SACC Speaks #13: DVD Commentary for I ET

Transcribed by: Jason Lin jclin524@hotmail.com (SACC#555 Master at stating the obvious)
Commentator: Claudia Black and Anthony Simcoe
DISCLAIMER: I’m doing this for all Farscape fans out there, and especially for those who do not have access or have not obtained the Farscape DVD. I recommend it highly to everybody, the episodes have very good transfer, and a lot of extras such as the commentary and documentary. Please give me any feedback, as I try to transcribe the commentaries as accurately as possible, but at times a commentator would trail off and not finish a sentence or cut off by another person, and there are many Australian terms I’m not familiar with. Please do not distribute this without my permission. Lastly I want to thank the cast and crew for this excellent feature, keep them coming in the future episodes!!!
Credits: Farscape is the trademark of the Jim Hensons Company, copyright 2000.Packaging design and DVD release is through A.D. Vision, Inc. copyright 2000.
A big thank you to: the Hensons Company and Farscape for caring its fans enough to include these commentaries in the DVD release of the episodes, please keep them coming and keep up the good work.

[Scene opens with John waking up to this annoying noise in Moya]

Claudia: I’m Claudia Black and I play officer Aeryn Sun on Farscape.

Anthony: And hello I’m Anthony Simcoe and welcome to this DVD commentary for episode two of Farscape.

Claudia: Ohhh...the memories are flooding back already, ok act like there’s a really bad loud noise.

Anthony: In fact we had one of the assistant directors doing the siren during the rehearsal, which was really not helpful at all.In fact this was one of those scenes that got broken up over quite a few days, we had to shoot a few shots through this corridor then when we get to the end we ran out of time, and then we found out we just have to keep doing pick ups for that scene over and over again.

Claudia: I think we also ran out of corridors, we said doctor who a lot of stuff in the corridors of Farscape.

Anthony: It’s the typical Farscape syndrome, we’ve run out corridors again, turn around, move back.

Claudia: Yeah and here we go this is a classic pick up shot, anecdotes, bend down and look like you’re looking at something strange, and get up again, and we’ll pick this up later.

Anthony: Now that shot there, you see the head sticking through looking out into the guts of the ship, that’s actually my very first B-unit day shot.(Aeryn sticking her head into the hole also) And there’s your B-unit day shot.

Claudia: (laughing) My very first B-unit day.

Anthony: It’s very exciting to work on B-unit cause it’s a smaller crew. B-unit is the crew that goes along and picks up all the smaller sections of the story, so the A-unit’s off with the main story doing all the big stunts, and the big scenes, and the B-unit is the unit that goes and picks up all that smaller stuff.

Claudia: Is affectionately termed chotnuet unit where you pick up all the bits and pieces, either that or pharaoh unit cause everyone’s a little bit wild.

Anthony: Pilot’s always shot by B-unit as well, so he’s never shot by the A-unit, or rarely shot by the A-unit team.

Claudia: I just started Farscape at the time I was completing Pitch Black, so right here they were sort of working overtime to get rid of the circles and bags under my eyes. So when I watch these earlier episodes of Farscape I’m just constantly reminded of Pino having to wake me up because I was asleep on the side of the set, I was so exhausted. Originally Aeryn had been cast elsewhere and they couldn’t get the person they wanted and I came to it as a reader helping all the people audition at the casting agency, put down a tape cause they thought I was perfect for the role just in case. Went off to complete Pitch Black and got a call half way through Pitch Black to come down and screen test with Ben Browder. We ran the lines just before we went in to tape it, Ben turn to me and said “you know what, this is perfect, we don’t need to rehearse this, let’s go in a put it down on tape,” and the rest is as they said history.

Anthony: I auditioned for this show over a really long period of time, over about 6 months during which the show was called Spacechase.It came down to about 7 auditions, at that time I was auditioning in an English accent because that was the brief, D’Argo was originally conceived like a Scottish pirate, and that was an idea that we lost pretty quickly. So yeah, doing about 7 auditions over 6 months, and finally when I got the job I was directing a play in Sydney, and they gave me the go ahead and I had to be in London 5 days later, and here we are.

Claudia: You were very lucky you were save by the project of Farscape, cause you were due to direct me in a play.

Anthony: I was?

Claudia: ...and a couple of friends.

Anthony: I was due to direct Claudia in a play, very shortly after.

Claudia: We organized a dinner theater, come around and talk to all the little eager actors waiting to be directed by Antony Simcoe and you never showed. (both laughs)

Anthony: I had a bigger offer somewhere else.

Claudia: I think you were in London getting your life cast done.

Anthony: Needless to say the project never went ahead.

[Crew discussing landing Moya on the planet surface]

Anthony: It’s fascinating for me looking at the makeup here on the show because it was such an arduous process to get the makeup ready for Farscape. We had a very quick pre-production time considering how late I was cast for the role, had to fly over to London getting something called a life cast, which was where they cover your body in alginate, and poke forms of the perfect mold of your body, and they integrate the makeup on top of that. But because I wasn’t in London except for the life cast, I flew over than flew straight back to Sydney because of the play I was directing, they didn’t have that much time to do tests. So in these first episodes I’m completely constricted by movement and by the suit, I can barely stand up let alone look left and right, the suit is incredibly heavy and quite cumbersome. They did a fantastic job but we had a lot of improvements to make, at this stage it was still next to unbearable to wear.

