Perdita
11-12-2009, 08:14
One of the most beloved and iconic of classic cult shows, The Prisoner is about to be reborn for a modern day audience in a new six-episode series for ITV. The story is faithful to the original (man wakes up in a bizarre gated community, bereft of personal identity) and the cast is huge (Jim Caviezel is Number Six, while Sir Ian McKellen (r) plays looming leader Number Two). In the next of our 2010 Previews, Tube Talk speaks to chief screenwriter Bill Gallagher to find out more about The Prisoner's resurrection.
How did the production come about?
"Damien Timmer, who was with Granada at the time, had long wanted to make an updated version of The Prisoner but couldn't track down who had the TV rights. Originally it was made by a company called ABC - now defunct - so the rights had gone elsewhere. Eventually he found out that actually the rights belonged to Granada International, who were one floor up from him! It took him two years to find that out. Once they had the rights they called me out of the blue one evening and asked if I would like to write a remake of The Prisoner. I was thrilled. I loved it as a kid. I couldn't make sense of it but it had a real impact on me and it was unlike anything else on television, so I jumped in immediately and then thought 'Well, how am I going to do this?'"
Did you have a list of things you want to keep from the original?
"I just thought 'What was the essence of it? What is it that makes it so different and compelling?' The obvious thing is a man in this place called The Village - but what is it? How did he get there? How does he get out? Such a nightmare experience, that. Also the way of storytelling. It wasn't a conventional narrative, it was strange ways of telling stories. My approach was to take the essence of it, but also it would have been pointless to repeat the original, so I just responded to it with 'these are the questions and dilemmas the original posed, what are the dilemmas now?'"
The original was very much a social commentary too - has that been maintained?
"It is but it's more oblique, less overt. There was the Cold War and a kind of assertion of the individual - 'I'm a free man' - those kinds of '60s concerns. It would have been easy to do a version that invokes terrorism - a kind of surface version - but the battles are more subtle these days. The world is different and so much more accessible in some respects. We're all bloody Americans now! Also I think I wanted to make it a bit more about the state of human beings, not looking in terms of political battles but what is going on within the individual. How have we changed? Where are we going as individuals? One of the notions I came up with was, 'what if we become so obsessed with our individuality that it's dangerous?' Dangerous on the small scale in relationships, families and communities, but also dangerous on a vast scale so it's actually affecting our means of functioning."
You've got a great cast. Can you tell us more about them and their characters?
"James Caviezel plays Number 6. He's an individual who works for a vast corporation, where there's a mammoth amount of surveillance going on. It's not so much for crime or any sinister means, but it's for mass observation - patterns of behaviour, patterns in lifestyle - and he starts to see things in his work that make him think something is happening so he reports it. Once he's reported it he wakes up in the village. His battle is: What is this place? Why am I here? How do I get out? He pretty soon realises he can't escape physically so he's left with the question of 'What is this place?'
"Ian McKellan plays Number 2. In the original series there was a different Number 2 every week but I wanted to dig into the character of Number 2 - I didn't want to make him a two-dimensional monster figure who controlled the village. I wanted to get inside the man so I gave him a family, I gave him a story, a moral dilemma, and I gave him doubt in himself. We sent [Ian] the scripts and he said he would do it straight away. We met in a restaurant in London and as he came in the restaurant I stood up to greet him. He gave me a hug, patted me on the head and said 'What goes on in that mind of yours, Bill?' I think he was really taken by the daring of the script. It was full of menace and madness and strangeness. Something you had to dig into rather than having it on a plate. Once we got Ian I went back through the scripts and rewrote his character. Not the story or events, but the way he speaks. I knew he would have this wonderful twinkling playful menace about him, which is fantastic. "
This was an international collaboration between AMC and ITV. Were there any particular challenges in creating a show that worked for both audiences?
"Not really. As I said earlier we're all Americans now and although I say that with my tongue in my cheek, we do have access to every blink of an eye all over the world. The village is this strange place and you don't know where it is, it's an international place - it's not a particularly English place. In terms of the identity of the show it's not a case of an English writer writing for an American audience, that wasn't the sensibility of it. Therefore things like characterisation and setting wasn't a concern. It's not set in a part of America or Britain or Italy, it's set in a world where all of us could be in that dilemma."
It's now aired on AMC in the US. Were you pleased with how it performed and the reaction?
"I was. There was a conventional experience of prior-to-broadcast, broadcast, reviews, reactions, audience figures - all of which went well. The new experience for me was the Twitter reactions, where I was reading the audience experience as they were watching it. That was phenomenal - like something out of The Prisoner! They were figuring it out and sharing their thoughts and giving reactions. As a writer, you spend two or three years on something and put it out there, then a few North London critics give you two paragraphs, but it was phenomenal to experience what people were going through as they watched it."
Finally, is there a possibility of a second series?
