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castle-dominion · 1 year ago

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6x6 get a clue trying to liveblog during my family watch even tho I can't

lmao jesus I WAS RIGHT

Ah yes, the first apartment Nice place Nice orchid or flower or whatever remember rick's cockroach races? This place is genuinely really nice! Pi is so happy!

heck yeah dumpster diving I mean, chill castle.

Pi: What colour is it? RC: RC: Free oOH BEES (it is genuinely important! There is a job out there for everyone!) fruit on the table lol

crap it looks like there is no transcript on livejournal yay there is a dustjackets transcript on my second liveblog through aka my clip gathering run! RC: No, it’s not good. I was hoping for squalor. I was counting on squalor. Because Alexis cannot last in squalor. I was just hoping this whole thing would blow over. She would see Pi for the ambition free hippie that he is. And now he’s morphed into some … new age crusader? It’s a though he’s turned being a charming man-child into a career.

charming manchild into a career? KB: Now that doesn’t sound familiar, does it?

ryan is pretty but hair is too short. I used to look a lot like him but then he cut his hair & we were different & then I shaved my sides & looked way different & then I cut my hair over the top & now we look vaguely similar again lol See? called it, crucefix Where's all the blood tho? lanie & me same brain Remember when George Crabtree kept getting orders from murdoch but george already did all the stuff he needed to do? that's ryan in this moment. He is a detective in his own right he doesn't need beckett giving the orders

Ryan looks pretty, we know that, but dang esposito bisexual outfit right there (I need a pic of those two together, but ig I could get an individual pic of each)

RC: Maybe her dark secret has something to do with the dark ages

Castle might be right? coming from beckett? YES I FOUND ANOTHER TRANSCRIPT Yeah so uh you know what? A ton of pagan & occult symbols actually have their origins in christianity, & a lot of christian symbols come from other cultures & their paganism heathenry & mythology & stuff (esp in grecoroman period judeo-christian media, lots of grecoroman pagan crossover) I'm literally wearing pants with a water earth fire air alchemy symbols bc I'm a christowitch

lmao "satanic" WAIT DID YOU SEE THAT HAND IMAGE? PI HAD A SIMILAR ONE

Nice, get together for dinner every few months even tho u'r not that close...

RC: Which leaves us with my theory. Our victim was dabbling with black magic and she conjured up a demon. she did not conjure up a demon lmao

KB: Or maybe she ran afoul of some obscure religious sect and they sacrificed her to their pagan deity. well fuck you. maybe she got into trouble with the people in a people way, she disrespected their religion & they killed her for that, not bc of their pagan deity Ok but wait, bac in s1 Castle was really smart, he looked atbeckett, listened to her accent, & was able to determine intimate details about her life & her parent's death.

Washington Heights again

is this the freemason one? lmao (yes it is)

First intro babes!

RC: Ritual markings. Left by some unholy initiation. KB: They’re more like surgical scars. RC: *squints at it* (not clipping)

RC: I’m telling you, our monk, our victim, and these symbols are all connected Me: Yeah, the symbols are hers & the monk killed her. The connection is susannah richmond or w/e her names was

JE: Ah, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Castle might be right about this Da Vinci Code thing. *castle opens his mouth to gloat.* JE: don’t ruin it.

You can see esposito go to his pocket for one of those mint spray things

Ooh a nice sword! (esposito hoping he gets to play with a sword this ep) What kind of ink? Yeah lol where is the morgue in relation to the precinct

Nice location here

lmao it is the freemasons! Oh in the capital city in the privince next to mine has christian & greek folklore symbols & roads & churches & politicians. cool conspiracy theory stuff my uncle mentioned lol. or maybe like the cool booze bottle

She could have made that symbol up herself ooh idea: her hands were burned to hide the symbols (or the symbols burned her hands)

Nice writing!! (too well lined though) I love being multilingual Is castle a freemason?

"monk's dome" lol

Ryan is so smart! He checked medical criminal stuff! KR: So that pattern of scars on our monk’s dome was from a procedure called stereotactic brain surgery. KB: Okay, can that get us an ID? Because medical records are confidential. (I'm surprised that is true in the usa) KR: Prison records aren’t. I took a shot that the guy did some time. Nineteen men in the system had this surgery, but only one had scars that were an exact match to the monk. Benjamin Wade. He got surgery to remove a tumor while doing a stretch at Greenhaven for an attempted murder.

btw esposito outfit <3

Did you see ryan flick his hand like that when he touched the railing?

wait what if this is alexis' house? KR: Look at this place. I’m going to get hepatitis just breathing the air in. said "nypd" pretty quiet Lol drugs it's the monk! & a blonde woman! What if he can't talk?

lmao silent but deadly I'm making a lot less comments & it is harder to write them down & organize them & I am missing vital watching-pretty-people & visual clues by writing. I mean I partially touch type, but I am also watching what I write on the screen & not entirely touch typing so it is hard for me to do this while watching with my family. I'm able to type this paragraph so much rn because my lil bro is upstairs stirring a batch of nuts & bolts. It is also hard bc I am using the literary/verbal part of my brain to type while also using it to listen to the show, at least one is typing output & one is auditory input, but still, I am hard of hearing & I have captions on so... yeah

Wade: Actually, I am a monk. I just learned to think before I speak. I believe this guy, this monk.

Yeah I believe him, counsel Pointing to a mysterious stranger. also brown long hair not long brown hair? Bro he didn't think he NEEDED to remember details abt it "it's what sells the lie" & then he gives a detail RC & me: nice, wicked Freuidian detail XD why didn't you say that detail earlier too?

JE: Wait, you guys are on the same page about this guy? KB: Not exactly. I think he’s guilty because of his contact with the victim, the stalking, and his history of violence. RC: I think he’s guilty because of his contact with the victim, the stalking, and his role in a sinister conspiracy involving Freemasons. (clipping)

freemason black belt lmao glad I already quoted this

RC: Way better than that. He was a patriot spy. He wrote codes and cyphers during the American Revolution. Meaning, this letter could be the key to finding the great secret of the Masons, enshrined somewhere within the city. KB: Why, because you want it to be? RC: Partly. RC: And because it’s the only story that makes sense. A shadowy brotherhood guarding Rose’s secret for all eternity. Susannah got too close, so they sent their monk assassin to kill her.

mum: didn't he buy his bar bc there was a treasure underneath it?

sketch artist for the time not the sketch?

Impress me There are times i wish she'd stayed in DC esposito's face will clip that if I get the chance (yep)

interesting shirt beckett has there lol

"up to their hoods" lol (lol)

stained glass baby Castle has a copy of the letter?

ah the ash heap is the altar! Makes sense!

interesting prayer candle corner interesting audio too weird little guy with a mouth lmao lil bro: It looks like gandalf I think the pics of the symbols are these places, see the texture? btw the stations of the cross are rly dirty. need to be cleaned.

Hephaestus is the god of blacksmiths or smth, right? he was thrown from a mountain (like me) & got ugly & also disabled? (btw from what I've heard from disbaled ppl, handicap is an outdated term but still used, cripple is a slur, & lame is a slur.)

since the 1700s? etna's forge! field trip third grade XD Nice scene with the low angle & fast walking

sexy place KB: Wow. This is incredible. Shouldn’t there be a docent or some sweaty guy hammering metal standing around? RC: Yeah. (he raises his voice in a british accent) Hello? Is there a smithy here about? We have travelled many a mile – (he’s interrupted by BECKETT’S hand on his arm) – is this annoying you?

Oooh. (he inspects them) Have it, want it, need it, got it, need it, got it, need it... (he did that with the cars too in s8) *pulls a sword on him* *castle just makes a comment* RC: Well now, that wouldn’t happen to be a double edged saber with a crenellated hilt, now would it? Zorro?

OH YEAH I FORGOT CASTLE WAS A FENCER"YOURE NOT SO BAD YOURSELF" PRINCESS BRIDE REFERENCE where is beckett tho?? WHAT SIGN SHALL BE REVEALED? So did she beat him in the swordfight? what is this guy talking about? (clipping)

OH WHAT IF IT IS LIKE SPYCATIONS so castle DIDN'T beat him?

Good old ren faires. Why does beckett's phone beep when she opened the photo?

Like the ghost episode, he couldn't tear down the murder building bc it was a historical site (man looks like my culinary teacher)

2500 is a lot of money but ig if some ppl have spent more... Ah that's why it was so pretty, it was hand written Castle's scalp lol

she never acknowledges his sword fighting? I feel like ryan & even esposito would be impressed by this. except that yk... it was fake... KB: Castle, you didn’t really believe that this was going to lead to some great Freemason treasure, did you? RC: No. Of course not. That would be foolish. (BECKETT nods once, unconvinced) Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home to wallow in what is perhaps the most disappointing day of my crime solving career. KB: Okay. I’ll come by later and try to cheer you up. Me: *lenny face*

oh hey btw esposito has cut his hair!

IT IS THE SAME GUY KR: Well, his name and address are bogus. Everything on the application is. None of this information is real.

cheque in this context

Yeah they only showed a little bit of the dinner, I feel like it may have gotten worse as the dinner progressed Castle really IS a dad.

MR: Of course I'm right! Love her so much

Smart trace? No way. That would n't work. It would need to be straight on. IT'S A MAP!

esposito wearing ryan-core outfit here Ryan looks even more ryan-core WOW THEY ARE WEARING THE SAME OUTFIT LMAO clipping the saga of tracking down the cab (also for the outfits lol)

castle walks Right Behind ryan like that lol so weird (he just... takes his place) (btw just noticed, ryan's shirt was not perfectly ironed. I love that fact.) *puts it on the board* castle is smart/sexy af except the shape was not /that/ good RC: the killer didn't want anyone else to figure it out Me: but susannah figured it out so other people surely also could

lil bro: put your hand in it DON'T PUT YOUR HAND IN IT she speaks french? AND russian? mum already saw the letter lol Oris. Oral. latin for mouth.

he's playing her (could clip but won't) (actually mu lil bro who is my voice of reason in my clipping suggested I do) I saw the thing was oddly broken, like it was pasted on the wall nah bro you would see a seam. You WOULD see a seam.

tomb? blood SWORD How can u tell they are fresh? it's stone castle u r not moving it.

I NOTICED the world ball! There are stars painted there!

The world turns! Mum: Booby trap? (remember tho, how does this work? do they have a hydraulic system? like the last treasure hunting episode, under the gun No they are FAKE half dimes Mum: I TOLD you about the booby trap WHY DIDN'T YOU LISTEN?

going to the chapel lol

He would not have made an anagram of his name candle wax IS a survival food... RC: Theodore Rose … is … head or toes. No. Theodore Rose … he do rooster. (he laughs) That’s inappropriate. Okay, Theodore Rose, Theodore Rose. Deer shot oreo. Oh, they didn’t have Oreos in the 1700s.

(on phone) What's up Beckett? We don't get to see the rescue, them making fun of caskett?

EXACTLY WHAT I'VE BEEN THINKING-- MAKE THEM ASSUME IT IS JUST A GAME they just... got em out lmao, not showing us that

oh it WASN'T just a game! crowdsourced treasure hunt lol she would NOT know that sort of family lore lmao. I have a ton of family lore & don't know any of it, anything that cool or important.

not lonely, talking abt family lore oh it WAS a big family myth he's awkward. He killed her. Similar nose! As DNA similarities!

mum: half dimes? aren't they nickels? Wow. That is sad. "the people" aren't going to receive them, the historical museum will. You could have sold them to the museum to put your aunt in assisted living.

We get to see thier shoes! (& also ryan's pants match his jacket) Ah, I was wondering how she figured it out when noone else did! She had been to weddings there! both: here we go again RC: I gotta go see alexis JE: *frowns in confusion* The girl & the dad know, but not esposito. (clipped, probably best as a gif tho)

actions speak louder than words

Alexis doubts beckett? But she loves her! WAIT DID PI & ALEXIS PROPOSE?

Make-up ice-cream my beloved SAD "I need time to stop being mad" valid lol

Ok so I did NOT comment as much as I usually do & it was very rushed & I'm not pleased with this, & I did not get any clips or pics (like a pic of rysposito walking out there) but hopefully I'll get the chance to get them.

Uh yeah so where was I? I'm done this ep. Good for me. I really feel like I had smth else to say. Tbh all throughout the film I felt like I had smth mor eto say but I never got th echance.

Oh I remember what I had to say-- & I forgot again. Maybe I was going to say that I would watch it again no wait it was that I'm going to try watching other shows like this-- ok I have it written down now I can write my thought in a better way

Since s5 is due soon, way too soon, I'm going to try writing my liveblog without pausing it at much if at all, bc I have no time. I apparently take 3 hours to watch an episode instead of 1.5 which was my goal. I can do this. I must NOT pause it tho lol

Me: here doubling my liveblog so I could get clips

#castle 6x6 #castle 6x6 quote #castle 6x6 spoilers #the freemason episode

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cptnbvcks · 5 years ago

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Ok but think abt phone sex with javi (I mean it IS cannon that if you call him at work saying you want his cock in you, he'll run out of the office like it's on fire to go fuck)

dial tone (javier peña x reader)

words: 1.3k

rating: mature/explicit (18+)

summary: you decide to have some fun with javi (and murphy) after feeling a little bored while he’s at work.

warnings: phone sex, female masturbation, mild murphy tease/cuckhold-y.

a/n: its kinda short kinda hot might blueball you too i’m sorry

(gif source: @december-nimbus)

“Hey, Murph, is Javi there?”

Tucking the bulky landline receiver between his cheek and his shoulder, Murphy lifted his gaze from the growing molehill of paperwork that had slowly begun to consume the pair of crudely shoved together desks.

The Embassy was busy tonight; the hallways humming low with indistinct conversations that all seemed a little too antsy for the time of night. The white-noise drawl was loud, but not loud enough to mask the pillow-soft voice at the other end of the line. Murphy shifted the phone closer to his ear.

“He’s a little tied up right now,” Murphy offered, casting a lazy glance over to the glass paneling that separated Messina’s office from the rest of the space. He bit down the smirk that tried to work its way from his mouth to his voice as he watched Javier pinch the bridge of his nose in annoyance while mutedly listening to Messina chew him out, “Pissed off Messina again.”

A hazy little laugh bubbled from the other side of the line, drawing its end on a breathless sigh. Murphy raised a brow, lowering his gaze to the phone cord as his thoughts pinwheeled around that airy amused sound.

“I think he likes her,” your voice pulls molasses slow from your throat; slow and honeyed enough that it makes him swallow and shift the phone against his ear again, “He only pisses off people he likes.”

“Then he must love me,” Murphy rallied back, winning another chimed laugh that made him feel like he’d been caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar when his partner met his gaze from behind the glass walls. Murphy straightened his back and pointed to the receiver, mouthing your name as Javier began to respectfully wave Messina off.

“Oh, I think he loves you more than he loves me, Murph,” You sigh around his nickname and fight the smile that arches your lips at the pregnant pause that suspends the air with phone static.

“If I knew any better, I might be jealous,” The words come more urgently now, catching heavy in your throat and Murphy can’t help but note that it sounds like you’re laying down. Even more so when he hears the soft fabric shuffle of sheets. His brain sputters as your words curl tighter. “Should I be jealous, Murph?”

Murphy opens his mouth, bone dry and fumbling for a response as he watches Javier swing open Messina’s door. He clears his throat and tries again.

“No, ma’am,” he manages, swapping the phone from one ear to the other as Javier shakes his head at him before adding the folder in his hands to the cascading collection already pooling over the desks. Murphy follows his partner with his eyes as the man sits back heavily in the adjacent chair and makes no explicit move to take over the line of conversation.

Murphy arches a brow at the phone, and Javier shakes his head again as he drags his typewriter closer.

A quiet hum purred through the warp of the phone line, testing the softer octaves of your vocal cords as the words pulled from your throat.

“You still there, Murph?”

“We’re a little busy out here right now, sweetheart,” Murphy offers, his tone clipped and quick as he stared at Javier, who was doing a pointed job of working, “Want me to pass on a message—?”

The words abruptly staggered to a halt in his mouth.

Did he just… hear you moan?

“I don’t think you can pass on this— this message, Stevie.”

Oh.

Your words are swallowed and thick and the sudden pause in Murphy’s words draws Javier’s attention just as the man juts the receiver out across the table for him to take. Murphy tips his head and shoots him a look that says you better take this.

The next voice you hear is Javier’s. Heady and deep and razing warm from his chest with that baritone that made your cunt clench with emptiness.

“Baby—” He exasperates into the receiver, his voice laden and heavy as he pins Murphy with an irate expression that quickly falters when you wrap your lips around his name and gasp for it like you’ve been holding your breath from the minute you called in.

“Javi— Javi, baby—”

Your words are light and triumphant and they hang in the air of little quick gasps that sound far too loud and too intimate for the ugly glaring fluorescents of the unquiet Embassy. He looks away from Murphy then, who’s making a point of distracting himself by tapping out a cigarette from its carton, and hunches down in his chair to shoulder the room.

You whine again, a high and tight sound that makes his cock stir to life in his jeans. Javi casts his eyes across the room, lowering his voice when he speaks with those abrasive words masked with the thin veil of both threat and intrigue. “What do you think you’re doing, mija?”

“I just— mm, fuck— I miss you, Javi. Needed t-to hear your voice—”

The sheets shuffle again, faster this time, and Javier doesn’t need to see you to know that it’s the sound of your feet kicking off the covers. He doesn’t need to be there to know that it’s your fingers curling and twisting deep in that pretty little pussy of yours that’s already so wet and aching and weeping for him.

Fuck, maybe if the Embassy was quieter he’d be able to hear every soaked noise it made while you listened to him speak. Instead, he presses the receiver closer to his ear.

“I’m working, baby. I can’t—”

You choke out a pathetic little noise then — a simpering tone that glimmers in the bedroom air every fucking time he digs the pad of his thumb up against your soft clit. He knows the way your thighs jolt every time he does it; the way it pulls the air, gasping and empty, right from your lungs.

“Then put Murphy back on the line.”

The baseless taunt drops into the pit of Javier’s stomach and coils hot and insidious and you’ve placed the checkmate that’s gotten him moving immediately. Murphy looks up from where he’s been pretending to read a Centra Spike transcript, watching now as Javier snuffs out his cigarette and impatiently yanks out the half-typed page from the typewriter reel.

“Say that again, sweetheart. See what happens.”

Your cunt bottoms out at the warning; clenches wetly around your curled fingers until your hips instinctively roll harder into your palm. Your exhale catches clearly on the other end of the line and Javier stands up with enough suddenness that his chair skitters back across the tiled floor.

“Javi?” Murphy voices his concern but Javier’s more focused on the hasty words that begin to fall from your mouth, and he knows you’re on the edge of something devastating with enough wickedness in you to try to drag him down too.

“Do you think he’d help me?” You croon, panting quick around every syllable as you listen to Javier’s breathing hitch to match your own, “Do you think he knows that I’ve got two fingers curled up in my pussy, thinking about you, Javi? I—I think he heard me. You know how loud I get s-sometimes. How wet—”

The line goes dead before you finish the thought.

“I’m heading out,” he blurts out to Murphy, dropping the phone into its cradle before snatching up his leather jacket from the back of his seat and yanking it on, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself, Javi.”

There’s a note of amusement in Murphy’s voice and Javier pauses, one foot already ascending the step leading to the main exit. He stops and turns, watching as Murphy tucks his cigarette back into his mouth and pours himself a glass from the half-empty whiskey bottle.

“Did she say something to you?”

Murphy’s brow lifted as he looked from Javier’s pointed finger before meeting his half-accusing stare. He leaned back into his chair until it groaned in protest and raised his hands defensively.

“Not a word.”

—

Tag List

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#inbox #anonymous #javier pena #javier peña #javier pena x reader #javier pena smut #javier pena fic #narcos fic #pedro pascal #narcos #idk tf else to tag this #myfic #steve murphy #steve murphy x reader

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nerdified · 4 years ago

Text

Procedural Notes: Patient #3 (FKA Hugo Jensen)

NOTE: [At the time of this audio recording, Mr. Hugo Jensen (NKA Norville Nerdlinger) has just begun the process, and is restrained. The identity of the speaker is unknown. This transcript is reproduced here in order to assist with identification of this man, who has since disappeared, absconding with an undisclosed amount of the process agonist. Efforts to locate him have, to date, been fruitless. If anyone knows anything about this man or his whereabouts, please report the information to Central Command.]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

Quiet, now. It’s no use struggling.

I’m not going to hurt you. Quite the opposite.

I see that look in your eyes, like you don’t think I could hurt you. You’re probably right. I’m not much of a fighter. But I know what you think of me, and other guys like me. I’ve been listening to you on the phone, you know. Hacked your telecommunications. What was it that you called me, on that call with the client yesterday?

Oh, yes, I remember. A walking pocket protector. I’ll admit, that was a new one for me. I’ve had “pencil-neck” and “four-eyes” and the good old-fashioned “nerd” lobbed at me before, but “walking pocket-protector”… Heck, it’s got a little poetry to it!

Shh. I know, it feels strange. It’s a little unsettling, at first, I’ll agree. But you’ll get used to it. It’ll go easier for you if you just relax and quit fighting it. In time, you’ll even begin to like it.

I’m sorry about the gag. Unfortunately, it’s just the beginning of the process, so I have to leave it in for…twenty-three more minutes, at least, if my calculations are correct.

Ha! Who am I kidding – my calculations are always correct.

I can see from your eyes that you hate my guts right now. That, too, will change.

You see, what’s about to happen to you isn’t out of the ordinary, or even very noteworthy. As far as I can tell, it happens to a lot of guys, especially those that zip through their twenties and then hit that speed bump called thirty, bank accounts empty and career opportunities shot. Those of us who didn’t win the genetic lottery couldn’t get by just on our looks and our charisma, like you did.

I remember how it felt when I was in high school, and guys like you were all A+ students and perfect jocks, too… gosh, it’s enough to make me swear.

But no. You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You couldn’t just be a jock, be good at sports, and leave the academics to the rest of us. We didn’t ask for much, you know. We just wanted to be left alone in our science labs, and in our tutorials, in our lives.

There's no escaping guys like you. You’re everywhere, and you’re spreading. For a time, we ignored it. Figured it was some kind of anomaly. But it wasn’t – it was a trend. And despite the fact that we didn’t see it coming, we are now prepared for its end.

Like I mentioned – it won’t surprise most people to see you change. Maybe a few of your close friends will worry about you. Express some concern. But by that point, you’ll already have accepted your new self. You’ll be able to say “This is just who I am,” and it’ll be their choice how to proceed. That’s a side benefit, by the way, of the process. You get to find out who your real friends are – and, spoiler alert: they’re not exactly big football fans.

You have to be prepared for some major shake-up in your life, though. The good thing about the process is that it won’t faze you in the slightest. Everything will be gee-whiz gosh-darn super-duper spiffy keen neat-o, if anyone asks, and for you, it will be.

Now, I know those terms are a little outdated. We’ve had to make a bit of an adjustment to the process in your case. The earlier version wasn’t quite strong enough for you, so we’ve had to over-compensate in a few directions. You won’t just be a little bit nerdy, you know, a couple of odd quirks, some new hobbies. For example, Derek – well, that’s his dead name, he goes by Derwood now – Derwood can sometimes get by in normal society. He even kept a few of his old friends. He’s just more into things like superhero movies, and he’s left behind all knowledge or passion for sports. I think I even saw him reading a comic book the other day, come to think of it.

But that’s not going to be you. Oh, sure, you might develop a taste for superhero movies, but if you do, it won’t just be a passing interest. You’ll become a rabid fan. I believe…obsessive…is the operative word, in fact. Yes, you see, that earlier version of the process would have worn off, and you’d have been back to your old self in no time, which would wreak havoc on your psyche, not to mention put our entire operation in jeopardy. We can’t have that.

