TICKET TO RIDE
DIRECTOR BEN CHESSELL TAKES THE TARDIS BACK IN TIME IN HIS TWO EPISODES
What can you tease about the episodes?
I got sent scripts and I read them and went, “These are crazy. These are wonderful, ambitious, in some ways quite nutty scripts.” Episode two is madcap and bold and unexpected, and loony in a really sharp and interesting way. We’ll have sequences that you’ve never seen in a Doctor Who episode before. Episode six is a more classic Doctor Who episode, but it’s romantic and funny and frightening.
Is filming in real world situations complicated?
Recreating ’60s London is tricky. Most of the location shooting is done in Cardiff – it really wouldn’t have been helpful to shoot in London anyway, because London doesn’t look like that any more. So we found streets that gave us some features – you can get streets that’ll give you maybe six good buildings and then you have to use visual effects to remove the buildings that wouldn’t have been there, and you can bring in foreground elements.
So there’s a scene where the Doctor and Ruby leave the TARDIS and cross the road on the way to Abbey Road Studios, and there’s a shot that looks right down the road. We picked that particular intersection because in the foreground, a lot of those buildings were genuine ’60s buildings.
Then we bring in some cars and then the rest of it is something that we build in post production: the deep background, because obviously the London skyline is wrong, and you have to do some replacement and some building. So you try to get as much real world as you can, and then use digital effects and matte paintings to fill in the gaps.
With music being a focus, do you have to work further ahead?
Absolutely. Murray Gold, the composer, and I worked quite extensively in pre-production. I worked with him much more than I would normally work with a composer in preproduction to produce temp versions of the music. Without saying too much, I can say there are sections in which various actors have to perform pieces of music, and they had to learn some of that music to the rough versions of tracks that we had developed so that their playing would be convincing.
They didn’t actually have to be accomplished instrumentalists, but their movements and their actions needed to be synchronised to the music. So we had to do a lot of preparing cue tracks that we could then use on the set on the day to achieve those sequences.
What was it like working with Jinkx?
Jinkx Monsoon was one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with. She was just like a real old-fashioned showbiz professional, just really fun and really relaxed. But then when someone called action, she hit her mark. She had a lot of showbiz razzle dazzle and she brought an American Broadway professionalism to the set that I hadn’t ever quite experienced exactly like that before.
I really loved working with Jinkx, she was quite surprising. I turned up to set with a very open mind as to maybe she would be unfamiliar with working on a drama, and that was all nonsense. She was absolutely a sharp Broadway professional.
What kind of character does Jinkx play?
I think we’re allowed to say that she is going to be one of the most challenging enemies that the Doctor has ever faced. There’s a fantastic sequence early in the episode where she has arrived and the Doctor has realised what he’s up against, and we were very excited to get the chance to really show the Doctor scared.
What’s it like working with Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa?
They had already been working together a little bit by the time I started working with them, but not that much. They were still finding their way of working together. So it was interesting for me to step into this quite fresh situation on set. They love each other very much. Let me talk about them individually.
Ncuti is extraordinary. He’s got incredible charisma. He’s got an incredible presence. He’s going to be as big a star as it’s possible to be, I think he’s just going to be huge. He’s beautiful and poised and highly skilled.
Ncuti doesn’t need a lot of direction. He likes to talk about things. He likes to get feedback. My job is to be the one person who’s absolutely watching everything that he does from a storytelling point of view.
So we would talk on that kind of level. He would ask, “Should I try this, should I try that, did that work?” So we had time to try things and Ncuti likes to have that space to play around and try different options, which is obviously great for an editor. Millie has superb comic timing – really, she’s a natural. She’s very instinctive – she’s got great chops and great comic timing and she’s really skilled at letting her own infectious personality come to the surface of the scene.
What was Jonathan Groff like?
As a director, I work with lots of famous actors, and a lot of my friends are actors. I don’t really get starstruck, but I was slightly starstruck by Jonathan Groff. He’s worked with David Fincher. God, I’m directing someone who’s directed by Fincher. All the time he’s got to be standing there thinking, “This guy’s not as good as Fincher.”
But he was so sweet and so delightful. Again, you don’t know what to expect. You try to go in with an open mind, but there are some American actors who stand on ceremony and expect a certain kind of formality on a set, and Jonathan couldn’t have been less like that.
What about Indira Varma?
Indira I have always loved as an actor. I was so pleased that she said yes to do that, that was really fun. I told her that I’ve always loved her. We wrapped one morning at 5am and the sun was coming up and it was dawn. Basically, the last scene was just her, me and the crew at dawn. For her to have kept a good nature and still being cracking jokes and having a good time at 5am, I thought, “You’re a good person.”
What are their characters like?
Jonathan plays a mysterious character. Indira, however, plays a villain. A terrifying villain. Which she loved, by the way. She loved really digging deep into her acting chops to play a big villain.
“Rogue” has a big ballroom scene…
There’s a lot that takes place in that Regency ballroom, that was a fantastic set. The art department put a massive amount of time and resources into building it. The building’s a genuine orangery, but they did a huge amount to build it back and make it a proper period Regency ballroom. They painted this beautiful mural and made a huge chandelier and then we filled it with 60 or 70 dancers in period costumes. It was quite a thing shooting that set.
What’s it like filming on the TARDIS?
It’s very big, so the main section where you stand at the console is quite a long way off the ground. The director of photography Jamie Cairney – who was excellent by the way, he’s such a skilful practitioner and a lovely guy – we stood on that set quite a lot. It was quite new. We weren’t the first to come on it, but we were one of the first. They put a lot of work into how the lighting worked.
But we spent a lot of time standing there, him and I, in a big empty studio talking about how to get the best out of that set. Because you don’t want to waste those great [opportunities]. Actually the fact that it’s high off the ground, there’s a sequence in episode two where one of the characters almost falls in that set. We designed that stunt to make the most of what a great set it is.
We built a platform opposite that set and put a big technocrane on that, because it felt like it gave us the most flexibility to put the camera wherever we wanted, without having a huge crew tromping all over the set and getting in the way of the actors. It’s big, but also the walkways are quite narrow and you don’t want to have seven crew up there with microphones and cameras and stuff. So we really mapped it out the way to get the most out of what an excellent set it is.
Were there any complicated or ambitious parts of your episodes?
Episode two has some incredibly complicated sequences in it. Sequences that involved – all in the one shot sometimes – music, characters pretending to play music, stunts, practical effects, puppetry, visual effects. Big moving shots, all happening all at once.
There’s a sequence in the show, an epic climactic sequence conflict/battle of episode two, that we took five days to shoot, which I’ve never really had that kind of level of time on a TV show to shoot one sequence. But that said, I’ve never shot a sequence quite that complicated – in a very big set that we built. We built a massive set. We built a set to be studio one at Abbey Road, and it’s a very, very big room.
Then episode six was more about finding the right locations for the period, to create the period setting. We had a number of different locations. So it all takes place in one stately home in 1813, but we shot it over three different locations and some sets that we built back at the studio.
So we had to map out the geography of our heads and work it out, so there was a lot of that, creating a coherent world challenges.
Ncuti is extraordinary. He’s got incredible charisma. He’s got an incredible presence