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Timothy Bond (Part 2) Jump straight to Part 3 of this very long interview or go back to Part 1 You did a couple of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. "I did. That was one of the first jobs I had in Los Angeles, actually. It was really a treat, mainly because of Patrick Stewart."
"It was huge, awe-inspiring. And very closely controlled. I'll give you an example from the first episode that I did. Oh by the way, I'd cut through a lot of special effects stuff by then because I'd also done the Friday the 13th televison series with lots and lots of optical effects. I'd learned a lot about opticals and trick shots and things like that. I had a phaser fight in my first show; I was called to a meeting, and they wanted to know how I was going to shoot it. They wanted to know specifically: how many set-ups I would make; how many times somebody would pull the trigger in each set-up; and how many times I would cut to each set-up. I said, 'Well, I can certainly figure this out, but tell me how this works. Why do you want to know all this, because I've never run into that before?' They said, 'Well, it's $10,000 a shot, it's $200 every time you pull the trigger, and it's another $1,000 for each time you cut back to the shot. So if you plan this out, we'll know exactly how much it's going to cost.' And I did, and they did. "Then I got a memo, which also went to my assistant director, who was of course employed by the studio, confirming our conversation: 'This is what you will do on set.' And it is what I did. Interestingly enough, when they saw the phaser fight, the producers liked it so much they said, 'Oh, we want to make this longer!' So they used all the out-takes. But yes, Star Trek did amaze me. I believe there were 28 copies of dailies that were made every day, circulated through the vast Paramount studios to people who all had the right to comment and send notes back to you." They always seem to have eight or nine co-producers and you think: what do all these people do? "Yes, I often wonder that. On Star Trek, it was actually very well run. I'm sure it still is; I haven't been there in a long time. And they all actually did do things. But I've done some series where, I swear to God... I did a series with 15 producers once! A series which shall be nameless, with 15 producers, and I swear I only met four of them. Knock off three more for post-production; I don't know where the others were! It's kind of a Hollywood disease: multiplying producers. It's like a social disease." I understand there was a problem on your second Trek episode. Wasn't David Rappaport supposed to be in it? "Oh yes. Boy, have you ever done your research! It was actually very sad, because David Rappaport was engaged as a guest star. For people who don't know him, he was a very short man who had had a very nice career, basically playing the short guy. Including a very nice stint on LA Law as a lawyer who, whenever he approached the bench, had to stand on his briefcase in order to talk to the judge. He had a great sense of humour. Anyway, we started off shooting with him, and I shot for three days with him, and then there was a weekend. And on the weekend, he tried to kill himself. Which was horrific. Of course, none of us knew him that well really, but we never knew why he attempted suicide. People often don't know why. He didn't kill himself, fortunately, but I had to recast. And subsequently, five weeks later, he went back and tried again and succeeded. "After the fact, you think, 'Did I say something? Did I do something?' It was tough going at the studios. We found out midnight Sunday night. My AD phoned me and said, 'Okay, I know you were deep in REM,' - I'll never forget the line, it was such a good line - 'but you're not shooting what you think you're shooting tomorrow.' We had to go on shooting of course, because it's $150,000 a day or something hideous, a huge number. So I had to put together with my AD a day's work that did not have that character, while we recast. Which was tough. The hair and make-up people were all in tears. They'd spent a lot of time with him because he had an elaborate rubber make-up. They'd spent an awful lot of time with him in moulds and big make-up sessions, so they knew him better than I did at that point." After Trek, what did you move onto? "I did a thing called Hard Time on Planet Earth." Oh my God, I remember that. It was shown over here once on Sunday lunchtime. They buried it away in the hope that nobody would notice it. "Understandably so. I had my first Hollywood awakening on that. I did the second episode, so of course all the attention went to the first episode. All the producers were clustered down around the camera and I just quietly put mine together, but the day before I was due to start shooting, they suddenly realised, 'Oh God, there's another one of these!' And there were another eleven or twelve after me as well. "One of the producers took me aside one day and said something that I thought was tremendously helpful. He said, 'I know this is early days for the series, and I know there are going to be times on set when you are basically alone, and you're going to wonder: which way should I play this part? Should I play this for comedy, or should I play this seriously, or what should I do? I just want you to remember: bottom line, this is fundamentally a comedy.' I said, 'Oh thank you. That's so helpful.' Perfect. I'm thinking, 'A Hollywood producer. Great - these guys know.' An hour later, his partner took me aside and said the same thing, only he said it's fundamentally a drama! The next day there were two more partners there. One of them said it was an action show, the other one said it was a relationship show! So I just thought, 'Well, I'll just go down to the floor and shoot whatever the hell I feel like!'" Disney had a stake in that, didn't they? "Yes, that was when Disney was first trying to get into cranking out network television. So there was, I guess, a lot riding on it at the time. Disney was trying to break into this thing and of course they've broken into it in spades."
