On The Set Of Eleventh Hour

by Todd Gold
Oct 6th, 2008 | 8:18 AM | Comments 0

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Befitting a show with a premise that hinges upon intellectual curiosity and scientific discovery, the set of Eleventh Hour was recently infiltrated by inquiring minds…..albeit ones with a less humanitarian bent. Yes, we entertainment journalists were given an opportunity to make like scientists ourselves and prod the creative masterminds behind the upcoming series - wielding questions about “inevitable” character love interests, in lieu of experiments involving electrodes, to torture our subjects.

Based upon a popular BBC miniseries starring Patrick Stewart, Eleventh Hour is the latest serial to trot out from executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s stable. Certain comparisons are already being drawn between this show, still poised at the starting gate, and another contender in the prime time race which is, at this writing, already galloping toward victory. (Hint: rhymes with “cringe,” which is more or less the reaction you will elicit from said creative masterminds if you attempt to draw the comparison).

The only real similarity between the two shows may in fact be that the word “science” can routinely be found floating around in the general logline region of either. But, if the content of two certain preview episodes is a reliable indicator, Eleventh Hour tips its hat in acknowledgement more toward Columbo or Stephen Hawking than to Mulder and Scully, or Ms. Dunham and the Bishop boys. With the pilot focusing upon human cloning, and a subsequent episode in which a medical mystery unfurls in a small town around a pack of pre-adolescent boys prone to heart attacks, the storylines are heavy on the “science,” but take fewer liberties with the “fiction” that permeates the fare being hawked by the competition.

Against an intriguing set backdrop of skeletons in a catacomb, stars Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton, along with executive producers Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Jonathan Littman and Mick Davis, were on hand to quash the comparisons and discuss what makes Eleventh Hour worth watching. Speculations may have also arisen as to who would win in a fist fight: Rufus Sewell, or Joshua Jackson?

Following are highlights from the Q and A session:

Can you talk about how you adapted the British series, and how different this is in tone or style……….?

Ethan: Well, Mick is actually the guy who adapted…..

Mick: Don’t ask me.

[Laughter]

Mick: What do you want to know? Ask me anything.

What changed significantly, I guess, is my question?

Mick: Everything. The first word is “Americanized,” because the thing was made in Britain, initially….so we just tried to make it more slick and more…..the word is “Bruckheimer.”

So it’s cool but it has a soul and….there’s more time for character development I think as well because…..the way the original was shot, it was all kind of one camera and very quick, whereas we’ve had the luxury of spending more time and allowing Marley and Rufus to develop the characters – I think that’s the big difference.

Ethan: Another big difference is that the original British series – it was a miniseries – there were only four episodes that were ever made…in fact I remember when we first came on to do this job or were considering it, I remember my partner Cyrus being really excited, almost to the point of gleeful shame: “It’s a British show! There’ll be like four hundred episodes! All we do is copy them all! It’ll be the easiest gig we’ve ever had!” And then we looked into it, and we watched four episodes…and that was it.

Rufus: And that’s the way it was designed…it was only ever going to be four episodes….

Ethan: There are two things….one thing, in terms of the English version and the American, there are certain things you’re able to pull off just because of ….and I hope you don’t take this as an aspersion….there’s a certain parochial nature of the U.K. in terms of you go to the English countryside, you can buy more that people are cut off from stuff, in terms of the scientific crisis and ideas….it’s harder….I mean, we went through a whole thing on an episode they’re shooting now, which has to do with an outbreak of smallpox hybrid, and the thing was, “Where do you set it?” Because if you set it in New York City, it’s unbelievable that the entire city wouldn’t come to a stop and be shut down in, like, four or five hours…..and it became like, OK, we’ve got to find someplace in the U.S. that it’s a little more believable that this story can play out the way it needs to for drama. I think they had a little easier time in the British version in doing that. If there’s some little town…some coal-mining town out in the middle of the English countryside, you can believe a little bit more that stuff can get a little crazier as opposed to in certain parts of the U.S.. I think another thing is also just the age difference – because Patrick Stewart played Rufus’ part in the original….

Rufus: He’s only four years older than me…..

Ethan: [Laughing] Clearly. But there was a little bit more of a father daughter relationship between Dr. Hood and the part of Rachel Young. So that clearly changed, and that dynamic has changed going forward.

[Directed to Rufus and Marley]: Can you two talk about the nature of your relationship and talk about your characters a little bit?

Marley: I think one fundamental thing is that we both want the same result but we go about things dramatically differently. I’m more of a pragmatist, I think, and sort of a straight shooter, and Rufus’ character…..

