Transcription[]
The following is a transcription of the Official Outlander Podcast episode 204, "La Dame Blanche (Episode)." It is provided here for the purposes of study, criticism, and accessibility.
RONALD MOORE: Hello, and welcome to the podcast for Episode 204, "La Dame Blanche." I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the Outlander television series, and I'm joined today by Toni Graphia who wrote this episode. Hello, Toni.
TONI GRAPHIA: Hi.
MOORE: This'll be a fun one. This is a great episode and today the Scotch, the whisky, as they say in Scotland, is Scapa, a 16 Year Old.
GRAPHIA: Slainte.
MOORE: Slainte. This is actually a Scotch Toni gave me many years ago at the opening of the Tall Ship offices.
GRAPHIA: Yes, the big party to christen Tall Ship.
MOORE: Oh, and it's a good one.
GRAPHIA: Oh, it is a good one.
MOORE: It's nice.
GRAPHIA: Very nice.
MOORE: So we'll just sit here and drink this and you folks can watch the show at home.
GRAPHIA: We're watching the credits. And I have to say, I do love my credit.
GRAPHIA: I'm probably more picky about the credits than the other...
MOORE: Oh, right, you go over the king.
GRAPHIA: I love being over the king. And thanks to Mikey O'Halloran, our editor, I believe who knew how much I would love...
MOORE: Yes, who knew you cared about exactly which one.
GRAPHIA: He's like, "I got you a great credit." Yeah, so I was very happy. And I love your ship credit.
MOORE: I'm very happy with the ship credit.
GRAPHIA: That's awesome.
MOORE: Well, this episode for a long... This was always... We talked about this internally as this was "the dinner party episode." This was a key story point in the book. They had this pivotal dinner party, where a lot of different things happened. And so in the structure of Season 2, 204 was always "the dinner party episode."
GRAPHIA: You could imagine how happy I was to get "the dinner party episode." After having the witch trial last year, it was... I was a little dubious about it, but it turned out to be a really juicy episode.
MOORE: That exterior shot that we just passed of is a recreation of Versailles. It's a VFX shot, actually. Mostly. Most of those elements are visual effects. Some of them were compiled from actual photographs of Versailles Palace and then our visual effects supervisor, Richard Briscoe, in working with his team, created that whole exterior. This interior of the chess is actually in Prague. This is a real library, very ancient, a very old library that, I think, had been built originally somewhere else and then laboriously transported to Prague by somebody and recreated there. It's a huge, beautiful, beautiful interior location.
GRAPHIA: It's gorgeous.
MOORE: So this was part of our Prague shoot. Now, this opening here, with the poisoning of Claire, is definitely drawn from the book. I'm trying to recall if this is in the same place as it was in the book story.
GRAPHIA: She is poisoned in the book at Versailles. I'm not sure if it was over chess. Um... We had moved the baby-naming sequence, which we had originally... You know, it originally was set in the book, and I believe, in the first script, in the bedroom where it was an intimate moment between them. And they were talking about the baby names. We moved it and put it during the chess game because we wanted to create some friction there to show that Jamie not only was not romantic and not having... You know, making love with Claire. But that they also didn't have that intimacy that couples have and that she was having trouble wrangling him even to talk about baby names to give her ammunition for the fight that they have later in this episode.
MOORE: I think in the book version of this sequence, she's poisoned and I think Jamie picks her up and she's taken to another, like a cottage or something, in Versailles and there's a royal physician and...
GRAPHIA: Yeah, we have the royal physician in the script and, unfortunately, he was cut for time, as were some... We had some French court ladies fawning over Jamie. And I remember one of them said, "Oh, he can castle my queenside any time." And we had to cut them also, for time. I hated losing them. But, the focus here was on the Comte and what he's doing to Claire there, to imply that he caused this poisoning in retribution for his ship that was burned.
MOORE: I'm pretty sure in the book St. Germain was there, right? And I think she did cross with him or saw him in the same room or something. So I think that was... But there was always... We were always trying to figure out exactly how to choreograph this so that you could kind of believe that it was probably the Comte St. Germain, but you didn't have real clear evidence that it was him.
GRAPHIA: They couldn't know for sure, or Jamie would just go kill the guy, and we couldn't have Jamie do that, because it would mess up their whole plan.
