Hi, I'm Dan Sackheim, the director of the Harsh Realm pilot you're watching, as well as the executive producer of the series.
So the idea here was 1990s UN peacekeepers trapped in a church in Sarajevo, and we actually used downtown Vancouver for Sarajevo. Built a church and pulled in truckloads of debris, basically shut down the whole town for two days.
And this is the introduction of our hero, Tom Hobbes, played by Scott Bairstow, and his buddy there, Major Mel Waters, played by Max Martini.
This was sort of shot in a style, I guess you'd say reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, in the sense of a blue, dark world, gritty, men in midst of battle. And this was actually an old, abandoned department store. I found this department store where they had ripped out the escalators and created like six layers looking up into the sky, shafts of light, and it was raining on the day that I found it. So we sort of kept that motif going, by putting water pipes above and having the rain drip down, a sort of dreary, dangerous world.
And of course, here you have the introduction of your sort of selfless, pure-of-heart hero, going in for his buddy, risking his own life.
We actually put the guys through about four days, five days, of boot camp training with Colonel Dale Dye who is sort of the official trainer who prepares these guys for combat missions in all the movies, Saving Private Ryan, all those big war films. Taught them how to walk, carry their packs, use guns. And here's sort of another example of using, the intention was to make this very dramatic and cinematic with wide frames and dramatic lighting, the rain coming down, the hot backlight.
I remember this day, actually we shot this and we never completed the sequence, so we had to go on the last day of filming to complete this part of the sequence and we built a small portion of the set in a warehouse and it was the very last day of shooting and we were going into the holiday weekend and it was a 23-hour day of shooting. This was the very last thing that we shot.
This symbol that he's looking at actually comes up later in the piece and it's sort of the foreboding in terms of what's to come, having to do with this world that Hobbes is going to enter in the piece, this virtual world. And here of course is the mystery of what happens.
Harsh Realm was actually, it was based very loosely on a comic book that I was turned on to a number of years ago by my agents at Creative Artists, a guy by name of Chris Monian, and it was really the story of a guy whose job, he's a detective, and he goes in and he rescues people out of a virtual reality game, that sort of illegal game, underground game, people go into and they get lost and he's the guy who goes and gets him out. So what we ended up with was a pretty different model. It has largely to do with Chris Carter's belief, my partner in crime, and the guy who created it. This notion of finding something that felt accessible and real that the audience could relate to. Something that they felt could really exist and really happen, which is where this whole notion of the military angle comes in play.
And here we are several years later, we see Hobbes is very much alive, and we're now about to meet his fiancée, played by the lovely Samantha Mathis, Sophie Green. A vision of beauty. And here's, I think it's really charming in this scene, he's trying to avoid looking at her in the wedding dress because the tradition that a groom is never supposed to look at the bride in the wedding dress before the wedding speaks to his sense of tradition and values and humility, all the things that Chris and I were trying to instil in this character. Actually, the name Tom Hobbes, he's named after the 19th century philosopher who believed in predestination, that people were inherently selfish and power-hungry, which is more or less what the character discovers in his journeys in this piece.
And there, in the corner of that photograph, is Max Martini who played Mel Waters who is the guy we saw him trying to protect in the building that was being bombed out in Sarajevo.
We actually shot this in a real complex that was for housing Canadian military.
Scott Bairstow you might remember from his days on Party of Five, a kind of love interest to Neve Campbell.
This was a Quonset hut that we actually built in Vancouver and that we actually will, as you'll later see, that we blew up.
This is Lance Henriksen who did a cameo for us, he was the star of Millennium, another Chris Carter series, who we got to come in and do this small little role for us.
Some fantastic dialogue written by Chris, really interesting and always sort of leads you to want more, you know, sort of peek behind the curtain. It's always very much gauged towards creating mystery, mystery elements.
And this is sort of inspired in a sense by the Last Supper. Chris was always looking for mythological and/or religious parables that he could play on in the series. Hobbes really is, in a sense, he's become sort of the saviour, the chosen one, almost a Christ-like figure.