Rufus: Yeah, well, I mean, what’s important and what’s interesting for me about Jacob Hood is that he’s not trained in this area – he’s not a cop. He’s not a detective. He’s a scientist. And he’s not used to living in this environment or dealing with these people in high stakes situations….so he brings what he brings. So he’s got a certain way about him. He doesn’t have great antenna for danger, for example. Not that he’s very brave – but he just doesn’t really see when he’s about to be hit on the head. And he can have a manner with people that might not be the best way of dealing with them. He doesn’t really understand the procedures, which for me is much more interesting. It means he needs help, and he needs help so he doesn’t make things worse, he doesn’t upset people, he doesn’t get killed…..

Marley: You know, his genius is that he’s kind of unorthodox and thinks outside the box, but that’s where I come in, and sort of help connect that….

Rufus: Yeah, there’s two slightly different ways of looking at the world. There’s a meeting which is more about humor than anything else…

When you have two characters like this in the kinds of situations you’re going to be in, there will be inevitable comparisons to other characters who are in similar situations, in a similar kind of relationship, and I think you know what I’m talking about….

Rufus: Well, yes, that’s the thing, I think once when you see the show, those comparisons will kind of wither out, because I think it’s quite distinctive. Other shows may seem similar – there’s quite a few that it might seem similar to – but that will evaporate once you see it. Once you see any of the shows, they have quite a distinct flavor…..

Cyrus: And if you’re talking about The X-Files in particular, which I think is a show that casts a big shadow over these types of series, the two biggest distinctions are again, as Rufus said, the characters that Rufus and Marley are playing - he’s a pure scientist, and she’s an FBI agent. So their approaches to things are going to be different every time – in terms of ways that she’ll try to solve a case, versus what he’ll do…it’s very different from the X-Files paradigm. The other thing is that the real hook of Eleventh Hour is that it’s science fact. We really don’t go into the realm of science fiction. I think we’ve occasionally gone into places where I will say that the truth is stranger than fiction. We’ve had a lot of conversations with studio executives, network executives of elements where someone will say, “Well, that’s not really real, is it?” or “That seems like science fiction,” and we’ll say, No, it’s actually real, and here’s the stuff to back it up. So that’s a big difference from The X-Files. And that was a big thing when Ethan and I signed on to do the show…… we wanted to keep it in that direction, because we felt like if we go down the sci fi road, it is just another knock-off of the X-Files. But you haven’t really seen this type of show done with hard science before. And there’s just as many fascinating stories and fascinating plotlines you can get out of the real world with this stuff.

Jonathan Littman: The heartbeat of X-Files is about a believer and a non-believer. And we don’t play in that realm. That debate doesn’t exist. It’s not having Rachel say, “This couldn’t possibly be true.” It’s “How does this happen?” And that’s the intricacies….

[What about] the inevitable love storyline…..?

Rufus: Well, it’s only inevitable that it be brought up in situations like this. No, but honestly, there’s nothing inevitable in it. There’s possibilities, always. These things are open to development in one direction or another depending on so many different factors, but I don’t think…..I disagree there’s an “inevitability,” that’s all.

Don’t you think though that viewers, seeing two very attractive people working together in sort of special situations, that people are going to want them to get together?

Rufus: Well, people can want what they want. Who knows? It’s not always interesting to give people what they want, as you find in real life. Sometimes people don’t want what they think they want. And I think what’s interesting is the possibility. That certainly makes things watchable. The idea of finding out……deciding where that’s going to go. They can do that for a long time.

Does that affect the way you two play your relationship with each other?

Rufus: Does what…..?

The possibility of……

Rufus: You mean the trembling lower lip…that permeates every moment? They’ve asked me to bring it down a bit.

Obviously in a pilot in which you’re establishing the characters, the characters get their humorous moments, and then pull back a little …what do you think is more….what represents the show better?

Ethan: Every story is different. And especially with this show, the fact that, unlike almost every one hour drama on television, we don’t have a home. They don’t have a police precinct, or a legal office, or a hospital that they’re constantly using as their home base. They don’t have the same set of supporting characters that they’re constantly going back and forth with. And that’s really kind of interesting and cool and opens things up, and at the same time it’s very challenging for us and for them in terms of producing the show. But it also means that different episodes, depending on what the story of the week is, and what the world of the week is, and who the supporting cast of the week is, are going to be a little bit different.

Going off that story of the week thing, could you guys talk about how extreme a case has to be for [the team] to be brought in, how far….?