It looks like some time has passed, but not quite enough for me to remove the gag yet. Do you feel your perfect white teeth shifting around in your gums, almost impatiently? Nod once for yes.

You don’t have to nod at all, not if you don’t want to. I don’t need you to confirm for me what I can already see happening in your eyes. Speaking of your eyes – how’s your vision? I can see you starting to squint every now and then. Trying to see past that blur? Don’t worry. I’ve already got your glasses, right here, for when it gets too bad for you to see. Talk about your Coke-bottle lenses - my calculations again predict that you’ll settle somewhere around…hm…negative six diopters, which is even worse than mine.

To put it simply: you won’t even be able to read the big E on the eye chart without your glasses on.

I know, you’ve never been to the optometrist in your life. You never needed to. And don’t think about getting contact lenses, either. I mean, go ahead and try, if you really want to embarrass yourself.

Oh, I can see it now: timid, nerdy little guy like you, shuffling into the doctor’s office – you say you want to get contact lenses, and they get you in the back for a fitting. They show you how to do it, you know, hold your eyelids apart and then just plop the lens on there. But you have to do it three times before they’ll let you leave with them, and you won’t even be able to get one in, because you’ll keep blinking it out. I wish I could be there to see it, honestly – you, all frustrated, trying to swear, but only able to say things like “Fudge!” and “Gosh darn it!”

It’ll be so beautiful. I’m getting teary just thinking about it.

I’m glad you’re starting to settle down a bit. Let me know when you need your glasses. Maybe while we wait, I’ll get started on your hair. That trendy fade has got to go, and so does that scruff on your face. At the start, you’ll have to shave a lot, but as the process continues, you’ll start producing more of a 5-alpha reductase enzyme. This will convert your testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, which will actually miniaturize your follicles. Kind of like using a shrink ray on them! Oh, and there will be no taking of inhibitors, like finasteride or anything like that – our process contains a potent agonist, with an affinity of 0.25 to 0.5 nM for the human androgen receptor.

It’s all very scientific, I assure you. And with the miniaturization of your follicles, your sebaceous glands will begin to over-produce sebum, which results in – you guessed it! Acne. Pimples. Zits. I know you’ve never had to deal with that before, so I’m just preparing you for it now. Pizza-face, I think the popular nickname is. Get ready for a lot of that.

Let’s see…what else can I tell you.... Gosh, this is kind of like the orientation for a new job, isn’t it? Ah, yes. I know. Speaking of jobs...

Yeah, this is the tough part. It’s all very natural, I assure you. Just like with your friends, your co-workers will come to see you in a different way. I know you have quite a few cutthroat underlings who would eat one another alive to get your corner office, and the moment they sense you’re not as much of a threat as you used to be, they’ll swarm.

I give it two weeks, tops, until you’re gone. If you choose that road. Or you could make it much easier on yourself and resign. You won’t be financially ruined – not with all that new information surging through your brain – you’ll be an asset to the right company, the right department. Maybe IT will take you. Or accounting. Maybe you won’t work corporate. Maybe you’ll work retail.

God, that’s cruel even for me. I wouldn’t wish retail on anyone, even a jerk like you. But there’s no telling what could happen. For all I know, once the process has completed, you could end up one of those Geek Squad guys at Best Buy! Have you seen the uniform they have to wear? It’s company-mandated dress code. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? White, short-sleeve, button-down shirt. Black polyester clip-on necktie; black, pleated trousers; black lace-up shoes…and white socks. Yes, white socks, kept completely spotless and bright. All this is enforced, too, with routine inspections, to make sure you’re being compliant!

You see, there’s really an infinity of possibilities for you. If anything, this is a new chance for you – a fresh start. I know it feels scary, all this change. But change is the only constant. Everything is always in flux. Heck, every seven years, your entire body regenerates – every cell is new and different, so why shouldn’t your personality and identity change, too?

It’s logical, isn’t it? Nod once for yes.

Good! You’re starting to come around, aren’t you? Like I said, it won’t be so bad if you just accept it. If you don’t fight it. That sudden urge to position your tongue up behind your teeth when you say ess. Eth. Eth. How your voice keeps breaking, and in the most unfortunate ways, and at the most unfortunate times – all of this is being etched into your muscle memory as I speak to you.

There isn’t much longer now until I can remove your gag, and I can see that the physical alterations are beginning. Too bad all that hard work at the gym all these years is so easily eroded by our process, but then, those muscles were mostly for show, weren’t they? Well, no longer. It isn’t exactly sarcopenia, but it’s close. You’ll be at least one and a half, possibly two, standard deviations below the relevant population mean, and no amount of exercise will restore your former abilities.

Yes, the ropes are looser now, because you’re much smaller. Rapid onset muscle deterioration. You could struggle out of them. Maybe you could even escape. You could try. But there’s no way you’d make it very far without your glasses. Who would believe you, anyway? What would you even say?

Like I said, you might as well give in. It’s not so bad, once you get used to it. And you’ll have me. I’ll be with you for the whole beginning process, so you can acclimate to your newly nerdy life. You won’t be able to continue living in that luxe apartment you’ve got – no, you’ll be moving into a nice little basement apartment I’ve got fixed up for you, in the suburbs outside the city. The landlords have just got it refurbished, with some nice wood paneling, and there’s a spare twin bed that should be just your size! There’s also tons of room on the walls to put up all your posters. You won’t need much room for anything else, really. You definitely won’t be needing that enormous closet of tailored, fitted button-down shirts, or all those sneakers, definitely not those expensive Under Armour boxer-briefs. What a waste. No, the new you is way more frugal with his money, seeing as he’s paid so little of it. The new you doesn’t even think that much about clothes, or fashion.

This must be a lot to handle. Maybe I should have a little mercy on you.

Tell you what. I’ll let you choose your underwear. How’s that, pal? That make you feel any better? Nod once for yes.

See, I’m not that bad. That’s right. So, here. You can choose…Hanes, or Fruit of the Loom?

Oh, I see. You thought I meant what kind of underwear. Haha, no. You’ll be wearing tighty-whities from now on. Sorry, them’s the rules. Besides, you won’t need much support…down there, if you catch my drift!

Don’t look so horrified. You won’t even notice that it’s gone. Mostly. You’ll still have some length, just, you know, not a lot. You won’t be able to call it a “cock” or a “dick” ever again, either. Oh, look how cute – you’re blushing just hearing me say it! You might call it something else, like your ding-a-ling, or your wiener.

Okay, okay, I can tell you’re getting embarrassed, you’ve gone all red and blotchy in your cheeks. We don’t have to talk about the … “no-no place” anymore, little buddy.

All right. Here’s your glasses. I’ll just set them on your nose, for you…there. Wow, they sure do make your eyes look tiny!

I can tell you’re getting near to the end of the process, and I’m curious to see how big your two front teeth have gotten. From that bump in your upper lip…gosh, it looks like you might be giving Bugs Bunny a run for his money!

You’ve really been behaving better, so I’ll bring you a mirror, okay? So you can see for yourself. I must say, it’s already quite the improvement. I wasn’t expecting your hair to turn so red, or get so curly. Maybe if you can’t get a job at Best Buy, you could run away and join the circus as a clown!

I’m just horsing around with you, pal. Don’t pass out on me. You promise not to scream? I hate it when they scream. Nod once for yes.

You’re a little excited, aren’t you? It’s okay. You can tell me. I bet you get a little more excitable than you used to. Maybe you even get a little clumsy, with the loss of all that hand-eye coordination. Trip over your own two feet and go sprawling.

But who knows. There’s so much potential.

And you’re just the beginning, too. Let’s just say that my proposal for introducing you to the process wasn’t well-received by Central. What do they know? They have this power, and they don’t use it. Well, you snooze, you lose, by golly! If you have a gift, you use it, otherwise it goes to waste.

Anyway. Enough of the supervillain speech. You don’t need to know anything more. It’ll probably be wiped out in the massive crush of nerdy trivia about Star Trek and Star Wars that’s going to download into your brain soon, anyway.

So, this is it. Are you ready to see? Nod once for yes, and I’ll pull the cloth off this mirror here.

Alrighty, dweeb, you asked for it. Here goes.

Say salutations to the new you!

[END TRANSCRIPT]

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poorreputation · 4 years ago

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Undertaker: The Last Ride

When I say I've been waiting years for this, I'm serious. Ever since Undertaker's loss at Wrestlemania 30, and shortly after that the news he would be on the Stone Cold Podcast, I've been eagerly anticipating seeing Mark Calaway speak as himself. Many fans have been hesitant to watch Calaway out of character, worried it would ruin the mystique of the Undertaker, but I've felt for years that the work put into these characters behind the scenes is just as fascinating as the fiction.

I watched episode one soon after it aired, and want to do a rewatch/reaction post before episode two drops tonight. Join me, if you wish.

If you've not seen the episode, a little content warning: there is blood, gore in a surgical setting (very, very graphic, but only there for a couple seconds at a time), needles, and implied injuries, including details of Mark's concussion at WM30.

CHAPTER 1: THE GREATEST FEAR

The series, all five episodes, takes place between 2017 and 2020. Chapter 1 covers Wrestlemania 33, and his match with Roman Reigns, which was intended to be his last.

This is the first time Mark Calaway's really opened up about his work, and himself in general. There's other instances of him being interviewed, even mixing fact and kayfabe, but never on a platform like this, certainly not with WWE.

Mark: You know they call me Santa Clause, now, right? Because I only come out once a year.

Jimmy Hart, being the sweetest: That's all you need to. You look great.

These backstage segments of Calaway with his coworkers are honestly some of the best parts of the episode. A transcript can only do so much justice.

Roman Reigns, upcoming opponent of the Undertaker, signs in at the lobby desk right next to Mark, being a smartass. Screw your camera guy, indeed.

Mark meditates on the struggles of working only once a year, and throughout the episode, chronicles the moments and injuries that make an already challenging schedule nearly impossible. Chasing the dragon that is the perfect match has lead him to a stalemate with himself and his character: if the Undertaker can go out in a match fitting of him at Wrestlemania, Mark Calaway will be happy.

Gah, baby 'Taker at his Survivor Series debut always gets me. No one could've called the run that boy was about to go on. I see other people call this portion of the episode the mythologizing of the character, building him up to be this big deal, and it's so funny to me because I wouldn't be watching if I didn't already think that of him. Like, y'all are just preaching to the choir, at this point. That, and so much that's been said here has been consistent with what Mark's peers have told about him in the past, it just feels like catching people up rather than building an image from scratch.

Say what you will about Vince McMahon (and there's a lot to be said), but there's something special about his comments on Mark Calaway. You rarely get to hear the guy talk candidly as it is, so when he does, you know it's important.

Calaway describing the weight, the prestige of Wrestlemania... and then the sneer he makes after that statement. I ain't a journalist, so I'll freely speculate: 'Mania's for the best of the best, and he just doesn't see himself as deserving to be there, not right now, at least.

Other wrestlers, from Orton to Edge to Batista, talk about what an honor, and mark of trust, it is to work with Undertaker, period. To work with him at Wrestlemania? You've arrived. The implication of what this would, or should, have meant for Roman is clear. It's a wonder if this image that his coworkers built up of him affected Mark's own expectations of himself. I mean, it's more or less spelled out in the episode, and it is the pro wrestling way to go out on your back, losing to someone who can use the rub, but, just throwing it out there, 'Taker had more pressure on him than most. That legacy, 'Mania, and the worry of managing to physically move during a match? It's overwhelming.

For those confused about why working once or twice a year would be so much more difficult than working hundreds of shows in that same time span, Steve Austin sums it up best: the road keeps you calloused and bruised. Ring rust from inactivity, due to being away or rehabbing an injury, gets you both mentally and physically. Knowing Mark's doing this process every year in his 50′s is insane.

During this, Steve plainly states that to go through that, and the many surgeries as Michelle McCool, Mark's wife, mentioned, it makes him a tough son of a bitch. It's an interesting note, considering we start this episode with Mark referring to that toughness as a thing of the past. His perception of himself, and what his peers see, is another fascinating aspect of the documentary.

Calaway talks about how nerve-racking the final workout before 'Mania is. The worry you'll hurt something while trying to train. Later, when other wrestlers talk about how calm, cool and collected 'Taker always seems... it's like they've built him up to be superhuman; Invulnerable to the same things and fears that plague all athletes. They talk about the physical decline, of course, that’s inevitable. But the mental side of things is where the biggest differences are.

Hoo boy, WrestleMania 30, the cause of my first major bout with depression. After that match between Undertaker and Brock Lesnar, not only was I crying and distressed, but there was then the news of Mark Calaway's hospitalization that was the numbing cherry on top. I remember registering how much more important the man's health was, but it was like I couldn't get any more upset.

After that, I'd read up on so many rumors, that the only new bit of information here in the documentary is about when Mark's being rushed to the ER; how Vince infamously left the arena before 'Mania was over just to make sure Mark was okay, and, in new info, Brock was in the car with him. I cannot stress enough how humanizing that is to hear, especially considering how closely guarded Brock is about his persona, and how the man and the character are often so blended together. Time heals all wounds, but I really appreciated hearing that.

So, the injury for the uninformed: during the match with Brock, 'Taker got concussed. No one knows when it happened, much less Mark, who can't remember anything from after 3:30 PM that afternoon. To say I, and many others, were convinced this was it, he'd retire, would be an understatement. Many people felt he should retire, I did too, at one point. But, I could also tell Calaway wouldn't want to leave on such a note, because frankly, the match sucked. That's what happens when one person gets knocked the fuck out, and the other guy's gotta improvise. The fact 'Taker's going on muscle memory while he's out is nothing short of a miracle.

With WM30 in the books, 'Taker was at a low point, his confidence shot and a lot riding on his match with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 31 (or Play Button, if you prefer). Bray himself recalling how nervous he was, but how chill Undertaker appeared, in comparison.

Triple H's pep talk with 'Taker backstage is another gem, and I just love their friendship. I love the raw vulnerability this series is providing, both when it comes to 'Taker, and everyone else around him. I hope it's a constant through the rest of the docuseries.

WM31 was an ego boost, and leads into the superior Brock-Undertaker program in 2015. It's not highlighted as much, but it's fire, and I think allowed Calaway to redeem himself a bit, in his eyes. Not too much, since he didn't retire, but it made fans really start to come back 'round.

Now, I liked WM32 because I got to see it in person, and it was the first time I'd ever seen Undertaker live, so I'm a biased bitch. Anyone signing up to work Hell in a Cell is a ballsy move, and considering how old both 'Taker and Shane McMahon were going into that is no small feat. I liked it, it was a spectacle, and I was sports entertained. There is the implication, between showing clips of WM32 and 'Taker's appearance at the 2017 Royal Rumble, that Calaway wasn't satisfied with how the former turned out. It becomes fully fleshed out he's talking about entering the RR, and feeling intense regret, but that he was also disappointed with the former. Again, if he were happy with it, he'd have retired, but that's again the difference between what the fans see and what the wrestler sees. I, and I imagine roughly 100,000 others, had the time of our lives; Mark Calaway was, and still is, chasing perfection.

With RR 2017, Mark freely admits that he had no business being there. It sounds truly like his thought process in the moment, and not just the regret of how WM33 went down, and that the build for that match began when he and Roman went toe-to-toe at the Rumble.

Back to WM33 weekend. 'Taker's finished up the final workout, and is talking about his place on the upcoming card:

Mark: Regardless of my injuries, regardless of my age, regardless of everything that has happened, if I'm on the card, there's some young guy that's making a lot of the shows through the year, you know, that may not be on that card. So, it's my duty to make sure that it's worth putting me on the card. No one would probably say it to my face if I stunk it up, (but) I would know, and that's one of my biggest fears, and um, is becoming a parody of myself.

This is someone who's also been reading the rumor mill, the comments, general fan reaction. It's neat he's so receptive to fan interaction, and makes me wonder if he's actually been doing this for years, but it's also sad to watch him only see the negative sides. The Undertaker, as a character, wouldn't have worked for so long without innovation, so being open-minded is important. And, I'm all for Mark Calaway doing what he wants with his life, but, for him, will anything, any match, ever be good enough?

It's the night of the Hall of Fame 2017 and we see Mark and Michelle backstage greeting people. We get a shot of Mark saying hi to the likes of the late Bruno Sammartino, inductees Sean Waltman and Kurt Angle, and I just love how dolled up Michelle looks, whereas Mark's just in jeans, a dress shirt and a cap. I love their dynamic, so so much. Also, Mark and Kurt's friendship, that's adorable. One of the good things to happen when I found out about kayfabe was thinking how these characters who normally hate each other on screen, were really besties backstage. It's a thought that still tickles me to this day, and watching that in the episode on several occasions is a joy to behold.

Kurt's talking about 'Taker's role as locker room leader, and Mark mentions how it wasn't ever something he actively pursued, it just happened. Being locker room leader just seems to be yet another thing added to the legend of the Undertaker. Makes a bit more sense why Mark's peers put him on a pedestal.

Wrestlers are talking about how, very early on, Undertaker set the benchmark, the gold standard, of work every night. John Bradshaw Layfield goes on to say, "(Mark) was the yardstick. And if you did well, then pretty much you were in, if not, then you were out, because you knew if you didn't do well, it wasn't the Undertaker's fault." That explains why it hurts so much for 'Taker to not be at his best. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, but it's fascinating to see all of these elements come together. It's also interesting to hear JBL build up 'Taker as the greatest of all time, and then plainly say he's never seen Mark in worse shape than he was heading into WM33.

On a lighter note, it's real funny to hear Mark and Roman talk about the latter's new twins (from 2017) considering he's got another set of twins on the way, now. Just in general, Roman going on about how much he loves talking to Mark about work, but mostly family and to hear the stories Mark's got to tell, you can see how much this match means to him. The prestige of working with 'Taker at any point, let alone 'Mania, he knows this is the highlight of his career. I can't help but respect Roman for that, and couldn't help but feel that way going into WM33. It's a stark difference from how I felt about Brock post-WM30, and I honestly thought I was prepared to watch Undertaker take his rumored loss at this show.

It's the night before 'Mania, and they're doing entrance rehearsals. The stage setup for this show was so cool, guys, it took inspiration from the theme parks that are littered throughout Orlando, and was a beauty to see live, especially when it got dark. And 'Taker's entrance, even in practice, is a spectacle.

Cuts to the day of WrestleMania 33. General nerves are felt, and the start of a very long day begins.

Mark: People say, "All you gotta do is go out there and chokeslam somebody, make your entrance, and everybody's gonna be happy." No. I'm not gonna be happy. Like when I say, and this isn't stupid man pride, or cliche stuff. I'm either gonna go out in a match that's befitting the Undertaker at WrestleMania, or I'm going out on my shield, one way or another.

And there we have it, the subject of this docuseries.

Roman talking about the weight of potentially being the last person to work with the Undertaker, it just makes you feel bad for him things didn't work out quite the way they planned. But, it's as JBL summed up before, no matter the outcome or if it's really 'Taker's last match, this is the biggest night of Roman Reigns' career. I know episode 2 will focus on the aftermath of WM33, and Mark's reaction, and what gets him to come back to wrestling, but I hope they get Roman's take as well. Is he as disappointed as 'Taker? Does he blame himself? Or, did he actually like what they did, flaws and all?

Content warning: they show the botched top rope dive from WM25, the one where 'Taker goes head-first into the mat. It's during the segment where Mark explains how he comes from the era of 'if you can move, you can make it to the ring'. He's okay, and we know he's okay, but it doesn't make it hurt any less to watch. They also mention the time he was severely sick and still worked a match with Big Show, and how he caught on fire in 2010 on the way to the Elimination Chamber match. Like, they actually show him engulfed in flames, then narrate how he went on to work the match. I love you, Undertaker, but JFC.

And now we're at the medical portion of the episode. Warning for needles.

Actual showtime for the match, and even now, 'Taker's entrance gives me chills. That feeling of happiness is indescribable, and is that precious something that never fails to make me smile.

So, everything else in the match is framed as great, brutal, well-done, and then that damn botched tombstone reversal comes up, and it's honestly the hardest thing to watch in the entire episode. I swear, it's the only bad thing in my eyes, and seems to be enough to make 'Taker dissatisfied. Again, I'm biased, with others saying his whole mood was off during the match, and that affected the overall performance, so what do I know? But, I will say this, ending 'Mania on such a grim note will always be a strange choice to me. I get it, if not the main event, where else would you put the Undertaker’s retirement match? Still, it completely changed my perception of the whole night, from riding high to finding myself depressed, once again. And maybe that’s exactly what all those wrestlers, namely Vince McMahon, were talking about. Instead of this being Shawn Michaels going out on a high note, it’s far more dour.

Mark: We'll see what tomorrow brings.

And with that look, and the fact he's had a match as recently as March/April of this year, he won't be gone for long.

Preview for the next episode contains intense surgical imagery. Just a heads up.

Post-episode thoughts:

I learned very little new information, but that's not the the hook of this series for me. Undertaker's the first character I ever truly loved, long before the likes of Supernatural came into my life. An interesting dynamic is potentially seeing both the Undertaker retire, and Supernatural come to a close, in the same year. I don't find myself mourning either, because I've already been through that. Now, I just want to indulge in behind-the-scenes tales, and watch two of the most influential stories in my life come to a close.

I greatly look forward to Chapter 2 of The Last Ride, and the rest of the episodes to come.

#WWE #Undertaker #Undertaker: The Last Ride #Mark Calaway #documentaries #docuseries #pro wrestling #or if you prefer #sports entertainment #graphic imagery #violence #notes #long post

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fallintosanity · 5 years ago

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the common fandom interpretation of mts is that they’re half-daemonified people inside suits of armor, which isn’t true according to either the main game or episode: prompto

but what the actual fuck besithia was doing with the clones is really hard to work out.

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15

“C’mon,” Future Prompto said over his shoulder as he sauntered toward the ramp down the side of the haven. “It’s a twenty-minute walk out to the water tower and if we take too long we’re gonna get sunburned.”

“Right,” Prompto said, and scrambled after him.

They walked for a few minutes in silence, following a faint track along the sun-hardened ground. In the distance, Prompto could see a short, squat water tower, probably their destination. His future self, despite what he’d said about sunburn, was walking at a lazy pace, his face tilted up to the sun again. Prompto trailed behind him, feeling awkward and unsure. How did you start a conversation with your future self, anyway?

He picked at the gauze that wrapped his right wrist in place of the familiar wristband Ardyn Izunia had sliced off. He couldn’t see his future self’s wrist; the crisp sleeves of his Kingsglaive uniform jacket covered it. The uniform looked surprisingly good on him. Prompto had never thought about joining the Kingsglaive, or even the Crownsguard, not seriously at least. The Crownsguard was for people like Gladio and Ignis, who’d trained since birth in all kinds of crazy fighting arts, who were muscular and powerful and brave. Prompto figured the former out-of-shape, shy kid who’d been too chicken to even talk to the other kids at school wouldn’t stand a chance.

No, Prompto had just planned to get through high school and find a job taking photos for magazines or something. Maybe see if Noctis wanted a royal photographer, though he’d known that was unlikely. Not that the Lucis Caelums didn’t have royal photographers, but like the Crownsguard, that was a prestigious role reserved for the country’s best. Not some nobody orphan with a barcode on his wrist.

But apparently his future self had ended up a Kingsglaive. He looked good, too - other than the unhealthy sunless pallor of his skin, which all four of the future adults had because apparently the sun went away in the future too, what the hell. But he was a couple of inches taller than Prompto, and while he was no Gladio, he’d filled out with muscle. Prompto’s own arms and legs were basically twigs, all skin and bone after a growth spurt he hadn’t planned for in his diet, and he felt constantly awkward and clumsy. His future self moved with easy confidence, the way Gladio did, the way the guards who followed Noctis everywhere did.

