerada,
a perfect Doctor Who monster
because they are the shadows.
I mean, technically,
they are the dust in the shadows.
But they are moving shadows
and Doctor Who is about shadows
and darkness and gothic corners
and what's out there in the dark.
Run!
What an individual
Vashta Nerada looks like...
Vashta Nerade? Vashta Neradi?
What a single one looks like,
we may never know.
Which I suppose is unusual in that
there's not a prosthetics creation
or a computer-generated creation.
But I guess it allows you to imagine,
you know.
They're described as
the piranhas of the air.
Where there's meat,
there's Vashta Nerada.
You can see them sometimes if you look.
The dust in sunbeams.
As David said to me today, in character,
"The dust in the sunbeams."
It suddenly resonated how scary
this episode is, really.
Everybody out. Go, go, go.
Move it. Move, move. Move it.
You want people
lying in their beds at night,
pulling the sheets close and saying,
"I don't know what that shadow is."
-Every shadow?
-No, but any shadow.
It's a great idea
that it's not every shadow,
but any shadow could have your leg off.
And it can clearly work
at a ferocious pace.
They can strip
flesh off the bone in milliseconds,
and yet you can't quite see them.
You can't quite put your finger on them.
You wouldn't want to put your finger
on them, they'd have it off.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, good. Pick it up.
Picking up, please. And action.
Out here, every book ever written.
Whole continents of Jeffrey Archer,
Bridget Jones,
Monty Python's Big Red Book.
Brand new editions, especially printed.
DIRECTOR: Cameras cut. Thank you.
Steven's written these two episodes
and set them in the biggest library
in the universe.
It's a whole planet made of books.
This library planet idea
has been around for years.
After Steven Moffat wrote
The Empty Child for series one,
and I just said to him, "What else do
you wanna write? We'll have anything."
"Please, anytime. Thank you."
I proposed a couple of ideas,
the first of which was the library.
I think at some point we've been
going to do that story every year.
I think.
That's why I feel...
And it's magnificent.
I feel we've waited a long time
to arrive at this library.
TENNANT: The library is something
terribly futuristic.
It's something from the far, far future.
And yet it's full of books,
which are practical,
material things,
which are almost old-fashioned now.
You know, they're not downloads,
they're not on a screen,
and they don't exist
in any kind of digital form.
They're real tangible things.
And I think that collision
of sort of antiquity with technology
is very appropriate to the world
of the Doctor, I think.
We're near the equator, so...
This must be biographies!
I love biographies.
You read that script, you think,
"Blimey, we're gonna have to travel
"a long way away."
You know, it was hard.
We couldn't find a lot of buildings
in Cardiff,
and then literally an empty library
on a huge scale in Swansea,
just before it's pulled down or sold,
was sitting there.
It was like the episode was handwritten
for the most perfect location.
It was gobsmacking, really,
because we'd never be able
to ordinarily go into a building
like that
and close it down
for the length of time we needed.
I mean, we were in there
for almost two full weeks.
And, you know, we needed to completely
take over that place.
We'd never have been able to do that.
I think it would have cost us...
We would probably
have had to build all that as a set.
We wouldn't have been able to get
the kind of scale that we get in there.
The levels and the beautiful dome.
And just everything
that location offered to us.
If we set-up for two wide shots,
one high one and one lower one...
-Yeah, fine.
-So, again, maybe playing
kind of foreground,
something in foreground,
-and just a bit of creepiness.
-Yeah.
In the episode The Library,
to give the impression
of more than one room, we're changing
the colour, the background colour.
We go from blue,
we go to yellow, we go to red.
So we only have one location,
but we kind of gave the impression
that it's more than one room.
Our design team have done
a really great job, I think.
And when we came here on a recce,
the Swansea Council
were taking all the books out,
which is the opposite of what we wanted.
We wanted this place full of books,
and fair play, the art department
have filled it
with a mile long of fake books.
There's not a single page
behind these covers.
They're all pretend,
but I think they look great.
I think most people
at one time in their life
have been scared of the dark.
There is no monsters in these episodes,
so the monsters are the shadows
and their own imagination.
So my particular fob
is to try and translate
what is written and the director's
wishes into that, really.
Hence, there's the matter of
making shadows that move.
I put lights on high stands
and lower them
so the shadows get shorter and longer.