Cyrus: We always talk about it as just being that the traditional methods have failed. There’s always….I think by the time we get to…if the show keeps going and we get into a second season, those type of methods and the dialogue of the scenes will start to fall out. But certainly in the first season, there’s always the bit where you reference, “The police are stumped, the CDC is stumped…” It’s sort of a situation where the traditional means of solving these types of cases or these problems have been exhausted to a certain extent….. and we need to bring in Jacob Hood.

[Speaking of Hood’s knowledge]…. in the first two episodes, it appears as if he could have the answer to absolutely any intellectual question…..

Rufus: That’s the way I like it.

Ethan: You know what? I would say that the reason we picked his backstory being a biophysicist is that it covers a broad range of sciences. I think there…..that is an element of the show that….that’s part of the journey that we ask the audience to go on. In every episode, there are other experts that he’ll work with a little bit. We won’t have him cracking a genetic code on his own – he’ll work with a geneticist. The theory is that he has sort of a working knowledge of…..

Rufus: He has limitless enthusiasm. And limitless childlike wonder and limitless interest. It doesn’t mean he knows all the answers. But in some sort of shambolic way he’s deeply interested enough, really hungry for knowledge in such a way as – hopefully if you’re watching it, you can discover with him, rather than have him be some ultimate intellect that just has the answers himself……

Ethan: Right. We try to show his process a little bit….

Cyrus: And also I think in both the episodes that you guys have seen, although they are filled with exactly what you are just describing, which is the areas where scientifically, or technically Jacob Hood is absolutely the man who knows everything….I think there are gonna be other moments – there are other moments in those two stories, and there are other moments in every episode where he’s the man who’s caught completely at a loss, because, whether it’s because of the human interaction or because of the criminal element of what’s going on, he’s finding himself someplace that he’s never been before and that he’s completely, basically unprepared to deal with.

Ethan: And also the law enforcement element, that’s where Marley’s character comes in and drives that part. There’s an episode coming up, there’s a bit where they have to break into…Hood has discovered some information, and we have to get into this lab tonight immediately, and Marley calls in these FBI resources, and she has this bit of techo – it’s all real – this techo dialogue where she’s like, “Bring in the inter entry and exit experts from the….level TC3…” or whatever, and there’s this great thing where Jacob is looking at her like he has no clue what she’s talking about, and she really relishes that, because for once, she knows something that he doesn’t. I think that’s a dynamic to play – again, he’s the scientist, she’s the law enforcement….

Can I ask the two of you the thought process of committing to a television series that could possibly go for years, given your movie careers?

Marley: I think it’s a matter of diving into the deep end, but not getting too ahead of yourself. It’s really an exercise in just being committed to the moment, to the now of now. I think what’s interesting, process-wise, is that it’s a continuum, rather than having beginning, middle and end, it’s probing a continuum, and so it’s more like a marathon than a sprint. That’s been an adjustment that kind of was a welcome challenge.

And you were looking for something to do like that?

Marley: Yeah, because one thing is, you’re allowed to go deeper with the character. You get to spend that much more time in a way with this person that you’re playing.

Rufus: With me, I’m not sure if it was something I was looking for, but I wasn’t really conscious of what I was looking for. It wasn’t actually what I was expecting - I was doing a play when it came up. But for me, most big decisions I’ve had in my career have been weighed by certain pros and cons. For me the fear would be being associated with one particular thing. But I think especially with me, in what dresses itself up as a varied film career, that I’ve found myself coming up against people who see me in a specific way that doesn’t accurately reflect what I’m capable of. Because of other things I’ve done in the past, people tended to see me as a kind of upper class villain on a horse, blah blah blah blah blah……which has been fun to do a couple of times, but I made a decision a while ago that I’d rather not work, than do it, because alright, enough is enough. As I’m primarily a character actor, and a comic actor actually if anything, I didn’t want to kind of get bored with myself, and in the process, bore other people. So the opportunity to show people that I can play a relatively good guy, quite complex, American, not on a horse, modern clothes………just the idea of, even if that becomes a stereotype that I’m stuck with for a while, there’s so much more play in that. There’s more play than there is with the stereotype I was in danger of being caught up with. And also I have no intention of giving up my theatre career or my film career. They might give up on me, but I’m not…..

In terms of modeling your character, I don’t know what type of actor you are in terms of preparation…..

Rufus: Near none. Near none…..

…but in terms of creating a relatively – compared to these past projects you’re referring to – a relatively cool dude, what do you…..