As if sensing his scrutiny, Future Prompto met his gaze. His mouth quirked, a small expression that wasn’t quite a smile. “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask.”

“Ask what?” Prompto said, nerves making his voioce less steady than he would have liked.

His future self waved a hand vaguely. “You have questions, right? Ask ‘em. It’ll be easier like that than if I just start babbling, you know?”

“Uh, right,” Prompto said. He rubbed at the gauze over his tattoo, took a deep breath, and blurted, “Your Noctis knows, doesn’t he? About… about the…” He waved his wrist. “Does that… does that mean you know, too?”

Future Prompto nodded. “Yeah.”

“So…” He almost couldn’t get the question out. He hadn’t thought he’d ever know the truth, and definitely hadn’t thought he’d learn it like this. “What is it? What does it mean?” He didn’t have to say what am I? If anyone would understand, it was his future self.

For a long moment Future Prompto said nothing, his gaze turned up toward the sky. Then he sighed and stopped walking, turning to meet Prompto’s eyes again. “You sure you want to know?”

Prompto opened his mouth to say Of course I’m sure, but the words didn’t come. Future Prompto wouldn’t be asking that if he didn’t think Prompto had a very good reason not to want to know. Instead he asked, very quietly, “It’s… it’s bad, isn’t it.”

His future self didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Prompto swallowed hard, looking away, eyes skating over the bright yellow desert landscape without really seeing it. But there really was only one option he could take. The barcode had haunted him his whole life; he couldn’t let it keep being a phantom holding him back. He said, “I’m sure. I want to know, even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad.”

Future Prompto started walking again. “Have you had that world history class yet, the one with, what’s his face, that one teacher who hated Noct?”

Prompto frowned at the non-sequiter, hurrying to catch up. “Mr. Malazan? Yeah, we have him this year, why?”

“Have you done the Niflheim module yet?”

“Yeah, last semester.”

“So you know about the origin of MTs.”

“Uh. I guess?” Prompto tried to remember what they’d covered. He hadn’t paid much attention to the lessons; he hadn’t thought he would ever need it, for one, and for two the whole idea of robot soldiers wigged him out. It wasn’t fair, Niflheim fighting with robots they could build and replace, while Lucis had to send humans to fight and die. “They were first created like thirty years ago by some Niff scientist, but didn’t start showing up in combat for another ten years or so.”

His future self nodded. “Thirty-two years ago from now. Forty-four from my time. The name of the scientist was Verstael Besithia. They didn’t show you a picture of him in class, did they?”

“They did, but it was some old grainy thing,” Prompto said. “All I remember was he was bald on top and kinda spotty. Why are you asking about this?” He wanted his future self to get to the point.

Future Prompto snorted. “Spotty,” he muttered, and shook his head. He held out a hand; blue magic shimmered between his fingers and suddenly he held a small, battered notebook. Prompto watched in amazement - even Noct didn’t use the magic of the royal Lucis armory that freely, and it was strange to see his future self treat it with the casualness of reaching into a pocket. Future Prompto handed him the notebook. “Take a look.”

Prompto frowned at him, but flipped through the book. The pages were covered with his own neat handwriting, and various newspaper clippings and photos had been wedged in between. Most of the handwritten blurbs were marked with the words “Transcript”, dates - all between ME 757 and 763 - and strings of letters that might have been abbreviated place names. The newspaper clippings were much older, dating back to 721, mostly from Niflheim and talking about Besithia and the production of magitek troopers.

Then he flipped a page and found a photo of himself staring back.

Except it wasn’t him. For a second he thought it was his older self instead, but that wasn’t right, either. The man in the photo was probably in his mid- to late forties, his blond hair fading to grey around the edges, his freckles turning into age spots above his beard. His outfit was ostentatious, brightly colored with a tall collar and broad shoulder pads, and matched the arrogance in his expression.

Prompto looked up at his older self in horror. “Who…?”

“Verstael Besithia,” Future Prompto answered shortly. His eyes had gone dark and shuttered, the way Noct’s did the rare few times someone mentioned the daemon attack he’d suffered as a child.

“But…” Prompto looked at the picture again, then up at his future self. They were damn near identical save for age. Even Gladio didn’t look that much like his dad. “He’s - he looks like—”

“Yeah,” Future Prompto said. “Noct mentioned where daemons come from, right? Last night?” Prompto nodded, not trusting his voice. Future Prompto continued, his voice flat, “Besithia needed daemon miasma to power his MTs. But using regular daemons didn’t work well, and when he tried using people who were in the process of turning, that didn’t work either because of something he called ‘ego death’. So he figured, why not use babies? They don’t have egos.”

His voice was bitter and sharp enough to cut, and Prompto flinched. His future self noticed and took a deep breath, visibly reining himself in, before continuing. “He cloned himself. He eventually figured out a way to speed up the babies’ aging without actually letting them develop as people enough to have egos. But before he did… some Lucian spy stole one of those cloned babies.”

Prompto stared at his future self, horror curdling his stomach; he was suddenly glad he hadn’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday. “That was—You mean—we were—”

Future Prompto nodded. “We were just one of thousands of clones meant to be infected with Starscourge and harvested for daemon miasma to power MTs.” He reached out and flipped the pages in the notebook Prompto’d forgotten he held, stopping on a page that had nothing but a photo taped to it.

A photo of tall narrow glass tubes, each one holding Prompto. A Prompto, a clone, one of many in a row, each with Prompto’s face and a barcode stamped on its right wrist.

“I was taking photos of every room I went into,” Future Prompto said tonelessly. “I figured the intel might be useful. I didn’t realize what I was looking at until after I took the shot.”

The world swayed and for a second Prompto had to focus on staying upright, on not collapsing to the hard desert rock and throwing up or passing out or screaming. The notebook fell from his fingers, shattering into blue crystal light before it could hit the ground. “But… but…”

Future Prompto said nothing. When Prompto looked up, his future self was staring at him, his expression grim. Prompto managed, “Noctis - your Noctis - knows? He knows?! And Gladio and Ignis?”

Last night, in the van, Future Noctis had said, It’s nothing to worry about. You’re fine.

Except Future Noctis had been wrong. How could Prompto be fine, how could he ever be fine again when he was—was that?!

His future self just nodded, and said softly, “They don’t care. They’re—It’s rare, people that good.”

“Does anyone else know? In the future?”

Future Prompto’s expression darkened and he gripped his own right wrist. “Everyone.” At Prompto’s horrified look, he added grimly, “Ardyn thought it would be fun to spread the news.” He met Prompto’s gaze, eyes cold and sharp and deadly. “He’s probably gonna do it again. He hates Besithia damn near as much as he hates Noctis, and Besithia’s dead in my time, so guess who he’s taking it out on. The guys are okay—” with a tilt of his head back toward the haven to indicate Noct and Gladio and Ignis— “but from now on, you don’t turn your back on anyone. Not strangers. Not people you think are friends.” His eyes closed for a moment, his fingers tightening around his wrist so hard the leather of his glove creaked. “Especially not people you think are friends.”

Prompto shivered. Despite the desert heat, a chill had seeped down into his bones, one he doubted any amount of sun or warmth could dispel. It was too much to take in all at once, too much to process, to understand. He couldn’t think, the photos of Verstael Besithia, of the clones in their tubes - him in a tube, hairless and placid and stamped with a barcode like the property he’d been created as - spinning through his brain. He doubled over, hands on his knees, breathing hard like he’d just finished a run, like he’d pushed himself past his physical limits only this time it was his mental limits, his ability to comprehend his own freaking existence, not who he was but what he was—

His future self hooked an arm around his shoulders, jolting him back to awareness. “Sorry,” Future Prompto said ruefully. “I didn’t…” He sighed. “I fucked this up. You need to know, but… it’s a lot to take in at once.”

That startled a laugh out of Prompto, watery and maybe a little more hysterical than he’d have liked. “A lot. Yeah.”

“C’mon,” his future self said, and ruffled his hair. “Let’s get to that water shed before we both get burned crispier than the steak when Noct’s cooking.”

Prompto snorted another almost-laugh, nearly choking on the hysteria before he wrangled himself under control. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Okay.”

#final fantasy xv #ffxv #chocobros #sanity's time travel fic #time travel #fanfiction #prompto argentum

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dmellieon · 5 years ago

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BAFTA A Life in Pictures: Martin Freeman

23 June 2019

Read the full transcript from BAFTA A Life in Pictures: Martin Freeman

Briony Hanson: Hello everybody, a very warm welcome this evening, thank you for coming to BAFTA on this very sunny evening and forsaking the sun for what is going to be a very entertaining evening, I think. I’m Briony Hanson, I’m delighted to be your host for this BAFTA Life in Pictures with Martin Freeman. With a back catalogue of well over thirty feature films and even more TV performances, Martin Freeman has a reputation for playing characters that we like, people that are full of wit, full of pathos, occasionally full of a little desperation around the edges. He feels incredibly relatable; we all think we know him from the characters that he plays, and tonight we get the chance to find out if that was all true. We’re going to see a little taster of his work before we introduce him; can we roll the clips please?

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Freeman.

[Applause]

Martin Freeman: Thank you.

BH: Hello, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

MF: It’s my pleasure.

BH: Everyone here probably first met you in The Office.

MF: Yeah, I’d think so.

BH: But there was a bit of backstory before we got there. Can you just fill us in on how you got to the point of becoming a kind of—everybody’s most loveable Tim.

MF: Yeah. That was about five or six years after I left drama school. I was at Central in North London for three years and I’d done a lot of theatre and small bits on TV and short films and stuff, and around about the time I got The Office, I was being seen a lot and doing little bits for BBC Comedy I suppose. I was kind of well known to that department as a young actor who could do—who could sort of be a bit funny, but I never saw that as—you know, I was an actor who could be funny as opposed to a stand-up. But I found myself in the company of a lot of people who were stand-ups I guess, you know, or who had that background, a straight comedy background.

And then yeah I got to The Office actually via, I had done a sketch show that Ricky Gervais wrote on, a sketch show called Bruiser that had Mitchell and Webb in it and Olivia Colman and Matt Holness and it was a sketch show that very few people saw but I first met Ricky there and we’d liked each other. He never said, ‘oh you’re going to be in my thing,’ but about six or eight months later or whatever when I went up for The Office, he wasn’t actually there but Stephen Merchant was there with Ash Atalla the producer and thankfully for me that audition went well. But I was knocking about doing—I was always working, you know, but I wasn’t famous…

BH: Had you always wanted to be an actor?

MF: Yeah. Well from about seventeen, yeah. I joined Youth Theatre when I was about fifteen in Teddington where I grew up and yeah, from about seventeen I thought it was something that I could do. I gradually had the confidence to think that I could maybe have a try at it as opposed to—I always really enjoyed it but I used to look with awe at people who could sight read or make anything look real or effortless and think ‘God that’s amazing,’ and then sort of little by little I thought ‘well I can do that.’ And so I then went to college and auditioned for drama school.

BH: And drama school you dropped out of.

MF: Well no I didn’t drop out but I left slightly early, I left slightly early because I got a job. In the third year, for those not familiar with this, the idea is anyway agents and business people come and see major drama schools in their third year and see young actors and see who they might like and whatever. And a few of us had agents but then the—yeah, I ended up leaving early to go and work with Matthew Warchus at the National Theatre in Volpone and then I did Mother Courage there. But yeah I left a few months early so I didn’t actually, I didn’t properly get my degree from Central.

[Laughter]

It’s been a bone of contention ever since.

BH: When you went to work at the National you’ve talked before about how you were effectively a spear-carrier.

MF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BH: Which presumably means you got to watch a lot of people?

MF: I did, yeah absolutely.

BH: And how was that?

MF: It was amazing. It was really—looking back on it I was twenty-three and it was startling really because I’d literally been at Central on the Friday and then I was rehearsing at the National Theatre on Monday and the first person I met there was Simon Russell Beale who was very nice and very welcoming and seemed as nervous as I was, weirdly. But watching him, watching Michael Gambon in that production then in Mother Courage watching Diana Rigg and Geoff Hutchings and David Bradley—it was amazing. And as I say I was doing very little in those productions, any little bits I had believe me I clung on to, but you got to do a lot of looking and learning, it was a fantastic place to learn.

BH: And did they ever contradict what you’d been told at drama school? I used to be involved in a company that trained screenwriters and we would tell them certain things and then put them up in front of Charlie Kaufman and everything they’d been told would be thrown up in the air. Was that the same?

MF: To a certain extent, yeah. I mean I remember first realising—and I didn’t know Michael Gambon, for instance, had a reputation for arsing about. I didn’t know that.

[Laughter]

But he does, he does. Because I was young, what did I know? And then half way through rehearsals he gives this big speech as Volpone where he’s talking to a crowd of people, a sort of mountain bank speech where he’s trying to sell them a load of hooky gear, you know. And he started just making shit up. And I thought ‘ha, that’s very funny, he won’t be doing that for real,’ but he did! He did!

[Laughter]

Pretty much every performance he had this probably four-minute stand-up, and it ended up being stand-up where he—Ben Johnson wasn’t writing about Nancy Sinatra and Pot Noodles, you know—

[Laughter]

That was pure Michael Gambon. So even though that wasn’t exactly—that wasn’t what Matthew Warchus asked him to do, but that’s what he was doing. So yeah, you would never have thought as a sort of serious acting student that that was what the great and the good would be doing. And they’re not all doing that; but that’s part of someone like his greatness actually is he’s loose. I mean thinking about it now, there’s a real—the dual thing of the professionalism, say, the real razor sharp, surgeon-like work of Simon Russell Beale and the really sort of looseness of Michael Gambon—not that he’s not also sort of professional and precise—but two very different approaches, and I think those were a really good first introduction to work for a young person, do you know what I mean? Because I was seeing, I think Michael Gambon would be completely mesmerising in one way, and Simon Russell Beale would be the same in a very different way. But they would complement each other.

BH: And you went from that to The Bill—is that your first credit?

MF: That was my first TV credit. I mean again at the time—I left in ’95, I left drama school in ’95 and for a good year and a half all I did was solid theatre all around the place, but my first TV credit was The Bill, yeah.

BH: Which is probably everybody who’s ever sat in that chair, that’s what they say, The Bill, Casualty…

MF: Apart from Nicole Kidman.

[Laughter]

She did Doctors.

[Laughter]

BH: Why do you think that’s such good training?

MF: Well, not wanting to disparage The Bill; I don’t know that it’s good training it’s just that’s what there was, that’s what was around. It was a sort of a kind of rep for actors really. It ended up being good training because of the speed of it, and you know people using terms that I didn’t know. I didn’t know what anyone was talking about for the two weeks I was on it. So when people would say ‘favour the wall,’ what?! Favour the wall? Oh you mean walk near the wall, right. ‘And if you could just banana over there,’ what the fuck are you talking about?!

[Laughter]

You mean walk in a curve, right OK. But yeah the speed of it, and I was fairly bad on The Bill, I was fairly bad in my little guest lead, but it was a good, very steep, quick learning curve. Through that and through—I’ve always been lucky enough to work, thank God, you want to get better. And so the next—I think the next time I was in front of the camera I knew to slightly just do less. I think the hard thing or the common thing with young actors or actors who don’t work that much, is you put them in front of the camera and they’re going to do all of their acting at one go. They’re going to do all their acting in two lines because it’s very difficult not to, because what else are you going to do? It’s a gradual thing about learning to refine and refine until eventually you are hopefully, unless you really are required to depending on what play you’re doing, you’re hopefully doing nothing at all. And that’s—I think that’s the goal of enlightenment, that’s when you reach Zen is when you’re doing nothing. Or at least what looks like nothing. You’re actually doing loads but it has to look like nothing or people just smell it a mile off.

BH: Let’s see if in The Office by that time you were doing nothing. Let’s have a look at our first clip.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

Too tragic to even describe. Do you remember the audition process for this? You said you knew Ricky…

MF: Yes I do remember the audition process. I went in actually to read for the part of Gareth who Mackenzie Crook ended up playing brilliantly. I went in for Gareth and it was Stephen Merchant and Ash Atella and I did my reading of Gareth whatever that would have been I don’t know, I can’t remember what I did. And it’s really like a showbiz story and I don’t know if it’s become a showbiz story because I’m naturally an actor and therefore am a twat—

[Laughter]

And therefore built it up to being this, but I’m pretty sure this is really what happened: I was on my way out the door, and I had my hand on the door—I think this is true, I don’t know but I think this is true—and Stephen Merchant or Ash said ‘actually can we get Martin in maybe to read Tim, I think that might be a good thing.’ And I’d seen the first episode script and really liked it so I knew the character Tim, so I sat back down and read Tim and thank God I did because I wouldn’t have got cast as Gareth over Mackenzie because he was so perfect for it. But thankfully that was a good fit, yeah. But I could very nearly have not been in The Office.

BH: Did you like auditioning? Do you like auditioning?

MF: I mean I don’t love it. I don’t think many actors love it, but there is a period where when you start getting offered—if you are lucky enough to be offered work on the one hand it’s a real relief and on the other hand you’re wondering if you deserve it, do you know what I mean? If you’ve earned it because you think have I fought for it or you know… Because you’re really in the trenches when you’re in a room, when you’re in a corridor, you know with twenty other people and you get the part you think ‘oh I won out over those.’ And when you start to get offered things of course it’s delightful and please God I don’t want to then go back to the corridor, but you do think ‘I wonder if…’ yeah part of you wonders if you’re a fraud, yeah.

BH: You wonder who you beat.

MF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BH: How tightly scripted was The Office? Did you have room to play with it or did you…

MF: You did have room to play with it, yeah. I think probably what—what I feel happened in the aftermath of the success of The Office was that when—because it looks improvised, because it looks like we’re improvising on camera, people would ask Ricky and Steve ‘is it improvised,’ and basically they came back ‘no, none of it’s improvised. It’s all scripted,’ which of course is true, it was very scripted, it was very scripted. But to say it was not loose would be not true. Anyone who knows—there’s a couple of people in the audience who have known me for a very long time and they know that there’s things that I say that are only me, and I’m sure the same goes for Lucy or Mackenzie, you know. That doesn’t mean I’m going to take a co-write or push to say it was improvised; it wasn’t improvised, it was a scripted comedy that I think they were—a) the scripts were fantastic, but also Ricky and Stephen were smart and generous enough to allow you to be loose with it. Because if you trust the people who are being loose, good things can happen, you know. We weren’t kind of improvising whole scenes on camera or going ‘I think my character should go down—‘ it wasn’t that, it was totally shaped and formed, but yeah we were allowed to be loose. And I think that’s what you see on the show.

BH: And what was the dynamic between the two of them, Ricky being in it, and the rest of the cast?

MF: Well I think—Ricky was and is an amazing person; I’ve not seen him for a long time, but he’s an amazing person in that he struck me as someone who, if he’s not making you laugh at any given time, life is a waste of time. Like it’s not actually worth living unless you are sort of convulsing in pain at something he’s just said. Brilliant, but on the other hand really infuriating if you’ve got ten minutes to go and half a page to do and you think ‘mate, this is your show. What are you—stop making everyone laugh!’ Because deliberately corpsing me isn’t going to get the day finished because I can’t carry on if you’re making me laugh. So it’s like a sort of pathological thing for him I think. It’s a very—I always felt like he was one of the best natural actors that I’d worked with, you know. Like everything he knows instinctively is pretty bang-on I think. And not having been trained in it and not having an actor’s background, he’s—I thought he was amazing.

BH: And what about Tim? I mean Tim’s a really fantastic sort of non-showy, relatively passive character, which is why that sequence is so dramatic, it’s such a big deal for him to do that. Did you like Tim?

MF: I loved him. I really loved him, yeah. Because he was—I was able to put a lot of me in it, there was a lot of my brother Tim in it as well; it felt familiar to me as someone—not that I’m always like that but as someone who is an observer of stuff and finds things ridiculous and awkward and embarrassing a lot of the time, yeah. And as a conduit for that I really enjoyed playing him. As a character he was the funniest person in that office because he had a true, the best sense of humour. For the audience at home obviously David Brent is a hilarious incarnation of a character, but as a real person Tim was a funny bloke and he had a real eye for what was amusing, but he was as happy to keep it to himself as he was to share it. But I liked Tim very much, yeah.

BH: But also amazingly tragic in that scene. It’s almost hard to watch.

MF: Yeah I know. But to give credit to Ricky and Steve, they wanted all that stuff to be as important as the David Brent Comic Relief dance or whatever. There’s sort of The Office Greatest Hits, which usually involve David Brent, understandably because it’s a fantastic character performed fantastically, but the really good B-sides I think are the more sort of straight bits, the more dramatic bits, you know. So it felt, from my career’s point of view, that was a big show. For those of you too young—including my kids, they don’t give a shit—do you know what they like? The American Office.

[Laughter]

They really love the American Office, they barely—that’ll be the first time they’ve seen that.

[Laughter]

BH: But the American Office is only one of many, many different language translations, isn’t it?

MF: Yes it is, yeah.

BH: There’s like a Finnish Office and an Indian Office.

MF: Yes, it was a big show.

BH: Is that a very surreal experience to see yourself—

MF: It is. It is, yeah. I’ve not stuck with the Finnish one as much as the American one. I got more out of the American one than the Azerbaijanian one.

[Laughter]

But it’s horses for courses. But having been in a very big comedy I still felt like because what Tim was being required to do was, you know, it was almost fifty-fifty between the funny stuff and the straight stuff so I was getting the best of both worlds for me as a practitioner because I was flexing both those muscles; it was really nice.

BH: Let’s move from the small screen to the big screen. You did a few bits and pieces and then you came to Hitchhiker’s Guide.

MF: Yeah.

BH: Actually some of those bits and pieces we clipped, that great Love, Actually clip.

MF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BH: Did you find that you were getting quite a lot of the same characters sent to you? Yeah.

MF: Sort of yeah. Versions of. I think in the wake of The Office you know, nice sort of nice next-door boys. Lovelorn, yeah. That kind of thing. Which I think happens—I had to make my peace with that because I realised as it went on that that happens to every single person. It wasn’t just happening to me, they weren’t just singling me out, that happens to the greatest actors. Once they’ve made their thing—you don’t think Robert Di Nero got offered a few gangsters? Or Al Pacino? The best people who I’ve always loved, that happens to them, so it’s going to happen to me of course.

I had to accept it and just still do the best work I could do within that, and still try and make it layered and still try to make it three-dimensional. That’s always my entire belief in anything I do; as long as you’re making it layered, as long as the audience believe you for that whether it’s half an hour or two hours of whatever; that for me is the beginning, middle and end of any actor’s job, you know? Whether or not you’re doing a Senegalese accent with a limp, that’s extra, but if I don’t believe you I don’t care. I’ve always tried to give myself that as the main goal. Even if you could say there’s a similarity in the world of parts, OK yeah there is, but there aren’t many people you and I could sit on the stage and name for whom that is not true. Meryl Streep might be one; there aren’t many. People we love and you go yeah but they sort of operate in that world.

Also you have to be realistic about what your playing range is. Not unambitious, because I’m still, you know I’m still really ambitious but also yeah I’m probably not going to play the same parts that X, Y and Z are going to play, or be offered those parts. And that’s where strategy and your own work and your representation’s good skills come in about trying to make people see you in a different light. But yeah, at first of course I was in Love, Actually because Richard Curtis loved The Office.

BH: Let’s move to another totally different world that is the world of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

MF: Sorry, yes.

BH: Let’s see.

MF: Do the thing.

[Laughter]

BH: Yes, that’s supposed to happen immediately!