And moving flags in front of the lights,
so the light's in the static position,
but the flag might move,
thereby giving the impression
that the shadow's moving
towards the object, towards the person.
That shadow, it's gone.
-We need to get back to the Tardis.
-why?
Because that shadow hasn't gone,
it's moved.
Steven is so clever
because he comes up with a monster
that's actually invisible,
that's a shadow.
And then he somehow manages to
turn that on its head
and give you a skeleton
in a space suit that chases people.
Back! Get back!
It's great with those movements
in those suits
because you've got to have fun with it
and you've gotta be scary
at the same time.
I always think it will be a success if,
Monday morning,
there's some kid
in a playground somewhere
lumbering like poor Proper Dave after...
He doesn't have to put a suit on.
But doing that...
It's a classic zombie walk.
I know Ailsa came in
and it worked out for us.
And you need it,
you need that choreography.
The actors need that choreography.
The other actors need it to respond to.
But what could be better than
classic zombie lurching?
But this time, it's in a space suit.
I just think it's such a strong image.
And suddenly it comes out
and staggers slightly
in the transition stage.
Basically, yes. Or it's almost... Yes.
But don't let it go limp
because remember out of that,
you're suddenly becoming stiff.
AILSA BERK: The first input is
actually what the script says.
How they are, they're stiff,
they're standing awkwardly,
they move clumsily.
And so that is the essence
of the movement.
They've got to walk where they come up
and over the top of the foot
and then down, so it gives it
that slight juddered motion.
And it literally is... It's like a...
That's it.
I'm gonna do a bit of it,
the sort of beginning of it,
and then they've got a movement
artist to sort of take over.
It's sort of locked knees, a bit
zombie kind of movement, you know.
And action.
Doctor!
Please tell me some kids on Monday
are doing that, then we've succeeded.
So why's it got a face?
This flesh aspect was donated
by Mark Chambers
on the occasion of his death.
It's a real face.
It has been actualised
individually for you
from the many facial aspects
saved to our extensive flesh banks.
It chose me a dead face
it thought I'd like.
That statue's got
a real dead person's face.
It's the 51st century. That's basically
like donating a park bench.
It's donating a face!
The Nodes, I think, are gruesome.
They're a truly gruesome invention,
in that they're a dead face.
In having come up with the idea,
slightly randomly of
there's gotta be an information thing,
they've got to get some information,
I'll make it creepy, I'll put a real
face on a statue. That'll be cool.
Please enjoy.
As ever with Steven's ideas,
they sort of sound astonishingly simple
and brilliant when we read them,
but actually making them
turns out to be a nightmare,
'cause that's a prosthetic which. ..
They had to remove the rest of the body,
it becomes a piece of CGI,
then there's the build
of the actual real Node itself on set
to get it turning.
Very complicated, indeed,
but very simple at the heart of it.
It's a talking statue.
Having had the idea,
you've got to chop off
the front of the companion's head
and stick it on a statue.
That's just the way it goes.
It's nice to be a cliffhanger.
It's exciting.
I teleported Donna back to the Tardis.
If we don't get back there
in under five hours,
Emergency Program One will activate.
Take her home, yeah.
We need to get a shift on.
She's not there.
I should've received a signal.
The console signals me
if there's a teleport breach.
Maybe the coordinates have slipped.
The equipment here's ancient.
Donna Noble. There's a Donna Noble
somewhere in this library.
Do you have the software
to locate her position?
Donna Noble has left the library.
-Donna Noble has been saved.
-Donna...
How can it be Donna?
How's that possible?
I think the best cliffhangers
will present you with a situation
that there is clearly no way out of.
That's the worst possible thing
I can think of doing to Donna,
therefore I must do it.
Donna Noble has left the Library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
The faces on the Nodes
are the faces of dead people.
Clearly Donna's dead.
It knocks you, it winds you.
For Donna to be a Node,
you have to be dead.
It's like, gosh, Donna's dead.
Donna Noble has left the library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
I defy anyone at the end of episode 8
to know how episode 9 begins.
Donna Noble has left the library.
Donna Noble has been saved.
As ever with Steven,
it's so brilliant and classy.
The key to all this...
I can't tell you any more.
Donna Noble has been saved.
Hopefully, what you're asking
in episode 8 is...
How's it all tied together?
...what is going on with
that little girl? Who is she?
And what is her relationship
with the library?
What on earth has happened to Donna?
Is she dead?
You'll find out.