Get a little glimpse of this woman at the table, that's Inga Fossa we will soon meet, played by Sarah-Jane Redmond, very fine Canadian actress, and she will be sort of the Mata Hari figure in this piece, almost like a double spy.
So the pursuit of Santiago, this rogue general who's more or less taken over this military game, is a homage somewhat to Colonel Kurtz.
We see Hobbes in this room. There were a number of conversations that happened in the conception of the piece about how we bring Hobbes into this virtual world. There are all kinds of sophisticated devices, we're going to use computers and so forth, and Chris opted, I think very wisely so, to use to a very simple, in fact a low-tech approach, in a sense so that we don't really know what's happening, we don't really know when the journey's complete. He looks at these special headphones with these little receptacles on them.
Now on the chair you'll see the writing 'siege', 'perilous', this was an idea of Chris's that these were actually the words that were written on the chair that King Arthur sat in, the first legend of King Arthur, whoever sits in this chair unless they are worthy to occupy this chair will turn to ash.
This is the voice of Gillian Anderson, from the X-Files, who did a little cameo for us in this. And the notion behind this video that Hobbes is watching was very much inspired by the video from the 1960's film 'The Parallax View', 1960s or 1970s, but very much about paranoia and government control, a very famous Alan Pakula film. It also sets up the purpose for this military game, this military virtual reality game, so it serves two purposes. And of course as it turns out that this device, this video, these headphones you watch becomes his entry into this virtual world.
Of course intercutting these clipped, staticky images with closeups of Hobbes to create the illusion that we somehow penetrated something gone into his head.
As you may recall, here is the room where he sat earlier, having breakfast with all the officers.
And we actually shot all of the material inside here on a sound stage. This is the character of Mike Pinocchio, played by DB Sweeney, this is sort of the antagonist of the piece who turns out in the long run to be Hobbes' ally. At the moment he is the tough guy, I guess you would say with the heart of gold.
We get a little sense here of what's going on, it's all being told from Hobbes' point of view, who are these people, what are they doing here. And Hobbes' only weapon now in the hands of this guy.
As I was saying earlier, we shot this on a sound stage and we had had some trees and rocks out through that doorway and it became obvious to us that it looked like a bunch of trees and rocks outside of a wall, so we had to go through and frame by frame replace everything outside that door with what's called plates or images shot up in the port of Vancouver.
And here's your Mexican stand-off, inspired by a John Woo film. You know the guy's going round, world spinning out of control. As a big fan of the movie 'Hardboiled' and I always wanted this scene to be reflective of the stand-off between two characters.
Real helicopter, real explosion, real actor in front of the explosion with a computer-generated missile. Anyway, the idea here was obviously to create a scenario where the world is spinning out of control as much as humanly possible. One minute he's having breakfast with these guys, next minute he's in a completely different world, being attacked, helicopter chasing after him, being shot at, by we don't know whom. And again, another moment here to show Hobbes as this selfless hero, picking up a complete stranger to rescue him, and the guy gets shot and the effect we called the 'digitised' which we'll explain later on the piece.
And out of one of the helicopters comes a mystery officer and we soon reveal that it's Waters, the same guy that Hobbes saved two years ago in the basement in Sarajevo.
And now the appearance of our first mythical character from this world, played by Rachel Hayward, the character Florence who is a mute and inspired by the notion of Florence Nightingale.
I remember when she came in, she was this beautiful, tall woman who almost looked like a fashion model and we were looking for someone who can convey the sense of beauty and yet power and muscularity, and of course we find that she has this magic touch of healing, ergo Florence, and she saves Hobbes' life. Anyway, she came in and she had shoulder length hair, and Chris kept making her come back and back and back, cutting her hair and cutting her hair and cutting her hair, before we would agree to give her the part, because we wanted her to look really military. I remember just about the last time she came in, she just about broke down into tears, and said: I sure hope I get this part because I don't have any of my hair left. And fortunately she did.
