Harsh Realm pilot episode
Transcript of DVD commentary
by Chris Carter
[Transcribed by Libby]
I'm Chris Carter, the writer and producer of the pilot of Harsh Realm, the series.
[An urban battlefield - Sarajevo 1994.]
The opening sequence is actually filmed on a downtown Vancouver street. There was a building that was used on X-Files, Millennium and Harsh Realm, that was an old department store called The Woodwards. Ironically, it was a family department store of Michelle McClaren who had come on to produce the television series of Harsh Realm, it was her family, going back to the turn of the century. But it took the place for Sarajevo here, a scene that was inspired by a terrific movie called Welcome to Sarajevo. Set designed by Graham Murray, beautifully designed. It's hard to make things look beautiful and semi-destroyed at the same time, beautiful and ugly at the same time.
This is the interior of that same building. Dan Sackheim did a very nice job with a very small amount of time. Any time you shoot weapons, reloading, resetting, replastering, everything has to be planned logistically very carefully because you are partially destroying the set every time you shoot.
Harsh Realm is really a story about heroism. Scott Bairstow, playing the character of Tom Hobbes, named after the philosopher, but ironic to that Hobbes' most famous quote which I think is "Life is short, brutish and nasty", but this Tom Hobbes is a romantic, an innocent, an optimist, which is what interested me in the character and in the story - about a man who is selfless, willing to risk his own life, for ultimately his bride, for his friend here. The kind of heroes we don't see in life these days, but we see it more in battlefield; it's just not legally tenable to act heroically which is why I think these stories resonate with us now.
Mark Snow's subtle, beautiful music here.
[Tom Hobbes: I never believed in fate, or destiny or that stuff about your path already being chosen.]
It was a choice to do a voice-over, to be in Tom Hobbes' head, and it gave the series a kind of literary quality which I liked a lot. I very much admired the movie Thin Red Line which came out around the same time as the Spielberg warpic Saving Private Ryan. The voice-over was inspired by that but ultimately I'm not sure if the audience liked that sort of thematic narrative.
[Fort Dix, Jew Jersey. Present day.]
This was actually a military housing in Vancouver. Samantha Mathis, who gets billing her as special guest star.
I think she was the last actress we saw for this part, and we saw many, many actresses to play the wife of Tom Hobbes.
Once again, Vancouver giving us so many opportunities to shoot different environments, cities, urban and rural.
Certain actors from other series stepping in here.
Lance Henriksen was kind to step off his hard work and hard schedule at Millennium to come over and play a superior officer for Tom Hobbes here. He has the intensity and the gravity that we needed to set the game in motion which would destroy all Tom Hobbes' hopes and dreams and plans for the future.
[Around the meal table.]
A scene that was inspired by the very famous scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen's character gets his assignment in a very similar way.
Introduction of the primary characters also in the pilot and the series.
So this is what interested me in the idea, which originally came from a comic book. We took really nothing from the comic book except the idea that there is a virtual world which the main character enters and has certain adventures. The whole military angle was my idea, it was interesting to me that the military was and is playing war games, virtual war games. This was one you could actually enter, at least you could enter it through your mind, through a sort of artificial, virtual transfer.
What Tom Hobbes doesn't know is that he is going to be a prisoner of the military here, who is sending him in, not just to play a game but to take care of Omar Santiago, who they know has hijacked the game.
The opportunity here was to tell stories in parallel worlds, to have reality and to have surreality or virtual reality as a point/counterpoint to one another.
And people recognize the voice of the narrator here - Gillian Anderson also taking some time off and generously given us not just her voice but her terrific ability to read scientific material believably as the scientist or, in this case, a military person.
And what Tom Hobbes doesn't know, doesn't anticipate, is that he is now in the game.
DB Sweeney's entrance as Mike Pinocchio. A man also trapped in the game who has no rules, obeys no rules, no superior, but will become Hobbes' best friend, an ally, and who explains to him the game, the consequences.
[Hobbes and Pinocchio in a Mexican standoff.]
A little John Woo here.
I think during the pilot and the entire series we had about two military vehicles to use and somehow we made them look like a hundred vehicles - clever cutting, planning. The use of this helicopter was a one-time use. Trying to do battle and war without the elements and tools of war is always a trick.
Tom Hobbes recognizes a face, a face we recognize from the opening scenes of the piece, his friend Waters. Hobbes still not realizing that he's in a game and that everyone's values, objectives and loyalties are different.
The introduction of another character, played by Rachel Hayward who plays Florence - after Florence Nightingale.
Florence is a speechless character who everyone seemed to love and was sorry to see go when the series was cancelled. The haircut which she has, which is sort of boyish short, was approached very delicately. She did not want to cut her hair this short but I think it actually added to the character and she's got such naturally beautiful bone structure, she's very lean and fit - Rachel is - it gave her a kind of military bearing which we needed. I heard she's since grown her hair down to her waist. [laughs]
I'm reminded that originally we went to Vancouver on the X Files six or seven years previously just for the forest. How beautifully the forest works here in Harsh Realm.
Once again, the idea to take away everything a man held dear, and destroy it. And to watch him survive and try to put it back together. I think the idea of the parallel worlds was confusing to people. I think that either we didn't do a good enough job of explaining it or people just weren't interested in seeing this sort of story telling which I think is always great - Philip Dick, as a science fiction writer, turned it into a fine art.
[In the bar.]
The casting call for this was, we wanted the raunchiest-looking women we could find, not necessarily the most beautiful, but somehow all the raunchy-looking women found their way to the sidelines and the beautiful women found their way in front of the camera, as is prone to happen, but we wanted this to be a place where anything could happen and where Hobbes would see quickly that there are no rules and there are no friends, and there is no right and wrong, it's just survival.
