Gary rocks! He did the transcription of the recorded interview with Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell at Fan Expo Toronto, 28 August 2010. Hope you enjoy it. --chris
LORANC: Our first question is for Adrienne. One of the several uncanny eerie scenes in episode two is the night scene with Pen by the pool with the vision of Bonnie who's creeping up out of the empty pool and looking at her. Can you tell us a little bit about this scene from a director's viewpoint and what is your inspiration?
ADRIENNE: Yes, well, it's a good question and when I read it on the script I thought, "wow, how am I going to render that when we have a very limited budget", so one of the things, I have to say, I drew some of my inspiration from the movie, The Ring, where if you've seen it, it's a horror film that's based on a Japanese horror film and they made an American version of it. What there was, was there was this really amazing scene where this girl was walking up a well. And what they did was they used a contortionist, to bend her body in a very strange awkward and frightening way. And I guess they shot it (inaudible) level.
So I wanted to use that technique, and I wanted to work with something that was a bit more organic, and did not have to entail special effects and CGI. Because in the script it required a bug like, spider-like motion, that's how it was described in the script. So we found, we did a couple auditions, and I was, can we find a contortionist, we looked at circuses and we looked at Cirque Du Soleil and if they could bring somebody in. And we needed a specific girl, you needed a girl and someone you could buy as being Pen's daughter.
Finally we found this Russian gymnast who had a team of young girls, and she brought them in and they were literally contortionists.
So my audition process was, let's find different ways of creating a backwards spider. Can you walk fast? What can you do with your arms? And finally we settled on a girl who was amazing. And so it was a combination of that and really cool editing. Annie Ilkow edited that scene and it was a combination of the girl's natural abilities to do weird motions and be quite contorted as she does it, and Annie's really cool editing. So that was the technical part of it.
What was the beautiful part of that scene was Michelle Forbes' connection there, with the daughter. Originally the scene was written as more of a horror scene, with the mother kind of recoiling. And I sort of talked with Laurie about it and said 'I think we should turn it around and sort of start out that way maybe, but what if we turned it around to something that had this moment of tenderness?'
And that's exactly where Michelle wanted to go too with it, because she had such a strong connection to this actor, to this girl. And I just thought that with the connection between the girl and Michelle and the emotion that Michelle displayed when she finally got past the scary part to that part where it was just two people, that was amazing.
So that was a bit of the backstory on that.
LORANC: My next question is for Janis: Could you have produced this kind of hard core drama twenty years ago? If not, what has changed to now make this possible in the industry?
JANIS: No. (laughter) I think the big change is Pay TV. Both internationally in the states, and certainly up here. Because there's no way that what we're trying to do would really work on conventional TV. We did have Global Television in for the first season, and they love the show and are very supportive of us. But it's not for conventional TV. So with the pay networks, you can see what they're doing with Sopranos, True Blood and (inaudible), and you're just able as a creator, as a team of people who want to do something a bit outside the box, who want to explore something that's beyond the usual generic genre that's out there, and for me that's the biggest change that's happened.
LORANC: Our next question is for both of you. The writer, who's not here right now, producer and director are all women, which is rather unusual in this industry, from what we've seen. Would you like to comment on that, and what has your overall experience been on that level?
ADRIENNE: Just very quickly, my perspective is I've always wanted to direct and be a part of something to create something, and it's really hard to do that by getting a job somewhere else, because there is such sort of a wall there, you know, it's male dominated. So what we all seem to all do at the same time, Janis, myself and Laurie, we seek similar people out to work with together and then we are able to do and create what we wanted to do. And I produce and create my own shows in order to direct them. It would be much harder just to try to get a job directing. Plus this is the dream anyway to do your own show. So it kind of worked out really well, but I think we wanted to find like-minded people and they happened to be women, of course, that we just connected with.
JANIS: I think the industry is set up that it's very fragmented so being a producer and a woman is acceptable. And I think part of that is because you have to work really hard and you don't necessarily get paid. So that's a perfect job for a woman, right? (laughter)
Directing on the other hand, as Adrienne said, she's an amazing director and she was just nominated for a Director's Guild nomination for what she did on Season 2, to be a woman and want to be a director in this industry is so difficult, as we saw with Katherine Bigelow with Hurt Locker finally, Finally, and you look at the series that are being done here, the thirteen episodes, the twenty-two episodes and you go through and see how many women are actually directing those episodes, and it's sad, and there's a lot of women out there who have the talent and can direct, and they're just not being given the opportunity, in Quebec and Montreal they don't hire, there's just no women out there working. Unless you're doing lifestyle again, it's at the lower end you're not getting paid and you're working really hard.