[Clip plays]

MF: Seamless!

[Applause]

BH: So this was your first feature lead.

MF: Yes.

BH: Did you—was there a sense of sort of anxiety or pressure about that?

MF: Oh God no.

[Laughter]

No there wasn’t. And I don’t say that with pride, but no there wasn’t. It all—what I remember about the audition process for that is I was doing an ITV sitcom at the time, I was filming it or I was rehearsing it, and I went for this audition with Garth Jennings and Nick Goldstein, the producer, and Garth the director of this. They had like a boat on the river, presumably… On the top of a tower block! And their office, a company called Hammer and Tongs and they were a very homely environment, they were two of the loveliest men you could hope to meet, and mainly what was in my head in that audition was my ex Amanda had driven me there, and I was aware that she had nowhere to park. And I thought ‘oh I better hurry up.’ And it was going very well, the chat was happening and going on and going on and all I was thinking was ‘Amanda’s going to fucking kill me.’

[Laughter]

Because at no point—it worked, because I got the part—at no point did I think ‘this is a big deal.’ And I think that’s sort of stood me in quite good stead all the time. All the time. Because I’m always basically thinking ‘someone’s double parked.’ That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.

BH: And this is the first time you took on a character that we all knew.

MF: Yeah.

BH: Because of the books, because of the TV series, yeah. Was that, does that—are you able to sort of bring your own stamp to it, or to what extent do you feel free to do that?

MF: I felt very free to do it within the confines of what the character is. And I think that’s true of all of them; I’ve played a few characters now that have been in literature, say, and there’s no point doing it—if I was just going to do an impression of Simon Jones, who’s my boyhood version of that part. Well he’s already done that and he’s done it better than I could do it so there’s no point, you know. So I definitely, I didn’t want a kind of Uncle Bulgaria dressing gown either, I wanted something different. That was towelling and we were doing it in the summer and it was fucking boiling.

[Laughter]

That was more fool me. But yeah I think you have to have your own stamp on it because it makes it fun for you and it makes it not a museum piece or a cover version; it should never be a cover version.

BH: And this one was in the works for a long time, long before you, too, from the ‘70s I think—is that right?

MF: Yeah I think they’d been trying to make a Hitchhiker’s for a long time, yeah.

BH: And Douglas Adams said that he didn’t want to do it because it was like Star Wars with jokes.

MF: Yeah so he had, well he latterly had help with a screenwriter called Kerry Kirkpatrick who helped bring it to life, and Douglas unfortunately didn’t live to see it made, which was a real tragedy actually. But there were people on our firm who did know Douglas and who loved Douglas and we got to meet his family a little bit so it was really nice. It did feel like a film made with a lot of love for him and for the idea and the tone of it, I guess.

BH: And the tone is very, very British.

MF: It’s really more British than I am. Yeah it’s really British.

BH: In a sort of Monty Python way.

MF: Yes, I think so, yes. Yeah, it’s very—and I don’t say this as anything like a slight because Monty Python is obviously a huge influence on my life as I’m sure it is everyone of a certain age’s, but yes, it’s very English university sort of humour, yes.

BH: Were you surprised that it travelled?

MF: I was in a way, but then it didn’t travel that well because we didn’t get to make another one.

[Laughter]

BH: It did OK though!

MF: Yeah it did really well; I could honestly say at that point I’m in a number one film in America and in Britain. Great, I could have retired on that, that’s something to tell your kids. Again, they don’t give a shit, they’re texting.

[Laughter]

BH: Now!

MF: They’re watching the American Office. But that’s something you could say was a successful film, but I remember having dinner with Garth Jennings shortly after it opened and I said ‘do you think there will be another one?’ and it just didn’t make enough, did it. It just has to make a certain amount, and I think it got to number one very quickly in America but it didn’t sustain; there just wasn’t enough there for an American audience or for an international audience. As you say, it’s not even British it’s English, it’s very English, yeah.

BH: You’ve continued with that very poster boy for British humour with The Cornetto trilogy, which I’m gutted we can’t screen.

MF: Right.

BH: And Nativity as well. Can you talk a little bit about those, particularly your relationship with Simon Pegg?

MF: Yeah. Well I’m not Simon Pegg, just to clarify.

BH: Good, that’s why I asked.

MF: We do—the running joke between me and Simon, and John Simm, actually, is that—

[Laughter]

If we’re in a pub or a park we’re sort of each other’s stand-ins for compliments or whatever. ‘I loved you in that Life on Mars’—‘wasn’t me, wasn’t me’—‘yes it was.’ You end up as an actor in the same Rolodex as other people, as other actors. Yes I became good friends with Simon many years ago, and Amanda my ex and Maureen, Simon’s wife, we would see each other a lot and we hung out a lot together and in the course of that yeah, Shaun of the Dead happened. I was actually offered another part on Shaun of the Dead, but I was doing—I was doing a thing called Charles II at the time with Joe Wright for the BBC, and so I couldn’t do it, and so I ended up doing a sort of joke appearance in Shaun of the Dead with an alternative gang. You sort of follow Shaun’s gang and they bump into another gang headed by the sort of people who are a bit like this gang. So there’s Tamsin Grieg and me and Reece Shearsmith as people in this other gang. And that was mine and Simon’s and Edgar’s I suppose joke to the fact that people think me and Simon are similar.

And then yeah Hot Fuzz I play a little bit more in it and then The World’s End I had my biggest role in the Cornetto trilogy when I got my head knocked off by a baseball bat.

BH: Were they fun?

MF: Yeah they are fun because they’re good people. Simon and Nick and Edgar are really lovely people and they’re friends and that shows I think and there’s a lot of love in those films, a lot of good humour on those sets.

BH: And same with Nativity? My son’s favourite film.

MF: Oh good. I love Nativity, I’m really proud of it. And short of—yeah there are some things I’ve done which are big things and very universal, but just below that there’s Nativity actually. I get more compliments for Nativity than almost, almost anything because of the age that it spans. Because parents like it, kids like it and different generations of kids like it; I really like that film. Debbie Isitt wrote that—well I say wrote, we were improvising on camera; she wrote the outline and storyboarded it and directed it. She’s a very smart cookie, Debbie, so smart that I was like ‘well just write a screenplay, please just write words so you don’t have to go through hours of me improvising badly to edit out.’ But she likes what happens between humans when they’re making stuff up on the fly.

BH: Interestingly all the reviews of that talk about the idea that it’s ripe for remake which seems ridiculous because it’s so British that Americans wouldn’t make a film with that as your lead character.

MF: No probably not, probably not. Again, as you said it seems very British I think. But the people from other places I know who have seen it, they do love it. There is a sort of, you know, people who have got kids, kids go to school, there is a sort of universal experience there about childhood and teachers. Not everyone has a nativity play but that thing of a common endeavour of putting a performance on, that’s universal, really.

BH: We should get to Sherlock.

MF: OK.

BH: Let’s see a little clip of Sherlock.

MF: Yep.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

BH: Again like The Office it’s something that you come to expecting one thing, you expect it to be a comedy or you expect it to be a whodunit, but actually incredibly poignant moments.

MF: Yes, yeah. I always thought it was just—what I was struck by when I read the first episode was just how smart it was and how funny it was and exciting. It really moved along at a great pace, and it was unexpected for me as well because I was sent this script saying they’re looking at you for Doctor Watson—not only me they were looking at a few people for Doctor Watson—and yeah, within the first couple of pages I thought this was really good. And my experience of it was it just got better. That was reading the first script before the pilot, before the first episode, anything. Every subsequent episode that I read, certainly of that first series, was amazing; it was so full. And then the decision was made, we made an hour-long pilot and then it went to ninety minutes and then we were told it was going to be ninety minutes and I thought that was a mistake, I thought ‘well that’s a bad idea, it doesn’t need to be ninety minutes, that’s rubbish. Bloody BBC.’ And I’m really glad that was the decision because it made it like a film; each episode was like a film and that made it like—I think that was partly why people were able to get behind it so much, because there was a lot of it but not too much of it.

BH: With a scene like that are you able to just put it off and go home and make the tea? Do you bring your work home with you?

MF: No. Not for things like that, no. I think what I tend to do is I don’t—I’m always aware when you’re talking about acting that you’re not down a coal mine. There’s hard work and then there’s hard work. But I don’t pretend that doing that costs me nothing or is easy or I’m not literally having a tea and then ‘oh yes love I’ll come and do the graveside scene,’ and all that, because you’ve got to get into a zone, you’ve got to concentrate and got to focus, but yeah, yes, for me generally as soon as you call wrap on a day it’s over. Especially with things like that and I’ve just done a show now I finished last night where there was some quite heavy stuff in that and my feeling is I want to get out of that as soon as possible because I’ve got to go home and I’ve got to see kids and I’ve got to be a normal person and I don’t want to carry that around. But for the duration of the day that you’re filming yeah if you don’t concentrate on it, to be honest, when you see it in six months time it won’t be as good as you hoped it would be. And I’ve been in that, I’ve seen that, and I don’t want to see it again. I want to try and protect myself as much as possible for when I sit down and watch it, often with my kids—I mean they do like some things that I’ve done, they like that—

BH: They like its.

MF: They like that. I want to be proud of it, you know, or as proud as I can be of it. So that does require real concentration. You know, acting is like anything, it’s really easy unless you want to do it well. If you want to be good at something it’s really hard. Football’s easy unless you want to be good; to be good at anything takes real work and application and concentration. For stuff like that, you ask for a bit of that atmosphere on the set and yeah, people always oblige because everyone in the crew wants to be good as well. But after it’s over it’s really over, yeah.

BH: Tell us about the chemistry between you and Benedict, which is famously the thing that makes everyone hysterical. How did you—you hadn’t worked with him before…

MF: No, I’d never worked with him before. I hadn’t—I’d seen him, I’d seen some of his work and knew he was really good. I really did think he was good and when I heard he was going to play Sherlock—because I was sent it, I was sent the script and as far as I remember, and my agent’s here, he can correct me, but I think Ben was attached to play Sherlock Holmes and I thought that’s good, I can see that, he’ll be brilliant at that. And when I finally got into a room with him and just sort of read, it worked, something worked. Neither me nor Ben can take credit for that it’s just luck, it’s good fortune, you know.

BH: I think Mark Gatiss said the way he played Sherlock changed after you were cast.

[Laughter]

I’m feeding you here.

MF: Not my words.

[Laughter]

The words of Mark Andrew Gatiss. That’s not his middle name. No but I think when you’re working with good people—well I mean he hadn’t seen the way I’d play John before but you know Ben had an effect on me. Because your job is to react. You know that old adage of acting is reacting is completely true. Unless you know how to receive something and change accordingly then there’s no good to anyone. Because if someone’s giving you A, B and C and you’re busy doing F, G and J, then it’s pointless; you have to be listening. Ben is very, very good at his job; he’s brilliantly cast in that role, and something happened, some little game of table tennis happened where we were just knocking it back and forth. It was really, it was obvious in the room—I’m not saying it was obvious it was going to be this thing—but it was obvious we worked well together, yeah.

BH: When did you realise it was going to be ‘this thing’?

MF: When it came out. The day it came out I was rehearsing a play at the Royal Court and the day after a couple of people in the cast said ‘that was really good last night, that was really good.’ And that happened more and more and more and grew sort of exponentially over the course. It’s only three episodes the first series, it’s three episodes, and seemingly by the end of the first—I think we all had screenings round each other’s houses for those first three and for the second series as well, but I can’t remember whose house we were at… And I’m very behind on social media and stuff but I remember Mark Gatiss being on Twitter—

[Laughter]

Because that’s where he lives, OK.

[Laughter]

BH: You’ve got a Twitter account I’ve seen it. You’ve tweeted like three times.

MF: I haven’t.

BH: Oh is it not you?

MF: Never me.

BH: It looks really convincing.

[Laughter]

It stops in like 2013.

MF: I don’t say that with pride I just don’t know how to work it. But him sort of relaying to the room all this stuff that was happening. Like with The Office I knew I was very proud of it, that’s all I knew. And I knew while we were making it I had that—yeah, I did. Outside of myself because Paul McGuigan the director was absolutely brilliant; Stephen and Mark, absolutely brilliant; Ben, brilliant. I thought ‘this is going to be good,’ it’s a really good show. But you can’t anticipate the reaction it’s going to have but I knew I was really proud of it.

BH: And then something else that got a bit of a reaction: The Hobbit. Let’s go to Middle Earth now.

MF: Yes, yes. Do that thing.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

BH: So obviously what we got there was a clip from all three of the films because we couldn’t decide which one to focus on. This is a mega project, three mega films with mega expectations and a mega part. Did you have fear taking it on? Was it an easy yes?

MF: No it wasn’t an easy yes, but for reasons more of family than of anything else, for practical reasons.

BH: Tell us how did you film it? In what period?

MF: I went to New Zealand in January 2011 and my last day was July 2013.

BH: Having done all three back to back?

MF: Not back to back, with a big gap. Two and a half years between the beginning and end but that wasn’t solid, there were gaps in there. The reticence for me was more about family because I was going to be away a long time. Amanda, who I was with at the time, she’s an actor, she’s a working actor, she’s a brilliant actor, and I didn’t feel I could just say—it wasn’t the ‘50s I couldn’t just say ‘right you’re coming with me.’ She had her own life, she had her own career. So that was a big decision for me. All around me people were going ‘well of course it’s a yes, of course it is.’ And I can see why they were saying that but I had two young children and I wanted that all to work, so that was why it was a difficult yes. So again it wasn’t because of a fandom thing or the legacy and literature and films; it genuinely wasn’t that, it was ‘Christ, how am I going to make this work for my family?’

BH: And when you’re performing in it, when you’re doing your day job, do you feel an expectation—all the financiers and everything they know that it’s got to hit certain points after The Lord of the Rings, it’s got to be a kind of mega success—does that translate to the cast or do you just kind of do your thing?

MF: No, no. It didn’t translate to me, not at all. Because Peter Jackson is so sort of omnipresent on those jobs that you know he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders and he’s probably having to compartmentalise that himself and just thinking ‘I just want to tell this story.’ So he’s probably trying to put the finance stuff on the backburner, all that stuff. It doesn’t, I didn’t feel it filtered down to us, now.

BH: And what about the green screen? Because you were basically standing on a kind of concrete floor with a few twigs around you.

MF: A lot of the time, yeah. There was a fair bit of time that was real and we went—as anyone who’s been there knows, New Zealand is a very beautiful country and it’s got lots of different looks. So we did shoot on a lot of different looks but we were also shooting a lot of the time in a car park, you know.

BH: But is that difficult, is that sort of flexing different muscles as an actor?

MF: It is, yeah. It is flexing different muscles as opposed to being something I hated. I’d much rather look in someone’s eyes and do it. I think McKellan’s told this story, that in the first film there’s a scene where all the dwarves come to Bilbo’s house and Gandalf, right. So there are about 50,000 people in my house and because we’re all small but Gandalf is taller, Ian had to be in a separate set where they filmed us both simultaneously on what they call slave motion. So two cameras are doing exactly the same movements at exactly the same time but filming different sets. So we had—me and the dwarves had each other to look at and a fake Gandalf, like a green tennis ball Gandalf, and Ian just had a load of fucking green tennis balls in his little grief hole. And we all had little earwig ear pieces in so we could all hear what the others were saying on the other set but we couldn’t look into their eyes, we couldn’t hear them the way we can hear each other. It was pretty difficult and I think Ian by his own admission found that pretty depressing, I think, because it sort of went against everything he’d done for the past fifty-five years. We found it hard too but it was beautifully choreographed and you see those scenes in the finished film and it’s worked, it’s beautifully done.

BH: And presumably you can’t see rushes, or if you can—

MF: I wasn’t, no I was certainly in no position either I didn’t want to and I certainly wouldn’t have been shown them anyway.

BH: Would you not normally do that?

MF: No I don’t think—also rushes are kind of different now because for previous generations when people were invited to rushes, you’re generally not now. I mean that’s a thing of the past I think, it’s not happening.

BH: Though it’s a bit surreal with this one where you did do them effectively sort of back-to-back, in that you couldn’t see what you’d done in order to change it.

MF: No, but because the filming period was so long that we could at least—no you’re right, you’re right. Which is why my performance is so uneven. Which explains the Scottish accent in the second one. And so we had to go back in 2013 and do stuff so we kind of were informed by that but I think, I don’t know, you’re playing that part for so long, we’d all played those parts for so long and obviously Ian had done it all those years before, you kind of know what part you’re playing and in some sense, and any actor will know this, it’s sort of wrong anyway to be led by the audience reaction. That’s why I find it not helpful if I’m doing a play to not read reviews during it because I don’t want to start playing the notes of what they did like or didn’t like about what I did.

I think you just have to stick true to what you know you’re playing. And if it’s suiting you and the director and the artistic team that’s what you’ve got to keep doing rather than suiting a critic or your cousin or whatever. You’ve just got to keep going with it.

BH: And given that you spent sort of two or three years in the world of orks and elves and lonely mountains—did it send you a bit mad?

MF: No it didn’t. No, I mean I think a lot of the time you think it’s a mad way to make a living, as an actor.

BH: You mean generally?

MF: Yeah. Whatever you’re doing, I mean I’ve just been doing a very naturalistic set in the real world thing and even then you find yourself in situations where you think this is not what the career’s officer had in mind, you know. But yeah that’s a more extreme version of that and there were times when I and I think everyone on the set of the Hobbit films felt this was just like ‘how is this going to work? We’re filming in a sort of nothing space and it’s going to become this Elvin kingdom or whatever.’ It is—it’s very, very impressive and it’s nothing to do with you. You’re doing you’re bit but you’re a little cog in a massive wheel with—I walked on to the set of The Hobbit for the first time and it was like walking into NASA because there were banks of people with laptops or not laptops but computers just doing this, and it wasn’t like a rehearsal room put it that way, it wasn’t like a normal film set, it was very techno. But all those techno people are also very creative and they’re artists as well. So everyone is going towards the same endeavour but your little bit of acting even though it is ultimately people want to see human experience, all the stuff going on around you and all the spectacle and cleverness is nothing to do with you, you know.

BH: Let’s move to the snowy North American wastes for a bit of Fargo.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

So obviously everyone knows that this is loosely based on the world that the Coen brothers created for Fargo, which is a much-loved world, a much loved film. Was it much loved by you?

MF: Yeah I really liked it but I wasn’t a Fargo-ologist or anything, I hadn’t seen it multiple times. I’d seen it when it came out, really liked it, loved the tone that they got and that particular flavour they got. But before I did it I hadn’t seen it for a long, long time.

BH: And did you trust that it was going to work, taking the kind of sense and tone and location—

MF: Yeah because I read—again, so much of my job and anything I can take credit for, one of the things is I have to trust my own taste. And this was a thing where my American representation did a fine job in getting to a point where I was being sent an offer for this show—I was filming series three of Sherlock, I was staying in a hotel and I got episode one through and that scene was the clincher for me, I was like ‘I’m going to be doing that with Billy Bob Thornton? Of course I’m going to fucking do it. That’s too good not to do.’ And it was a straight offer and there weren’t—for where Lester Nygaard gets to go in those episodes, not everyone’s seen me do that. So it was really lovely to be offered it and to be trusted with that. Also with that accent and that particular flavour, that’s not something I’m doing all the time and to have that trust is a real confidence boost.

BH: And tell us about that accent because obviously that’s such a massive part of this. Is that constraining or liberating or fun or—

MF: Very liberating. It’s totally liberating. I think when anything is written with an accent in mind, written well with an accent in mind, there’s just that tune in your ear and in a way it can only be said in that accent. It makes complete sense in that accent. I worked very hard at it, I kept it up a lot.

BH: Are the scripts written with that accent?

MF: Billy’s character Lorne Malvo is not because he’s a drifter from somewhere else but everyone else has that tune and it’s everywhere in the script, yeah.

BH: It’s interesting what you said about your character progressed, because Tim in The Office his progression was that he tells Dawn what he thinks; this he becomes a massive killer and hits his wife with a hammer and—

MF: Orchestrates the death of his next wife—

BH: Which presumably is hugely entertaining?

MF: It’s massively entertaining, yeah. Contained within that first episode were so many things that as an actor you want to play. Again it was too good not to. I think, because my managers had always known that I’m just not going to do American TV because in those days, which seems like 100 years ago now, sort of just about or not quite pre-Netflix but just as Netflix was coming up, you had to sign on the line for seven years before you’d even kind of committed to the pilot. I was never going to do that, again because I have a family and I’m not going to up sticks and go somewhere else for seven years. But this was finite, it was ten episodes so they said ‘look read this, I know it’s American TV but it’s only ten episodes; it’s an offer, I think it’s really good.’ And it was, of course, brilliant. Noah Hawley was the writer and show runner and he did a fantastic job of getting that tone of the Coens and just running with it himself. People say to me ‘what was it like working with the Coen Brothers?’ and I have no idea! I’ve never met them! They were executive producers on it but I think that just involved them going ‘yeah you can do it,’ they gave their blessing but we never met them.

BH: We’ve got one final clip and we’re going to go into the Marvel world. So let’s see a little clip from Black Panther.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

So this is obviously the second outing for Everett.

MF: Yes. Everett Ross appeared in the previous Captain America film in a small part and it was always going to be the deal that Everett had kind of more to do in the Black Panther film.

BH: What was the appeal of him? Because he couldn’t be further from where we started this evening.

MF: Well in his world, like he’s a fish out of water when he gets to Wakanda obviously, but in his world he’s got real high status, he’s kind of within the CIA let’s say quite a big fish, he’s a major sort of dude, you know. And I like—because I’ve played a lot of people who aren’t very confident, and I’ve played a lot of people who are sort of awkward, but I also like playing people who are confident; it’s sort of it’s quite relaxing, do you know what I mean? Just to be able to play someone who walks in the room knowing the room is for him. Again, he finds himself in a world where that’s not the case but on his own turf he has status and it’s kind of fun playing people—it’s fun playing all of it but I like playing people with status sometimes because you don’t get to, you definitely don’t end up kind of doing little tics and stuff that you’ve done a lot before when you’re playing nervous man from Surrey, you know.

[Laughter]

BH: Nervous disappointed man.

MF: Thwarted man.

BH: We talked about Sherlock being a thing. Good grief, did you know this was going to be the thing it became.

MF: Again not to the extent that it was, but when we were making it and before I was doing it I knew people who were very excited about it and I was hearing people very excited about it. I knew it had an audience, we all knew it had an audience and I thought it was really good what was happening on set everyday, I thought it was very impressive.

BH: Because you and Andy Serkis are the only two white actors in it.

MF: I don’t see colour.

[Laughter]

I refuse to see it… Yeah. And obviously I’m old mates with Andy and that was really lovely. I love those scenes between those characters, yeah. They’re great scenes. But I really liked Ryan Coogler who was the director and co-writer and he’s a very smart guy and very, what I liked about him because he’s young, you know, this sounds obvious to say that he cared but he really poured himself into it a lot and took nothing, nothing for granted. You could see it was work, he was going to work every day and not leaving anything in the locker, as they say.

BH: How does it work when you enter that Marvel universe? How much control, how much is dictated about your performance or what the film looks like?

MF: Nothing felt dictated, actually, no. It felt—the joy for me in all the work I’ve done, and please God continue to do, is I’ve eked out enough space for myself in my working life that I have autonomy, I don’t mean autonomy like I’m in charge, of course I’m not in charge, but in terms of between action and cut I don’t want to have gone home that day thinking ‘I wish I would have tried that,’ I try everything and I want to be satisfied, I want to be sated. And that felt like that on Black Panther, it was—regardless of size, my thing always is regardless of whether it’s a tiny indie film or a huge Marvel film, your job is the same and your relationship with the director should be the same. It’s an artistic one and it should be a craft one. Whether you’ve got billions or two quid, you want to make the scene the best you can and you’re trying to work out how that’s possible. That’s what I loved doing on Black Panther as well; we had a lot of chats about who he was and what his place in this world was, as Ryan did with every character. It’s the same job; it’s the same relationship you have on Nativity! or anything else, you know. You’re just trying—between action and cut you want the audience to believe what’s happening, the end. That’s your only job really.

