We’re at Primeval’s halfway point, and as it starts to become clear that the anomalies are, if not necessarily artificial, then being exploited by Helen Cutter for ecological reasons of her own, it’s difficult not to ask producers Tim Haines and Cameron McAllister if they’re aware of an old Doctor Who story called invasion of the Dinosaurs.
“One thing about Doctor Who,” comments Haines, who eight years ago brought convincing dinosaurs to primetime with the groundbreaking Walking with Dinosaurs “is that it does cover every possible subject that you can think of.” The key change is that dinosaurs aren’t now static rod puppets. “But that was true right up until the 1990’s. Only about three years before I did Walking with Dinosaurs Granada had a big series called Dinosaur, and they were using dodgy hand puppets. When I first got quotes for this sort of stuff they would say $10,000 per second, so clearly that was too pricey.”
Walking with Dinosaurs was the breakthrough, and Primeval has taken things a step further, Haines acknowledges. “Yes, the technology that was developed or copied from America for Walking with Dinosaurs we’ve perfected and developed, together with Framestore, to the point where its natural home is drama.” That has its dangers though. “The thing is they have to be really, really good to survive in drama. You don’t want anything that looks a bit dodgy next to an actor because the whole thing collapses.”
Shades of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, where the T-Rex had a disturbing resemblance to the monster from the old Chewits adverts. “It’s going to add to your cost, and that’s difficult for drama, because drama’s being squeezed just to make ordinary drama. But that’s why it stands out, because nobody else is doing this…”
You suspect that the accountants would then, have preferred that the anomalies remained locked to one specific time period rather than flipping around the fossil record and a whole menagerie of creatures. “Variety is essential,” Haines acknowledges.
“We could go through to the future, just you wait!” Cameron McAllister adds, teasingly hinting at things to come in the final episodes.
With the series at its halfway point, the producers open up about what’s to come in the last three weeks…and they haven’t always come out quite as planned, partly because it’s been McAllister’s first experience of a drama with this amount of effects. “It was for me, yes,” he says, turning to his colleague Haines. “But you did Lost World didn’t you?”
“Yes, Lost World,” Haines laughs, referring to the BBC’s prestigious millennial version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel. “Seems like it’s come from another world now ‘cause that was the BBC in 2000 and the way it was planned it was all so much looser. Which is good, this one is very tight, very planned and hard work for everyone because you are being incredibly ambitious, not only in visual effects but also in action.”
“I think we made it as hard as we could for ourselves because we were ambitious,” McAllister explains. “We wanted it to be as exciting as possible. At the end of the day we want people to go, “It’s amazing!”
Hence the change of plans on episode five, which started out as a chance to let the budget balance. “I’ll let you into a secret; at one stage we thought “This is nuts, we’ve completely going to bust the budget,” says McAllister, “so we’d do one episode and make it a bit lighter. Do you know which was the most expensive episode? That episode! Episode five. We thought ‘Right, we’ll play this down a little bit.’ We thought we’d try and limit it, it virtually blew the budget didn’t it?”, he asks Haines.
“Well the thing was the method of delivering the animals was quite complicated and therefore completely against what I would call logic. It started to mount. It was a nice contained show, but the computer graphics just turned out to be a monster.”
“Instead of having one creature that does a certain thing….” McAllister pauses, stepping back to explain the background. “We normally have at least two creatures, and here’s the pterosaur, and then we had a pterodactyl, and a flock of pterosaurs. You think ‘Well that’ll be all right, we’re on a cycle,’ but actually it took virtually all my CGI guys all individually doing different animals and so they were saying, ‘The shots have gone through the roof.’ I said ‘What are you talking about? This is our easy episode.’ So no easy episodes.”
“You can’t just say ‘have loads of animals’. They all have to be doing different things.”
And then there’s episode six, which was always planned as spectacular.
“The series ends on the most spectacular set piece,” McAllister explains. “We won’t give away too much, but there’s a massive showdown between two creatures, and it’s a real tour de force that, isn’t it?”
“Just a little bit of plain showing off,” Haines admits.
“Well, it’s a bit of a given, we tend to overwrite, and be ambitious,” McAllister comments. “You get this movie script and think, ‘Don’t know if we can do that, but unfortunately it’s too late to change it’. Well, we did have the chance to change it for the last three, but we couldn’t help ourselves and so it ends up with this huge spectacular piece.”
It’s no secret that one of these creatures comes not from the past but from the future, so was that an opportunity to let the imagination rip with some terrible, Giger-esque creation?
“It’s all got logic to it,” Haines insists. “The principle of these creatures is they’re based on real creatures as much as possible, and even if you look into the future you want to base it on something that might exist, because when you try and get a Fantasy animal to move around and look convincing, it just doesn’t work. Dragons very rarely look like real animals, because there’s no real animal that’s ever been like that.”
“And also I think that our USP, our selling point,” McAllister adds, “which makes us a little bit different from, say, Doctor Who or Torchwood, is that we’re not really a Fantasy programme, because we’ve got anomalies, but everything’s supposed to be possible. And so when we were creating a creature from the future, it was quite carefully looked at that it was viable and plausible.”
“The evolutionary and fossil record allows you to be quite fast and loose,” Haines continues, “because of course you find one animal from one time and the scientist will say, ‘This is the animal that existed then’ and you can say, ‘Well here’s one that developed a few years after that,’ and it’s a bit bigger an a big nastier.”
“It’s quite fun thinking about how creatures could evolve in the future, what could they come from, because actually anything goes. That’s very well cared for by excellent programmes like Doctor Who, but we’re different.” So does that mean they’ve outlined what the future is like – post-global warming, cooling, nuclear winter? “We know exactly, but you won’t get that out of us!” Haines says, wickedly.
“And we will let on in due course what the future’s like.” McAllister concludes.
Anthony Brown TV Zone issue 213 page 32