"It's a miniseries. That was the brief in the beginning and it always had that beginning, middle and end. Of course I didn't write it in order to do this but given that The Village still exists, I suppose it is possible for there to be another series. It hasn't gone out in England yet though so we're just getting to the end of this one. Artistically it's possible, but whether the world wants another one I don't know!"
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/tubetalk/a190540/2010-tv-preview-the-prisoner.html
I used to love this series
How did the production come about?
"Damien Timmer, who was with Granada at the time, had long wanted to make an updated version of The Prisoner but couldn't track down who had the TV rights. Originally it was made by a company called ABC - now defunct - so the rights had gone elsewhere. Eventually he found out that actually the rights belonged to Granada International, who were one floor up from him! It took him two years to find that out. Once they had the rights they called me out of the blue one evening and asked if I would like to write a remake of The Prisoner. I was thrilled. I loved it as a kid. I couldn't make sense of it but it had a real impact on me and it was unlike anything else on television, so I jumped in immediately and then thought 'Well, how am I going to do this?'"
Did you have a list of things you want to keep from the original?
"I just thought 'What was the essence of it? What is it that makes it so different and compelling?' The obvious thing is a man in this place called The Village - but what is it? How did he get there? How does he get out? Such a nightmare experience, that. Also the way of storytelling. It wasn't a conventional narrative, it was strange ways of telling stories. My approach was to take the essence of it, but also it would have been pointless to repeat the original, so I just responded to it with 'these are the questions and dilemmas the original posed, what are the dilemmas now?'"
The original was very much a social commentary too - has that been maintained?
"It is but it's more oblique, less overt. There was the Cold War and a kind of assertion of the individual - 'I'm a free man' - those kinds of '60s concerns. It would have been easy to do a version that invokes terrorism - a kind of surface version - but the battles are more subtle these days. The world is different and so much more accessible in some respects. We're all bloody Americans now! Also I think I wanted to make it a bit more about the state of human beings, not looking in terms of political battles but what is going on within the individual. How have we changed? Where are we going as individuals? One of the notions I came up with was, 'what if we become so obsessed with our individuality that it's dangerous?' Dangerous on the small scale in relationships, families and communities, but also dangerous on a vast scale so it's actually affecting our means of functioning."
You've got a great cast. Can you tell us more about them and their characters?
"James Caviezel plays Number 6. He's an individual who works for a vast corporation, where there's a mammoth amount of surveillance going on. It's not so much for crime or any sinister means, but it's for mass observation - patterns of behaviour, patterns in lifestyle - and he starts to see things in his work that make him think something is happening so he reports it. Once he's reported it he wakes up in the village. His battle is: What is this place? Why am I here? How do I get out? He pretty soon realises he can't escape physically so he's left with the question of 'What is this place?'
"Ian McKellan plays Number 2. In the original series there was a different Number 2 every week but I wanted to dig into the character of Number 2 - I didn't want to make him a two-dimensional monster figure who controlled the village. I wanted to get inside the man so I gave him a family, I gave him a story, a moral dilemma, and I gave him doubt in himself. We sent [Ian] the scripts and he said he would do it straight away. We met in a restaurant in London and as he came in the restaurant I stood up to greet him. He gave me a hug, patted me on the head and said 'What goes on in that mind of yours, Bill?' I think he was really taken by the daring of the script. It was full of menace and madness and strangeness. Something you had to dig into rather than having it on a plate. Once we got Ian I went back through the scripts and rewrote his character. Not the story or events, but the way he speaks. I knew he would have this wonderful twinkling playful menace about him, which is fantastic. "
This was an international collaboration between AMC and ITV. Were there any particular challenges in creating a show that worked for both audiences?
"Not really. As I said earlier we're all Americans now and although I say that with my tongue in my cheek, we do have access to every blink of an eye all over the world. The village is this strange place and you don't know where it is, it's an international place - it's not a particularly English place. In terms of the identity of the show it's not a case of an English writer writing for an American audience, that wasn't the sensibility of it. Therefore things like characterisation and setting wasn't a concern. It's not set in a part of America or Britain or Italy, it's set in a world where all of us could be in that dilemma."
It's now aired on AMC in the US. Were you pleased with how it performed and the reaction?
"I was. There was a conventional experience of prior-to-broadcast, broadcast, reviews, reactions, audience figures - all of which went well. The new experience for me was the Twitter reactions, where I was reading the audience experience as they were watching it. That was phenomenal - like something out of The Prisoner! They were figuring it out and sharing their thoughts and giving reactions. As a writer, you spend two or three years on something and put it out there, then a few North London critics give you two paragraphs, but it was phenomenal to experience what people were going through as they watched it."
Finally, is there a possibility of a second series?
"It's a miniseries. That was the brief in the beginning and it always had that beginning, middle and end. Of course I didn't write it in order to do this but given that The Village still exists, I suppose it is possible for there to be another series. It hasn't gone out in England yet though so we're just getting to the end of this one. Artistically it's possible, but whether the world wants another one I don't know!"
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/tubetalk/a190540/2010-tv-preview-the-prisoner.html
I used to love this series