Claudia: I don’t think you were actually capable of leaning back and pulling out your own qualta blade, because you were so restricted. It was really tragic sight.

Anthony: Terrible for a warrior not to be able to get his iron sword out. Here is my favorite CGI shot in Farscape. (Referring to the scene where Moya is flying over the water)

Claudia: Beautiful.

Anthony: Absolutely wonderful, Garner MacLennan, Paul Butterworth, absolutely genius on season one, and here we go now crashing into the water.

Claudia: Just fantastic.

Anthony: Such detailed, wonderful work.I mean that’s one of the shot I’ll always think about when I described what I called the Farscape syndrome, the production quality is so high that people often compare the CGI and the effects in Farscape to science fiction cinemas, well this that and the other. And you’re thinking wait a minute, this is a television show, this is something that’s turning over every week or every 10 days a new episode, and to get these much detail and level and beautiful CGI shots in like that is really a fantastic accomplishment, a real credit to Paul Butterworth.

Claudia: And of course at this stage we were shooting in episodic blocs, so this episode, we called episode 2, screened further down the line in America the first time around, and episode 4 ‘Throne for a Loss,’ were filmed in one bloc by the same director Pino Amenta. It was an impossible task that we’re given him, episode one and three were filmed together as well in the same bloc but with different directors, but Pino had this extraordinary task on his hands to try and deliver two episodes without knowing essentially what kind of show he’d come aboard to. He had a wonderful sense of humor and he dealt with the stress so beautifully, but it was such as huge job.

Anthony: It was a mistake to shoot the show in blocs, we only ever did it twice, with episode one and three as a bloc and two and four. The reasoning behind it was in Australia normally with drama you shoot in blocs like that, the reasoning being that you shoot out of set. So you may say for these two episodes, we have 5 scenes on command in episode two, and we have 8 scenes in command on episode 4, so let’s shoot those 13 scenes together and then we’ll clear out of that set and move on to the next one. But this in the end just became logistical nightmare.

Claudia: Yeah, I mean the logistic of shooting with Rygel, 6 people I think it required on the floor to deal with him, and there were people who haven’t worked together as a team before, or if they had it was a new technology. Green screen, all the elements coming together, and the CGI, we had no idea what would be putting in post (afterwards), we’ve been given perhaps shown drawings, or the image was explained to us. But there were so many elements coming in that were unknown that hadn’t been done in the past.

[Rygel discussing his knowledge in mud]

Anthony: Pino Amenta directed this bloc, very difficult job, he wasn’t involved in the pre-production for the series, so in effect he was the very first director to come in cold to direct Farscape. Everyone universally agreed, and we even talk about it to this day, is what Pino brought to Farscape that has stayed on and on and on, is the level of comedic fun, the irreverence, the silliness if you want for a better word. Pino was fantastic in getting us to make comic choices, at this stage we sort of had another model of science fiction in our head cause we had never made science fiction like this in Australia, and we thought oh no science fiction, yes we can have these sort of quirky moments but it’s meant to be science fiction, isn’t that sort of lofty and serious. Then Pino’s like no, absolutely not, the show cannot be like that, it’s got to be silly, it’s got to be irreverent, it’s got to be funny, look for the gag, look for the lightness, and Pino was really the person who drove that into us, and that legacy has stayed with us always.

Claudia: I think it was the nervousness perhaps, because we were dealing with animatronic creatures, and it was important to make them life like so the audience could connect to them. You can take it so easy to look at those creatures and believe that they are cast members with a heartbeat, so Pino took it beyond that point and made us all players in a troupe. As Aeryn I have quite a few scenes with Pilot, the puppeteers were enormously sensitive and as an actor it’s important to do what we called off lines, which is lines for them when were not on camera. To make them as dedicated as possible, because the puppeteers are sensitive enough to pick up on your performance and respond to it, even though there are a set of 5 or 6 people in control of the puppet on screen at any given time. Pilot’s face is so articulated that I’ve actually included on one of my reels, it’s a scene where I’m crying with one of the puppets, which wasn’t a difficult thing to do at all because he’s a member of the cast, Pilot, really now, so life like.

Anthony: The wonderful thing about having animatronics on the set is that when you have creative minds contributing to a scene, it’s not just you and Rygel persay, it’s you and the 6 people that operate Rygel. So you have all these wonderful ideas that you can spot against with this incredibly creative team, and sometimes we get the time to really get together and make it work, and sometimes we have to fly by the seat of our pants, but that’s ok, because we all got a great trust with one another. The puppeteers or puppetering team they are not really lock down to one character, although there is someone in charge of each, so there is John Eccleston here on series one operating Rygel with the puppeteering team. And then Sean Masterson is in charge of Pilot but is with the same puppeteers, so Sean is actually working with Rygel as well and John is helping out on Pilot, moving through different animatronic characters together. Sometimes they’ll get some animatronics on the set, I remembered in episode one with the proprietor, everyone was so against the wall when getting things ready, the proprietor puppet only arrived on set two hours before we had to shoot. The puppeteers had to go and do a good job without any rehearsal, of course they did a fabulous job and it looks wonderful, so it’s fantastic working with the puppeteers, they are very well supported by the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, so that’s fantastic.