So we then went into this town where we had shot the beginning of the piece, this pristine, beautiful, anywhere America, and we torched it, trashed it, with broken glass all over the streets and brought in truckloads of trash, and here's actually the home that we went into, sort of deconstructed it.
And of course the notion here is that he is in essence in a parallel universe, this virtual reality where we duplicated his world, only his world is very different. Right down to his dog. And the allusion there to Dexter is that it was his beloved dog who had died a couple of years before, and yet that character, that dog, was mapped and created digitally before it died, so although it had died in the real world it hadn't died in the digital world or the virtual world. This is the church that we see Hobbes has driven by in the beginning of the piece, this is actually where he and Sophie were to be married. Only now in this world it turns out that it's a brothel.
And there's Mike Pinocchio with Hobbes' wedding ring.
I guess this is what you call Mexican stand-off times thirty.
And of course here's a reference to Santiago, which is again like sort of the rogue colonel, the rogue general, inspired by 'Apocalypse Now'. And of course what we're going to discover here is there is history between Mike Pinocchio and Santiago. Santiago who is played by Terry O'Quinn. Actually the character's named General Omar Santiago, which was inspired by Omar Bradley, the famous general.
Here is Mike Pinocchio's car, which is sort of this retro fitted muscle car, we put all kinds of pipes in and grids and screens on. This whole thing was conceived as kind of a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic world. And this famous fence, also sort of inspired by the Berlin wall. This was to keep people out of the prize city of Harsh Realm.
First time "a-hole" was used on television.
It was one of those sequences that just for some reason, I remember it as being the most frustrating and bitter experience to shoot. It took us forever to shoot it, it was very, very cold and I had the flu, and I had a 102 fever and it was like 32 degrees, freezing cold, and the sun was coming up, and we ended up having to sort of recreate this in different parts of Vancouver to actually complete it. There is the beautiful city of downtown Vancouver, aka Santiago City. And there is the patch, which is the symbol that if you remember Hobbes saw down in the basement when they were being bombed in Sarajevo.
Beautiful downtown Vancouver, aka Santiago City. And here we go, we meet Major Waters.
I want to say, I think it was about 5 million dollars and about 16 days to do it, which is a short amount of money for the amount of action that's in the piece and the number of visual effects in their day.
Of course here is Samantha Mathis, so our reveal is that Sophie, his wife from the real world, exists in Harsh Realm and is actually married to Waters, Max Martini's character. And of course she doesn't know who he is because she's never met him in this world.
Most TV series are shot in about eight days and most TV pilots are shot in about anywhere from twelve to 16 days.
The conception behind this place that we never really were able to achieve the way we wanted to achieve it, but the notion was that in Santiago City you see everyone is finely dressed and it was almost like pre-war Germany, Nazi Germany, everyone is suppressed and yet living this wonderful life.
You can see there were places in the city where we actually had huge posters and lighted figures of General Santiago, that he had actually, he had become this almost Hitler-esque character.
And there he is on the side of the bus: one people, one nation, one Santiago.
Back to the fence.
Of course, what we now come to realise is that everyone who lives in Santiago City, and actually I think in Harsh Realm, they have a little chip in them, so they can be tracked, computer chip.
And here we were, a typical night in Vancouver in the rainforest where it rains.
Everyone has this tracking device, this bar code.
So of course the idea here is that there are virtual characters and there are real people, so the notion is that it's a two-class system, that Hobbes is a real character that has somehow been transported into this world, as is Mike Pinocchio. And Sophie here, Samantha Mathis, is a virtual character, that she's not really real.
VC - short for Virtual Character.
This was actually created and shot prior to the Matrix, the first Matrix movie, coming out. And as it seems as in the zeitgeist, you know, a number of similarly-themed projects sort of tend to evolve at the same time, so although it was conceived prior to the Matrix coming out, it actually was aired about, as I recall, three months after the movie.
These guys were referred to as the "disco soldiers" because Chris Carter actually shot this sequence with them out in the rainforest and one of the takes he put on some disco music and they sort of started dancing to it.