I remember when the show was finally cancelled after nine episodes, actually after three episodes aired, the Vancouver papers went after us and criticized the dog, which is a funny thing, I guess they considered it to be last year's dog, because the same breed of dog had been on Frasier. I guess this serves for some people as criticism. I found it to be a funny potshot that was taken because we'd had so much success and now we were off the air with this show, that people were criticizing us even for our choice of dogs.
The dog's name is Dexter after the original character in the comic book "Harsh Realm" but that's one of the few things that we actually took from that original comic book series.
A little road-wire touch with the car. This fence was actually a very short piece of fencing and CGI set extension, making it look like it goes on for ever and ever, a kind of Berlin Wall dividing Santiago's world and the lawless world outside.
Originally I had written it as just as an electric fence but Dan Sackheim and Frank Spotnitz, reading the script, thought we needed to have a kind of virtual element here, something that was different than the real world, that told us we weren't in Kansas any more.
[Santiago City Perimeter.]
Beautiful downtown Vancouver.
The re-introduction of Tom Hobbes' best friend, a man whose life he saved in the real world. And who he is now about to find has taken his most valuable possession.
[Hobbes and Waters in Waters' apartment. Sophie arrives home.]
I thought that was a pretty great twist. The turn here that his fiancée does not recognize him in the game, in the Harsh Realm, and now he's got to take her hostage, she is the wife of his best friend.
[Hobbes and Sophie on the street.]
Beautiful cinematography here. A big street scene, shot by Joel Ransom who had done such beautiful work on the X Files. Santiago, functioning as a kind of Saddam Hussein here.
William Gibson saw the pilot and liked it very much, and it had come on the heels of the success of The Matrix and he called The Matrix a 70 million dollar trailer for Harsh Realm, but that didn't turn out to work to our benefit.
[Back at the fence, they trip the alarm. Subsequently, they go to Pinocchio's hide-out where Hobbes discovers Pinocchio's name.]
The name Mike Pinocchio came from a guy I grew up with, played baseball with. I just liked the name because it suggested a liar and a person who was somewhat untrustworthy, but who would turn out to be the opposite.
[Pinocchio explains to Hobbes the situation he's now in. Soldiers are searching the forest.]
I actually shot these scenes. I shot an entire night out in the rain, this is Vancouver rain, in the rainy forest. We ended up using about, probably less than 20, 25 seconds of several hours of hard work, cold, hard work.
This shoot was very difficult because of the number of locations. The scope of the pilot which had to paint not just a real world but an entire virtual world and give it dimension and believability. Two sets, or a location and a set, functioning as one here. That hole that the soldier jumped in to was dug on set and connected through a cut to a hole we built on stage.
[Boat at dockside.]
Once again here, another big, big scene, lots of extras. Shot on, I believe, Falls Creek in Vancouver.
[Hobbes pleads with Sophie to go on the boat.]
We wanted to play that there was some connection between the virtual world and the real world, that Hobbes could look into the eyes of his real fiancée in this virtual world and make a connection to her and that she could see that that connection was real, even though she had never met this man before. It's strange that there's a kind of moment in the X Files pilot like this, when Scully is looking through a one-way mirror at Mulder, or she can't see him but she senses his presence and it's the same thing, an almost psychic connection between two characters.
That shot always bothered me. It was blurry because it was blown up so much. That boat never moved out of the dock quickly enough for me, but these are things you sacrifice on a pilot budget, pilot schedule. Never enough soldiers, never enough sense of danger.
The idea was to keep this character of Santiago, who got bigger and bigger through reference to him, seeing his world and what he controlled. We delayed the introduction of him so that it makes his character that much bigger and more powerful. We didn't want to play him as a big, powerful character. We wanted to play him as a much more sober one.
And Terry O'Quinn had done such great work on both Millennium, and X-Files in a more limited way, and we wanted to give him a starring role here. I think he was terrific.
We wanted to him to seem like a sane and virtuous character, but that he was obviously insane, possessed, megalomaniac.
[Hobbes: What about those outside the fence?
Santiago: Those people are just on the wrong side. As you were. You must be able to see that now. You've been sent on a mission from which you can't return.
(Sophie has been captured along with others on the boat and they are marched into a cell.)
Santiago: A man could have it all here.]
The attempted corruption of Tom Hobbes.
[Hobbes in the dining room.]
We wanted to show him as ravenous. He hadn't eaten since he had been in the game, so creature comforts are a feature of the game. My wife actually hated that scene, she hated the way that Tom Hobbes ate, she said people don't eat like that even when they're starving.
[Sophie: I never believed the stories, but I believe them now. About another world. And the man who's coming to save us.
(Santiago slaps her.)
Santiago: I am your savior! I am that man.]
So Tom Hobbes' introduction into the world, his arrival, has actually created a problem for Santiago. And what Hobbes doesn't know is that he is legend, he is mythic to the game, the idea that there will be a savior, a hero, that will come and destroy Santiago, who will come and free everyone inside the game.
We actually took an entire floor of a Vancouver hotel in downtown Vancouver. As you'll see, we shoot it up pretty well. There was concern about the other hotel guests and the gun fire, and these are always problematic things when you need to shoot an elegant environment in a real, practical location.
[During the rescue of Hobbes and Sophie, Sophie is killed by Waters.]
And the unexpected, and I thought this was a good twist too, that as soon as Hobbes had convinced Sophie to come with him, that she disappears from him in the virtual game and the only way he can get back to her now is by getting back to the real world, defeating Santiago. And he'll need Mike Pinocchio to do that.
And the Raiders of the Lost Ark shot.
[The real world.]
Where we see that Hobbes is actually lying on a gurney in the real world along with so many others who also are prisoners in the game. This, at a time before, or when you could tell about military conspiracies - now I think the subject would be much less palatable.