Claudia: We found that actually the best way to make the puppets come alive is to touch them, is to have physical contact with them, makes an enormous difference if you can get Rygel into your arms or into your hands, you’ll instantly have a stronger relationship with him than something that’s got wires and rubber.

[John, Aeryn and D’Argo looking for clorium on the surface]

Anthony: This is the very first night I ever felt comfortable in my suit because it was freezing, and my costume is so incredibly hot that everyone after every take is...blankets are coming around and hot drinks and coffee and people are being shoved into the vans, and I’m just going hey I’m cool. Anthony, you want a hot drink? No, no, bring me a Coke.

Claudia: Yeah, we were freezing, Ben and I were freezing to death, it was about 3 in the morning, we were sitting in the car listening to Jeff Buckley feeling very sorry for ourselves.

[Everyone sees a vehicle with huge headlights in the distance]

Anthony: And also it’s our first prop with flashing lights. (both laughing)

Claudia: Oh no, I wanted to touch it, we were all saying, I’m not touching that thing, that became the pleasure vibe 2000 that thing, that was the nickname for it.

Anthony: The pleasure vibe  2000.

Claudia: I was like dude, dude, I’m not touching that, there’s no way you’re giving that thing to me. So we all took it in turns and in the end I think you lost buddy, you were to hold it...

Anthony: But at the end of the day it never came back.

Claudia: Oh yes it did, they just turn it upside down and put some new lights on it. Ohhh Zenons...

Anthony: Oh my god!

Claudia: Ohhh...I think we flew them over on a plane with our own seats.

Anthony: Long shafts of lights in science fiction? No, don’t tell me it’s true.

Claudia: Oh wow! This is exactly like the X-files only different.

Anthony: And smoke, this is so like the X-files that it’s absolutely nothing like it.

Claudia: Farscape is the most physically arduous project I’ve ever been connected with, and I would say that my appropriate exception as a child was never particularly good, I was a little geek in the recorder consort. Intellectually I knew I could portray Aeryn, it took me a couple of episodes to really work out what to do with her, and I knew that physically she needed to look enormously strong and capable and physically adept. And when you’re running around with a bronze leather satchel, a little 70’s pouch around you, it’s very difficult to look butch. I have no set of physical training, I had no martial arts training, and it was a concern of mine at the time leading into Farscape in pre-production, I certainly would’ve done some martial arts, and I’d asked to meet with some army people to train but it never happened, so I just had to sort of make up as I went along.

Anthony: I’ve got to say while I remembered that a couple of shots back where D’Argo and Aeryn making sounds to distract the bad guys. (Claudia laughing loudly in the background) I hate DVD commentaries where they just commenting on how great everything is, let me be the first person to tell you that those two shots are completely crap, and every time we see them we’re very embarrassed. The script says D’Argo dives out of a bush and distracts the bad guys. (Claudia making owl sounds) What type of sound am I gonna make?

Claudia: And the biggest problem we had we couldn’t make Earth related sounds, we couldn’t go... (Claudia does the owl noises again and also some whistling)

Anthony: Hey you!

Claudia: Or whatever, which was one of the Australian show called Skippie (referring to the whistling,) which is the equivalent of Lassie. We worked so hard to find some sort of signal noise and I think in the script that was the problem, in the big print it was so funny, it had been written Aeryn and D’Argo make alien noises to alert Crichton’s attention. What the hell is an alien sound?

Anthony: All we can say is we’re sorry. This here is a scout hole just in the northern beaches of Sydney with some CGI planted over the top of it (referring to the barn/house Crichton discovered.) What I really remembered most from doing this is, I just felt so sorry for Pino the director, because if ever a shoot was rained out, I mean it was pouring buckets of rain while we were shooting this, we can hardly get anything done.

Claudia: Come to Australia where it’s sunniest place in the world, you’ll get more outside broadcast days than you could’ve ever imaging in the States. (Anthony making rainstorm sound)

Anthony: Rain.

Claudia: Bum bum!

Anthony: Wrong! The answer to that question is wrong!

Claudia: As we say here in Australia, sucked in, we say sucked in.Oh, and here we have the use of the comm badges (John’s communication badge beeping,) we never established the premise by which how the piece work.

Anthony: ‘Cause none of the directors care, that was what was horrible...

Claudia: No, they were frightened, no one wanted to establish any.

Anthony: We walk on set and ok, do we touch the comms, do we ignore the comms, do we talk into the comms, do we talk out to the thing. One director would say, yeah, tap your comm. One director would say, don’t touch your comm just speak out into the thing. One director would say, don’t touch it, but push your head towards it and speak into it so people know what you were doing, and it was an absolute nightmare.

Claudia: Which of course the fans thankfully worked out for us on the internet, they worked out a way that sort of logistically it would be possible that these comms work. All the different things that all the cast members were doing when their comms...

Anthony: They had a perfect theory worked out, yeah of course it’s like that, because blah, blah, blah. We learned from that, we learned from the board, if we haven’t it worked it out, we go oh don’t worry, they’ll solve it on the board. So please keep doing it, because we love that stuff.

