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“Gaspode” brings back Euros Lyn, who directed both 2.7, “The Idiot’s Lantern,” and tonight’s 2.11, “Fear Her.” This is the second part of the interview that was posted the night “Lantern” hit SciFi:
Before we discuss ‘Fear Her,’ let’s talk about ‘Idiot’s Lantern for a moment. What kind of tone did you have in mind when you were shooting that episode, which is set in the fifties?
Euros Lyn: From the beginning, the central theme in episode seven is this battle against fascism. Even from early on, I think we’re supposed to be scared of Eddie the father. He’s probably quite violent, and from the first scene he’s in, we know he’s not a nice guy, and there’s always this simmering undercurrent that he could do some very unpleasant things if his temper was unleashed, so it kind of balances that darkness.
It’s a slightly subversive episode isn’t it, suggesting connecting television with loss of identity and so forth?
Lyn: I think so. It exists as a metaphor exactly the way you describe it, but within the episode, it also resonates as a warning of the dangers of fascism and the dangers of any totalitarian ideology, so you have Tommy as this incredibly hopeful character, who embraces new technology and wants to have the freedom to be friends with whoever he wants to be friends with and to love whoever he wants to love. This is a young character, who yearns for freedom, and his triumph at the end is that metaphoric vanquishing of fascism. I think it’s interesting, this idea that German was defeated at the end of the Second World War and Britain was living in a peaceful happy time, but in this episode, that darkness and danger exists within Britain, and I think that’s very pertinent for our age now. We live in a time where those forces, those fascistic ideologies are actually with us now, and we need to be vigilant that they never triumph.
But the post-war period was also still very difficult for Britain, hence the idea of a TV in every house having a great deal of resonance.
Lyn: The Doctor has this fantastic speech where he realizes that they’ve landed in 1953 and it’s the end of austerity and everybody is off the ration and the Technicolor, and they can look forward to a brighter, happier future. One of the wonderful things about this series is the aspiration and hope that drives every single story forward. Yes, it wasn’t an entirely cozy, happy simple time, where everybody lived in happy families, but what drives our heroes through this story is the hope for a better life and for freedom and love.
You’ve got a great guest cast in this episode, including Ron Cook, Maureen Lipman-
Lyn: It is a good piece of drama, with some fantastic performances. There are some really subtle, nuanced performances by all the cast, and but we’re also fortunate to have Andy Pryor as our casting director, who’s got the most amazing instincts I think one of the main skills for a casting director is to understand the nature of being human, and Andy is particularly attuned to that. He can understand the essence of a character and put his finger on the right actor for that part, so we’re very fortunate to have him.
Although ‘Idiot’s Lantern’ is a period piece to some extent, presumably you had to be careful with your research considering some of your viewers would still remember that period quite well.
Lyn: Absolutely, and we relied a lot on photographs. Jean Challis one of our actors who played Auntie Betty actually went to the Coronation as a young girl and stood cheering the queen as she passed by on the Strand. She could tell us what the weather was like, but unfortunately we couldn’t control that, but again, we wanted to be historically accurate, because it helps us tell the truth.
‘Fear Her’ is really a character piece, isn’t it?
Lyn: Yeah, there are very few visual FX in it. In any episode, the FX are there to tell the story. Maybe sometimes they’re exciting in themselves, but really, the visual FX are only exciting if they serve to tell the story, and Matthew Graham has written a very dramatic story, with very few FX, but the dramatic events he’s written are thrilling, so it works.
Was it tough to find a good young actor to play Chloe?
Lyn: In the past, when I was casting kids, I would go around to schools, so I and met literally hundreds of kids and whittled them down and arranged recalls where a few of them would come back in and eventually you work your way down to the one who can do it. But on this show, we didn’t have time to do that, so you kind of go through the agency kids, many of whom are very stage schooly; they’ve done stage musicals, which isn’t particularly useful for screen acting. But the way it worked this time was that Andy went out to some community drama groups in London, who had no film experience and saw some stage plays and invited some of the kids in, one of whom was Abby and I think she’s done pretty well. Because the child is possessed by the alien and as a result is desperate for love and for company, but her actions, which are honorably driven, lead to chaos and destruction, so she starts stealing kids from the street and she’s essentially a benign, benevolent character, doing things for the best of her intentions, but in actual fact, her actions are evil, so it’s a really tricky role.
Didn’t you ever hear the warning about working with kids or animals?
Lyn: I think there are practical and logistic difficulties, like they’re only allowed to work nine hours a day and every hour they have to have a 15-20 minute break, so there are the rules, but there’s also their concentration. They can’t keep going in the way an adult can; well, sometimes they can actually, but also their experience is much less, so they’re discovering the disciplines of shooting for the first time, and that can be quite a challenge. We were very lucky with the little girl we had, because she’s playing somebody who’s affected by an alien presence, and she pitched it very well, and it’s a very strange experience to watch her, which is exactly right for the story.
Strange in what sense?
Lyn: How can I say it without giving too much away for the people who haven’t seen it yet? She’s kind of emotionally removed I guess and I think that’s perfect for the character in the story.
This may sound a bit politically incorrect, but were you at all worried about casting black actors to play a single mother and her child, without tapping into some unfortunate racial stereotypes, particularly as far as abuse and abandonment were concerned?
Lyn: It’s interesting, because in Britain there are far more white kids than there are black kids, so the choice of actors is greater with white kids, just because there are more of them and it’s actually more difficult to find in any minority, once you decide to cast from a minority group, it’s more difficult to cast. I think with Doctor Who, we’re in the business of mirroring life and we represent Britain on screen, so it’s very important to us that we have characters from across lots of different minority groups, and we wanted the lead character to be black, and I think the fact that she goes on quite a dark journey has no relevance to whether she’s black or white. That could have gone either way.
Did you find it was easier to use simple tricks to create the illusion of the drawings moving?
Lyn: The guy in the wardrobe, we never see him move, but he has a voice, he has a growl and the wardrobe doors are banging, so it’s the truism of what you don’t see is often scarier than what you do see. There’s a classic Who moment near the end of the episode where the dad escapes from the wardrobe and he’s rounding the top of the staircase, and all you can see is his shadow, because he’s back-lit by this red glow from the pit of hell where he’s come from, and his shadow grows at the top of the landing and just this sense of what’s about to come is far scarier than it would be had we ever seen him.
So you’ve already scared the hell out of kids by putting a monster under the bed in ‘Girl in the Fireplace,’ and now you’ve got a monster in the closet.
Lyn: I think one of the scariest moments is in episode two, where it’s not what we see but what we hear. It’s when Captain Reynolds is devoured by the werewolf and we can hear his limbs being torn apart one by one and then there’s blood-curdling death scream from him. That’s kind of worse than anything we see.
Looking back over your four episodes from season two, what are you happiest with?
Lyn: I think I’m really proud of some of the action sequences in episode two, especially. In Doctor Who, we’ve done emotion brilliantly and I think we’ve done some CG very well, but up until the end of the last series, some of the action sequences could have been better, so that’s something we wanted to improve, and I’m really proud that we’ve been able to do that. And I’m really proud that episode 11 even with a much lower budget is as great an episode of Doctor Who as an episode with a bigger canvas. So I suppose it’s those two extremes really.
8 p.m. Friday. SciFi.
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