BH: I don’t want to get all Desert Island Discs about it, but if there is a favourite character you’ve—

MF: The Beatles.

[Laughter]

BH: Have you got a favourite out of all these characters?

MF: No. No I haven’t. There are things I can��t imagine, the way my working life has gone I can’t imagine not having done The Hobbit or Sherlock or The Office, and now Black Panther as a recent addition to my working life, of course I’m very proud of that, proud to have been part of something that feels—it’s an artistic endeavour but it’s also a sort of social and cultural phenomenon as well.

BH: And obviously people want you to go back to things, they want you to do another Sherlock, they want you to do more Black Panther, which of course you’re going to do—

MF: Yes, please God

BH: Do you—are there directions that you want to go in?

MF: I mean a lot of them are unknown by me at the moment. What I’ve started to do and what I’ll hopefully do more of is be behind the creation of things and the actual the sort of coming to fruition of things. I like that. I like having a vote and not just having an opinion.

BH: Might that extend to writing and directing?

MF: I think I would need to get more confidence with those things, especially with writing. Because people say to me when I have this conversation sometimes with writers, because of course writers don’t see writing as this thing. So a lot of writers have said to me, ‘well you could write, you’re allowed to,’ and I’m like—it seems to me still like something that people from another planet do, like music. How do you do that?

BH: What about directing, though?

MF: I could see that more, but even then. I don’t know I would need to get more confidence in that. And again, so many people have told me well it’s a question of delegation: you get a good editor, you get a good DoP, all this stuff, and I know that’s always true but the stuff that you have to do before you start shooting and then after you start shooting, I’m not sure my brain works like that. I’m not sure that I can do the months of pre- and the months of post-. I don’t know.

BH: Co-direct.

MF: Maybe. But my favourite thing is acting. I think I’m quite good at acting.

[Laughter]

But genuinely I think that’s what I have to offer and I’m not exactly backwards in coming forwards with my opinions on a set or in a rehearsal room. I definitely want my flavour to be in there, but I like the collaboration of it. And again directing is also collaborative if you’re smart, if you’re a good director, but I don’t know. I don’t know if my brain is there for ‘OK now three months we’re going on another recce to some other place and I have to care as much about what rucksack someone’s wearing.’ I don’t care. Some people are fantastic at that thankfully, but I love my job and so many actors come to writing because they’re not acting, do you know what I mean? So in their downtime when they’re not getting parts they do that. I’ve been very lucky; I’ve not had that. I mean I know at some point I will and everything is finite but I’ve been very lucky; I’ve worked. I’ve always had that muscle worked, I’ve always had that satisfied.

BH: And throughout your career you’ve sort of flip-flopped between film, TV and theatre as well. Do you have a kind of first love out of those three disciplines, and are they different?

MF: They are quite different but again as I say your job is always the same, your job is just to make the audience believe for the duration of the play or the film or the television episode just to believe you’re that character. That’s it for me. The execution of it, of course, is different. But I don’t know that I have a first love. I learned everything through theatre, the basics, the rudiments of acting I learned in a Youth Theatre in Teddington with a couple of people who are here tonight as a teenager. And I owe that a lot. But I also know myself that I have quite a low boredom threshold and that I don’t want to do a run for eight months or a year or even six months; I’m not necessarily built for that because I like to move on, I’m quite restless like that. I do sort of—they’re like children, you love them all equally. They’ve all got different value but all equal value in a way. When I haven’t done a play in a while I’m desperate to do a play, and sometimes filming drives me up the fricking wall because sometimes the monotony of it or just the relentless ‘we’re going again, OK we’re going again. Christ.’ Filming walking up a hill fifty-six times or something. But then the monotony of doing a play eight times a week for months and months… So that’s why I quite like keeping on the move and being a moving target and doing a bit of that. It keeps me sane otherwise I feel like I atrophy.

BH: We’re going to take some questions from the audience. Just while we sort some microphones out, I believe there is one on either side, let me just ask you—do you know when you’ve done a good job? Do you feel, you know, do you do a take and go ‘do you know what I’ve nailed it.’

MF: Occasionally yeah. You’re not supposed to say that are you? But occasionally yes.

BH: And has that got better as you’ve gone—as you’ve done more and more?

MF: Your own gauge for that?

BH: Say again.

MF: My own gauge for that?

BH: Yeah.

MF: Yeah I think it has. With anything, whatever you do as a job you should get better at it the more you do it. If you’re a carpenter you should get better with wood twenty years after you start; so yeah the hope is you’ve got better and your experience tells you that probably will work and that won’t work. The job I just finished yesterday there was a day that I really had to admit that it wasn’t happening today. And professionally you are still at a baseline level and you have to deliver something, but whatever inspiration or Holy Spirit that you hope is going to descent on you, it sometimes doesn’t. You have to be OK with that. And again not that anyone else will necessarily agree or think that take was different, but just so you can think ‘I did the best I can possibly do there,’ some days unfortunately that doesn’t happen. Experience tells you to not kill yourself over it.

BH: Perfect. Let’s take some questions we’ve got a couple, one on either side down here. You first, or whoever gets the mic first. Don’t be shy, go for it.

Q: You were talking about accents. Is that a big part of learning acting process, studying it? Is that a big part of acting when you learn?

MF: What, sorry?

Q: Sorry my accent. Is learning accents a big part of acting process—

MF: Oh accents. Yeah, when required, yeah. I don’t think… I mean accents should be a by-product of whatever character you’re playing. Not every great actor is brilliant at accents and that doesn’t mean they’re a less brilliant actor. But I think if you are doing an accent, if I come out and I’m playing an American and I sound Swedish I will have failed.

[Laughter]

Q: Like for the accent from Fargo it really changed from the voice you—

MF: Yes it does in that sense it does—I played a Glaswegian in a film a few years ago and things make you feel differently, yeah. I mean an old friend of mine he saw Fargo and he’s not an actor but he was embarrassed because he thought my accent was terrible.

[Laughter]

BH: He’d never met anyone from Minnesota.

MF: No exactly. He hadn’t quite clocked that it was meant to be—he thought it was just a general American accent. And he thought ‘Martin’s shit at accents.’

[Laughter]

Which again may or may not be true but when he figured out it was a specific kind of one he gave me a pass. But yeah I think accents make you, like anything, speaking is a physical act so if you’re speaking in an accent different to your own one it makes you feel a different way. So in that sense it’s very important. I would rather see a truthful, good performance in someone’s own accent than a showy-offy performance in a different accent. Because it still has to be truthful and real.

Q: Thank you.

BH: And down here and then up here.

Q: Hello. My question is, because you have done lots of work adapted from books and novels and some of those are different, like Sherlock is just taking the core of the books but The Hobbit we know Peter Jackson was really faithful for the original materials. My question is for you as an actor taking part in adapted work do you take more care translating the word from the screenplay to the visual arts or do you also consider the original materials as well? And can I ask another question? And another question because you mentioned when you’re acting you like to give more options to the director, like you offer opinions to the director—do you think a film or TV series is a kind of collaborative work or does the creative work come from the director like we usually say the directors are the authors.

BH: You’re not going to say it’s all from the director, are you?

[Laughter]

MF: I like collaborating and I like giving choice. I’m a big believer in if we’re going to do sixteen takes of something we may as well try everything in those sixteen times. If you’ve got the first one and the director says ‘that was great, let’s do it again,’ there’s no point doing it sixteen ways the same. As long as you’re not disrupting anyone else’s process, a) it should be fun, and as I said I have a low boredom threshold and I want to try everything out, but also I’ve got one eye on the edit for the director to give them choice. And I think it’s much better for the director, and I’ve heard this from many directors, it’s nice to choose that or that or—and they’re distinct, different flavours. As long as they’re part of the same story, it’s fine. I just want to give myself license to have fun and have freedom.

The other question being about the adaptations: Ian McKellen was very, very quite religious about having Tolkein on set all the time and he kept going back to the books. And I see the value in that definitely, and obviously we know how good Ian McKellen is and how fantastic Gandalf is, so that obviously has great value. But also I’m aware that we’re not strictly speaking doing—Tolkein’s not on set, I mean he hasn’t written the screenplay; the screenplay’s written by Philippa, Fran and Peter, and that’s what we’re actually dealing with. So beyond knowing—I like to know the source material definitely, but myself, rightly or wrongly, will probably be less referential to the source material than the screenplay because it’s the screenplay I’m actually doing. Thank you.

Q: When you’re looking at a script and trying to decide whether to take on a project, what sort of qualities in the script are likely to make you decide to go with something? What do you find compelling?

MF: I suppose tonally what I find interesting is if it doesn’t feel like it’s been written by a committee or it doesn’t feel like it’s been written to tick boxes but it feels authored, I suppose. If it feel like—whatever that voice is, if it feels like someone means it then that’s always good. Beyond that, then it’s just about whether someone can write. But there are plenty of scripts that I’ve really liked and some that I’ve done that are not you know they’re not Oscar Wilde in terms of grammar and they’re not beautifully written, but if they’re real and if they’re real as far as that writer is concerned I’m always interested in that. I like people who aren’t begging to be liked and I like scripts like that. Comedies that aren’t begging for your laughs but just set out their stall and if you like this great, if you don’t then fine.

BH: Have you got better at reading scripts?

MF: Yes I suppose I’ve got quicker, to be fair. Whether that means I’ve got better I don’t know, but I hope I haven’t got worse. Yeah I suppose you know your own process for when you read scripts. The old cliché is true: People read scripts wanting this to be their next thing. Every script that comes on to my laptop I hope I love this. So that’s why, with that in mind—it’s like when you see something really good, if I see say Fleabag, right. That looks to me—obviously it’s brilliantly written, brilliantly crafted as it turns out, but at first you just think this is someone writing whatever the hell she likes, just making up any old shit she wants to.

[Laughter]

Without much deference to the process or what should be in a programme; it’s someone’s imagination gone like that on a page. I like that; I like the boldness of that. That’s obviously not always going to work, but if you’re good and if you’re smart then it’ll work. I like people taking a bit of a punt, I suppose. And for me personally if a director or writer sends me something I haven’t played fifteen times before, that’s obviously something as well.

BH: Question this side, and then there.

Q: Hi, I’m a big fan of your theatre work and think you’re brilliant. I liked you in Richard III… My question is your acting is very much layered characters; how do you build up these characters. A script is paper but you build up someone who has a backstory and history, etcetera. What is your regular procedure to build up these characters? Thank you.

MF: My procedure would vary. For someone like Richard III I suppose that’s something that’s been performed lots and lots and lots over centuries so at the same time you’re trying not to just recreate someone else’s Richard III but you’re also aware there are parameters there if you know what I mean. There’s definitely a structure there that works so you should probably follow the structure. Generally speaking, like every actor does, just flesh it out make it three-dimensional. The page is absolutely one thing, and I think your job as an actor—I think my job is to elevate the material. And that sounds possibly very pretentious and presumptuous, but it is sort of your job. If the writing is very good, let’s—I mean what a noble hope to try and make it even better. That’s not by rewriting it but just by making it totally human and again as I say offering choice. At the same time I don’t believe in railroading a script or a scene and thinking ‘I’m just going to pull this and make it something else.’ It has to serve the story; I think if what you’re doing isn’t ultimately subject to the story and the point that the director and the writer want to make, it’s surplus to requirements. You have to kind of get out whatever individual creative thing you want to do and whatever show-offy bits that you want to do, but it has to serve the common thread I suppose. Sometimes you see someone’s pulling over here but the story is going over there but they want to show you how they can fucking juggle or something. And it’s like who cares? No one cares and they’re not serving the scene or the story. I don’t know, I like to yeah—I like to make things relatable and real. I don’t have—as you can see I don’t have a procedure. I wish I had a better answer.

BH: There was a question there, yep. And then we may have time for one more.

Q: Hi. I think you’re very inspirational and I really like your confidence and I think it’s something you really need to be an actor because I imagine it’s really tough. Do you have any advice for an aspiring young actor who wants to start a career hopefully?

MF: Is that you?

[Laughter]

Q: Yep.

MF: Well the only thing I did and the thing that I always feel is that I hope you love it, because you’ll need to because it’s hard. It’s hard to make a living at and it’s hard to even make a bad living at. It’s hard to just stay in poverty you know, because just to get this job and get that job, you know like if you even just get three jobs vaguely in a row that’s—you’re doing well, you know. I think love it, firstly; try and be good before you be anything else I would say. You seem like a sensible person, but yeah try and be good before you’re famous or try and be good before you’re well-known or anything. Because I think ultimately if no one else—and part of the reason we do what we do is to share it—but if no one else is ever going to see it or if no one else is going to be lucky enough to have this fortune; I am very lucky to have some of the public reaction to some of the things that I do, but say if that wasn’t going to happen, do I think I’ve done a good job? Do I think I’ve been good or do I think I’m improving? So I think attending to the craft side of it I find very important, I think. Having fun is important, not taking yourself too seriously is important, but I don’t know, having a thick skin is probably the thing. I don’t know. I joined Youth Theatre and then I was lucky enough to get into drama school, so that was my route in but not everyone has the same thing. If you want to act, find somewhere you’ll be able to act, whether it’s a local amateur dramatics company or a youth theatre or whatever, you know. Because that’s where you really find out if you want to do it rather than trying to get an agent and being famous. You better be doing it because you love it, because if you don’t love it it’s a terrible job.

[Laughter]

It’s a hard enough job if you do love it; it’s a cruel job sometimes if you love it. So make sure that connection is there before anything else I would say, and good luck.

BH: One final question. No pressure, make it a good one.

MF: Not you. Not these undercover midgets. Little people.

Q: You said that you leave work at work…

MF: I what sorry?

Q: You leave work at work. I was just wondering if there’s a part you’ve played that you felt was actually hard leaving it at work, not bringing it home with you or—

MF: There are plenty of things that I remind myself all the time or am reminded of the fact that I find a lot of it hard, as in I think ‘God I can’t do this very well.’ Just as I think ‘I’m quite good at acting, I’m quite good at this,’ there will usually be something that happens where I think this is completely eluding me and I’m not getting it at all. You forget how difficult on a day-to-day level it can be. Not as far as bringing stuff home with me, no; I never bring characters home with me ever because I’m not mad.

[Laughter]

I don’t think there’s any—there’s nothing good about bringing a character, you don’t get points—in my opinion, this is my school of thought, there’s no virtue in bringing a character home with you and treating your wife like a twat just because well I’m playing this. Oh good man, great. There are plenty of things that are hard because from a practitioner’s point of view you’re not getting, but not—no I’ve never found that thing about bringing… For me, the heavier the scene, the more emotionally hard the scene, I find humans—never mind actors—at some point in every funeral someone will laugh and find the joy in something. In the worst, worst, worst human situations they often actually they look for humour and laughter. So if I’m doing something quite heavy you can’t wait to laugh and all that. So that’s why I never bring heaviness home. I mean my kids will tell you—don’t talk to them—but were you to ask them—don’t ask them—

[Laughter]

I’m heavy enough anyway, I’m a fairly moody bastard anyway, so I don’t need that from work. I get made very happy by work and I get made deliriously happy by work but no, if I’m playing a real nasty, nasty manipulative person as I’ve occasionally done, I have never found that a problem at home. Because I’ve got enough of that in me anyway, do you know what I mean?

[Laughter]

There’s enough of that in all of us that you don’t need to rely on the excuse of playing a part like that because it’s all in you anyway, you know?

BH: We’re going to go and ask your kids now if that’s actually true.

MF: Don’t ask them anything!

BH: I am so sorry that we’ve run out of time. Thank you all for your questions and for being here, but most of all thank you so much Martin Freeman.

MF: Thank you so much. Appreciate it, thank you.

[Applause]

source: http://www.bafta.org/whats-on/a-life-in-pictures-martin-freeman

#Dee posts #martin freeman #bafta #transcript #life in pictures #23 June 2019

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travelysh · 5 years ago

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Being an Intern... 🤓

...can be so individual. With me being a journalism student, my supervisor thought I wanted to do a lot of writing during my internship with NCEM because that’s what she associated journalism with. I was given my personal office in the TV department’s building and I started off by writing stories. Until I joined PR meetings and started to get involved with other things.

But wait! First of all, what is NCEM all about?

Well... Okay!

The Northern Canada Evangelical Mission strives to equip their members with the necessary hardware and software (skills and much more) that they need. They want to empower them in every possible way and to encourage them throughout their work. For their wish is to establish strong multiplying churches across Canada as part of God’s amazing church. They work especially with and for First Nations people (= people of Native Canadian origin) and there are a lot of different areas that they are involved in. NCEM isn’t about making the big money and everyone who is engaged with them is supported by voluntary donors.

Check out their website📌 for more information.

1) What I have done:

NCEM’s TV team produces programs called Tribal Trails in which First Nations tell stories from their lives to encourage and inspire others. They release their newsletter News & Views several times a year. I started off with writing a story for the upcoming newsletter about a couple who had been interviewed for Tribal Trails. Their story really moved me. They had shared about the hard times they went through when their son was deceased with spinal meningitis at the age of 4 and how they were encouraged to trust in God when he was healed. Not even 30 years later they lost their son in a car accident. Reading through the transcription of their interview moved me to tears.

If you want to read about how they dealt with their struggles, read the whole story here: In the Midst of the Storm 📌

After finishing this task on the third day of my internship, I continued with a story for NCEM’s website about a young skateboarder from Arizona in the USA. I even emailed the guy to ask him if he could proof-read my story before it went online and it was fun to get recent updates from his life. He’d gotten married just a few months ago and had a really bad car accident. His story will be online soon and I’ll share the link if you’d like to read it.

Then there were PR meetings at our headquarters and I asked if I could join because PR was a big part of what I’d been looking forward to get involved with for my internship. There I got a better understanding of where NCEM’s at nowadays. I also met Caylea, our social media coordinator, for the first time. When I suggested that I could help by producing videos for promotion, some of us got really excited and I think that’s what kind of triggered what I’ve been doing since then and what I will be doing within the upcoming months.

2) What I am doing:

Since those meetings I’ve been in touch with Caylea and Jason (our PR manager) a lot more. Most people working with the organization are a lot older to me and NCEM is looking for more people to work with them, especially younger ones. So I started to work on my first video project. It’s a video about myself introducing the opportunity to do an internship with NCEM. At first it was an exciting idea to record a short clip that we could upload online, but it turned into a bigger project. The video is going online by the end of this week. I made a few final edits in the office today and there’s an English as well as a German version coming up. Wait for it! 🙂

The video is online on YouTube now! Watch it here📌 (English and German available)

I am also trying to help with creating social media content and with getting their online accounts a little more known. I am featured on their Facebook📌 and Instagram📌 profiles every once in a while. If you’d like to see those specific posts or to see more about what’s going on within NCEM, you should totally check out their accounts.

At the headquarters we mostly start the day together in a “chapel meeting”. Usually someone shares a few inspirational thoughts or words, we sing together and we pray for current things. It’s encouraging to pray for one another, to hear what the person who prepared for chapel has to share, and to spend time in community before we head to our offices. I was allowed to share about my life and thoughts that felt worth sharing twice since I started my internship. It’s a learning process for me, too, and it can be so much fun!

3) What I will be doing:

Jason, Caylea and I, with the help and inspiration of others, have come up with ideas for further video projects. NCEM doesn’t have a video about who they are and what they do yet and we want to change that. We’re planning to record several interviews and scenes from the different ministry fields like summer camps, aviation, TV production, the bookstore and the printshop...

We’d also like to record footage that can be uploaded on Youtube📌 on a more regular basis like interviews with NCEM workers, their kids, kids from camps etc.

It’d be nice to have more videos for example for Tribal Trails to explain what they are all about. But these jobs require a lot of time and we gotta start taking up one task at a time. If we can make a general NCEM promotion, maybe even in English and in German, that’d just be awesome!

This means that for recording and working together Caylea and I will try to visit each other every once in a while and starting in July, we’ll visit camps for about 2 weeks to get things done. It’ll be a great experience for me to get to know First Nations kids and to learn more about their cultures. Maybe I’ll be able to teach you a few words in Cree or Dene afterwards! 😉 I already picked up the most important word in Cree: tanse. It means something like “what’s up” and they apparently use it all the time.

Caylea and I will also visit several other camps for a day or two each to set up a booth and to tell the people about NCEM and what we do. Also, I’m looking forward to our general staff conference in the end of August with about 200 - 250 members attending.

THANK YOU! - For showing so much interest in what I’m doing in this wide country so far from home. Send me a message if you’d like to know more, to just stay in touch, to share about your personal experiences and journeys in life or to support me in any way: spiritually, mentally, financially, ...

VERY MUCH LOVE! ♥️

#Canada #internet #internship #social media #youtube #work #student #travel #life #stories

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meelasworkbook · 3 years ago

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Interview Transcript

John Kim, 24, Male

Guitarist/Song Writer

Tell me about yourself and how you’re involved in the arts industry. What do you do?

I’m a 24-year-old immigrant that plays in a punk band with three white kids. Basically, yeah, I’ve done it since I was 17, not consistently, but I’ve been in it for 3 years solidly.

What do you enjoy about what you do?

I think it’s about crowd interaction. Seeing, like, crowds sing back your songs or like, the energy, like how you can influence other peoples’ energy. Like, if I’m boring on stage then no one’s gonna be hyped for it. I think you have to be an extrovert to like that kinda stuff.

What kind of goals do you have with yourself or within your band?

Get 100,000 listens on Spotify.

How does your band currently promote their events?

I’ll give you two examples because I was in two different bands. So, this band I’m in currently, our exposure is doing more gigs. So, going to small shows and meeting the right people since we just started. So, obviously when you start, you can’t really do Instagram ads because you’re not consistently playing shows enough. Obviously, as soon as you start getting shows is when you can start promoting. You know what I mean? If you just start, you might play once every three months, once every two months. But when you’re more well-known, you can do once every month, once every two weeks, blah blah blah. So, I think currently our marketing is just going to these small shows and playing, like, in front of people.

How do you get to play in front of people though?

It’s normally through people you know when you first start. So, obviously, James who you just saw before, the guy with the beard, he has a lot of people in the music industry already so we can just be like, “hey, we started a band, can we play one of his shows?” and then we’ll have a bit of a waiting list, then we’ll start playing. We have three, four bands playing a night, right? So, those three, four bands will also be like, “hey, we have a show coming up, do you want to play?” It’s kinda word of mouth at the start. However, with my last band, which was a little bit bigger than this one at the time because we were active for two years by the time we stopped doing it, we were able to do Instagram advertising, which meant we could get more people who, ‘cause we were putting on consistent shows, we could get people to come. But yeah, it kinda depends.

How do those methods currently perform for your band? How did Instagram ads compare to what you do now?

I think, also, platform popularity was different compared to when I was in my old band and now. I think, currently, Instagram is the best way to promote. ‘Cause it’s images right? You know when you scroll your feed, you have images pop up, or a short video that pops up that tells you it’s an ad, right? It’s all integrated. However, Facebook, I feel like, it’s not as engaging because you can’t have audio and video clips on. It’s just photos, you know what I mean? Like, little statuses. It doesn’t show who you’re band is so a lot of people don’t know what you sound like. I feel like, Facebook is more for like, “20% off”, the creative side of it, isn’t the best platform, because for creative I feel like you need images, videos, sound kinda thing. Like, that’s a better way of showing it. Whereas Facebook only has like, a little rectangle that says your band is performing.