[Crichton sees the alien child Fostro]

Claudia: This was an extraordinary rigorous makeup job, an extraordinarily rigorous sculpt for what essentially looks like a humanoid alien but what they did was extend the ears out to the sides of the character’s head. And it’s incredibly difficult process I’m sure Anthony can describe, but for child what would it be like to sit in a chair and deal with that prosthetics application.

Anthony: It’s so hard to deal with prosthetics as a child, and it’s equally difficult for the makeup artist, because they’ve got very fine detailed work to do, and the patience of a child isn’t always fantastical. Although this kid was fantastic, but still it’s very difficult to work prosthetics on a child, because you also have the working out problem, it might take a couple of hours to put the makeup on, you’re only allowed to work child actors for so many hours a day in Australia. So we had a very, very short window of opportunity to work with this kid.

Claudia: ...and with the rain...

Anthony: With the rain, and the prosthetics, and the kid, we come up against a lot of brick walls in this episode. To be honest, I would say it’s probably one of the most difficult episodes we had to shoot. (Claudia agrees) We weren’t very happy campers, got the result in the end and that’s fantastic.

[John falls to the floor after getting zapped by Fostro]

Anthony: Oh, and the fake arm (referring to John’s arm closest to the camera.) Yes, the creature shop did a wonderful job of the arm here, so that’s a fake arm made by the creature shop. They did an alginate cast of Ben’s arm, and then they individually punched every single hair in that hand, and that’s where the real detailed work comes in, punch in each of those hairs and do the paint job to make it look like his arm so that you can get this gag coming up here.

Claudia: Mary Mara who American audiences might not recognize with this funky makeup...

Anthony: There we go, there’s the arm moving now, get that rubber effect.

Claudia: It’s working.

Anthony: It certainly looks like rubber my friend.

Claudia: I like to think the position it lands in as well, that was serendipitous wasn’t it?

Anthony: Now this thing that they are pointing reminds me of the Blake’s 7 guns, I don’t know whether you got that in America but it’s this British science fiction show called Blake’s 7 which I’m an absolute fan of.

Claudia: Mary Mara is an actress who might most recently be remembered for her work on Ally McBeal, and I’m sure she has a very extensive CV.

Anthony: I think she had a recurring character on ER as well, I’m not sure though.

Claudia: But she’d been attached to a very emotional episode of Ally McBeal concerning a child I think who’s sick, and it was very well known in the States. Look at Rygel’s eyebrows, they’re out of control in this episode. Rygel sort of underwent a metamorphosis, an evolution, if you’d like, technologically and aesthetically, and his eyebrows were just I think...

Anthony: Oh his eyebrows are playing up there actually, could be a shake going on.

Claudia: He’s got a bit of a twitch happening.

Anthony: All the creature shop things went through a massive development, D’Argo, Rygel, simply because the pre-production for a show like this is immense. One of the problems that they had getting Farscape up, is that the normal process for making a television show, is that you pitch it, someone picks it up, you make a pilot then you go to another stage of decision making, and then you move on to see whether you’re going to make a series. But to do the pre-production required on a show like Farscape, there is no way any company in the world would invest the money to put into just a pilot, so they had the added difficulty of having to secure a season before they’d even made a pilot, which made it a very difficult show to sell.

[D’Argo and Aeryn waiting in the trees while aliens searching down below]

Claudia: Oh this scene, oh this scene, this brings back some shocking memories. This was kind of me in my absolute lowest of the low on Farscape, I was exhausted, massive dramas left right and center, and after complete they said right now we’re going to stick you up a tree, very difficult to balance on the top of that tree with Anthony and his enormous costume.

Anthony: Actually very high up, it’s a very high crane shot, it’s not one of those thing where the camera is tricking you that it’s high. It’s actually higher than the camera making it looking, we’re really high up in the trees.

Claudia: And each of the directors have what they called tokens for CGI, and Pino had allocated where he was going to use them, there were very extensive shots in the beginning of the landing of Moya, so we simplified everything else which followed. And in this scene it was scripted that a bird was suppose to fly past and D’Argo was suppose to stick his hand out and strangle the bird, and we had to sort of discuss this while sitting up the tree, what we’re gonna do.

Anthony: ‘Cause he had run of tokens, so I had to do the cheesy, well, it’s actually behind your back. It’s ok, I’ll kill it anyway.

Claudia: I think this is what we were referring to in those good old days is Euro scenes, they were scenes that didn’t necessarily make the cut in the American version that went on air here. The European version runs slightly longer because of advertising time, or lack of, so...

Anthony: So I think for many Americans this will be the very first time that they’ll be seeing this scene.

Claudia: Or some of them in the early episodes there might be scenes here on DVD release that you haven’t seen.

