Do Time Lords Have Free Will?: another Heaven Sent BTS blog
Spoilers below. If you have not yet watched Heaven Sent, you probably won’t be reading this. But, just in case, this definitely contains spoilers. So, go watch it. Now. Do not pass go.
Why are you still reading? I said “Now!”
I have been asked what Peter Capaldi and I disagreed about on “Heaven Sent”. I presume these queries are based on the interview segment where Peter talks about us discussing different points of view on the script? (Feel free to let me know if he said something else somewhere, because I don’t absorb all the press).
Sorry to disappoint, but we did not have any dramatic ding-dongs. What I believe Peter was referring to was that the complexity of the script meant that there were many ways to interpret scenes, especially in terms of tone. Often there wasn’t a right/wrong as much as a lot of shading, so sculpting the whole was an ongoing discussion. For those of you who have read the script, you might see where there was more than the usual amount of room for varying viewpoints.
Peter and I (separately) had broken the script into three acts: (I) the opening up to the dive into the water, (II) the montage of time, and (III) finding room 12 through the ending.
Section II, the montage in the middle, was the area that created the most substantive dialogue. In this section, the Doctor is telling Clara about his time in the castle and how the castle works. (Yes, he is talking to (dead) Clara on top of the tower in what, at first glance, appears to be voiceover.)
What Peter and I debated (not contentiously, but curiously, as there was seemingly no right answer) was when each scene was taking place. Because time in the castle was speculative and non-linear (like editing), there weren’t really clues as to how long the Doctor spent in the castle in each iteration. There also wasn’t information as to which iteration we were on in each scene. So we could have been watching him in iteration 10, 10,000, 1000000, or 4 billion. And, being film, they didn’t have to take place sequentially. Did he do different things each time? Yes. Was he searching for room 12 long enough to be frustrated or to start going mad? What was his mental state in each scene? Was it different each iteration, even though he was a “carbon-copy” of himself.
In other words, grand questions: do we have free-will? Or more to the point, do Time-Lords?
Of course I discussed this with Steven and he said the Doctor was always confident he would get out. As each iteration was forgotten between repeats, it was not a journey of defeat, it was still a journey of discovery. But that still left a near-infinite number of choices for tone scene by scene.
This is one reason why the soup scene was so important to me. It was its own image of the man alone in his castle — the scope of the table was critical. The echo on the spoon was an echo of all his other ghosts of being there. (Pretentious — sorry!)
Peter loves to experiment. He will try many approaches and textures and is not afraid to play. This meant the door for variety was wide open. And so, each time we came to one of those scenes, we had to make these choices.
The one time I remember Peter really questioning me was when I suggested lightening up the tone of the first scene in the bedroom. We shot that before we did any of the scenes that took place earlier in the script. Peter’s first rehearsal was played straight. It added weight to the threat of the Veil and darkness as he told the old-woman story and as the Veil approached again, trapping him without an exit.
When I suggested this lighter approach, I fully understood Peter’s wondering why I would want to dissipate the intensity at that moment. The Doctor has just admitted how scared he is, he’s in a room with a portrait of Clara, he’s gutted. It’s a heartbreaking script, and playing an entire episode of the Doctor only burdened by Clara’s death, even with the script’s jokes, felt as if it might add up to too morose and too slow. Peter, Steven and I all agreed about this.
But at the point we were shooting this scene, Peter had not done the material before, so in order to explain and justify going lighter, it was necessary to pitch how I planned to shoot the earlier materials and why I thought we could afford humor at that specific point. Because the doctor is again backed into a corner, he is using the new tone to play for time and to take control back. It was a choice to have the Doctor play against the emotions he had just shown and to tease the Veil.
After this discussion, Peter embraced the suggestions. The performance itself was all him. I could never have specified and detailed that perfect combination of physical and verbal antics which still allows for the seriousness of the situation.
This is just one illustration of our discussions, all taking place on set while shooting at TV pace. One of the hard parts about TV is that there isn’t ever enough time. Peter and I talked about the script just once before we started shooting, when I managed to nab him during a short break while he was filming episode 10. He had only read the script once, having just received it and being in the middle of another episode. I managed to give him an overview of my approach and discuss the question of how to play Clara’s death without chest-beating. All I really had time for, before he was called back to set, was to lay the most cursory groundwork.
Production is a series of problem-solving compromises. The perfect preparation in one’s head is always thwarted by realities - from weather to errors to disagreements to things not working to traffic to phone calls to equipment malfunctions to … the hold-ups are always there. Time (lack of it) is the enemy — every delay steals a shot or a take, every extra take steals from the number of shots. All day long, I balance this — as if my head is an abacus, constantly calculating and re-calculated the day to ensure we finish and the time on each scene is chosen in terms of its singular importance.
In Heaven Sent, were all scenes equally important? Are some scenes more equal than others?
As an addendum, I leave you with another question: When the doctor finds Room 12, why does he return to the top of the Tower? (Feel free to send your thoughts privately so as not to ruin other’s opportunity to think about this. Maybe the answer is obvious.)
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