Rufus: I just have to hide my inherent evilness.

Do you draw from any real life observations or have you thought about what type of person is a scientist?

Rufus: Well, I don’t find it any more of a challenge to play someone like this than to play anything else. It’s not like I have some central type of persona which is further from this than anything else. For me it’s always been more of a stretch to be other things. You never know what’s a stretch for people. For me, my way into this and also what was very important to me about it was that just because he knows a lot, that there’s a kind of humility to him and a slightly shambolic kind of scruffy way to the way he thinks so that…. the great minds that I have known and had the privilege of working with kind of pop out these pieces of genius as though it was kind of a humble suggestion, some silly thing that you’re welcome to use if you like. And that just modeling that – not modeling my performance but just remembering it – the great geniuses I’ve known have had quite a lot of humility and generosity………….. and sometimes can still have quite good clothes.

Ethan: Actually, something that happens in series television which I think is interesting….I think when you start the process, everybody is trying to sort of find the show and also find the characters, and I think as you go on, it almost….. when you’re writing the show, you almost start handing it over to the actors a little bit in the sense that, if the show runs long enough, I think you find that the actors start really knowing the characters a little bit more than you, because they’re doing one thing every day – when you’re producing a show, you’re overseeing scripts, you’re working on edits, you’re getting notes from the network, you’re doing a thousand different things, casting……but these guys are playing these parts every day, doing this singular thing. So it’s almost like a hand-off at a certain point. I think there’s a certain point where you sort of have to….you start to trust the actors instincts in a sense, where if there are elements or things they’ll talk about, like, well, maybe this character should behave this way …..you sort of have to pay attention to that, just because you really at a certain point realize Rufus and Marley at this point are starting to spend more time with these characters as the show goes on than anybody else….so there is the certain point, and I think if the show runs longer that’s especially true, you sort of have to trust the judgment of your cast.

Jonathan: But also with actors like Rufus and Marley, they’re gonna find stuff in their roles that we never thought of, and you’ll start seeing on screen, and the storylines start coming out of it. And it’s incredible and they start inhabiting these characters so completely, that just in their subtle moments, that you go “Wait a minute – I never thought of that…” and it just starts launching a whole new storyline. And that’s what’s great about episodic television, it that it has that rhythm.

I also wanted to ask the question about comparisons with another show that by coincidence is on the air right now and sort of has a similar kind of premise…

Ethan: And it’s made by the same studio – Warner Brothers…

How does that affect what you do? Or does it? Does it concern you about the comparisons?

Ethan: It doesn’t concern me at all. It only affects us in the sense that once in a while, a Warner Brothers executive will call up and say, “Wait a second…..your characters are talking about a pattern….” And I’m like, “Well, “pattern” is just a word in the English language….”

Cyrus: They said pattern on Fringe last night!

Ethan: And I go, OK, well, I guess we’ll look for a synonym for “pattern.”

[Laughter.]

Ethan: That really happened. The things is, on paper, perhaps at one glance a sentence or half a paragraph about Eleventh Hour or Fringe will look like, “Uh oh, those are exact….” If you watch the two shows or read a script on the two shows, they’re as diametrically….I don’t want to say diametrically opposed, because they’re not the opposition, but….they’re so different. They couldn’t be more different. Having an FBI presence in the show, they couldn’t be more different. That’s a total what it is, and I wish it well, and I hope it’s a great success…we all get our paychecks from the same people, which is Warner Brothers Studios, and I hope it’s a triumph, and we are what we are. And I hope we’re a triumph too. I really think it’s very difficult to mix the two shows together. They are so much science fiction, and so much absolute, over the top, beyond the edge mythology in that show, and our show has none of that.

Cyrus: Come on - we have Rufus Sewell. They have Pacey from Dawson’s Creek.

Who do you think would win in a fist fight?

Ethan: We may have to stage that for publicity purposes.

I don’t know if anyone can speak for Jerry [Bruckheimer] – maybe you Jonathan - but why was this a show you wanted to take on, and are you pleased with the direction it’s going in and the progress…?

Rufus [looking to Jonathan]: This is not the time to tell us, “No….”

Jonathan: Exactly. To answer that backwards, yes, and quite – quite pleased. Why take it on? You know what? We saw the format, and it felt like a show from us. It was…from the minute we saw the original four episodes, we thought this is an incredibly good way of telling a mystery. That is the heartbeat of our company….and this was just a really original way to get into that. We cannot be more happy with the way the show’s going and the way the episodes look.