"I only did one Outer Limits. I did the one that was the first of the one-hour shows to air. Does that play in England?" On and off. We've had a lot of episodes. "Oh good. The one I did was called 'Valerie 23' and it's one of the films I'm most proud of. It's about a wheelchair-bound scientist who works in a robotics laboratory. It was a really inspired idea, I think. This guy gets roped into being the beta-tester of this girl, Valerie 23, who is of course to-die-for gorgeous, but just a little mechanical! He falls in love with her, then realises that he's being a fool and resists. There's a whole back and forth thing that happens between them. Meanwhile, a relationship that he's been pining for, with a real woman, ends up working out. So he throws over Valerie 23, who's living in his house anyway, doing his dishes, and he starts dating this other woman. And Valerie gets jealous. And Valerie is programmed to make the relationship work - no matter what. So then she becomes a homicidal robot. It was a lot of fun." What sort of brief were you given about making this different from, or similar to, the 1960s series? "We were encouraged not to look at the original series. And we were basically told, which was wonderful and very liberating: 'Make movies. Don't make television.' You don't often get to hear that. Or sometimes you do but it's not actually sincere! It's a little bit tough to follow up on that brief though when you don't actually have a decent amount of time to do the work. It's all very well to say it, but how about another six days of shooting time to do that? But that of course wasn't forthcoming. "I guess your mag is interested a lot in special effects, because I made a really cool special effects shot in that show, which I can talk about if you're interested. It was my first motion-control shot, back in the days before computers could really help you a lot. 'Back in the days' - it was three years ago! We now have computer programmes that will track motion within a shot, but in the days when I was doing this thing, we still had to use a motion-control camera, which is still the prefered way to do it. I guess you know what that is and how that works. So we had a little portable motion-control rig, believe it or not, that was brought into the studio. Because usually you have to go to the camera, build your set around the camera. But it was a sweet little rig, and it really worked well. "What we did is a shot where Valerie, the robot, is sitting in a chair, and the guy comes into the lab in his wheelchair. And she says hi and has a chat with him. They haven't dated yet, but she says, 'I understand we're going to be dating, and I'm really looking forward to it. Do you like opera? I really like opera. I think La Boheme...' And on and on. While this is going on, one of the technicians in the room takes her hair off and opens up the back of her head. We dollied around her while she was doing this, from the point of view of the guy in the wheelchair, wheeling around her, looking at the back of her head. Inside was this sort of organic goop. You could see her chatting away on the side angle, while this tool went into the back of her head and adjusted something inside her head! And it worked beautifully well. It took a lot of time." Again, that was the second episode, after the pilot. The same on Touched By an Angel too. "I used to be Mr Second Episode." Is it: 'We've done the pilot. Right, get Bond in to do the next one'? "I think that may be the case. I think also part of that is because some producers know that I can manage on my own a little bit, that I'm very organised. If you work in the special effects area of film-making you've got to be very organised. And I hope that's why I've ended up with them. I'll tell you quite frankly, I also seek them out. Because sometimes you can make a better film if you don't have everybody 'helping' you. One of the curses of television is that sometimes you get a little more help than you can actually handle. We have a saying here that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. I guess you guys have those too."
