Everyone thinks his dark materials is a location- and VFX-based show. And that’s just a presumption: oh, they’ve got money! But it’s not. There are VFX in it, and there are a few locations, in equal measure, but we built this enormous amount of stuff to make a flavor and a tone. It’s funny – you look at Cittàgazze, people aren’t going to think we built that in Wales! But we did. People were sitting there having coffees. You get lost around it. It was a huge, huge space – and fun.
I was also well aware that we had young actors who are really talented. We wanted to give them something to physically engage with. I know that Dafne [Keen] and Amir [Wilson] ended up sneakily writing my name all over the town because they said I’d made it. They were saying, “See if you can spot where we’ve written it!” So that was quite naughty…
THE HISTORY OF CITTÀGAZZE
I started with a mound of rock and a small building, and I built the history of this entire town upwards, over centuries. When you have a place of homage and reverence people often spiral around it, a bit like an old castle where people would build their homesteads around the castle walls. It would be a magnet to people. So over the centuries, people have built their way around the tower. We worked out the history of the place. It was where they forged the knife and they built the tower on top of the ironsmith. The mound grew and the town grew as the greed around the knife grew.
REAL WORLD INFLUENCES
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INSCAPE
THE TRUTH IS JUST A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
GALLOWGLASS
To adapt Leo Tolstoy’s observation that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, each member of such a family is uniquely unhappy in his or her own particular fashion.
DOORS OF SLEEP
Some people dream of other worlds; Zax Delatree actually travels to them when he sleeps.
The Living Sea Of Waking Dreams
World On Fire
WONDER WOMAN 1984
In a league of her own
TENET
You Only Live Twice
SUITING UP
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE ACTOR PLAYING THE TITLE ROLE LEAVES YOUR SHOW? CAROLINE DRIES EXPLAINS HOW BATWOMAN BEGINS AGAIN
WHOOPI GOLDBERG
A big sci-fi fan, she’d have loved to have been the first female Doctor...
WE'RE ALL DOOMED!
CELEBRATED ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR, BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS THE SHOW EXPLORED MATTER MORE THAN EVER. SPEAKING IN 1988, CO-CREATOR GERRY DAVIS REVEALED HOW HE AND KIT PEDLER SCARED THE NATION
KIERAN LARWOOD
Write Of The Lepus: meet a children’s author whose heroes are rabbits