BBC America gets "Primeval" on us

With the success of "Dr. Who" spinoff for adults "Torchwood" here, BBC America is going for another sci fi/fantasy win with the British hit "Primeval," debuting Saturday on the cable channel.

Douglas Henshall (right) stars as evolutionary zoologist Nick Cutter, who discovers prehistoric creatures alive and well in the present-day. Something is punching holes in the fabric of time, allowing beasties from the very earliest days of earth to roam our world.

Not only does Nick have to lead his team to track down the creatures and save humanity, he also has to face the face that his wife, fellow scientist Helen Cutter (Juliet Aubrey), is not dead after all; since she disappeared eight years ago, she's simply been time-traveling. But now that she's back, what's her real agenda?

Henshall and producers Tim Haines (of the nonfiction "Walking With Dinosaurs") and Adrian Hodges met the press recently to talk about the show...

Question: We all kind of grew up on things like that,  Dr. Who" in the old days, when they had these really cheesy little low-budget special effects and so forth. So it's amazing now to see a British production with that kind of special effects. Did something change drastically in the last few years that makes it possible - first of all, you're working with a  smaller audience base, so you've got to be limited in your budget in some ways. How are you able to do those kind of things? 

Haines: Well, I mean, Hollywood invented it, but then it become democratized, so now everyone can do it. And in fact, the sort of skill levels you've got in London are the same in the areas you've got in San
Francisco or you've got in Auckland. So I think it's something we keyed into quite early on. And they do
- they've produced - the company that make those frames still produce some beautiful results. We know
how to do creatures very, very well.

Hodges: Yeah. And we mix in some real dinosaurs as well just to keep the costs down.

Question: Watching the pilot the other night, the character Helen, his ex-wife (right), who supposedly was dead,  she has an ulterior motive, if I'm not wrong. And she actually comes off as a selfish, cold-hearted - take it from there. And does she have an ulterior motive, or are you going to eventually be able to explain that? How often is she going to be in the actual show running from one land to the other?

HODGES: Well, that's an easy one. Yeah, no, she certainly does have an ulterior motive. She has a range of ulterior motives. Her story is mixed in with Nick Cutter's story right from the outset and three subsequent episodes and three subsequent - she's a big part of the future of the show. Let me put it that way. So a lot of things will be explained about Helen and Nick and all the rest of the team. And we obviously will take our time doing that. That's part of the mythology of the show, if you like. But she very much is part of the whole reason for the stories to work.

Question: Tim, working for years on the scientifically accurate "Walking with Dinosaurs" to this, is this something you had to do, (that you) had in the back of your mind as something that would be really fun while you were doing all that very accurate stuff, to just kind of let loose and -

Haines: Yes, it is, actually. After years of discussing things like the angle of an abelisaur's
front arm, I think it's great to just say, "Well, this is sort of what they looked like." And primarily what
they are, characters. They are things that play amongst the actors, and therefore they've got to
perform their roles. We don't worry about scientific accuracy because the whole premise is a science
fiction one. At the same time, sometimes that information can really fire off ideas. If you know a
creature behaved in this way or you knew what it should be like, that can give you a great dramatic
story. It gives Nick Cutter, the professor, maybe something he can use to work out how to defeat it. So
there's lots and lots of stuff from previous work I can bring to this. But it's great being able to give
gorgonopsid two sets of saber teeth just to make him nastier, even though they didn't have them in reality.

Hodges: I have to say we spent a lot of time thinking up very crazy and sort of adventurous, exciting scenarios. And then Tim will always come in with the science part towards the end. He'll always worry about that side of it. He's not giving himself enough credit. There's a lot of -- it's science fiction, but there's a lot of science in it. The creatures from the past behave, as far as we know, like they would, by and large.

Question: Can you talk about the explanations for keeping these rips in time secret and these creatures? That would seem, to me, to be a big hurdle, I mean, in the era of the Internet.

Haines: Well, I'm sure aging has something to do with it. Of course, these stories go around anyway. I
mean, in the UK, people spot giant, unexplainable cats 80 times a month. In Shropshire, there's a big focus on them at the moment, and yet, of course, you read about them, and you don't believe a word of it. And that's why this is meant to exist. The mammoth turns up on a motorway, and they are explained away by being an escaped elephant.