Anthony: What’s interesting also about that last scene is that you can see the contacts still in D’Argo’s eyes. Not many people notice this but D’Argo starts out wearing green contacts as a part of the makeup, and I really didn’t like this ‘cause I believe you read the emotion of a character through many ways, but one of the ways is through the dilation of the pupils. I thought ‘cause I’ve got so much rubber on already, can’t you at least give me my pupil changes, so we had that bit of drama, also it was very, very uncomfortable. After we shot that scene up in the tree, I went back to the makeup van, and unfortunately some makeup removal got in my eye and I had to be rushed to hospital because I had actually burned my cornea. So from the point, I was only in the hospital overnight, I was back at work I think by the following Wednesday. But we had a problem, because the doctor said well this is actually a very serious accident, you can’t wear any contact lenses for a couple of months.

Claudia: Oh, damn it (both laughs.)

Anthony: I’m in the middle of a series, not only am I in the middle of a series, I’m in the middle of an episode, and a bloc of episodes if you like, this is two, so two and four. So what’s interesting is you’ll see in episodes two and four Farscape, scenes where I have the contacts in and scenes where I have the contacts out, and after this point we just kept the contacts out all the way up until series two. In series two we tried to wipe them in again and I didn’t like it so I got them mad.

[John and Lyneea discussing first contact]

Claudia: It was such a shocking scene, that scene. I was sitting at the top of the tree, and someone said we’re bringing you down, and they brought this huge long metal ladder up to the tree, smashed the ladder up against the top of the tree to make sure it’d contacted with something, it had to, it was my hand. I was really trying to portray a strong character up there on the tree, and all I was saying to myself was don’t cry, don’t cry, please don’t cry in front of this crew of about 150 people who think you’re playing an incredibly tough character. Anthony was sort of behind me squeezing on to my arm, saying just here’s a new sensation, think about this, think about this. Just like let me punch you in the head so you don’t think about your hand. Nightmare.

Anthony: I was trying to make you laugh, but I think she was in a bit too much pain. She wasn’t having a barrel of it.

Claudia: Oh...my...finger... (while making exaggerated sobbing sound)

Anthony: It’s ok, settle down.

Claudia: So of course he had to one up me, you bastard, and go to the hospital after that.

Anthony: I was craving the attention.

Claudia: Just each day Ben and I use to count our bruises as we got off set, and I remember one particular fight scene in an episode shortly after this, it was episode 3, when a Crichton comes into command and sees her and he thinks it’s Aeryn, in actual fact it was just a replicant. They go into this fight scene, our stunt coordinator left set and he left somebody else on set, and the communication kind of got lost somehow down the line because I had asked him to ask Ben to move several feet away because I was gonna to an exaggerated kick up into the air as if I was kicking him in the stomach. I had warned Ben just before we went to the take to make sure that he had been given that information, and he didn’t understand what I was saying, and I was just stipulating saying move back as Sam was rolling and then called action, I said just a foot or so. He registered something that he had heard me so I thought ok fine, so I step in to do the kick and of course made contact with Ben Browder’s ribs, and it took him a while to trust me after that. There are so many battle scars that you walk away with on this show, I remembered I was doing a scene with you Anthony further down the track in season one, and they said ok now to just overlap what the stuntees have done could you please take a leap through the air and slide across the floor. I said what you mean slide across the floor, and they said just throw yourself on the floor and land, and I said but I’ve got exposed arms, I’m wearing a singlet, what do you mean land on the floor? I was such a girl, I never did that again, I now relish every opportunity to throw myself around, I’ll never do that again.

Anthony: The voice was the biggest struggle in trying to find the character of D’Argo, because we didn’t want to have a wolf typing sound, which is a very clear, very beautiful voice. I really didn’t want to make the voice beautiful like that, I want to make it much rougher and harsher, and have it a little bit more what I would call dirt in the sound. But we just couldn’t find the voice, and it was very difficult to rehearse with me out of makeup, because the voice is such an integral part of the whole character, that you really need to be in makeup to judge whether the voice is working for you or not, and we tried and tried and tried, people were really starting to panic because we haven’t made a decision. Then one night I was mucking around with friends doing my version of movie trailer, so I’d be doing things like (in a deep voice,) ‘it’s here, Jim Henson’s productions presents, the most exciting series on television,’ and stuff like that. I thought well I’ve gotta go in to work tomorrow and see whether I can possibly get away with doing my movie trailer voice as my D’Argo voice. I went into work and I said Andrew, Brian, I’ve come up with it, I’ve got the voice for D’Argo (in the same deep voice,) ‘I think D’Argo should sound like this,’ and they were like no, absolutely not, he’s not going to sound like that. We actually didn’t make a decision until we got on set, the very first day that I had to shoot as D’Argo in the makeup, we still haven’t made a decision. Andrew Prowse the director was so busy with other things I think I asked him at the right now because he had a million other things to think about, and went up to him and I said (in the deep voice) ‘I really think I should speak like this,’ and he’s like ‘alright, good, good, do it.’ And bam, we roll the cameras, I was on, and I started speaking like that and that’s how the voice of D’Argo came around. When I watched these first episodes I can still hear the voice hasn’t really settle into what eventually became the very solid D’Argo voice, also it’s always much deeper down here, where as time went on we developed an aspect of D’Argo’s voice that sounded a lot like this, which was still rough and dirty, but a lot lighter.