This was a dock in Vancouver and one of the interesting things that when you plan for a shoot you don't always take into account is the fact that the water rises and falls in the ocean, tide comes in, tide goes out. And so what we find is we're dealing with the boat, one moment you would shoot a character standing in front of the boat, you turn around, shoot something else, and you turn back and now the boat was four feet lower in the water. So we would do all kinds of tricks like put the character on his knees and shoot him from the chest up, so that we didn't give away the fact that the tide had changed.
This becomes sort of the crucial test of Pinocchio's moral compass, for lack of a better word. Is he going to stop Hobbes or is he going to let him send his true love away.
Chris was absolutely fantastic in terms of his use of music in the piece, he was very involved in it and he would actually write it into the script, select it.
And this, of course, becomes Santiago's introduction here.
Terry O'Quinn, who plays Santiago, is actually probably best known for his role in the cult-classic 'Stepfather', a series of movies where he's this psychotic stepfather who kills one of his family after the next after the next.
Great guy. Very serious actor. Very commanding presence.
We wanted him to be sort of a poetic, romantic figure, I guess I should say. A man who speaks in rhymes.
I love this notion that Chris created here of a virtual world and even in this virtual world there you have the wrong side of the tracks, you have a world split in half, by the haves and the have nots, by people living in desperation and people living with all the means and money at their disposal.
And of course the dilemma of your hero having this choice foist upon him, to sell his soul. Of course, he walks into the room, he hasn't eaten in two days and this beautiful buffet put in front of him.
And this is the first allusion to the legend, to the saviour.
So the comparisons to a film like the Matrix are fairly obvious in terms of the mythical legendary aspects of the storytelling.
Of course, another allusion to the legend. I think this is the first time, too, that we draw the relationship between Florence and Mike Pinocchio. And of course the bad guy who falls in love with the dog and can't bring himself to eat the dog. And again, Florence, this sort of romantic figure, this mute with all kinds of powers.
One of the sort of famous wormholes that's created in this digital world. It was really a challenge because there were all kinds of things that you could do that you couldn't do in the real world, and yet Chris was very insistent on us having definite rules that we would follow. You know, in much like the X-Files, we wanted it in its own way to sort of seem real and perilous and Chris has his famous saying: it's only as scary as it is real.
And of course, here's the backstory with Pinocchio, that he worked for Santiago and became a deserter from his army.
And somehow across this divide, this electronic divide, in this virtual world, this virtual character somehow makes a connection and realises that she's meant to be with this guy. It's really a great romantic story. The woman that he's destined to be with in any world.
We shot this in an old hotel in Vancouver, and I remember just going, shot it in such a way to make these halls look endless. There were sort of two hallways here and we just kept going down them and turning corners and turning corners, and it's what's called cheating, to make the appearance that you're in a different place.
But I love these long endless corridors. And of course had the reprise of the music that we used at the docks.
And the death of Sophie. And this immense, the animus between Hobbes and Waters, and sort of creates the catalyst for the series. These two men that were once great friends, now pitted against each other. And Waters has in essence murdered his own wife, and yet at the same time, murdered the one and only true love for Hobbes.
So we're up in this hotel, shooting into all hours of the evening, people complaining because they're making calls because they feel that people are being shot on a floor below.
Santiago clearly not a man of compassion. And yet a man who realises the big picture here.
So the idea here was that this was to be his diary, every week he would enter another passage in his diary, to his wife. And now sort of the surprise ending. That in essence being a virtual world it is all in his head, and yet it's real, if he dies in that world he dies here. And to reveal here that the world is populated by a number of people, the shot that we're about to reveal here was inspired much by the shot that Chris and I came up with for the end of the X-Files pilot where there is a small piece of evidence of extraterrestrial planetary life that's hidden away in a huge warehouse. And we kind of applied the same approach. This is sort of an homage to the end of the X-Files, it's just a warehouse with about ten bodies in it and we just sort of, technically it's called cloning.
Anyway, that's it, and I hope you enjoyed it.