I have a sort of character introduction question. One of the things that I noticed that was different from the original British pilot and this one is that in the original British pilot Marley’s character does come very, very close to sleeping with the local law enforcement official….which seems like something that’s an important thing in the introduction of that character…that that’s sort of the way she operates. And in this American version, she doesn’t, obviously, and that’s not even hinted at….

Ethan: There’s a simple answer – keep watching the show. Marley’s character….

Mick: That’s because the original woman was Scottish.

[Laughter]

Mick: That’s all Scottish women do.

[Marley laughs.]

Marley: Eventually? Keep watching?

Is [Marc]Blucas done, though? Will he be back?

Ethan: He’s done until some other scientific crime or crisis happens in Seattle.

Marley: But I know what you’re saying. I do think that is the hope, that as he gets to know Rachel more that we will see more….that dimension of her character….and that is a part of her, and she is aggressive, and it may come out in that way, it may come out in other ways….you know that she’s a modern woman, and I think that we will be exploring all sides of her….

Rufus: So to speak.

A question on the science……….how do you go about generating ideas in terms of real science…?

Ethan: Well, that’s a big answer. The answer is we put together a very talented and hard working writing staff, which includes Mick over there…….despite appearances.

[Laughter]

Ethan: And as part of that writing staff….there’s two things…. We did the show Sleeper Cell on Showtime. When we did Sleeper Cell, which involved terrorism….

Cyrus: We became terrorists.

Ethan: Right. So now we became scientists. No, but what we did was, because we weren’t terrorists, and we weren’t professional counter-terrorists, we reached out of our own box and tried to get in close contact with the real people on the front lines of that war, and we used those guys, to great results, I think. And what we wanted to do here with the science was the exact same thing. So we reached outside our own box and we got a physicist and we got a biochemist and we use those guys to get our own story ideas, and to get our scripts. And at the same time, when we put together the writing staff, we looked around and we actually found one talented screenwriter who used to be a rocket scientist who worked at NASA, and another talented screenwriter who spent about a dozen years as a science journalist who wrote for Scientific American and Popular Mechanics and Wired, etc., etc.., and we hired both those guys, and they’ve been great resources in the writers room.

Cyrus: I think a lot of it is, the thing about this show is if you just go though a book or a newspaper or go online, you’ll find the world we live in now is just infused with crazy science stuff all over the place. You’ll find tons of story ideas. The challenge then is to dramatize them in a way that works for the show. I think….the really hard thing with this show is that ….it’s two-fold. One is….you really hold yourself…and maybe nobody cares but Ethan and I, but we really hold ourselves to a standard of trying to make sure that all that science is real. The stuff that we portray is researched and is real and everything that is coming up could actually happen. That means you can’t bang out an episode over a weekend. In some ways, it’s much easier to just make shit up. Because it’s sort of like, you know…..whatever your imagination can …..when you make things up and then want to try and make them real, you’re holding yourself to a much higher standard, it’s much more labor intensive. The other thing honestly is finding the balance, because you don’t want the show to get so dense with the science that people go, I have no clue what’s happening or what’s going on. So you’re always trying to find that balance. I think one of the things we’ve discovered is….it helps to have Rufus and Marley – two talented, magnetic, interesting performers – because a lot of times there’ll be little moments when even I will say, I’m not one hundred percent exactly sure what Rufus just said, but I know it’s really important!

[Laughter]

Cyrus: And a minute later you’ll say, oh, I get it now! It’s a challenge. You’re constantly trying to find that balance.

Jonathan: It’s one of the hardest things to act, and I think both the actors will agree, is the science. But it’s integral to the story.

Rufus: It’s about human interest in the story. It’s about what emotions it elicits, what it does to people. It’s only interesting in that way. Otherwise you could just hand out a pamphlet….It’s about what people care about, it’s about how it affects real people’s lives. And that is what makes it interesting. So sometimes you might not even quite understand until it’s explained it in a way that relates to you, and suddenly it opens up.

Jonathan: Living in a time of really unlimited possibility of science, it’s scary for a lot of people, and a lot of great stuff will come out of it, but it’s so easy to turn it on its head, and take things in a direction that aren’t good for people, or aren’t good for your overall general population. And that’s where the show lives. You can look at the exact same discovery and go, wow, I could use it to cure this, and someone says, I could make a billion dollars if I did this. We see it in the internet now, we see it in hard science…..and it’s changing our world.

Brave the new world of Eleventh Hour, which premieres this Thursday, October 9th at 10 p.m. on CBS.

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