Hodges: Yeah. I think you have to sort of ask yourself, "Would people believe it?" I mean, the internet is a medium of great truth and innovation, and it's also full of enormous amounts of rubbish. So there's going to be a balance there. Very few people are going to believe that you've actually met a dinosaur. So we play coastal in a series off of people's natural disbelief, and I think, hopefully, it strikes a balance that works.

Question: So does it ever get any easier to act opposite something that isn't there?

Henshall: Yeah, it does. I stopped worrying about it so much. It's just kind of second nature now. But the only kind of worrying thing is how many expressions have you got for being scared witless because, you know, the difference between a future predator, a gorgonopsid, or a velosoraptor, they are all going to hurt you really badly. So it's difficult to kind of characterize them and maybe look slightly less scared or freaked out. You know, it's difficult to gauge. I think I've got one. I've just settled on one that I like, and that's what you get. You know, I mean, after 17 weeks of kind of going "Oh, my God," it's really difficult to try and think of another one.

Question: When you've got these special effects at your disposal, have you found that there's a -- that there's a limit to -- do you find the urge to overuse because you want these things to look fantastic, and yet you don't want people to get so blase about it that it stops being exciting. Do you find yourself caught in that at all?

Haines: Well, it's funny how there's actually a huge variety in the amount of shots, effect shots, in each
show that it's not even, and what's amazing is the ones that have quite a lot of shots in them are not
necessarily that much more impactful than ones with fewer. But if you look at what the pattern of the shows are, there are two very strong themes. You've either got a rollicking good romp where you need the creatures to turn up again and again, or you've got some very tense show where you are waiting for the creature to show up. And those tend to give you two different feelings and therefore need a different amount of effects. We are very clear on those. These effects are used to create an animal that then affects the drama. We don't have to -  there's very little, you know, massive train crashes or blowing up volcanoes or anything like that. What the effects are there for is to create that character and run merry havoc amongst people like Dougie.

Hodges: Yeah. I mean, we know what this stuff costs. I mean, we are very conscious of the budgets we
have and what we can do on it. So we really have to make the action count. We have to get it dead right. And I think we all know that you can see a huge Hollywood movie, and sometimes it just wears you down, you know, just having all of that stuff thrown at you with no -- I don't think anybody is purely impressed by special effects anymore, even on television. What you've got to do is make them count, make them as witty, as clever, as funny, as imaginative as you can, and that's what we tried to do.

Question: What was your homebase  studio? And secondly, with so much digital magic being done now, how important is it to have a fantastic home facility, whether it's Pinewood or wherever you happen to be?

Haines: Well, I have to be brutally honest. In this instance, it's a location-based shot. We go to places,
and unfortunately for the actors, that means standing in a filthy, wet, muddy hole. And you do the effects there in-camera. The water stuff is probably the only place where we did have to go into the studio because you can't -- it's for safety's sake. You need the controlled situation of a tank. But we don't have a studio. We don't shoot it at a studio, essentially. We have now - you'll see it in the second part of the series. We have a great set that was built as sort of a precinct for the show, and it's an old, I think, tank range, laser ranging site. But it's this beautiful circular building, and that gives a sense of scale for the show.

Henshall: Going to the underwater stage of  Pinewood was like going on a holiday to the Bahamas because a lot of the places that we had run, that spring to mind, was a sewage plant, an old, Victorian sewage plant that looked absolutely fantastic. But every single time you turned around in the wind, you just kind of thought, What is that smell? You kind of come home kind  of still smelling that smell. So getting to go to Pinewood and use their facilities was great.

Comments

[Anne Louise Bannon]

Hey, Joel;

If you'll excuse another TV critic butting in here, I did just get to look at the show (for my own blog) and I was surprised at how much I liked it. Okay, we've got a few plot holes here and there (and not just in the fabric of time). But there was some real humor, including a great poop joke and an obscure European Union joke that I didn't entirely get. Ultimately a lot of fun and I think I'll probably be watching it again, never mind how full my DVR's hard drive is.

Good post. Anne B.