MOORE: Right. And now we're back on our soundstages in Scotland.
GRAPHIA: Yes, we had set up in the last episode that she knows that Master Raymond sells this particular poison to people who want to poison their enemies.
MOORE: Yeah, without it being a fatal dose. And now, this is where she tells him that Jack is actually alive, right?
GRAPHIA: Yeah, this secret has been weighing on her for two episodes now and...
MOORE: I remember as we structured this, there was a lot of... Some of the stuff that kept floating around was, "When does she tell Jamie that Jack is alive and how and under what circumstances?" And it took a while... This was like a late development, that it became this scene in the show.
GRAPHIA: Right.
MOORE: And there was also, I remember us playing around with, well, what was his reaction going to be? And I remember we came... At some point in the structuring process, we thought it would be fun if actually he was overjoyed at the news. Which was in contradiction to what the last... Where we left last week.
GRAPHIA: Exactly.
MOORE: Which was, "Oh, my God. "If Jamie finds out, he's gonna lose his mind."
GRAPHIA: "He's gonna go crazy and run off and kill him." And we wanted to play that as a surprise.
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: The pressure is really on Claire, because not only did she find out he's alive back in Scotland, and she thought that Jamie might go back to find him in Scotland. Now, knowing that he could meet Alex, the Duke of Sandringham's secretary, now Jamie wants to have this dinner party and Sandringham is actually gonna be in their house. And if Sandringham's gonna be in their house...
MOORE: Yeah, when Jamie... Well, and the dinner party... You know, the dinner party was part-and-parcel of the book. A lot of key things happen there, like I said earlier. But the rationale for the dinner party was something we felt had to be tied into the plot that we were playing in the TV show, more firmly. So the idea of having Charles at the dinner party as a way of showing him up in front of the Duke of Sandringham, was something that evolved in our discussions of what was the pretext for the dinner party.
GRAPHIA: Right, to derail the money coming from Sandringham to Charles. They wanted Sandringham to see what a bad investment Charles was and what sort of a dreamer that he was, in person.
MOORE: Yeah, and here's the big moment when she finally tells him. It's so funny. It's like literally today is... Toni and I are doing this podcast. Earlier we were sitting downstairs at Tall Ship Productions working on Season 3, in earnest. Like, working on story structures and breaks. Okay, how would this all work? And this is like...
GRAPHIA: Episode 4. And this is Episode 4.
MOORE: This is like we've gone through the stones and we've time traveled back to a different era. It's, like, so hard to remember, "Oh, yeah, God, 204."
GRAPHIA: Such a long time ago.
MOORE: When in reality... When did we shoot this? Is this last fall?
GRAPHIA: It was last summer.
MOORE: Last summer. So this is, like...
GRAPHIA: I was there in the summer, from May through the end of July.
MOORE: And this was shot before we went to Prague, right? All the Scotland stuff was shot...
GRAPHIA: Yes.
MOORE: All the Paris stuff, rather, was shot in Scotland. Then we went to Prague at the end.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, the interior Paris stuff was shot in Scotland, but we saved certain scenes, for instance, the upcoming Murtagh and Fergus scene was shot exterior of the hospital in Prague.
MOORE: Which is very complicated, when you're cross... It's called cross-boarding, when you're separating scenes like that and shooting them in batches, which is a common practice. But doing it as aggressively as we did it in Season 2, with Prague and Scotland and France and South of England and all this kind of stuff... It's very complicated not just in terms of the production but also for the actors, 'cause the actors have to remember where they were.
GRAPHIA: I don't know how they do it. My hats off to them. They have to shoot all these things out of order and it's like, -"Hey, today, am I happy? Am I sad? Am I..."
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: "Am I mad at Jamie?" Or, "How far along in the story are we?" And it's very tricky to boomerang those emotions from day to day. And they do it masterfully.
MOORE: Yeah, they just do it so well. Like, this whole sequence is the aftermath of her poisoning, but they hadn't shot the poisoning yet. And we didn't shoot the poisoning for months. And I thought it was really important, I mean, we kept... There was a temptation to cut this little scene with Claire and Murtagh over and over again. But, it was just like a joke I couldn't leave on the table, that he's... Yeah. That afterward she's like, "I never thought... I don't know what you were worried about."