How do people currently find out about your band and its events?

Depends where you’re playing. So, Whammy Bar, which we played before, has a ‘Whammy’ crowd. So, people who like Whammy will go to Whammy even if they don’t know what bands are playing. There’s like a certain group of people that will just go there for cheap gigs. You know what I mean? They just enjoy going to gigs. That’s their thing. Whammy Bar’s one of those places where you have a ‘Whammy’ crowd. Same thing goes for Ding Dong Lounge. So, Ding Dong Lounge’s another rock bar and there’s a ‘Ding Dong’ crowd, and people just go there. Another thing is like, you invite friends and friends invite other friends on events. I think Facebook is good at that if you’re inviting other people. As soon as we make an event I will invite a bunch of my friends and they will invite their friends, and they will come to our show. You can share it too. That platform’s easy. Also, another way you can know about a shows is you can run ads. Like, we’re planning to run ads and we have a budget for it. As soon as we play like, two, three shows, we’ll probably have a budget for Instagram ads and then we can have like, a photo of the gig, and you can swipe, and there’ll be like, a band photo or something like that. That’s the way you normally you do it.

What is the most rewarding thing about being in a band and performing?

I think it’s knowing when you know you’ve made a good song. Like, when people like it. After, when someone’s like “oh, you’ve done a really good job” or “I really like that song”, that’s the best part of it.

Knowing that people like it?

Yeah, knowing that people actually like your shit. If it’s ass then I have to go back to the drawing board and write a new song. I think bands and the creative arts is very different to other things where it’s all about the audience and what the audience wants. Even though it sounds good to you it doesn’t mean it sounds good to everyone else. There are times when I write songs and it’s more for the people than myself.

When do you feel stuck? When do you feel low?

I played a show ages ago. We were opening up for a big band which we shouldn’t have at the time.

How come?

My friend had contacts and we got into this pretty big gig. We were opening for Blind Spot. We weren’t ready. That kinda stuff mentally feels shit because like, you’re playing a show and obviously no one knows who you are, right? Also like, I feel like when someone’s there to see a particular band, they just don’t care about the opening acts. How many times do you go to a gig and a no-name comes out? And you’re like, “who the fuck are they?”. And you can’t really vibe to the song either because you have no idea what the hell they’re saying. So, I feel like being an opening band and then no one giving a fuck about you is pretty shit. Like, you’re playing your heart out and they’re like, at the bar, just drinking, not caring. Obviously, when people like you it feels really good, but when no one’s responding to it then you’re like “oh man, this sucks.” You can’t really like, bang your head or have a good time because no one’s reacting. ‘Cause it looks like you’re overdoing it.

Do you guys struggle with having people attend on a regular basis?

Yeah, obviously, because I feel like everyone, we talked about this, the first ever show you usually do is the biggest one, because all your friends come, you know what I mean? Like, first show, “oh yeah, come to my gig” and everyone’s like, “okay cool, we’ll be there.” And they’ll all come, and the second show everyone’s like “oh, we’ve already seen you once, is there any point in me coming again?” ‘Cause even friends who don’t like your type of music will come. Like, I’m in a punk band, all our friends aren’t really into punk, but they came anyway because ‘cause we were playing. So, we do struggle sometimes with having a regular crowd coming. Like, we always talk about this ‘dip’. There’s always this ‘dip’ that goes on when you’re in a band. So, it goes like, what happens is like, all your friends will come, right? You have an incline of people who you know who come, they come to the first show, they come to the second show, they come to the third show, you’re just going up on people. Then, you have this massive dive where you just have to make a name for yourself. That’s when the dive happens. There’s a weird stage of playing five or six gigs where you’re friends don’t really show up anymore but you have people who come to the other gigs who are there. Then, you have this other rise that happens where people know your music and come to your gig because they like you. I think every band goes through this ‘dip’. Like, there’s always a ‘dip’ and a middle point. If you are shit, you never come out that ‘dip’. Every band goes through a ‘dip’ but the rise happens again if everyone likes your stuff and likes you playing live. But, you’ll stay in this ‘dip’ if you have shit music. If you have bad stage performance or like, if you’re inconsistent. You stay in that ‘dip’ and it disbands your band because it’s not going anywhere.

How do you think the pandemic has positively or negatively affected the arts industry?

Positively, I can name one straight off the bat, it’s people wanting to go to gigs again. Like, you see like that Gorillaz playing live and they never play live. If you see some of the festivals coming out recently and you see the lineup, you’re like, “whoa, they’re playing live?” Also like, Lorde’s playing after the pandemic as well? It’s like these, real big artists who don’t play live a lot are suddenly playing live because I guess they’ve missed it, you know what I mean? And they know the turnouts gonna be huge because everyone’s been waiting for such a long time. The bad side is you couldn’t play live shows which meant less money coming your way.

During lockdowns there were a lot of online events that replaced events that would’ve otherwise happened in-person. What are your thoughts around that?

I love it. I think it tested technology, 100%. I think it was good in that… I feel like if you do a live show there’s more possibilities than doing an actual live show. Doing a virtual live show has more possibilities than doing… Yeah, ‘cause there’s more technological things you could do with it. Like adding CGI and stuff like that. That kinda stuff may look visually more appealing than actual live shows. You see sometimes, like, a good example is the League of Legends live show they did, and the music video kinda thing that they shot, they had like CGI and stuff and it looked really cool. That looked like it was really fun and cool, but obviously when you have the actual live show that kinda stuff isn’t actually there. So, I guess with virtual live shows you have more possibilities of doing cooler stuff that everyone can kinda just see and you can make it visually appealing, compared to an actual live show. I actually love it. I think it tests a lot of technological boundaries and what you can do.

Do you think it’ll ever replace physical attendance?

No.

Do you think people prefer in-person engagement at events?

100%. I think live shows are about actual people. But there are some exceptions though, like Gorillaz. I think that’s a really good one, like, their visual is basically holograms and that kinda stuff. I think shows, when you look at those kinda things, like live audiences and everything, even though you have a robot or an AI playing, you still get this massive crown in. I think virtual will never replace live shows until we get to a point where VR happens. One day, maybe, if VR gets so good to the point, I feel like, I would love to go to Tomorrow Land, but fi you can’t go there for certain restrictions, the best thing is VR. I feel like VR and artificial, like, reality stuff is a really good way of… I think it’s the best for your restrictive boundaries, right?

Do you attend events yourself?

Yup. 100%.

How do you currently search or find events?

Facebook. A lot of times it is just people sending me invites on Facebook, being like, “yo, lets go to this.” Or ads, like Live Nation always has ads come up. Or even emails, like subscription based kinda stuff. I have Event Finda message me all the time about events that are happening. I think that is the best… Instagram as well.

What do you enjoy about attending them?

I think, actually, I love attending because they give different perspectives to songs. What I mean by that is like, I remember seeing Chet Faker one time at Laneway and Chet Faker does electronic music right? But when he performs live, he performs with a live band. It gives a different vibe. I remember listening to Cigarettes and Loneliness live, and I was like, “this sounds way better than the actual recording.” I went home, listened to it again and was like, “this doesn’t sound as good.” Because, even like A$AP Rocky, he has a live band as well when he plays. He has an actual drummer, an actual bassist and everything. They do an interesting perspective of an actual song that already exists. Or even DJs, DJs are really cool because even though you know the actual songs they will remix other people’s songs live. I like the fact that it’s just not their discography, like just like a playthrough. It’s a different perspective, or they do like a cool little thing in between. Flume does intervals really well.

Is it important for you to support other emerging bands even if you don’t know them?

I’m guilty of not doing. I’m pretty guilty of not supporting emerging bands even though I should, I don’t really. If it’s my friends, I would. There was a period of time where I was going to Whammy gigs just for the sake of it. ‘Cause of the atmosphere. I think the atmosphere is all different.

When you go to a gig and see an opening act, do you make sure that you’re engaging with them, just because you know how bad it feels?

No, I’m guilty of doing that too. I think it depends where I like the songs or not. If I like it while I’m having a drink or something, then I’ll engage.

#inrd702 #week 5

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innuendostudios · 7 years ago

Video

youtube

The next video in my series on Alt-Right rhetorical strategies. You can help this series come out regularly, as well as support my other work, by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there's this feminist media critic whose work you respect. Being an internet-savvy human in the information age, you sometimes share your opinions of her work on your various social media platforms. And you've noticed, whenever you speak positively of her, many different people come out to yell the same handful of things at you.

It usually starts with, "How can you support that conwoman after she stole thousands of dollars from people?"

And you say, "No, she didn't steal anything, she ran a crowdfunding campaign that people contributed willingly to, and overwhelmingly those people seem satisfied with their donations."

And they say, "Yeah, she asked for a hundred thousand dollars for a shitty little project."

And you say, "No, she got a hundred thousand, because people got excited about her work and gave her more than she asked for, but the original pitch was only 10k. Also, how many times have you given that number to people without looking it up?"

And they say, "Yeah, she asked for 10k and then never finished anything."

And you say, "No, she finished the project earlier this year. Of course it took longer than it was originally pitched, you get ten times what you ask for you’re kind of obligated to make a bigger project, because, if you didn't, that would be running away with ninety grand..."

Now, by this time you’ve noticed your interlocutor's position has changed from "she stole from people" to "she asked too much to begin with" to "she took too long to deliver" as though these are all the same argument. You also notice the pattern of the conversation: he says something short, quippy, and wrong, you give a detailed correction, he says something else short, quippy, wrong, and only tangentially related to his last point, and the cycle repeats itself. This goes on and on.

And it's not, you've noticed, just this discussion; you find this manner of argument often whenever you express left-of-center beliefs. You talk about the election, someone says you vote Democrat because you must have a conservative father you hate; you talk about polyamory, someone says if you have more than one female partner you must be a sexist; or they just say you're faking a non-regional accent. (I don’t understand that one, either.)

The running theme here is all these people who ostensibly want a frank exchange of ideas spend a lot more time making accusations than asking questions. Because, why ask what you believe when they can tell you what you believe and make you correct them? And if you ever don’t correct them, must be because they’re right.

And you're not naive; you see what's going on here. This isn't about conversation, it's about boxes. When you say something cogent that they don't agree with, and they get the sinking feeling that you might start making sense, they need a reason not to listen to you. So they reach for a box to stick you in: dishonest feminism, fake progressivism, daddy-issue liberalism. No one in those boxes is worth listening to, which means, as long as they've got you in one, they're not at risk of having their minds changed. This isn’t even an argument with you, not really; their presenting themselves with arguments for why they don't have to listen to you.

So your first reflex is to defy their expectations. "Actually, my dad was a draft-dodging hippie who told me he loved me every day." "And I never said what genders my partners are but I promise they're all feminists." "As for my accent- actually, I don't know what to do with the accent thing." But the point is, “I refuse to fit in your box.” And if they can't put you in one, if they can't dismiss you outright, they'll have to engage with your argument.

But if you've spent any time arguing with angry dudes online you know what I'm about to say: They don’t. This accusatory, condescending attitude never falters. Because a technique that has permeated anti-progressivism is to Never Play Defense.

Now don't get me wrong, what I said about the Right fitting the Left into simplified boxes as a way of preserving their own egos, I do think that's a thing, at least for many people much of the time. And I think the reassurance it brings is why the technique stays so popular. But that framing is about how individual people are feeling in isolated moments, and leaves out the larger game that's being played. Because there is a long-term strategic value to never playing defense, and it's less to do with arguments than with attitude.

From your perspective, this debate about the feminist is a joke. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he comes in hot without confirming any of his assumptions, the whole conversation is you repeatedly schooling an ignorant dipshit. But that's only if you’re the fool who listens to what’s actually being said. Never Play Defense is a strategy that looks past language to posture; the tone, word choice, even the expressions on your faces. If you half-focus your eyes and look not at the words but the flow of the conversation, you can see the dynamic at play:

He says his short, quippy statement, and you give your detailed rebuttal. He then picks a single point from your response and attacks that as the new subject. Now, to an onlooker, the logical brain would register that he's leaving 90% of your argument on the table, and that, by changing positions, he's conceding he lost the first round. But the lizard brain notices that he's always making the accusations, always in the dominant position, that he's always acting and you're always reacting. Regardless of what is said, he displays all the outward signs of winning. So, on a purely emotional level, he leaves the impression of being right.

I have never had an argument look like this that wasn’t in public. This is a technique that means speaking not so much to the other person as to the people watching. Liberals tend to operate as though voters are beings of pure reason, and neglect that rational people still have emotions, and those emotions factor into what they believe. And that long after this argument is over, when people only half-remember what was said, what lingers on is what impressions the speakers made.

Ronald Reagan coined the phrase, "If you're explaining, you're losing." The trick is, if he's always accusing, then you're always explaining.

This technique of winning by looking like you’re winning is not new, and, historically, it's been used by both parties. But modern liberals seem especially susceptible to it because it plays on one of their big weaknesses, which is - and I say this with love - the liberal fantasy of putting someone in their place.

Any time a free speech warrior gets the Bill of Rights quoted to them, when a racist gets "historical accuracy" explained by an actual historian, liberals take screencaps. We put it on Storify. We pass that shit around like theater popcorn. We live for the day an ignorant prick gets dunked on.

I remind you: this was the central conceit of an entire TV show. [West Wing clip.]

But let me ask you: in all these scenarios, who's doing all the explaining?

The reason scenes like this are so satisfying is precisely because they activate the emotions. Everyone wants to be Joseph Welch telling off McCarthy, where an appeal to reason looks like winning. But the Right has learned that, if you never look like you’re losing, you can convince a lot of people that you’re not. And, if you keep your statements short and punchy, people will remember what you said better than they remember the long explanation of why it’s untrue. If done correctly, you might even convince yourself you know what you’re talking about.

Now, again, this is not exclusive to the Right - this is how most teenagers argue regardless of their politics, where it’s less important to be right than it is to be better than someone. But mixed with Control the Conversation - see previous video - the Right has a full-bodied cocktail for manipulating how the Left argues.

But where it gets dangerous is in how the Alt-Right has capitalized on this.

This argument isn’t just about sticking a woman in the Lying Feminism box so she doesn’t have to be listened to, it’s also signaling to anyone watching what box they should stick her in. Even if an onlooker recognizes that she literally did not con anyone out of their money, the idea that how much she asked for and how long she took to deliver are relevant to her credibility is still planted in their heads. It subtly suggests that, the next time they feel threatened by a female media critic, maybe they should look at how much money she makes, how long her work takes to produce; maybe they don’t have to listen to her, because they’ve got this handy box.

So what’s most valuable to the Alt-Right is not who wins or loses any individual argument, it’s the mechanics of the argument itself; it’s the boxes. Over the last several years the far Right has pushed hard on a number of reductive categories: the Cultural Marxism box, the Reverse Racism box, even terms like “beta” and “mangina” are just shorthands for the Failed Masculinity box. The Alt-Right is a box factory, putting huge swaths of Leftist rhetoric, most especially that that would rebut their core positions, into categories where they can be summarily ignored.

These myths have power if and only if they are immediately recognizable to a lot of people. One function of this aggressive posturing is that they want to provoke an argument, to be so pompous that you’re itching to publicly take this asshole down, which gives that asshole access to your followers. It’s about them introducing a myth to your audience and reinforcing that myth for theirs. And that myth gets spread even when you feel like you’re winning.

I can’t tell you the best way to deal with this, but I do know one way, which is to keep control of your own story. When someone comes out the gate with accusations, it’s a big red flag that they are not arguing in good faith. You are not required to argue with them. When someone says something untrue, you can just tell your audience what the truth is without acknowledging the lie or the one repeating it. A detailed explanation lands a lot better when it’s not being contrasted with a sound bite. Decide for yourself how your audience gets acquainted with a popular fiction, and never be too proud to delete a comment.

In this political climate, these debates have real impact on real people’s lives. They’re not, in fact, a game of football. So if someone tries to force you to play defense, you don’t have to play.

#video essay #the alt-right playbook #alt-right

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hornyfifer30 · 6 years ago

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10 Tricks for Applying YouTube To Eliminate At Regional Search engine marketing

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Confira o artigo [Treinamento Negócio Mobile]

#treinamentonegócioonline #treinamentomobile #treinamentonegociomobile

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leverage-commentary · 7 years ago

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Leverage Season 1, Episode 6, The Miracle Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

Arvin: Thank you. This was wonderful. It was really fun to do.

Chris: I’m Chris Downey, Executive Producer

John: John Rogers, Executive Producer

Christine: Christine Boylan, I wrote this episode

Arvin: And Arvin Brown, the Director

John: This is the Miracle Job! This is episode, I think episode four of the series and - Arvine, why don’t you tell us since it’s kind of unusual career path, why don’t you tell us how you sort of started directing and move into the television?

Arvin: Well, my career was the theatre for many many years. I ran a theatre on an east coast called Long Worth as the artistic director for roughly - exactly 30 years actually, but I always wanted to work more with a camera, and started making the transition a few years before. I gave theatre a year’s notice and discovered that it was exciting and wonderful to tackle a new medium at my stage of the game and eventually after I officially retired from Long Worth, I came out here and made this the- sort of my full career.

John: That’s cool. Now that was D. B. Sweeney our friend D. B. Sweeney as the priest.

Christine: D.B. Sweeny.

John: [laughs] Dreamy Sweeney as the

Christine: He is lovely! Dreamy Sweeney

John: A ridiculous number women on the set, muttering ‘toepick’ and wandering around, giggling in the corner.

Christine: There’s a ridiculous amount of good looking men in this episode.

John: [laughs] Yes, there is.

Christine: To balance out the already glorious female members of the casts.

John: Now, uh -

Arvin: [speaks over John] Yes, exactly! [Christine laughs]

John: - Miss Boyler, why don’t you tell us what the what the purpose of the scene is here? Because-

Christine: The purpose of this scene! Is to talk about Death of a Salesman! [laughs] Isn’t that the purpose of the scene? Um, what’s the purpose of the scene?

John: We’re really trying to establish the family, kind of

Christine: We kicked this around. Well can we…? Yeah we’re trying to establishing the family. The fact that they’ve all gone to Sophie’s play even though Parker’s making that face.

Arvin: I love that shot right there.

Chris: I love that shot!

Christine: Yup, Parker’s dramatic criticism in one shot.

John: Yeah.

Christine: That’s pretty great. They care about each other. They care about each other.

John: This is really the part where - this is, I mean we talk about the arc of the season. This is where we’re trying to establish that they are moving from bunch of people working in the same office, kinda know each other, to actually doing these little interpersonal things.

Chris: That’s one of our classic, kind of, cut away jokes.

John: Yup.

Chris: I mean, that’s really a perfect one right there.

John: Yeah.

Arvine: Although, one of the things I loved working on this - there’s always a slight edge left, you know, which is again, sort of family dynamics.

John & Chris: Yeah.

Arvin: It never gets sentimental in that sense.

John: No, no - they don’t necessarily like each other even though they like each other

All: Right. Exactly.

Arvin: Which I love.

Christine: It’s nice because you can do a workplace scenario and still have this sort of fun of an action show because they’re con men.

John: Now this is interesting. Arvin, you are one of the few directors who came in that was not involved in the development of the show. You know, Roskin had been here, Dean had been here-

Arvin: Uh-huh.

John: So, I mean, when you come into this sort of character dynamic, what do you look at when you look at the scripts? How do you work with the actors? ‘Cause I know you tend to really sit down with the actors to grind out the scripts even between the scenes.

Arvin: Well, one of the things I do in the course of the scene is substantial homework. I mean I read every script that has been written up to the one I’m about to tackle and if there is anything that's completed on... you know as far as I'm concerned I watch it all so I can then-. I really have a real belief that actors always have to feel some sort of continuity in their work and when shows get careless about that, I always think it’s a big mistake. So I wanna know everything that has already been stated about the history of every character before we start, and then I analyze the episode I’m about to do for where it’s going to fit into a sort of - overall journey. What’s happening, what’s changing, what the arcs are, you know, in that particular episode. A perfect example here, I think, is the relationship of Timothy’s character to D.B.’s character and what that said about his past, what that said about his capacity for friendship, a number of things that I think were wonderful character elements to be introducing into the series.

John: And, boy, that brings us to D.B.’s character - Catholicism and the Catholic church.

Christine: Ah, Catholicism...There were really only two people on the staff who could have written this episode.

[All Laugh]

Christine: One is me, and the other is you.

John: Yeah, pretty much. This actually started from us drinking Guinness - there’s a sponsor. Right after the show was picked up I wrote down a couple sheets of con ideas and one of them was ‘steal a miracle’ and it was always one we knew we were going to come in and do and you wound up taking it over as the only other Catholic on staff.

Chris: Well, hey!

John: Well you were busy writing [The] Wedding [Job].

Christine: That’s true.

John: You were the only other episode with somebody in a priest collar.

Chris: I was. The only other -

Christine: And you’re generally happy. We’re the sort of unhappy former Catholics.

John: And you’re generally happy. If you’re doing, like, tortured Catholic writing, that’s really more -

Chris: Tortured Catholic is really not my thing.

Christine: We handle the tortured area here.

John: Yeah, and that was the end here, was - if you’re going to have a group of thieves at some point you sort of have to address the morality. But now I want to talk about how you wound up structuring the mass and everything and all of the research you did on all of this.

Christine: Um, a good deal of research. It’s funny the stuff you remember when you go to mass. And I went to a couple masses around LA. I also - oddly enough there’s a lot of - if you need a particular part of a mass and you want to compare and contrast - you can find that stuff on YouTube.

John: Really?

Christine: Yes!

John: People videotape masses?

Christine: People videotape their masses. I mean, you can also find masses on television. I mean, you know, everybody’s grandma watches mass on TV sometimes. But you can find this stuff on YouTube. I went to a couple of churches in LA - location scouting just to get the feel of it back now. I really hadn’t been to church since I was in Europe a while ago. [chuckles]. Yeah, it was really interesting to go back in sort of a research capacity.

Arvin: And you know what was kind of fun was the resident priest of the church where we shot became a kind of defacto consultant almost in spite of himself. And as we went he was learning - and I love this - he was learning the dramatic requirements. So it wasn’t - he was understanding that every once in a while the ritual had to be bent a little bit to accomodate the story. And he was getting excited about it instead of challenged.

Christine: It was great. It was Father Luis, right?

Arvin: Yeah.

Chris: It was tricky to find the right church too. I mean that was -

Christine: Oh yeah, that was a big thing.

Chris: We wanted to find one that you could believe was about to be bulldozed and wouldn’t have people out chaining themselves to it and yet at the same time had to fulfill all of the story points.

John: Actually, I want to point out that that’s a green screen behind Eliot.

Christine: Yes it is.

John: We actually extended that tunnel going longer in that direction. That’s actually a very pleasant park on the other side.

Christine: The park has a beautiful pond with ducks and children feeding the ducks; it was gorgeous.

John: Which was not what we wanted. [mumbles] This was one of my favorite fight scenes on the show because it’s not a fight scene. It basically… And it’s one of the first times. Interestingly, you can track Eliot and Hardison’s scenes throughout the arc of the season and see how the relationship changes. And he very much, sort of, schools Hardison in violence.

Christine: Uh-huh. And the restraint of violence.

John: And the restraint of violence, that’s exactly right. The entire point - and that’s something that Chris came up with actually - is… It was in the pilot script that he popped the clip on every gun as he moved through the crowd. He made it into a character bit that he disarms the weapon at the end of every fight.

Christine: That’s great.

John: In order to take the weapon out of the equation. Because most people are dependent on the guns. You know, that’s one of the reasons he rejects them.