Claudia: Oooo...It was interesting because the accents and voices of the characters became not just the domain of the actors to work out, to experiment with, but also those of the producers’, because it’s a co-production and we’re representing England, Australia and America. The Aussies are very proud, we were all hoping that we could use sounds that were closer to our home voices.I personally sort of have a bit of a mix, my voice is more Australian than English, but it have a sort of a blend of several sounds, sort of an English family brought up in Australia. My mom and dad are Australians but their forefathers were not, we were always taught to speak round and forward when we were growing up, and I always wished I was as fabulous as the actress in Australia, Sandy Gore, who appeared on our show in season 2, who has the most fantastic voice, she’s one of my idols. I remember reading an article about Sam Neil when he was doing Event Horizon, and all the actors were approached, they were asked in space in the future, your country would be represented by what flag, you can choose or you can design it. Sam Neil chose the Koru flag, the Aboriginal flag to represent Australia. I remembered thinking well obviously in space you’ll not be heard when you scream, but there are no precedents, so I wanted to create a sound that was international and incorporated many elements of the show, the English and Australians who were represented. Aeryn’s got quite a hybrid voice which of course then cause problems for peacekeepers, people who had to come in and play peacekeepers, because they didn’t know what kind of sound to create, because they couldn’t use my voice as a model, because it’s naturally such a melange of sound, but it seems to work for the character.

[Alien military unit shows up at Lyneea’s house]

Anthony: What’s been amazing about shooting Farscape for us is the sense that we’re really doing it in a bubble, because we’re shooting in Australia, in Sydney.In fact series one here we shot in Fox Studios, series two ended up moving to our own studios. To hear back the success of the show overseas was really quite surreal, because it wasn’t on air in Australia, we had no contact with anyone who is watching the show. People would asks us what are you doing now, haven’t seen you in any films or anything recent, what are you up to, and you said I’m doing this science fiction series now called Farscape, and they go ‘what’s that?’ Well it’s this American cable show, so they go ‘fine, ok, let’s go out to dinner,’ and that’s the end of that. No one knows how it’s going, in fact we didn’t really either, we hear it’s going really well, but we had actually no contact with the success of the show.

Claudia: Yeah, working completely in the back here.

Anthony: So it’s really interesting, we’ve actually just finished our first Farscape convention yesterday, which was very interesting to interact with people who actually watch the show, which was fantastic.

Claudia: One of the interesting things about starting Farscape was working out the tone of the show and what kind of energy we want to put across. Of course there is enormous physical energy with explosions and fight sequences, the most important thing was finding an energy between the characters, so there’s antagonism, there’s conflict, but there also needs to be a spark, you need a sexual sense and also want to see a humorous spark living within each of the characters, because I think it’s incredibly endearing. Over a long series you want to be entertained, you don’t just want to see explosions and pulse rifles going off left right and center. We were treading a very fine line between the comedy elements of the show at that stage and the action, I think in season two it develops to a point where there’s a lot more improvisation from the actors contributing and pushing the line of the humor more.

Anthony: We look back on these episodes and actually think we didn’t push the comedy enough, there’s hints of it there and Pino certainly brought it out of us, but there is some moments where our show apply very differently today. As Claudia said, part of finding the tone of the show.

[Scene when Aeryn returns to Moya and found out she is collapsing]

Claudia: Here are all the kids who get stuck up on Moya, there’s always two or three stuck up on the ship while everyone else goes down to locations, so they can separate the work load for the ensemble. Ahhh, being bitten by puppet, ohhh...scary, ohhh...hurt. I remembered that take just getting Rygel to look like swallowing something took half a day because the motion, Rygel obviously got no neck movement, so sort of putting a chunk of foam covered in sort of tomato ketchup into his mouth with a...oh look, and he’s got no blood on his mouth now.

Anthony: That’s gone. (both laughs)

Claudia: Oops

Anthony: This tiny works fast, that’s all I can say.

Claudia: They’ll never notice that.

Anthony: It’s part of the efforts to try and make the puppets live as characters, to try and make them too cutesy. So that’s why I think they were very careful about making Rygel really one of the nastier or meaner characters, and they inject those moments like biting me up to try and remove the kid show like nature of working with animatronics, that’s developed over time.

Claudia: Yeah, the antithesis of Muppets. What would Kermit never do?I know, bite someone’s arm and then swallow the flesh. Brilliant, let’s use it.

Anthony: There is a plan.

Claudia: And these puppets, we’ve mentioned before, they are much more articulated, the technologies advanced so much, you have different puppeteers commanding different elements of the puppets. Someone’s dealing with the eye expressions, someone’s dealing with the ears and the twitching there, and the mouth movements is done by the puppeteer, his hand is inside the puppet. Oh no, actually it’s animatronic as well. The technologies, I think, changed from season one to season two.

Anthony: Yeah, season one John...

Claudia: It was puppeteered, the mouth was puppeteered.

Anthony: He’s doing the opening and closing motion with his hand that’s inside the puppet, he’s doing the articulation of the lips with what looks like a joystick which is strapped around his waist like a belt, and as he makes each vowel sound he’s pushing the joystick a thousand miles an hour in different directions. It’s a truly incredible thing to watch, it’s like watching an incredible musician playing a piano or violin or something like that. The amount of dexterity and precision needed to just do a normal sentence is incredible, you’d have no idea how fast that joystick has to move unless you’ve actually seen it.When I first saw it I was completely blown away ‘cause I thought it’ll be like push it there, push it there, move your hand and it’ll be fine.

