Slaughter of Innocence

ƒëlïx ruvërïs

Posted on 16/5/2014, 21:17 by: ƒëlïx ruvërïs

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Intervista per TV Guide di Laurie McCarthy sul finale e sulla prossima stagione. // Laurie McCarthy on the season finale and season two for Tv Guide.

CITAZIONE

TV Guide Canada: Mary has really hardened the past couple of episodes. What consequences will that have for her?

Laurie McCarthy: I think you saw a Mary who made some really difficult choices. I think the immediate consequence is that she and Francis have enormous secrets from each other. She had to operate independently, she had to do things to save herself, she had to make choices that, surprisingly, are the kind of choices one could imagine Catherine de Medici (Megan Follows) might have made over the course of being a woman in power, but also being a woman whose power was not necessarily stable and was often threatened. That’s not to say Mary’s going to wind up like Catherine de Medici but she has really struggled with balancing her heart over her duty. There’s a line in the script where she says “It’s always the woman who must bow to the queen” and I think she realizes that within herself that’s true.

TVGC: You mention her becoming quite a bit like Catherine, and Catherine was quite influential in that. Did we see a reverse where Mary softened Catherine?

LM: I don’t see Catherine as hard as everyone else does. I think being a parent always softens her and I think for all the troubles that she and Mary have had, she has been a substitute parent for her over the course of her younger years, and she’s tried to guide her as a young adult. Obviously when anyone’s a foe of Catherine’s, she’ll take them down. Her position—even though she’s the queen of France—it’s not a secure position. We saw that threatened this year, because at any turn you realize the king is game to get rid of her and then where would she be? So I think that their relationship is complex, but I wouldn’t look for a softer Catherine in Season 2 by any means.

TVGC: Before Henry died, we saw this fantastic journey of him going completely insane. Why did you decide to do that with him?

LM: We did it because we knew the actor, Alan Van Sprang, could pull it off. It felt like it was a great time to shake things up at court, and truthfully, when you look back at the historical figure of Henry there were things he did that you could argue were mad. When you put them in the context of the time, they don’t look so crazy but he was a pretty violent guy himself. But honestly, it felt like the most interesting story to tell while we were telling a story about there being potential monsters in the woods and monsters outside the castle, it felt like a great time to tell the story of what it would be like if the monster was actually inside the castle and he had absolute power.

TVGC: The scenes between Catherine and Henry—staring with hiding the body—were pure comedy gold. Is there anything coming in Season 2 to replace what we’re losing?

LM: There will be. I can’t speak directly to it, but I think there’s an undercurrent of black comedy in the show anyway. But if you look at that episode it was actually the launching of his madness, so what started out as a piece that seemed comedic turned very quickly to realizing this was maybe the first girl that we knew that he had killed and then it turned out that maybe it wasn’t an accident at all. There will always be a thread of black comedy in the show because their lives are absurd in so many ways. I think even though it’s grounded in its own way—the characters don’t see their lives as being wildly absurd—they’re strange times to live in.

TVGC: Speaking of, how is Francis going to live with killing his father?

LM: I think it’s going to eat away at him. There was the death bed scene with his father—the father who killed his brother said to take the life of someone you love is a burden you carry your entire life and it does eat away at you and I think that will be true of Francis. It’s less true if it’s a burden you can share with others, but that remains to be seen, who he’ll be able to share that burden with.

TVGC: The hug between the brothers was really moving, but how will Bash feel when he finds out Francis killed their father?

LM: It will be interesting to see who finds out what Francis did, and who uses it against him, and who offers him support and who is understanding of that. Their relationship moving forward—they’ll be bonded but it will continue to be complex. Francis really loves his brother, and Bash really loves Francis but their stations will always pull them apart. At the core of the series, I really see that brotherly connection as a deep and true friendship—it’s one of the running love stories of the series, the love between the brothers and the love for Mary and her friends.

TVGC: Kenna and Bash finding happiness together was almost a bigger surprise than their marriage–but we know from what we’ve seen and speaking with Torrance Coombs that things do not go well for Bash, ever. How long do we expect this happiness to last?

LM: I think their love will last. I wouldn’t put a clock on it, but he’s a character who is adventurous and who Francis will come to lean on in a position of leadership. He also has a lot of knowledge about things going on beyond the castle wall. The plague is going to change the landscape of our region of France and that Bash will be involved, as will Francis, with the aftermath of that. There will be a power shift and there will be powerful lords rising from the ashes—people who may be friends but will oftentimes be foes. How it will affect his relationship with Kenna, we’re still figuring that out. But there’s also a genre element to the show. It’s less supernatural and more horror and that has touched and will continue to touch Bash in the upcoming season.

TVGC: Why did you opt to have pagans in the wood and go into that conflict instead of the more historical Protestant vs. Catholic struggle?