Chris: Now Arvin, your approach to this? I mean, I see a lot of hand-held, keeping everything close. Was that how you wanted to…?

Arvin: Yeah because I think the essence of this particular - you guys are already nailing it - this particular fight is what’s going on in kind of psychological terms, not about the physical actions here.

John: It’s more of a chess match.

Arvin: It’s a chess match. And there’s a very kind of - in one short scene - there’s a lot of, kind of, power issues going on. You know, transfer of power and the fact that when Chris and Aldis walk out of that scene, the power has shifted to them and away from the leader. There’s almost an Asian sense of saving face even though these are not Asian guys.

John: But gang culture and power culture is universal. It’s one of the reasons that the Hong Kong movies really popped in the ‘80s, because of the universality of the sort of crime mythos.

Arvin: Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Christine: The fight scene was a nice way to show in miniature, the idea of the shifting moralities too. This is a gang, they’re bad guys, but this one member beat up a priest, so the entire gang turns on him.

John: Now, actually, there’s a scene missing there, which I kinda regret we did.

Christine: [Sighs deeply.] Sad day.

John: Which was explaining why the church was going under. Because ordinarily you can’t just buy a church, but we had, actually, a scene where the bishop - we explained and went to the Bishop Rick and we talked to the bishop and said, you know. And we talked to the bishop and they had basically closed the church and were selling it. So there wasn’t really much that D.B. Sweeney’s character could do, but it just wound up going by the wayside, and only really a couple diehards-

Arvin: But this was before I read the script.

John: Yeah, this was before you read the script. It became a pagecount thing.

Christine: Yeah this was way back.

John: It was a pagecount issue. But it really was an interesting scene because it was that the church is in many ways a multi-billion dollar business and they own a lot of valuable property and they make a decision based on a mixture of the needs of the congregations and also where those resources are best allocated.

Arvin: You know, one of the things we should say at some point in here - and maybe this is as good a time as any - is that one of the things that really moved me about the whole experience of this episode was that the issues that the episode was about were really in the neighborhood where we shot. There was a reality to it, partly because of choice of location that I mean, the loyalty of the congregation of this particular church, and yet the financial struggle of that church. I remember on one location day we were trying to get there to scout the place - you guys may remember this - and there was a funeral going on and we watched that funeral and the dynamic of that community, with everybody walking to the funeral - I mean they weren’t driving - there was no parking.

John: No, it was the local church - it’s the church you walk to.

Christine: It was beautiful. It was really beautiful. [Pause] Oh, I’m so happy about that stunt. Can I just take a second and talk about Arvin’s choreography and how it’s brilliant? If anybody uses the space… I mean, really uses the space. It’s just, I mean, look at this location.

John: Well and it’s als the trick- Where is this location?

Christine: It’s an unfinished floor of a building downtown in the neighborhood of the church where we shot.

John: Now with the elevator gag.

Christine: That elevator’s very scary.

Chris: I love the elevator and that we got to use this.

Christine: Oh, these two. That late night. They were hilarious every take after take.

John: That’s Scott...uh…

Christine and Arvin: Scott Lowell.

Christine: He was from Queer as Folk; the American Queer as Folk. He also does A LOT theatre.

John: It was really interesting because we desperately needed a villain - and we use that word, not the other word - and we needed a villain who was almost likeable in this one. Like, almost - you spend a lot more time with the villain than you do in other episodes and you really need someone that you can kinda go ‘Wow! Good opponent. Good scrappy guy. Resourceful.’ You know?

Chris: Well he, you know, imbued it with a kind of showmanship that you needed this character to have.

Christine: Yeah. I really dig in on the villains, so I was happy to have an actor I admired come in and do this. He’s really great.

Alvin: But also one of the greatest advantages you can have if you’re playing villains is a sense of humor and this guy had a major sense of humor.

John: He was really the funniest version of this and that was crucial, particularly with the stuff he has to do later.

Christine: And it lightens it, sort of. Tim and D.B have so much drama to get through, it’s kind of nice to have this a bit lighter.

Chris: [Mumbles something in the background.]

John: And this is clearly His Girl Friday. Actually, this is not the elevator sequence. The elevator scene that we’re doing from the His Girl Friday ripoff that was Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner -

Chris: Wow, referencing the Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner’s Changing Channels. [Transcriber Note: it’s actually called Switching Channels.]

[Everyone talking at once]

Christine: Wow, that’s so many layers deep I don’t know where to go.

Chris: We might have to make a Flintstone's reference.

[All Laugh]

Chris: As you see from the man from Bedrock…

[Laughs and mumbles]

John: But no, that’s when you’re trying to- When you’re writing a show that blows through two or three cons or heists per episode and you’re doing 13 of them, you do start going through, ‘Alright, what contained space can we put them in? What flaw can he have? What paranoia can he have?’ We have a list of like, unreasonable fears that we can inflict on the bad guys. This is also the first time that we drug someone.

All: Yeah.

Arvin: You know, one point we should make also about Scott in this scene which fascinates me is that you have a terrific comic actor, but his physical work in that elevator is remarkable; his sensory work.

Christine: Yeah, absolutely.

John: He’s sweating! He’s really working himself into a frenzy here.

Christine: And then between takes, just strolled over, sipping a water. ‘How you doing?’ Funny. Flirty. You know. And then right back in and hysterical again. It was wonderful. So much fun to work with.

John: And this was also where we started. Was this before 5? Where we started to figure out how little you needed to do in an act. I mean if you found a sequence you really liked with a bad guy you really liked, you could kind of live with them a little longer. You didn’t have to quite hammer the audience.

Arvin: It’s a wonderful discovery to make.

John: Because the problem is - we’re all heist heads. We’re all con freaks. And so for the first couple of episodes definitely, it was a lot of: how much con can we cram into one episode to fool us. And then it became ‘No wait, actually, one well done long sequence.’ And then if you notice past this a lot of times, an entire act is one long sequence. Like Homecoming which was done right after this, is structured that way, because really the entire second act is one heist.

Christine: Oh yeah, it is.

John: And that came from figuring this out.

Arvin: And that’s an incredible discovery to make. I can’t tell you the number of shows I’ve done over these last years where the essential difficulty with the show is that it’s overplotted. Audiences, in my experience, turn off of that. They really are hooked on character for the most part.

John: Is this the first time we meet Tomas? This is the first time we meet Tomas.

Christine: No, second time. He was in the construction sequence. Parker knocked him over with a beam. Andres Hudson. Lovely, lovely man.

John: They did a great job. This is the hardest working office in show business again. This is our bad guy office. Every office.

Arvin: Oh, is that true? [Laughs]

John: Yeah. Seriously, this office is in every episode.

Christine: Every bad guy’s office.

John: We turn the desk around. We turn the windows around. Welcome to shooting on the only independent TV studio in the world. Yeah. You only get one office. But! Our production designer, Lauren Crasco, really made it work. Yeah. Architectural designs in the background. Tables out.

Christine: And the helmet hanging out back. The construction helmet

Arvin: She’s so gifted. Lauren is really gifted.

John: She did a great job.

Christine: So great.

John: Andi was great on set dec.

Christine: Unflappable, that woman.

John: And this was interesting.This was trying to figure out the hook for her. And this is, by the way - a lot of people don’t know this - Gina was born in New Zealand, so this is actually-

Chris: This is going home for her.

Christine: Her native accent.

John: This is her native accent that she’s doing here. This is a great hook, and really the challenge of the episode was trying to figure out how the hell to get him to-

Arvin: -to reveal.

John: To reveal what was going on. And what publicist-? We actually pulled this from someone who had gone through a bunch of publicists. And the publicist had just written a tell-all.

Arin: Oh really?

Christine: Yeah.

John: Because your publicist has to cover your sins. They’re like a priest. And the priest metaphor came in and it just kind of clicked.

Christine: It clicked everything together.

Chris: These scenes are challenging too because you have to have everyone in the conference room. Arvin, what was, kind of, your approach here? Did you look at how some of these were done before?

Arvin: Yeah, as a matter of fact Dean had said to me early on - and I loved the idea of this, so I was happy to try to find the places to do it. He had conceived a stylistic approach that talked about the fact that when the plannings were taking shape or the mission was being stated or whatever, that a circular camera move suggesting the world of change, in a sense, was something he really wanted to explore. And I found a couple of places in the episode - that being one of them that we just watched - where it leant itself perfectly to that kind of dynamic. And it adds excitement to what can often be very static scenes.

Chris: They’re brutal.

[All talk over each other]

Arvin: We all shoot conference room scenes to the point where we want to scream. And this is a whole way of doing it that I think makes absolute sense.

Christine: You did a good job of whipping everybody into a frenzy before what could be dry scenes.

Chris: And Arvin, people might be surprised that a lot of directors don’t do this, but before every scene, you would kind of makes ure that the cast knew where they were in the story and what had come before and what was coming after.

John: You read through the previous scene on this one right?

Arvin: Yep. And you know it’s interesting. It’s been my method since the beginning of working in television, coming out of my background in theatre, in that, far from being a time waster, if you take even just four minutes to outline where this fits in the story, what do we want to accomplish in this scene in terms of the overall arc of the episode. And the minute the actors hear that, it somehow - everybody’s on board then, and then all of the complicated issues you have to deal with in terms of staging, camera work, and everything else fall into place from that.

John: Well that’s interesting, because I just talked about features. I was doing some sort of seminar. I was talking about everybody making the same movie in their own head. And a lot of times even when we’re breaking these episodes, we suddenly run into a problem because we’re all breaking into a different room in our heads. We have to diagram the room, we have to diagram the con. And getting everybody on set - and that’s the most important thing when you’re shooting anything (television, but particularly collaborative mediums between the actors) is everybody’s got the same scene in their heads, everybody’s going to the same endpoint, everyone knows that we’re on the same track.

Arvin: And you know, another point to make about working with actors and in the rigors of working in episodic television. I was told in the beginning, ‘You know, you won’t get any rehearsal time. You won’t be able to rehearse.’ Well in comparison to theatre life, of course there isn’t rehearsal time. But I’ve discovered that if you really care about that, you choose your moments. I mean, I go to the makeup trailer, I go to the wardrobe room, I go wherever they are to go over any points that I think need to be discussed away from the work that’s actually going on on set. And it’s amazing if you know how to talk to actors, the amount of detail you can accomplish in doing it that way.

John: This is where we start to flip our Busey [something] on you.

Chris: Busey being our shorthand for the sidekick.

John: The sidekick. The henchman. Taken from Gary Busey playing the role in Lethal Weapon.

Arvin: Oh! Right!

John: Where you always have a main villain and you always have a Busey.

Chris and Christine: The Busey.

[All Laugh]

John: The Busey is in charge of killing or torturing or coverups and stuff. In our case, Tomas is more of a scheduling Busey.

Christine: We have an executive Busey every once in a while. A notary Busey.

[All talking at once]

Chris: We did. We talked about the Busey as a notary.

John: In this case, Tomas is - and this is - we end with the betraying Busey, which we don’t always use.

Christine: We flipped the Busey.

John: Yeah, we flipped the Busey.

Christine: Because right here he is an arch-villain in training.

John: Yes. Up until this point, hr will eventually be the same ruthless bastard that Scott is playing. And luckily a bunch of - my favorite bit of it - and the actual start of the episode. How the episode was born was: the line scrawled in the bottom of that Guinness-stained paper was five thieves helped me save my church.

Christine: Right.

John: That my miracle. And so working backwards you realize slowly that whether they want to or not, the Leverage team winds up redeeming a bunch of people along the way here. Often accidentally.

Christine: Oh yeah. It’s collateral redemption really.

All: Yeah.

Christine: Oh this was so much fun. I could have done this for weeks.

John: And big props to Eric Bates, by the way for creating -

Chris: Our prop guy.

Christine: Oh, fantastic.

John: Our prop master.

Arvin: This was probably the most challenging scene.

All: Yeah.

Christine: But it was fun!

Arvin: Technically challenging scene.

Chris: And there was. Can we shoot it in the conference room? There was a lot of back and forth about where we were going to set this.

John: And this is the great thing about television, too is - on a ridiculous 7-day budget you have to be able to go to someone and say ‘I need three full size statues of the saint.’ And they will then go make them for you. That was also -

Christine: And we need them to bleed, please.

John: Yeah, we need them to bleed. And we need some of them to explode or fizz.

Arvin: And of course there’s nothing wardrobe loves more than blood on set.

All: YES. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris: Come on, that’s great. That’s a great yellow hat.

John: The yellow duck coat.

Christine: I just love that outfit. It’s like he’s the Morton Salt girl.

John: I also love the little - see this is also where we started realizing if you just give Chris and Aldis a little room, they will make a scene for you.

[All talking at once]

John: It’s like, OK, what is this? They’re like 12 year olds now.

Christine: They would run back to video village and say, ‘We’re gonna do it again cuz we got some other stuff. Is is cool if we do that part again?’ And we’d just laugh. They were terrific.

Chris: I lover her just reading. ‘Oh there’s more blood in the conference room again.’

[All Laugh]

John: ‘This is the sort of thing that happens at Leverage.’

Christine: ‘What a wacky office. Don’t melt Santa.’

John: Now the conference room is a bitch to shoot because while you can open up three walls, you cannot open the wall behind them. It’s actually actually where the TVs are.

Arvin: It’s where the monitors are, yeah.

John: So when you shoot roundy-rounds you have to squeeze a camera in a tiny, tiny space there. But that’s the first time we really realized if we just open the conference room fully we have a continuous space all the way through.

Christine: Right.

Arvin: Yeah.

John: This was a late scene. This was a late edition.

Christine: This was the scene that made us all cry.

John: This was… Essentially we always felt we needed to, you know, we needed to address the fact that Nate had been married and had a son at the same time that these two had had a past. So exactly what were the boundaries of that past? And this was one of those nice moments where you have an Oscar winner and a classically-trained British actress that you can give them a scene and they go, ‘We wanna tweak it.’ And instead of you going, ‘ Oh sweet God, the actors are going to tweak it’, you go, ‘OK, let’s scee what you got!’ And it wound up being fairly close to the middle of what everyone was aiming for.

Arvin: And you know what I loved about-? This is something that should be said more often. Everyone assumes that actors are always angling for more lines and basically their contribution in this scene, if you remember, were trims.

John: Tim cut a bunch of the lines, yeah.

Arvin: And that fact that a good actor - and these people are wonderful actors - always knows what he or she can accomplish with a look and a smile.

John: Well a lot of times you overwrite because you need it to read on the page what the intention of the scene is.

Arvin: EXACTLY.

John: And then you have to trust the actors to say, ‘OK. If that’s your intent as the writer, I can get you there in fewer yards down.

Christine: And that has very much always been my process in the room - is overwriting and then cutting it down.

John: Oh really? Is that going to be your excuse for giving me big, bloated first drafts? OK. Sure.

Christine: Yeah, that’s my excuse for the monologues. You like that?

John: That’s very nice.

Arvin: But, you know, on balance it is a better way to go than the opposite - to underwrite.

John: You talked to him about this beforehand, didn’t you?

Arvin: [Laughs]

Christine: I adore Arvin. I adore him.

Chris: They’re on the same page.

John: They’re definitely on the same page. They’re making the same excuses.

Chris: He’s looking at index cards!

Christine: But Chris and I had a similar experience with D.B. about the sermon. We talked to him and basically all three of us together made cuts. And it was so good.

Chris: Yeah. And it really made it so much better.

Christine: Just everything worked. The more we cut the better it was. Because he was giving us what we needed.

John: This shot’s huge by the way.

Christine: Oh yeah.

John: That’s a big shot. How many…? You had one day to do this, right? With the people outside?

Christine: Oh yeah. Exterior church. First day? Second day?

Arvin: Yeah. Second day I think. That’s Lily. Her name is Lily. That’s Lily.

John: I love how the nuns just appeared.

[All Laugh]

John: They have nuns on call.

Arvin: That was almost my foresight moment.

[All Laugh]

John: ‘There’s a miracle! We need four nuns to get down here and pray.’ [Imitating sirens] Wee-oo-wee-oo.

Chris: That’s a great shot, the way it’s framed with the arms.

John: With the arms and the overhead, it’s a beautiful shot. And also this is one of the times where- Usually when we’re on locations we’re in offices, or we’re in… We’re moving through them as plot points. Very rarely is the location we’re in a plot point itself. It’s usually on the way to a con. And it was interesting to see how, you know, you’re a much more actor and sort of style oriented director. You really made the most of this church. There’s a lot of beautiful shots in here which really focus on the fact it’s a church. It has inherently beautiful architecture. It has beautiful angles. It has beautiful lighting.

Arvin: And for examples, the little area now that we’re looking at is an actual ritual area that’s there. The minute I saw it i thought, ‘We have to-. That has to be incorporated. It’s part of- It’s something so neighborhood and touchingly about faith in that little scenario.

Christine: Absolutely. We just had a different feeling even being in there or just right outside the church.

John: Yes. Yeah. It’s definitely an off-speed for the rest of the season. In a good way. But that’s, you know. We were talking about this in an interview yesterday, and we were talking about the fact that they shouldn’t feel like 13 of the same episode. The luxury of doing television as opposed to movies is that you can do one that feels a little different. You know, one that feels more like a baseball lineup than a...you know…

Arvin: Oh my god. That is so true.

John: And there’s D.B. very angry.

Christine: I love that. ‘What did you do?’ We laughed every time. He grabs him almost by the ear and pulls him into the church. These two were just magical together.

John: And they could really create-. It’s interesting - Tim’s originally from Jamaica Plain, South Boston, you know, he keyed in on this approach to the character that we did immediately. And you really get the sense that he and D.B. have been friends for -.

Chris: Oh, you really do. I mean, that’s for sure. In their scenes together, these guys are old friends.

Arvin: They really loved working together.

John: And it’s also Tim does something here that I think is subtle is that Nate uses a slightly different voice and attitude with D.B. than he does with everybody else.

Christine: Yes he does.

John: Because you change when you’re with your childhood friends. You recall that personality at that time.

Christine: Absolutely.

John: He’s nowhere near the same person he is with the team when he’s with D.B.

Chris: And D.B. was very excited to play a priest, right? It was one of the things-

Arvin: Yeah his whole career-.

John: Yeah. He was playing bad guys for a while.

Chris: -bad guys. I mean, Eight Men Out he was - was he Shoeless Joe Jackson?

John: Well on Jericho he just spent like two seasons as evil young deaf girl shooting Blackwater.

Christine: That’s right.

John: So, you know, it was basically like, ‘I get to be a priest? Yeah, I’m all over that.’

Arvin: You know, another thing those two guys created in their relationship in the show - which I thought was amazing - was D.B’s capacity to hurt Tim in really subtle ways in ways that we don’t ordinarily see with that character. So that his disappointment at the fake miracle and what that meant in terms of creating a lie for him with his congregation was painful to Tim.

Christine: I think it cues up the season finale as far as Nate and Sophie’s- the backstory, what’s gonna happen in their past and their future. Kind of just a little goosing here.

John: Well I mean, the fact that Nate is building an awful lot of his current life on his arrogance. His arrogance and his need for revenge. Really the line that we have later in the- [under his breath] ugh, Bibletopia. Um...

Chris: And look at the showmanship here - that’s what I love about it.

Christine: And this was the monologue for the audition. And uh, wow was that fun.

Chris: One of the interesting things about our bad guys is that the ones who really stand out is that they have one moment where they really give their philosophy, their point of view, and I thought this one was [mumbles].

John: And you realize it’s a valid one. Like, in his world view it is a valid point of view.

Christine: It is, but he doesn something - Scott does something so beautiful here in that sort of, just that switch, of when he just leans in and says, ‘Come on, Christy’ and he just kinda lays it in there. The ‘Are you kidding me’ moment, which I really like.

Chris: It’s very Glengarry Glen Ross.

Arvin: Yeah, that’s a perfect comparison.

Chris: You can totally see this actor doing Glengarry Glen Ross.

John: And the model was fantastic. And it was Dean who came up with Bibletopia because we were really struggling

Christine: He burst into the room and said -

Christine and John: ‘Bibletopia’!

Christine: Which was hilarious.

Arvin: That’s great.

John: Well we know we wanted to do the switch, but we didn’t have one way to say it.

Christine: Right.

John: And he came down with the word. I remember we were actually sitting upstairs and talking about it and then he burst into the room and wandered off again.

Chris: As he’s wont to do.

John: As he’s wont to do. He will like burst into the writers room, drop something, and then run out again.

Chris: He’s a hallucination!

Christine: Just something crazy.

John: But that’s part of the fun! [Clears throat] Pardon me. We have the writer’s room and the whole production facility in one building. And that’s part of the fun of it is we have a lot of cross-pollination between departments. You know, as long as you can keep enough control that everyone realizes that the writers are really in charge.

Christine: Yay TV.

Arvin: You know, a little issue here that emerges is that the miracle spins out of control - the fake miracle - is that the comment that’s also being made about our culture, that given what goes on with the media, that everything spins out of control.

John: Well that was actually a TNT note where they asked us, ‘Would it really spin out of control this fast?’ And I sent them the YouTube video where there were a thousand people looking at a stain of Christ on a wall.

Arvin: YES.

John: The water stain. It was plainly Kris Kristofferson, not Christ. It was plainly not even vaguely Christ-like. Which may imply things about the religious nature of Kris Kristofferson, I wanted to explore. The point is: that, yes-. Usually whenever we get a question, it’s like I can give you four things from popular culture which show it’s even far worse. And the apostolic visitation is great. The idea that it’s the Vatican CSI squad.

Chris: Vatican sold by suits. That’s really what you sell ‘em by. Guys in white hair and suits.

John: And the apostolic visitation team is real.

Christine: Yeah, apostolic visitations are real.

John: They send out a confirmation team and in most TV shows they’re portrayed as a hot young Italian woman and then a rugged anthropologist or psychologist who has doubts about his faith and then one older priest, but we went with three priests.

Christine: Don’t step on my feature. Why would you guys do that?

Arvin: This is one of my favorite beats in the whole thing because of course he goes in - Tim goes into the priest’s part of the confessional, forcing D.B. to be in the -

John: -other side. Which pays us off on the-. And this was, by the way, one of those writing moments where we really didn’t know how to flip the Busey. It it was just in the middle - I remember it was like a Thursday morning at like 10:30 in the morning and somebody went, ‘Wait. Tim’s in the confessional. Ah!’ And then we flipped it. The idea that he would have thought he was talking to the priest and he would have led them. And by the way, we have to note - Nate’s a horrible human being for doing that.

Christine: It’s not a, you know - how strong a foundation is one’s arrogance?

John: Well personally it’s my foundation.

Christine: Solid rock.

John: It’s the bedrock.

Arvin: This confessional booth incidentally, when we first saw it on set, was a little smaller than anyone had been banking on.

Christine: There are a bunch of iPhone pictures of me in the booth.

Chris: Did you look at any movies or anything set in church? I mean, were there any you looked at when doing this?

Arvin: Yeah. Uh-huh. There’s actually a Hitchcock film called I Confess.

John: Oh God, yeah.

Arvin: Which I looked at.

John: I forgot that. That’s really obscure.

Arvin: There’s some terrific confessional sequences in that. But I also had shot a major confessional sequence for a series called Ally McBeal which has become kind of like a cult moment in which the confessional has been bugged by a nun who wants to sell secrets to a reality TV show.

Everyone: [Awkward giggles] Wow.

Chris: That sounds like an Ally McBeal plot.

Arvin: Yeah. Totally Ally McBeal. So I used that for some of the imagery.