Claudia: Yeah, hand in the sock, but it’s the most exceptionally difficult task for this result.

Anthony: His hand that is not inside the puppet is working a million miles an hour just to get one sentence out.

[John attempting to communicate with Moya using Lyneea’s equpiments]

Claudia: It was also traditional I think with the Henson group and certainly with puppeteering in the old days that the puppeteeers’ voices would be used. So we were used to John Eccleston’s voice and it informed the character of Rygel to an extent, so we didn’t really meet Rygel, the real Rygel and get to know his character properly until Jonathan Hardy came in and voiced...

Anthony: Wonderful Jonathan Hardy.

Claudia: Beautiful Jonathan Hardy whose eyebrows look exactly like Rygel’s, it’s fantastic, I can understand...

Anthony: Jonathan Hardy has the largest eyebrows in the universe.

Claudia: They are so out of control, when people meet him, an AD came up in the lunch room, I think I’ve told Jonathan this story afterwards. I was talking to Jonathan at lunch and one of the AD came in to tell me I was needed in makeup, and he lost concentration midstream in the sentence ‘cause he noticed Jonathan’s eyebrows and afterwards came up to me and said ‘dude, dude, that man has the most out of control eyebrows I’ve ever seen.’

Anthony: He’s the most wonderful actor, absolutely incredible to work with, and he has the most energy and commitment of any person I’ve ever met in my life.

Claudia: And he has such a difficult job because he has no physical relationship on set with any of the performers, he has to go in to a sort of a dry, cold ADR booth and bring life back into the character of Rygel a second time after it’s been done beautifully by the puppeteers. We didn’t really become acquainted with Rygel until that final element had been put into place, that require seeing some episodes finished in post, and we didn’t have that luxury for quite some time as we were shooting season one.

Anthony: It’s one of the fantastic things about working in science fiction, and also one of the challenging things is that much of the story is completed in post-production. So often we’re working with green screens, looking at walls where there will be characters but there aren’t any now, dealing with that is particular, I wouldn’t say skill but leap of imagination. It’s often interesting to finally see the finished product with all the explosions and the rig removals done, and the effects, what was I guess more challenging at this point in time is that we hadn’t seen any of it finished. Now that we’ve been doing Farscape for quite a while we have an idea about the visual look of the show in terms of CGI, but at this point in time all we have were sketches and drawings, so we didn’t know what sort of shape the CGI would take on, what sort of life it would bring to the show ‘cause it extends the universe of the show so much, the CGI work. So we were really working in cold, we’re told there will be a hologram of Pilot, we didn’t exactly know how that would look, in fact I think they experimented with a few different types in the show as well of the hologram, that was what was more challenging at this point in time. It’s interesting for me watching these earlier episodes because I got this amazing phone call once from Rockne O’Bannon, the creator of the show, and he was complimenting me. But in complimenting me he let me in on one of their plans that I wasn’t meant to know about, because he said to me ‘Anthony, we love your work on the show, we think you’re doing fantastic because we originally just wrote D’Argo as the guy who come in, scream and leave, a background warrior type of guy. But you’re sort of trying to find more naive and more vulnerable parts of the character, and we think that’s fantastic, do you mind if we explore more that part of D’Argo,’ and I said yes, please, let’s go down that direction. So I think in these first episodes you’re really seeing the archetype of warrior much more than you do in future episodes, but you are starting to see the hints of vulnerability of me trying to find or trying to inject moments of compassion and softness if you like, because if he did continue in the show just as the blustering tough guy, then he would become very, very boring to play. So it’s really interesting for me to look back on these episodes, ‘cause not only had we made that decision to go down that path in quite a flowing way. Also at this point in time I’m physically very bound by the costume ‘cause we hadn’t really fixed up many of the issues, so I can’t really turn my head properly, I can’t see properly, I can’t move. So lots of constraints going on there that I’m really happy that we were able to deal with in future episodes, I’m still proud of what we’re doing here, but it really is just a genesis of where we’re going to take the character of D’Argo in the future.

Claudia: I was so lucky when Farscape came along because the casting directors had said to me ‘you’re so perfect for this role but I don’t if we’ll ever cast it here in Australia, the other characters are being cast here besides Ben’s, but I think you’ll miss out, but let’s put you down on tape just in case they changed their minds.’ Of course I do now play Aeryn, but Brian Henson actually said to me ‘you weren’t what we envisaged, we didn’t imagine that we would hire an actress like you to portray this role. You’re more mature, you’ve been around the block a bit, and we wanted originally Aeryn to be more naive, so we need to take your lead on this, you give it a go and we’ll develop the character around you.’ I’ve been told several things, I’ve been told that she was kind of like a robot, that she has no emotions, which is obviously a more interesting choice dramatically as a performer. She is like a human but she’s been told to suppress all her emotions, and she’s never had a form of it in which to display and to express a more sensitive emotional sides to her character. I thought personally that she had the most interesting character arc to portray, because she has such extremes, such polarities within her nature. Although I didn’t endow myself with the strength and confidence to really take the lead and create Aeryn Sun, it took until about episode seven PK Tech Girl where I really felt that I started to nail who Aeryn Sun was. I was so nervous at the beginning that I had to accommodate everybody’s wishes and hopes for Aeryn ‘cause I knew she was such a fantastic character, and I just wanted to really do her justice.

