It’s a great thing in a writing career when you find yourself in business with a set of people who genuinely seem to like what you do, and whom you like in return. I’ve been lucky, it’s happened to me a few times over the years, and earlier today a change-of-address email triggered memories of my times with Zenith, where my dealings were mostly with Scott Meek and Archie Tait.
It began when Zenith picked up Chimera. They then took feature options on Valley of Lights and Down River, and we began TV development on Victorian Gothic (which would eventually beget the Sebastian Becker books) and a four-part adaptation of my second novel for Sphere, Follower. They backed me for my writer/director debut on Rain, with David Lascelles producing (see Horrocks, Capaldi, and the Rain That Never Fell).
None of that happened. I hope that the company’s sudden demise wasn’t down to our relationship but that’s how it ended, with pitches pitched, screenplays written, seasons planned, and then… it was over.
Regrets? None. I had a great time with good people and I got paid. You have to enjoy the game for its own sake because if you’re only about the glory, you’ll spend 90% of your life fretting about it. I have many, many projects into which I put a huge amount of work with a genuine prospect of seeing them realised, which got so far and then were stopped at somebody’s desk.
Follower, for instance. A Scandi-set tale with a shapeshifter creature and a cabin-in-the-woods finale. To research it I’d backpacked my way up along the Norwegian coast into the Arctic Circle, travelling by local ferries and buses and at one point spending three days on a stranded train in a snowdrift. In cahoots with Scott and Archie I devised a complete four-part treatment of the novel and wrote three drafts of a pilot episode. We’d planned on spinning drama to a track of Hounds of Love while the Duffer Brothers were still in their high chairs.
And speaking of brothers… earlier today I found myself looking through the Follower file and being reminded of the plans we’d made. If you’re aware of the Quay Brothers, you’ll know that they’re artists and filmmakers strongly influenced by Eastern European animation from the likes of Jan Svankmaer and Jiří Trnka. Looking for a way of going next-level with our FX in this new show, and not wanting to imitate anything that had gone before, I’d pitched to Archie the idea of sounding them out for their prospective involvement.
Here’s how I developed my thinking in a memo at the time. Bear in mind, this was the mid-90s. The look of TV drama was changing, but generally speaking it still looked like TV:
On CHIMERA we talked about looking at the available talent among Britain’s world-class comics artists but simply didn’t have the time available to pursue it. If we can bring in someone who can give us a cracking good look for the Follower, fully rendered artwork with the kind of precision and detail that can be translated directly into three dimensions, we can use that look as a springboard for the overall production design and also use the same person to develop storyboards for the set-piece sequences …
… The other way would be to hire the Quay Brothers both for design and execution, and extend their influence to a number of the interior settings for a sense of visual integration. The potential big advantage: a kind of thrilling and disturbing originality. The potential disadvantage: that we might get an art house horror for peak time viewing, like getting in the Poltergeist audience and bewildering them with Eraserhead. But if one could successfully negotiate a marriage between the two forms—solidly conventional narrative combined with the evocation of genuine nightmare—one could have something really special. A possible drawback: that they might be masters on the tabletop but less willing to embrace other available technologies so that you’d get puppet interludes rather than realistically integrated effects. But they’ve done a range of stuff from opera set design to Ronseal commercials, so I don’t imagine that they’re particularly narrow or precious in their outlook.
We hadn’t approached the Quays at this point and it’s entirely possible that they might not have been interested in lending their gothic aesthetic to a TV drama. But the prospect was an exciting one, and Archie took it on board and started to make enquiries of their agent. My memo ranged around other subjects, including the casting of children and the resistance of ITV managers to a real-world use of languages and subtitles (a problem I’d later hit as director on Oktober). But in the end it came back to the same topic.
Creature execution. As I’ve said above, I don’t believe we’re looking at a straightforward rubber mask job this time. Having said which, a purely electronic T2-style creation is probably beyond our scope. I reckon that our main Follower effect, whether it’s a mechanical floor effect or a stop-motion puppet or even a suit, will be deliberately incomplete, being subsequently completed by image enhancement. Each episode has two major set pieces, one as an early hook and the other as a climactic payoff. At first glance they may look really ambitious and effects-loaded. I’ll admit to ambitious, but when you analyse them down we’re talking about 95% of each Follower scene being either trained-dog action, people shots or something-unseen-about-to-come-through-the-door shots, with (I reckon) only a small and controllable proportion of Light and Magic stuff. I’ve tried to indicate the blow-by-blow dynamics of each piece so that we can start to work on the practicalities as part of the development. If the end results look effects-loaded, that’s fine.
When it comes to getting the design, I’d be inclined to throw out a few basic key words and then see what we get back. It has a feminine origin, so there should be as much of the big cat as the canine about it. Clockwork. Steam power. Oil, chrome and darkness. Visible light pulsing through its veins. Skulls and bones glimpsed as if by lightning as it mutates from one form to another. An echoing sound design like demons mating with unwilling animals at the bottom of a mile-deep pit.
You know, a bit like Tenko.