John: I also like the opposing colors on the backgrounds on either one. The high light to help point out which side you’re on. Yeah, this is really where D.B. Sweeney. - and the moment goes by so quickly, but it’s the foundation of the entire first season, which is - ‘You’re trying to kill yourself and take some guys with you. And it sort of blows by. But then if you look at the entire arc, that’s really one of the things we focus on. Nate’s not a good guy, you know, and he’s really building, he’s really redeeming this group of criminals by destroying himself.

Christine: And we’re talking about the team gelling and becoming closer. They are not close enough to call him on his problems.

John: Not until the end of the season. You can say bullshit by the way.

Christine: Can I? Can I say bullshit?

John: Sure. Yeah. I don’t care.

Chris: John does.

John: I do. I don’t think they’ve bleeped me yet.

Christine: I heard you were just going for it.

John: I am. It’s a non-stop torrent of filth on these commentaries.

Christine: Filth. Those ties. Wow. I love them. I love the way Scott’s dressed all the way through.

Arvine: Yeah, that was wonderful.

John: And co-opting the apostolic visitation for his own purposes.

Christine: Oh yeah. Terrific.

John: That’s it. That’s all I’ve got on this one.

Christine: That’s it? You’re done? That’s it?

John: Well I’m almost out of Guinness.

Christine: We didn’t even get to the [mumbles].

John: There’s a nice moment actually where we flip the Busey moment. And again, it was interesting - the ‘I’m going to confession.’ ‘So am I.’ was a joke take that led us to the plotline.

Chris: Well that’s how you wanna - when you wanna hide it, you wanna hide it in a joke. Not give it away.

Christine: Um-hum. For those of us who aren’t really good at plot, we just try to take the character stuff and make it into a plot.

Arvin: One of the things that you guys have cultivated that I love and I played on that here - is that sometimes these characters just appear. You don’t know where exactly they’ve come from or how they got there in any kind of logical terms.

John: I actually had a director say when I first started, ‘You know what? Unless they’re walking through the front door in a really interesting way, no one really wants to see them walk through the door.

Arvin: Yeah. And boy, this proves the point I think.

John: Yup: Also a lot of people missed - they’re actually hiding in the confessional in there. When she says ‘that closet’, a lot of people didn’t realize the geography. We’ve crammed them state-room like - A Night at the Opera like.

Arvin: Yeah. Which was with the image there for sure.

John: And this is also where Nate’s arrogance - and this is also really what the episode’s about - is Nate keeps trying to fix things by doing worse things.

Arvin: And this is another one of our circular shots.

Christine: Which is really kind of my favorite shot when it’s done well. And this is just beautiful.

John: Also the church helps. The fact that we’re in this beautiful church so we can get those stained glass windows in the 360. We’re shooting at night, so did we blow those out? We had lights behind those blowing in?

Christine: I believe, yeah. Or at least half of them.

Chris: And the use of candles and stuff? How did that play into, Arvin, in terms of the lighting of this? Did you use some of the natural candlelight when possible?

Arvin: We did. We did.

John: I mean, you can’t get a lot of film use out of it. They’re not good for practical, but they’re great for - look at how they pop out.

Chris: But they’re great atmosphere pieces.

Arvin: They’re just amazing. And they play again at the end.

John: And that’s a nice touch, by the way, is the very Catholic thing of knowing what the candles are for.

Arvin: Incidentally for this final mass, you know, this is one of the great uses of CGI in the episode.

John: This church is never more than half-full.

Christine: That’s right. We’re half empty depending.

John: Yeah. Depends on how you look at it. This is a doubled, CG crowd.

Arvin: That’s right.

John: Now how did you set that up? Did Mark Franco come down and help you set that up?

Arvin: Yes. Uh-huh.

Chris: Mark Franco’s our visual effects supervisor.

John: Uh-huh. Did you do all back to front or left to right? Left on one side and right on the other, right? Or did you just shoot them on one side and they just flipped it.

Arvin: It was all on the right.

Christine: And the the left a different order.

John: And then they just duped them. Yeah. And D.B. really digging in on a perfectly good sermon based on this parable, by the way.

Christine: Thank you very much.

John: You’re welcome.

Chris: You have a second career ahead of you.

Christine: Yeah.

John: When I got this script on my desk, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a perfectly good sermon on this parable. I’m actually fairly impressed.’ I feel somewhat redeemed.

Arvin: Now this is an example for me. This scene - this whole scene of how much can be accomplished on an episodic schedule. Which is just amazing. In a film, I mean, you have a complicated dialogue scene; you have the CGI of filling the church; and then the CGI of the miracle itself.

Christine: Plus picking everybody up.

John: Plus picking up coverage on all these actors.

Arvin: And this was a half - this was not our whole day.

[All Laugh]

Christine: Not it was not. There was not fat on Arvin.

John: There was no fat on Arvin’s shooting schedule at all.

Christine: No, not at all.

John: And how many times did D.B. have to do the sermon? How many? Did you run..?

Christine: I think he asked for an extra time.

Arvin: Yeah he was-

John: Uh! Look at that shot! Oh, that’s beautiful. You can’t build that on a set.

Arvin: Oh no. The ability to use this church was just extraordinary.

John: And he really-. And this is the trick to this - the entire thing is to basically indict each of the characters for the parable and also set up the heist. So D.B. is carrying - in a monologue - this entire show for about two and a half minutes. It’s really a great piece of acting. And he’s right by the way when he calls Nate on his bullshit.

Christine: At this point in the season, he’s the only one who can. Before we meet Maggie.

John: Exactly. And then the miracle itself. This was one of those ones where it really was still a miracle up until we were almost ready to shoot. ‘How do we steal the statue?’ ‘Working on it!’

Christine: We’ll figure it out.

John: Yep. And it was the fact that - uh, where did this come from? The fact that we had to make the lightweight versions of the statue anyway in order to do the miracles. That sort of backed us into, oh - you do the switch the night before.

Arvin: I live this way of showing them. Of the fact that we had created the lightweight this with the guys struggling.

John: With the lightweight thing by the way.

Arvin: Of course.

Chris: That’s acting folks.

John: That’s what the Oscar is for, is the heavyweight - is the fact he can act like things are heavy. A lot of people don’t know that.

Christine: This lovely young actress here.

John: Oh, she’s great in this.

Christine: She’s got more credits than a lot of us, let me tell you.

[All Laugh]

John: Yes, and the fact that they faked a miracle here is really reprehensible. I mean, we don’t often have the team do really horrible things, but speaking as a Catholic, this is a really terrible thing to do.

Christine: It’s pretty bad. Yeah. It’s pretty bad.

Chris: It’s pretty bad all around.

Christine: Although my grandma didn’t think it was so bad and I did give her the shoutout when Hardison talks about his Nana. She’s my Nana. She said, ‘It’s not so bad because it was for a good reason.’ And I said,’ Oh, the ends justify the means for you Nana. That’s fantastic. Thank you very much.’

[All Laugh]

Arvin: That’s interesting.

Christine: I felt great about it. Totally vindicated.

John: And I love how the team does not even try to hide itself as they try to frame the dude at this point.

Arvin: Right.

Christine: Chris Kane’s hilarious over there.

John: Yeah. Constant heckling. ‘You disgust me.’

Christine: Every take Aldis gave a different hilarious line. ‘You need Jesus’ was my favorite one. ‘You need Jesus.’ and walks off.

John: But this was interesting because again it’s one of the things when you write a con or a heist show, the geography of the heist and the sightlines which are usually very different, and so we had to rejigger how things were stolen, how he saw Parker, what the sightline was based on the location.

Chris: Look how many reactions shots have to be built in too here. It just literally one after the other.

Arvin: The story points of this whole sequence are just amazing, I mean, really. If you charted them out of every tiny bit that you have to tell.

John: Yeah, there’s an awful lot of - this scene in our show tends to make our break us, because it really is: how much of the show can you explain with flashbacks before you feel like you’re making shit up.

Christine: Right.

John: And this was a lovely reveal, by the way. I actually had no idea how the director was going to do this moment.

Christine: Oh I so happy about how this worked. This just…

John: [Quoting the script] ‘And then you reveal it’s Tim’. I don’t know! I don’t know how you do that! And you have him lean back and pull focus. It’s lovely.

Chris: It’s great.

John: I think we actually stole a police car for that.

[All Laugh]

John: We’d done that before in Chicago, but that’s another story for another commentary.

Chris: That should go on.

John: That’s a little harder. And I love the conspiratorial look there. It’s the only time Parker is ever in white. Her hair looks really 1940s there.

Arvin: It is, isn’t it?

Christine: Yeah, it’s really - she walked out to do that stunt shot and I couldn’t believe it. She came over to hug me, I said, ‘Don’t touch me, your hair is perfect. Don’t move. Don’t stand in front of a breeze. Just stay.’

John: And of course the bad guy’s bested by his own [something].

Chris: And the gloat!

John: And the gloat scene which we don’t do every episode. Kind of really satisfying.

Christine: And Scott adlibbing, ‘Are you even British?’ Which is just such a nice button.

[All Laugh]

Arvin: That was really great.

John: You know what’s weird? A lot of the time our buttons do come from our day players. In Homecoming it was the reporter saying, ‘We’re going with crap.’

Christine: Oh, that was hilarious.

John: And this is.

All [overlapping each other]: Oh, I love this.

Christine: Brotastic right here.

John: And I will say also from a strictly TV director standpoint, not to blow a little smoke up you, but this should be an incredibly boring moment - just visually. And that fact that you’re actually shooting from under them up is not a choice that a lot of people would make. The stained glass. It really opens it up; it’s a really nice choice.

Christine: Honestly, you know what they remind me of, just the way they’re lit? It’s just like two alter boys waiting, to me. And it’s gorgeous.

John: Yeah. Which is what they were.

Christine: Absolutely.

Arvin: And again, it’s - that sort of thing really does start with staging, because you have to realize. I mean we put them there very deliberately, you know.

Chris: And was this something that you had storyboarded or did you come into the day and thought, kind of - felt out?

Arvin: No, I mean, I always knew - I didn’t storyboard, because I don’t storyboard for most sequences, but I had in my head where it was going to take place from the beginning once we saw the location I knew how the last thing would work. And we placed the - when he moves to the In Memoriam area, all that was calculated far in advance as to what was in relation to what, you know.

Christine: Using the space again and just having him walk in like that.

John: And that’s also Gary Camp, our camera operator, who can shoot anything.

Christine: Oh, he’s fantastic. He can shoot anything!

Arvin: He’s amazing. He’s just amazing. And here again, is the candle imagery.

John: Which we don’t do a lot, actually, in the show. We don’t do extreme close-ups on the show. We do a lot of prop work, or foreground or background. It’s interesting - again, the great thing about TV is you get different directors every week and you get a stylistic mix and you get a show that sometimes looks a little different. And you realize, ‘Oh, we should do more of that.’

Arvin: But also this was in line with what you were talking about in the difference of this episode is that the psychological moment for him, for Timothy, at the end, is not a characteristic moment.

John: No.

Arvin: So I mean, to be that tight on him is almost- And then going with what you were saying about the team, what I love about the way this fell out was the privacy they gave him for that moment, you know.

Christine: Um-hm.

John: They’re respecting his pain.

Arvin & Christine: Yeah.

Christine: Because they’ve all got their own pain.

John: And this is the credit sequence where you get to say anything you want.

Chris: Anything you want. Any thing you left out?

Christine: Anything you want over the credit sequence? I don’t know.

John: Go ahead Boylan. Anything you left out. Any shoutouts.

Christine: I want Arvin to direct everything forever.

[All Laugh]

Christine: He makes me look good.

Arvin: [Laughs] It was wonderful working with Christine who’s sort of a first timer on this.

Christine: This is my first produced episode.

John: This is your first produced episode of television.

Chris: Two theatre veterans.

Arvin: The excitement that you brought to bear and the enthusiasm, I mean, I loved every moment.

Christine: It was like a directing class. I followed him around like a baby chick the entire time. I started getting earlier and earlier to set just to catch him during his walkthroughs. It was great.

John: And thank you very much Arvin and Christine for joining us.

Christine: Thank you. It was fantastic.

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 1 #Episode 6 #Season 1 Episode 6 #The Miracle Job

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tefltraininginstitute · 5 years ago

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The Art of Story Arcs and Transitions in Language Lessons (With Diederik Van Gorp)

Do lessons have a plot? Should classes have a story line? How do lesson plans resemble movie scripts? We speak with teacher trainer extraordinaire Diederik Van Gorp, about story arcs in lessons and how these affect our transitions form one activity to the next.

The Art of Story Arcs and Transitions in Language Lessons (With Diederik Van Gorp) - Transcript

Tracy: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. Let me introduce our special guest, Diederik.

Diederik Van Gorp: Hello.

Tracy: Welcome.

Diederik: Thank you very much.

Ross Thorburn: Just to check because I don’t think we said last time, it’s Diederik Van Gorp, right?

Diederik: Yes.

Ross: Just in case there's many other Diederiks out there. [laughs]

Diederik: I haven't met them yet.

[laughter]

[crosstalk]

Diederik: The dutch pronunciation would be Diederik Van Gorp. But I anglicized it slightly, I think automatically. When I was teaching children in China, it very quickly just became D.

Ross: I remember you saying that to me, "Just call me D."

[laughter]

Diederik: The first class, you introduce yourself and I just write a letter D. They thought it was hilarious because this person just has one letter as a name.

[laughter]

Diederik: They're very cute.

Ross: Diederik, you wanted to talk about transitions, which I think is really interesting. One, because there's not very much about it online, just as you pointed out. Two, actually when I started preparing for this, I also got to this point where I was like, "What does he mean?"

Diederik: I wondered as well. At one point, I was talking to a colleague, he's like, "The transitions were very smooth in this lesson, from one stage to the next." It was very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what that was, trying to find an article, you go online, or go to your books. There's almost nothing there. I guess now, they're creating the...

[crosstalk]

Diederik: One of the big things in the lesson is context. There's one stage of the lesson, you're going to the next stage. It can be very abrupt, means that the learners have no idea where did this come from. Good transition is, you either refer back, for example to the context, or you point to something that's going to happen later.

If you go from a nice lexis activity to a reading task and then all of a sudden there's this seven, eight words, students are matching them, you ask concept‑check questions, you drill it maybe, all of a sudden you say, "Read the text. Answer the questions." Where did this come from? It's a very clear instruction, there's no confusion possible but it's very mechanical.

Linking that activity to...these words were actually in the text. By quickly pointing that out or a listing, or, "Do you remember earlier on?" "Ah, yeah, yeah, we're going to read something about your friend Bob." It gives it coherence. There's something else that I quite like, if a lesson is a narrative, if a lesson is a story, then it becomes very coherent. I like it when it comes full circle.

I wrote for a while, writing dialogues for short movie clips to learn English. Basically, one of the things I learned there was, it's not just the movie that needs a beginning, middle, end. Even a dialogue needs a beginning, middle, end and there needs to be some kind of conflict.

If you look at a lesson, because they argue that the human mind is a bit wired for beginning, middle, end. For a lesson, it seems to be similar. You need a beginning, set it up well. You need to the meat, the most important part of the movie, most important part of the lesson. Then, some kind of closure at the end.

Very often, lessons fall flat because teachers are great at setting it up but it falls flat at the end because they run out of time and becomes very abrupt the end. That's why, watching a movie ‑‑ the bad guy got killed and that's the end of the movie ‑‑ we don't see them being happily ever after, getting married and all those things.

Ross: Interesting. I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" a while ago. It does end like that. I think the woman jumps off this tower and dies. Sorry, if you've not seen it.

[laughter]

Diederik: Spoiler alert.

[crosstalk]

Ross: ...and dies. Literally, the credits come on and you're still in this shock. You're like, "Oh, that's it?" Like you say, movies always, nowadays, we have this scene.

Diederik: Somehow, it links back to the beginning but there will be the change. With a lesson, that could be a nice idea to approach a lesson. If you fit your stages in there, finish on the high somehow.

Tracy: Do you know there is an activity, at least we played it in Chinese a lot when I was a kid. This kind of my understanding of transition in the class. You say Chinese [Chinese] .

Ross: Idiom.

Diederik: Idiom?

Tracy: Yeah.

Diederik: The four‑character idiom?

Tracy: Yeah, the four‑character idiom. The next person would have to use the last words from the last idiom and then next, the beginning of the next idiom. That's hard picture like a lesson transition.

Diederik: That's interesting. The last thing you do needs to be the first thing of the next stage. Something like that?

Tracy: Yes, something like that.

Ross: Your example earlier, Diederik, of that read‑this‑answer‑the‑questions, it's almost so abrupt you can imagine people going, "Did I hear that right?" Whereas if you say you have that who could remember these eight words? Can you see these words anywhere here? Oh, one of them's in the title. Where do you think the other set will be? Great. Now, read this and answer the questions."

Tracy: Another thing ‑‑ it might be related to transition ‑‑ is about the difficulty level. If you look at a lesson, it's a flow. Maybe at the very beginning something a little bit easier or less challenging. Then it's getting maybe a little bit more challenging. At the end, they can see how much they have improved.

Diederik: Then you release the pressure again a little bit at the end test, what have you learned or something?

Tracy: Yeah.

Diederik: When you introduce the language in a traditionally staged lesson, maybe in a movie where the conflict is introduced, we have an obstacle to overcome, it's this language point.

Ross: Is it Joseph Campbell? Is that the person? This idea of there's a story arc, there's only one story that basically people ever had...

[crosstalk]

Diederik: Yeah, or just a variation on the theme.

[crosstalk]

Ross: One great story but a lot of it. Certainly my favorite lessons that I've taught to start off with some...We're doing one like an activity. I think it's on my diploma at the beginning asking people, "Oh, I'm doing this. Are you interested in coming to this thing tonight?"

People turning down this invitation and at the end of the class, you go back and do the same thing again but, like the story, the characters have changed. Except in this, the language the students are using have changed. That's the difference, that's the development that's happened which is like a story.

I'm just so into this movie analogy now. You got me thinking of this great Chinese movie I love called "Shower" or Xǐ zǎo in Chinese. At some point in the movie ‑‑ it's some people who are in a bath house in Beijing ‑‑ it cuts to 50 years ago in this desert area of China. After five minutes, you start thinking, "Is this a mistake? Is there a problem with the DVD?"

It creates this expectation. Eventually, it cuts back. It's like the back story. The main character says, "That was your mother." This reminded me of doing teacher training years ago, doing an activity for writing lesson, getting them to do something stupid like, "Give them a dart board but no darts. Then ask them who's the best darts player."

I remember one of the trainees say, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?" One of the other ones goes, "There will be a point. You'll find out in a minute."

I think it's almost that same thing, isn't it? Like with the movies, it's creating this expectation. Sometimes, I don't know what's going on here but if I have belief in this teacher, this trainer, I know there's going to be a point.

Diederik: It must be there for a reason, but they must have been disappointed so many times.

[laughter]

[music]

Diederik: Just thinking of something related to transitions is, one of the main scales that a teacher needs is working with published materials, either course book or whatever that has been given to them. That teaching is going from one exercise to the next. "Are you finished?" "Yes." "Now, do exercise three. Do exercise four."

The teacher actually can see the flow of that lesson and just verbalizes it almost, "Yes, now we're going to put that into practice." Maybe transition are a bit more important than you think, to bring something that's dead on the page, bring it alive, give it purpose.

Tracy: When we're doing research about this topic before, not really much about it, do you think it's because transition in class, it doesn't affect the lesson a lot?

Diederik: Maybe for the feeling, for motivation of the students, maybe it does a little bit more than we think it does.

Ross: I think this also comes down to this idea that if your classes feel like a succession of unrelated activities, it's going to be very easy to give up as a learner. It's going to be very challenging to maintain motivation for a long period, isn't it? Like, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?"

Diederik: Another gap filled.

[laughter]

Diederik: There's another one. I just remembered this. When I started out as a teacher trainer, I was explaining to new students, if one stage does not go well, no problem. Every stage is like a new spring, you can start anew.

A stage that feels flat, the energy is drained, it was boring, whatever went on. Every stage is a new opportunity to re‑energize the students, project your voice. Transitions can actually spike the energy again.

[music]

Ross: I want to talk about what I actually thought you meant by transitions, which is completely different. What I think we spoke about there was teaching for adults or maybe teenagers but probably not like six‑year‑olds.

What I actually ended up writing about, taking notes on, was going from one activity to another with some very young learners, almost like this classroom management idea for kindergarten students. As an example, the chaos of some six‑year‑olds with bags coming in to a classroom...

Diederik: Almost a routine, in this part of the room, this happens, this is the storytelling corner, here we do the book work.

Ross: This is obviously potential, "All right. Everyone, move to the front of the room!" Then there's this, you can just imagine a car leaving a cloud of dust, things are flying out.

Diederik: The transition then would be sometimes counting, maybe sometimes a song.

Ross: Exactly. The idea that if you have those in place and you trained your students on them then all those moving from this part of the room to that part of the room or from a writing or a coloring activity, to another, are smoother and safer.

Diederik: Different cues, basically. That's similar to teaching adults. Some of the automatic things you do ‑‑ like they worked on their own and you let them compare around as in pairs ‑‑ there's this moment they do it automatically. They're also transitions, I guess.

Ross: The commonality between the two of those is that if you do a good job of them, they should become so natural that the longer you work with the students, almost the less instructions you need to give.

Diederik: I've seen a beautiful thing once where the student was so used to the techniques, because this person just came every month to every class of every training teacher, that if the teacher was about to give the handouts, while giving the instructions, she would give an act...

[laughter]

Diederik: It was like, "Oh, instruction before handout." She wouldn't say it. It's like she knew it.

Ross: Did you go by that point about it being logical and making sense? It reminds me of...Tracy, when you and I were in India a few years ago, we booked these cinema tickets. It was some beautiful old cinema in Jaipur. We bought these tickets. I think we assumed it was in English or at least it would have English subtitles, but it didn't. It was all in Hindi and had Hindi subtitles.

Because of the genre of the film, which was like Arnold Schwarzenegger‑esque action film, we were able to follow and understand the whole thing. It made complete sense even though we couldn't really understand a word in the whole movie. I think that's similar, isn't it?

Diederik: Yes, it's very similar. I remember watching Disney movies on the small screen in a long‑distance bus in Turkey. It was all in Turkish. I could understand everything, I think "Kung Fu Panda" and I'm indeed [inaudible 12:56] . It's like, yeah, this is the moment that the obstacle is introduced.

Ross: It's almost like that you think of the brain being hardwired, the stories are hardwired for a language classes, something, right? They will know the beginning, middle, end.

Diederik: When people really hate a movie, very often, it's an art‑type movie that they accidentally watched. A lot of people do like it but they're not the mainstream.

Ross: Or it doesn't wrap up at the end, there's no ending to it.

Diederik: Like the Coen Brothers movies, [inaudible 13:20] at the end.

Ross: That almost reminds me of another point. I think Donald Freeman had an article. It was called "From Teacher to Teacher Trainer." He talks about, how can you tell if your training was successful?

He said, people smiling, high‑fiving each other at the classroom doesn't mean they learned anything. People leaving confused and disappointed doesn't mean they didn't learn anything. That's almost like the Coen Brothers just because at the end of the movie, "What on earth was that about?" It doesn't mean it was a bad movie.

Diederik: It makes you think maybe.

Ross: Those are movies that I love where you're still thinking about what could the ending mean weeks or months after.

Diederik: Let's say an action movie, the immediate response is satisfaction but you want to remember it, you want to talk about it more.

[music]

Tracy: Thanks very much for listening. Thank you so much, Diederik, for coming to our podcast.

Diederik: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Tracy: All right. See you next time.

Diederik: See you.

#narrative #story #plot #transitions #segues #movies #cinema #genre #prediction #instructions #teacher training #teacher talk #Diederik Van Gorp #Practical Classroom Ideas

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