LM: Really, my fondness for telling mysteries and the actual superstitions and the horrors and terrors of the time. I thought it was a compelling way to look at that factor of society at the time. We won’t shy away from the violence between the Protestants and the Catholics, particularly in Season 2. In Season 1, we wanted the series to be a little more insular. It felt like it was a lot to bring Mary to court, introducing her to all these other characters, introduce the audience to all these characters, and not just the politics and the intrigue and the dynamic of that particular French court and the region around it, but to bring it in really [to] the politics of England and Scotland. I feel like we’ve accomplished that now, and now that Mary’s firmly rooted in France, she’s about to begin her reign as the queen of France alongside Francis, and I think that they will find themselves as king and queen of a nation that’s really on fire and an enormous part of that is going to be the Protestant/Catholic conflict.

TVGC: Is Lola a threat to Mary now that Francis knows about the baby?

LM: I think that she is. I think that Lola has given Francis something that Mary up to now has not been able to give him—not just an heir, but a child. Francis is a child of a very unhappy marriage and a relatively unhappy family. To do it himself and do it differently, is a pretty big draw. To want to be a father, and a very different father than he [had] is an enormous pull toward Lola. That’s not necessarily a romantic pull, but I think anything that tears at your husband’s affections…and it will be a husband who’s already king of a country so there’s not a lot of extra time or affection to spare. I think Mary will fight her unease and fight her jealousy with every fiber of her body, but I think it’s going to be a battle.

TVGC: Greer was the only one of the five to make the right decisions for a woman of her station in that time, and Leith attacked her for it! Does some part of him understand why she did it?

LM: I think he does understand why she’s doing it, but it hurts anyway. He’s in love with her, she’s in love with him—he knows that. He is a very ambitious, driven guy. He’s met her family, he realizes that there’s almost no helping them–they’re surprisingly penniless according to the needs of her world. He really feels like he’s been given an opportunity to rise in society and that it’s a miracle, really, at this point in time and that she should be brave and take his hand and jump in with him. When she doesn’t do that, and she betrays not only him but her own heart, he reacts passionately toward her. So I understand his point of view. I also really understand Greer taking a safer path. What he considers a big bump in society just isn’t enough to help her sisters. I thought it’s was great conflict for the two of them. I agree with you that she did what a girl in her position would do, but she paid a price for it and she’s going to have to pay a price down the road as well.

TVGC: It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Castleroy’s daughter is Leith’s new interest. How much can we actually trust Castleroy despite all the supposedly generous things he’s done?

LM: Yes. The question is how much can you trust anyone when something they love is threatened, or when you threaten to take away someone who is very dear to them? I think he’ll have to search his own heart. It will be an interesting quadrangle in the future.

TVGC: Mary’s dress, when she puts on the English coat of arms, was this brilliant crimson colour which is similar to the dress that she wore when she died. Was that a deliberate choice?

LM: It really wasn’t. We’re aware of the fact that she meets a terrible and violent end and this was a moment where her fate might have gone another way. Historically, one of the things that really did her in in Elizabeth’s mind was the fact that she used the English coat of arms. The banner that proclaimed her England’s queen was behind her head at many occasions and it’s true that Henry II really was responsible for that, but at some point Mary was really complicit too. So we made a choice to bring that forward. The red dress being evocative of her beheading, I think that there’s an undercurrent of that there but it’s certainly nothing we’re racing towards.

TVGC: How are you balancing these historical moments with telling your own story?

LM: I think we’re following the major milestones. To use a different metaphor, if those historical events are giant curves in the road, we’ll get to them. It’s just a question of how quickly we hit those turns. Her life was fascinating, her life in France was fascinating, her life when she returned to Scotland was fascinating—but we’re also telling the stories of what I like to call the in-between pages of those chapters. In the next season it will be really interesting to see how she and Francis together handle being the king and queen of France.

TVGC: The costumes again, and also the music—you were really fusing the modern with the past. How did you figure out the way you wanted to do that and what was the process?

LM: I looked at other historical fiction—and you realize everybody takes some liberties. That opened the door a little bit. From the minute I started talking about doing this project, I was looking through fashion magazines and catalogues. I knew that I wanted it to feel really tribal—I wanted to do an origin story, I wanted these girls to look a little different than other members of French court, but also I wanted the show to look a little different than other series that had been done, and other features. I wanted it to feel aspirational, I wanted the girls to look beautiful, I wanted them to look as comfortable as one could look in a corset. I wanted it to look like clothes they might have chosen themselves and I wanted to feel like we were really with them in their everyday life as opposed to when they were getting their portraits done. So that’s why we moved away from any kind of Elizabethan collars, we went for layering and mixing textures as opposed to just going for velvets and taffetas. I just wanted it to be fun and beautiful. In terms of the music, I wanted you to feel what they were feeling and not feel estranged from the emotion. So that’s one of the reasons why we went for a more contemporary score and some contemporary needle drop as well.

TVGC: How gross can we expect things to get with the plague?

LM: I think you can expect them to be perilous. I don’t know how gross they’ll be. It’ll feel apocalyptic. There’s going to be huge division between those who are privileged to survive and those who don’t. It will be horrific and violent and chilling, but I don’t know that I would say that we’re going to go gross.

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Slaughter of Innocence

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