GRAPHIA: Yeah, yeah.
MOORE: I had to have that joke. It was like, it just felt like it was incomplete if we didn't play that.
GRAPHIA: We did have to, unfortunately, cut the scene at the bottom of the stairs, where Fergus was telling him about the melons...
MOORE: Oh, yeah.
GRAPHIA: Fergus was talking about one of the prostitutes and how she had big melons or something. And Jamie was just trying to figure out which one to talk to that he didn't have to sleep with. He wanted to know which of the girls talked the most. We had to cut that for time, too, but it plays later when Claire... You'll see when Claire's upset about him being in a brothel.
MOORE: When she's upset about... With the prostitute. Yeah, that was a really... And she smelled of sandalwood or something, right?
GRAPHIA: Yes. That was a whole... We played that again and again.
MOORE: It's nice to be back in the apothecary shop.
GRAPHIA: This apothecary is an amazing, amazing set. Maybe my favorite of the whole series so far. And Gary Steele and Gina did an amazing job building this and filling it with, you know...
MOORE: You could roam in there for hours, just picking up little knickknacks off the shelves...
GRAPHIA: Yeah, every little thing. Every little bottle.
MOORE: And odd pieces. And some of them are really gross. Like, you pick up a bottle where they'll have literally floating goat fetuses in it or some crazy thing.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, exactly. And now they're going into the secret room, which is a part from the book that we really loved, the secret room that he had. And here's where she's... In the book she finds an old wolf skull. It's from an old wolf. But we actually... I remember Gina found some skulls that she said were even more... They were like, prehistoric. That one, is the one she picks up. She said some of these are, like, dinosaur skulls and prehistoric skulls. And the skulls and the bones they found were gorgeous and spooky and just really made this scene. And I love when Master Raymond says to her, "I'm fascinated by things not of this time."
MOORE: "Not of this time."
GRAPHIA: And he's really... We had to keep telling the actor, "You're staring at her, because..."
MOORE: Yeah, that it's about her.
GRAPHIA: It's about her more than the bones. And it's like, "How much does he know? Does he see through me?"
MOORE: Yeah, "Is he a time traveler?" It's like you're playing all these kinds of...
GRAPHIA: Yeah, how would he know? There is something magical about this guy and he does know. And Claire, ironically, there's not anyone she can talk to, really, about Frank, especially Jamie. And even though Jamie knows about Frank, she's worried about him. We felt it was important to show that she loved Frank once. She's concerned about him. He's on her mind, and Master Raymond becomes her confidante. And I love that when she starts to talk to Master Raymond about him... it builds a friendship between them.
MOORE: Yeah and this is all... I don't think this was in the book, right?
GRAPHIA: No, no. Actually, this was your idea.
MOORE: Was it?
GRAPHIA: We were gonna have him read her... I had, in the first draft he read her astrological chart, which actually made no sense, because she wasn't born in the year that she tells him she's born in. And he kind of gleaned that there was something off about her, because she lied and her chart doesn't add up. But we went away from astrology. That was a little cliché. And you said, "Oh, I've heard this thing about something they do in Africa, "throwing the bones. Do something like that." And I remember, I googled it and thought, "Oh ! It's perfect. This is..." And I had read an account off of Wikipedia or something about throwing the bones and using animal hides. And so I suggested to them the zebra hide and...
MOORE: It's a nice exotic... It's a truly exotic touch.
GRAPHIA: Exotic. And it's something Claire knew about from her travels with Uncle Lamb, because she went all over the world with her anthropologist uncle, so she says, "I've heard of this." And she knew what it was. And I love when she says... When Raymond tells her, "You will see him again." And she's perplexed, because actually in the opener of the season, in Episode 1 of Season 2, we see that she does see Frank again. But the Claire standing here doesn't know. Can't imagine that she'll ever see Frank again. So it was just kind of a little Easter egg to drop in there.
MOORE: It was a nice little, nice little piece of continuity. And here's the famous necklace, the stone. This is definitely drawn from the book 'cause this necklace plays a key role in subsequent episodes, that you'll see. And there was a lot of... I'm pretty sure Terry... Terry Dresbach, I think is her last name.
