(Revisit Part One of our Primeval: New World interview HERE)
Primeval started off as a UK show and has now migrated to Canadian shores with spin-off Primeval: New World. Focussing on a less-experienced, disparate group - one learning by trial and error and that doesn’t have the backing of an ARC/military effort featured in the original, it is both a continuation, reboot and a sister show to the British fan favourite. With half of its first season already broadcast in Canada and nominated for several awards, it’s clear it has made the impact intended. WATCH are showing the series in the UK, starting this Tuesday at 9:00pm. So it seems like an opportune time to take a look at what British viewers can expect.
Gillian, can you give us a rundown of the main characters we’ll be meeting in the show…
Gillian Horvath: Sure. Niall Matter is playing Evan Cross. He’s a guy who has a reason to be interested in anomalies and dinosaurs. He’s the guy with a mission to learn more about this. The team assembles around him at his company Cross Photonics. He’s a very successful innovator who is using the money he’s made through his successes to fund his research into something that others don’t believe in. When the show starts, the people around him are: Ange Finch (Miranda Frigon) who is the CEO of the company and keeps his life on track while he’s distracted by being a brilliant genius. They are long-term friends and have a long history going back. Toby Nance (Crystal Lowe) is part of the Cross Photonics team, a non-conformist and Evan’s tech-genius. She’s also a theoretical physicist who also knows her way around the inside of a computer - because every show needs that!
Mac Rendell (Danny Rahim) was brought from the UK to Canada by Evan and doesn’t know anything about the anomalies when we start, but he’s a bit of an adrenaline junkie. He doesn’t mind at all getting drawn into an adventure like this! The ‘newcomer’ into the story in the first episode is Dylan Weir (Sara Canning). She’s our ‘perspective’ character in a way… she brings the viewer into joining this team. When she took her curiosity in a very different direction, she ends up discovering something herself and ends up crossing paths with Evan. They come at the situation from different sides. Geoff Gustafson (Lt. Ken Leeds) is our military presence and he’s the surprise factor…
It’s almost a full Canadian cast, except Danny. It was Danny Rahim’s first time in Canada and North America. We did a talent search for the character and Danny moved to Vancouver to join our cast…
Martin Wood: He landed, we handed him a GPS and a car, told him he had to drive on the other side of the road and then left him to his own devices for a week! (laughs)
GH: He walked in the door and sat down with Martin and started talking about Danny’s REAL-LIFE back-story and it matched up with Mac Rendell’s back-story. He came in for a wardrobe-fitting and I asked him if he’d already been fitted-out as his clothes were perfect. He was just the perfect fit for the role and we’ve had that happen with a few of our cast/characters, so fate took a hand…
Behind the camera it’s good to see you’re giving some up and coming talent a chance… we expect great things from these newcomers: Andy Mikita, Mike Rohl and one ‘Amanda Tapping’...
MW: (laughs) Amanda now qualifies as a seasoned director. We have three seasoned directors who are sharing the load. Amanda’s been very excited about it. This is her first chance to direct a show where she doesn’t also have to be acting… this has been the first project where she hasn’t had to learn her own lines as well…
But these are three directors who have all worked with both visual effects backgrounds and visual effects creatures before. That, for us, was a big thing. There are lots of people who have dabbled in effects, but people who haven’t dealt with 3D creatures on a big scale… it’s difficult to plug them into it. There’s a steep learning curve about what you can and can’t so. When one of the ‘characters’ or ‘antagonists’ in your show is going to be added later you need to plan ahead.
GH: We made the decision early on - and this was not a controversial decision, everyone was onboard for it, at all levels - that we’d have a short roster of directors, each directing multiple episodes. It creates that team spirit, that family feeling. For instance Andy Mikita directed episodes two, four and seven; he’s practically been here form the start and is as familiar with the characters and stories as anyone who is in the building full-time. Mike Rohl is directing three episodes, Amanda as well… they really are familiar with the show, not just being handled a single script to understand.
Is it fair to say that Primeval: New World will be a mix of monster-of-the-week and a growing background story-arc?
GH: We certainly have those premise-setting episodes that are about ‘…not getting eaten by a dinosaur’ There’s a lot of story-arc pieces between the ‘A’ story of the week and also several episodes that are more linked to that arc.
MW: It’s not the kind of show that you couldn’t join mid-season, that you'd be lost…LOST being that prime example… but while you could, you will want to watch each week to see how the pieces of the arc progress.
You’ve both had a long association with projects that have been shot in Vancouver, how has the city and its resources changed over the last decade?
MW: To begin with I think we were a service industry for American productions and that’s where all this came from. Just recently - without getting too high on a soap-box here - Sanctuary was one of the first shows to do an all-Canadian show. It wasn’t servicing the American market. It was ‘WE can do this. We just haven’t had enough money!’ We have these incredible visual-effects savvy crews. Huge blockbusters get made up here. We have a lot of shows that need visual effects. The FX houses here are astounding. Atmosphere Visual Effects - with whom I worked before on Stargate:Atlantis and Stargate: Universe are a multi-Emmy winning FX house. They blew us away. They told us they’d done some dinosaur demos. They did three - including a raptor in an urban environment.
GH: They had a raptor in the office we were standing in and they showed us it walking down the corridor we’d just walked down. It did give us the genuine ‘Holy Crap, THAT’s what it would be like in the world of Primeval…’ and that was something done relatively quickly.
As for changes in the city, I agree with everything Martin’s said, but I’d probably say that when I was up here for Highlander, which was a Canadian/French co-production with a minor American participation - so it was a unique bird for its time, we filmed in Gastown all the time. We could shoot in the heart of the city. Nowadays it’s harder, we have to be more creative with location filming. We’ve been very fortunate to be able to shoot where we have, but the Vancouver population has exploded in the last ten years and so access isn‘t always as easy.
If the show continues to do well, are you ready for the potential fan base to increase and… maybe even Primeval conventions and the like?
GH: Having done Highlander before and Martin having done Stargate, I think it would be exciting to be part of something like that again. People are still drawn to those shows years later and it would be the best we could hope for to achieve that level of interest…
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