Anthony: With the time one of the things we haven’t really discovered or fleshed out properly at this stage was the age of D’Argo, because if we’re gonna keep D’Argo as a sort of more two dimensional warrior then I guess he’d be aged somewhere in his thirties. But I thought that was gonna be quite uninteresting to play, so what I decided very early on is that D’Argo would be like a sixteen year old. You don’t see many flashes of that in these early episodes, but as time goes on we get more of chance to explore it, but every single opportunity I could get to display that sort of naivete, I push it in. It’s someone who wants to be something other than what he is, he might become that one day when he’s learned more lessons, but at the moment he’s got too many hang ups about who he is and who he can be to fully explore that.

Claudia: The life span of the aliens in the Farscape world is akin to dog years, a Sebacean lives approximately 200 cycles or the equivalent of about 200 years, so we’re going to age a lot more gracefully on this show than most.

Anthony: But Crichton is always worried dying before everyone else, he’ll be alright then.

[John and D’Argo saying goodbye to Lyneea and Fostro]

Claudia: D’Argo’s looking very interested over there in the background.

Anthony: Oh, this kid was freaking out during this scene, so I...

Claudia: Ok kid, just stand there and act like you’re in a conversation with him.

Anthony: He was having a real, a bit of trouble walking from there, he’s a beautiful boy and absolutely wonderful, but I think by this time he was just a bit tired.

Claudia: Yeah, this is afternoon.

Anthony: So I was over there trying to keep him happy while Ben and Mary are trying to do their scene. At this stage in that suit, I was dying, it was so uncomfortable, I think actually this is the stage where I got heat blisters all over my neck. So they’re actual blisters from my chin down to my adam’s apple, because I use to have to wear helmet underneath the thing and the strap went underneath my chin that caused heat blisters.

[Aeryn trying to hold Zhaan up against the wall so she could partake in the pain Moya is feeling]

Claudia: Oh, it’s really difficult to film sequences where Zhaan would be around elements like water, because Virginia Hey is covered in paint which will obviously run in these sorts of extreme environments. They managed to put us into water twice and then they thought it wasn’t such a terrific idea, episode three when Aeryn suffering from heat delirium and the two chicks are in the shower together. It made a great image for sort of advertising purposes, but I think the practicality of it soon sort of necessitated a change of direction. Whenever you’re working with special effects on set, you always then have to go in and redo your dialogue because they need a clean track, we’re now doing at the moment about I’d say sixty to eighty percent of our dialogue again, because of the studios that we’re shooting in. A lot of the stuff that you see on the show is very action based, and what you’re doing...your commitment as an actor to the activity will inform the vocal quality with which you perform, and it’s very difficult to then get back into the ADR booth and redo your dialogue without the physical action attached to it. [Scene showing Pilot’s room] I love this.

Anthony: Oh yeah, one of the very first composites shots of Pilot’s den. In actuality of course all we have on set is the barrier around Pilot and the puppet itself, and all the rest is added in with a plate shot and with CGI.

Claudia: And that was the first time, we were shooting for weeks on end before we saw that shot complete.

Anthony: Yes, that was wonderful for us to see how large that area is and extensive, ‘cause when on set shooting you imaging Pilot’s in this quite contained space but in fact it’s really large.

Claudia: It’s only I think towards the end of season one and early in season two that the environment of the Pilot’s den has been sort of broadened by the directors, who have been cheating, sort of what would exists just below Pilot’s den and around it. This is at the very early stages of the Crichton and Aeryn relationship, and earlier on in the episode you’ll see that we were sort of bashing bulk heads together, and developing that unresolved sexual tension, moonlighting in space type banter. Aeryn doesn’t quite know how to deal with Crichton, she’s been brought up in an environment where she had no parental guidance. She was taught that emotions are not to be expressed or displayed unless they are those of anger and more negative warrior style emotions, to be very focused and not think about anything sentimental or romantic because it will get you killed in the heat of battle. She’s intrigued by him, she’s incredibly intrigued by Crichton, but she’s very threatened by what he represents, which is the removal from her environment and the necessity for change to survive. One of my most treasured memories of Farscape was in the very first week, and Anthony Simcoe and I were standing in the wings about to go onto set, and I remember you saying ‘I can’t believe I’ve spent my entire childhood wishing to be on a show like this.Wanting to pretend for half of my childhood that I could be out in space, and I’m about to walk onto set, on to command and say Pilot, prepare for starburst.’

Anthony: It was my favorite line in the whole thing, just wanted to get out there, (in D’Argo’s voice) ‘Pilot, prepare for starburst,’ was like yeah! (both laughing)

[Ending credits]

Claudia: Thank you very much for the opportunity to do this commentary, I love listening to DVD commentaries myself and I hope you’ll take the time over these credits to have a look at some of the names of these people who involved in season one and creating quite an extraordinary journey for all of us.

Anthony: It is, thanks very much, hope you enjoyed it.

[The End]