"Oh, how wonderful." Well, what everyone wondered was: have you ever actually been to England? Because everyone looked at it and said, 'This is supposed to be in England?!' "Did it look like it at all?" Well, it was things like: Excalibur isn't part of the Crown Jewels! "Does Excalibur actually exist?" No, it's all a legend. Also there was this one double decker bus in the background of every shot. It was a pure American view of England. "Yes. I'll tell you exactly what happened there. It's shot in Toronto, but they decided it had to be set in England. Of course, they weren't going to send me to shoot it. But what they did do was, they sent me to England for - get this - a day and a half. That was a nice trip. What I did do while I was there was look around at locations and make mental notes of things that reminded me of specific places in Toronto, to try to at least get the right feel for the location. The other thing that I did was I met up with a cameraman, a wonderful man named Paul Bisson, sort of the dean of British cameramen, someone I'd worked with before. We went around and looked at shots that he could make for me after the fact, that I could matte into my film. To at least fool an American audience, but never a British audience, that we were in London." So he shot landmarks and things that you could matte into the background? "Yes. Then I went back to Toronto and booked the only double decker bus and found the only two London taxi cabs, one of which was actually left-hand drive. And I nailed down locations that reminded me of places I had seen in England to get it as close as I could. I shot the film, edited the film, then sent Paul Bisson back a shot list, which was totally detailed. Focal length: I actually got ordinance maps of London. 'There's a traffic island here, in front of the National Gallery. Go to this island and orient your camera at 27 degrees from North magnetic. Put this lens on it, put this on the bottom of the frame. You'll make the shot I need.' As a result, I was able to make a rather short sequence of a car chase through London in the fog, where the cars were shot in Toronto and London was shot in London. It was a nice little technical exercise that I knew wouldn't fool you guys. You must have had a lot of laughs watching that." It was about as English as Dick Van Dyke's accent. "There's all the poor Canadian actors doing their best as well." How much control did William Shatner have over the Tekwar series? "A lot. It's his baby. He wrote the books." It is alledged... "He was executive producer. He wasn't there all the time; he was in Los Angeles and again we were in Toronto, because this was still during my Toronto days. But he was very much a hands-on producer, and really good. What he did was he prevented the stories from just sinking into the mire of being futuristic: let's show the world what it it's going be like however many years in the future, whenever it was set, and do a kind of college thesis on it. There was a certain kind of impetus behind this that they didn't want to do that, which is one of the things that actually made it look good. Shatner would always say 'Don't forget this is entertaining. No no no, we don't want that here. We want a car chase.' "I really enjoyed it for that, because when you put the film together it really helped if it was entertaining. It's an area actually where Canadians are weakest. We're very earnest film-makers, I think. Bill, although he's Canadian, has spent a long time here and knows you've got to entertain the troops. Keep this moving, keep this exciting. So he was a joy to work with. I shot with him for two days only, but he was a treat. There was a great story on that. We had a huge budget cut in half the week before I was due to start shooting. A decision had been made to prepare all of our optical efffects shots - there were a hundred - to film resolution instead of video resolution. This is done after the film has started shooting, after the film has been financed, so they had to come up with I don't know how many million more dollars. So they start combing through the remaining film to try to find as much money as they could. So we had a sort of bloodletting one day and some things were cut. "One of the things that the studio cut out of the film were the motorcycles. The kids who all thought they were Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur, their steeds were motorcycles. They were riding around on these things with banners on the back of them. The studio said, 'Ah, you don't need the motorcycles. They can just ride around in old cars. It was a considerable saving because of using stunt drivers for the wide-shots, and instead of one car you had to have four motorcycles, also how many days of shooting. All that stuff goes on. I called Bill and I said, 'I think they're going to ruin our film if they do this. What do you think?' He said, 'Oh absolutely. This is stupid.' So he called the producer, and the producer said, 'There's nothing we can do about it, Bill. The studio's made their pronouncement: the motorcycles are cut. We tried. We went and fought. We agree with you, they should be in the film. but they said no. Bill said, 'They won't say no to me.' And you know, they didn't! Now there's an executive producer!" A useful guy to have on your side. "He was a treat that way. I said, 'How did you do it?' He said, 'Oh hell, I live higher up the hill than they do'! Which is a line I've never forgotten, it's a good one. I'm sure he does live way up in the Hollywood hills." Continue to Part 3 of this very long interview, where Timothy Bond discusses his work on Sliders, Hercules and Goosebumps. Or go back to Part 1 where he talks about The Shadow Men and how he got his start as a director on Canadian TV | ||
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