| Creatures on the Loose An interview with Adrain Hodges Where did the idea for Primeval come from? Did it leap into your head fully formed? I’d always wanted to do a love story, but one with an unusual aspect to it – I didn’t want to do it in a socio-realistic way. I had this notion of a man who’d lost his wife in very odd circumstances, and I knew there was a mystery there somewhere, but it wasn’t until I met Tim Haines of Impossible Pictures during the making of The Lost World that it went anywhere. We started talking about doing an updated version of the story, and he’d had an idea about time anomalies and the creatures that might have come through them. So we put two and two together. So initially, at least, dinosaurs weren’t part of your thinking at all? Well, my initial thoughts weren’t really a story, more of a fragment of an idea. Much of the appeal of Primeval – especially for the younger audience, but for me too is the creatures. I’m easily young enough to feel the thrill when one of theses amazing creatures walks across the screen, especially since what Framestore do with the effects is so remarkable. But I don’t think the show would work if that was all there was to it. We also need a story our audience can get increasingly drawn into, one about people who have a journey to make. I was hugely impressed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the idea of creating intensely personal stories in the context of something thrilling going on every week – a world of mystery, but which also feels very human. I think the appeal of Primeval is similar. From what we’ve seen and heard so far about series two, Primeval is a bigger, better show this time around. We’ve always say the second season is bigger, that’s what we do! But indeed, it is bigger on a pure logistics level that much is absolutely true. We’ve got bigger sets, we’ve spent more money, we’ve got more action. When we started we were telling fairly simple monster stories, but now we’re developing the mythology, and things get more interesting down the line. Of course we start the new series with Cutter coming back to the present, and finding time travelling activity in the distant past has changed the world. One of the things I’m intrigued by is what it would be like to inhabit the skin you always have, but to look out on a different world. We’re not changing everything – it’s not like we’ve got talking cats – but there are subtle changes. This is not a parallel universe; this is our world, but it’s evolved differently because of what our characters have done in the past. I think all this stuff is hugely intriguing, but it can make your head after a while. As writers, we worry about the time travel stuff a lot, and we’ve used it in a way that, I hope, people will find intriguing and interesting. But if we overdid it, I think they’d get confused. One thing we’re not doing is going down the parallel universe route; it’s a concept that has become rather too familiar in recent shows. This is more of a classic, Ray Bradbury kind of universe – which brings its own issues. The way you deal with it seems rather like the Ray Bradbury story ‘A Sound of Thunder’, where the guy steps off the path whilst hunting dinosaurs… That’s the one! It’s a great story and massively influential. For a long time that was the template for every time travel story, but more recently the parallel universe has taken over. But the trouble with parallel universes is that you can reach a point where nothing is at stake, because there’s always a get-out clause. One thing I like about Primeval’s world is that if you do something massive in the past you are very likely messing with the present. How much of a problem do you have with coming up with new bizarre creatures? I’m not much of a dinosaur geek. But Tim Haines will be thrilled to be called one, and of course he is. He’s forever telling me, ‘Well, actually Adrian that’s not a dinosaur; that’s a pre-dinosaur.’ There’s a bit of ‘creature of the week’ aspect to it, but we try to keep things as fresh as possible. Something like the Mer-creature is completely made up. These are disgusting extraordinary-looking things – a bit like a seal, a bit like a walrus. They’re creatures from a blasted future world, where what’s left of humanity has evolved back into the ocean. Do they come from the same future as the bat-like super predator last series? I don’t want to say too much, because you’ve hit upon something there, but the whole point of the future – as opposed to the past and present- is that it’s not settled, so even if there’s a version we haven’t seen before in Primeval, as we know from the end of the first series, things can change. The whole issue of how anomalies are related to some distant future scenario is very important. You’ve got one more episode this time… If we could, we would have done more this year, and it’s certainly out intention that we'd do more for our third series, though how many isn’t nailed down yet. Those American seasons can be too long I think – even the best shows find it tough to to do 23 episodes in a year – but nevertheless, it must be wonderful to have so much time to explore a mythololgy. The intention is that Primeval will run for more than three series-for as long as people want to watch it in fact -, though there are aspects of the central story arc that are designed to be resolved by the end of our third year. But that will no means be a finishing point. The idea of the anomalies make it tempting to think it could turn into a sort of British Stargate, with missions to other time periods or worlds. That’s not impossible. We’ve got a very clear idea about how the third series will work, but the way those ideas shake down as we actually write it will dictate the form of subsequent series – if we’re lucky enough to get them. All shows like this need to find ways to keep recreating themselves and ways of telling stories. We’re no different.” Interview by Matt Belby - Deathray – February 2008 page 25. |
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