GRAPHIA: Yeah.
MOORE: Terry came up with... I think we left her the design of coming up with exactly what the jewel looks like.
GRAPHIA: The jewel was.
MOORE: Oh! And there's your cuckoo clock.
GRAPHIA: The cuckoo clock was actually taken from another section of the book that's in a much later chapter. But I knew, because I'd actually written another script already and it was in that chapter. And I knew I wasn't using the cuckoo clock for Episode 7, my next episode, so I stole it for here. The first version of this scene, actually, I had written it that Claire... That Louise was sitting for a portrait with her pet monkey, which is something that people did back in those days. They'd have their little dog, little pet. And I wanted the monkey to get loose from her, run through the house, and Louise to burst into tears. And then Claire says... Thinks she's crying over the monkey, but it turns out to be something more serious, which is that she's pregnant. But I remember David Brown, our fantastic Scotland producer, sent me a very short email that just said, "Monkey stays in the cage."
MOORE: Yeah. Monkey is not running around the set.
GRAPHIA: "We are not gonna have the monkey running around on the set." And I just had to laugh and go, "All right, I get it." I couldn't argue on that one. And we changed it, then that's when I said, "Let's do the cuckoo clock, 'cause I love it and we can't use it in the other script, so let's put it here."
MOORE: I just like it. It's like a nice little historical detail, that the cuckoo clock was, like, a new thing to them. It was like, "Ooh, look at this. Have you ever seen anything like it?"
GRAPHIA: In fact, we made it from scratch. Gina and Gary, they had this made by the... I was told recently it was by the same people who made the watch for Episode 13 last year, who made the watch for the watch episode.
MOORE: Oh, really? That's interesting.
GRAPHIA: They're our makers and they make all these historical things.
MOORE: Oh, that's great. It's a great clock.
GRAPHIA: It's a beautiful clock. And it's not the classic cuckoo clock look. It's not the German... Bavarian... The heavy wood. We were surprised that it wasn't that, because that's what we pictured. But it was even better.
MOORE: And I'm sure it'll be auctioned off at the end of the show, so...
GRAPHIA: I want the watch, so someone else can get the cuckoo clock.
MOORE: Yeah. We'll all be stealing various things.
GRAPHIA: I do love this scene, because this is where we see a different side of Louise. We've really only seen her be kind of a flighty party girl, gossipy woman. And here she's got a real problem, and Claire, ironically, is the only friend that she can turn to. And she knows Claire's a healer, so she goes to her, confides in her for one thing, which is to help her to lose the child, but as they talk, you know, Claire ends up counseling her and saying, "Well, what do you... What is it you want? Do you love the man? Do you want the baby?" And helps her to make this decision...
MOORE: Yeah, it's a nice scene between these two friends. There was a lot... I remember in the room having a lot of discussion about when do we reveal that Louise and Charles are lovers. And when does that secret come out. And does Claire know at this point or does she... And wasn't there even a version where this was where it was revealed, that Claire found out that Charlie...
GRAPHIA: I think there might've been, but we wanted to save that as a card that they play at the dinner party, so...
MOORE: So that at the dinner party they supposedly didn't know.
GRAPHIA: We wait... No, we wait and we find out when... An upcoming scene, when Charles comes...
MOORE: No, no, no, but we were trying to preserve that the public face was... Supposedly Claire and Jamie didn't know that they were lovers.
GRAPHIA: Yes, exactly, exactly. We talked about this scene endlessly. This we called "the bite mark scene..."
MOORE: This was...
GRAPHIA: And it's something from the book and... Whoo! Jamie, there we go.
MOORE: Trying to get to the, you know... How upset Claire could be, how defensive was Jamie? What this really was about. Was this really about the prostitutes?
GRAPHIA: Right.
MOORE: Wasn't it really about something deeper? Is it a funny scene? Is it a heartrending scene? Ultimately, it sort of starts in this light tone...
GRAPHIA: Right, it has to walk the line between all of those things, because we didn't want to play that Claire really thought Jamie had slept with someone else. 'Cause we all know Jamie really... It's unlikely that he would bed another woman at this point. But, when women are pregnant, they're emotional. And she hasn't been intimate with him lately, so... He's funny and great in this scene, because he... The more he tries to explain, the deeper he gets here. But to him, it's really a great thing, because he...