So when Adrienne and I started our company, she really wanted to direct, and she really wanted to direct drama, and so how do we do that? We create our own shows, we produce our own shows and we find the money and we do what we fucking want to do. Because otherwise we're not going to be able to do that. (laughter and crosstalk)
LORANC: Now let's move on to Michelle Forbes, which is why we're here. We found her simply brilliant as Pen, how was it like working with her on the set?
ADRIENNE: You know I've never worked with such a prepared actor in my entire life. She just dove into the role. Just focused, lived and breathed it. She basically, we just did one or two takes - she would do more, but we did not need any more. She was such an amazing actor, so invested in the role, so talented. The thing is, you know, we saw it in the audition room. It's very hard, with the characters that Laurie writes, they're so, shades of gray, it's so hard for an actor to pull that out of themselves, and Michelle was brilliant at doing that.
You know, even in the audition room, she went from a wide gamut of emotions and range that I was just like, my hair was like this after the audition. I was like 'Wow, that's amazing'. So yeah, she's a comfortable person to work with, she jokes a lot, and she gets along well with the crew, but she's very very focused and she can be quite intense, and she needed to be for that role. She had to be focused.
JANIS: Well, I don't know that there's much I can add. She's amazing, she's really amazing to watch her act. When we were doing auditions for this role, it was getting pretty scary because we had auditioned a lot of people, almost everyone in Canada, Adrienne had gone down to the States, and you get into a situation where the actors are trying really hard, and they're doing their best, but they're 'acting'. And Michelle, in this role, she lived that roll and she became that person.
There were days on the set that she didn't want to talk to anyone, she was just doing her thing. She was like "just give me my breakfast in the morning, and I'm going to do my scenes", and then there were other times when she would just be laughing and joking, and she'd come out of this intense scene and then she would tell this funny thing, and I'd be "I don't know how, I don't know how actors do it, I don't know how she does it'. But a total joy. A total joy.
ADRIENNE: As a director I think I learned a lot from her. She's got a ton of experience acting, and there's a quality to her that you just stop. You just stop and you are really invited into a realm of concentration and focus that you rarely are with actors. And I really learned as a director that you have to pay attention to that. That I had to really pay attention to that and not hide behind my visual (inaudible) and she actually taught me to really come into that kind of space that she was in. And I learned a lot as a director from her.
LORANC: And for our final question, what would you like the audience to take away from Durham County?
ADRIENNE: Well, I mean, Durham County is such a cathartic series. What I'd like them to take is, if you've got pain, if there's things in you that unsettle you, that disturb you or things that you find in your own behavior that unsettling and disturbing, I think Durham County is a wonderful series to watch because you can watch characters at the extreme of those kinds of emotions, yet Laurie writes them in such a way that they're so empathetic that you are not alienated from them, you're not, you can't turn your back on those characters, in fact you can see glimpses of yourself. So in a way, it's like, I hope that they can take away what they might learn from a character like that, if they feel anything that's similar, that there's a humanity there, and the viewer's own humanity is there. And not to just turn your back on someone who might be dismissed as a monster. If we do that constantly, we're not going to learn about the human condition in order to stop that, so that's what I want them to take away from that.
JANIS: Because if you turn your back on the monster, then the monster just create more monsters. So I really hope that people watch the show, and try to gain a better understanding of human nature, and learn a bit of compassion. It's very difficult to do, because a lot of what we see in tv and films when you see these characters, it's very black and white and you want to hate them.
And if you don't learn to love them, and love that part of yourself, then I think we'll have a real problem, moving forward as a race.
Some weeks ago I contacted the creators of Durham County and asked if it would be possible to ask writer Laurie Finstad Knizhnik a couple of questions at the Fan Expo in Toronto. They kindly agreed and suggested to include director Adrienne Mitchell and producer Janis Lundman as well for a round table, because the series is such a collaborative effort.