MOORE: Yeah, he's excited.
GRAPHIA: He felt like, "When you told me Jack Randall was alive, I got fired up again. And I wanted to find my way back to you." And... He thinks he's telling her a good thing, like, "I was so filled with lust." And she's like, "Yeah, but not for me."
MOORE: And it's a fine line, 'cause there's a certain, like, yes, men are stupid. And we really will think dumb things like that. "Hey, honey! Good news! This hooker got me excited! Isn't that great?" But he couldn't be a complete idiot. So you had to sort of find a way so that at least he had a rationale of...
GRAPHIA: Exactly.
MOORE: And it really was this deeper thing about his history with Jack and how the Jack thing was holding him back, and that this actually was a breakthrough.
GRAPHIA: Right. And she'd been putting up with him going to the brothel all along, knowing that it was just for political reasons. But when you see bite marks on your hubby, you're like, "Hmm. Maybe I should've asked a few more questions about this whole brothel thing."
MOORE: And this was also a time to finally talk about the elephant that's been in the room between the two of them since 201. It's really the aftermath of Jamie's experience with Jack and how that was still affecting the relationship. And how it had kept them from being intimate all this time. And really, that Claire was able to sort of put voice to the fact of how this was affecting her, that she had put up with it and dealt with it and tried to give him space, and tried to be understanding. But there was a point where she's going...
GRAPHIA: "What about me?"
MOORE: "What about me and what about us?" And, "Oh, my God." And you know, you don't even...
GRAPHIA: And this is where, Jamie, he gives his, what we call the "blade of grass" speech, which was actually back from book one. It was at the end of book one. And we didn't play it back there. It didn't fit back there, but it was something that Maril Davis, our producer, she remembered it. And I remember she came to me and said, "There was this thing we didn't use, we didn't have room for. This 'blade of grass' speech, which is very poignant. If there's any way to get it in this season and if there's any way it could fit?" And when we realized that this was the perfect place for it, because Claire's just saying, "Talk to me." She's not pushing him to do anything. But she's saying, "Let's talk. We're never gonna solve this if we don't really communicate." And here's where he gives this speech. And the way it's used in the first book is not quite... It's a little more...
MOORE: It's in a different context.
GRAPHIA: It's a totally different context. And I remember running it by you and you said, "It's okay if we use that. I love the speech. But at this point in the relationship, he's gotta give it more, angry almost, angst ridden, grappling with it." It's not just a pretty piece of literature.
MOORE: Yeah, it's not just an explanation.
GRAPHIA: It's not just a poetic explanation. It's got to be that he's... It's torment... More tormented. And it worked here.
MOORE: 'Cause it's a lovely... It's a great example of Diana's skill as a writer because it's a beautiful, poetic speech.
GRAPHIA: Totally.
MOORE: And all of us, instinctively, the writers went, "Oh, that's lovely. If there's a way to use it. But how do we use it in our version of the show?" And we keep... It's great that Maril remembered that and that we keep these things in mind 'cause you do want to use them, if you can.
GRAPHIA: Some things are... Sound really good when you read them, but then when you say them out loud, if it's not done in exactly the right way, it doesn't particularly translate to screen. So we do try to get in all those gems that we love, but find a way to do it that it makes organic sense in the show.
MOORE: Yeah, and it worked really well here, 'cause it's the... In fact, you needed... This scene demanded a moment of eloquence from Jamie, who's not... It's not in his nature to be a flowery speech guy.
GRAPHIA: Right, right.
MOORE: But this was a moment where he had to bare some part of his soul in a really eloquent way to get through to Claire and get through to the audience what was going on.
GRAPHIA: And then Jamie storms out to sleep in this... We had this little nook in the parlor that... A day bed. And we kept making jokes and saying... When we walked through the set, remember, we were like, "Somebody's gotta have sex in here." 'Cause it's the perfect place. At one point it was gonna be Murtagh and his maid and they were gonna find them.
MOORE: That's right.
GRAPHIA: And it was gonna be a funny scene, that they discover them. But we... It was actually your idea, Ron, that they have sex in here for the first time in many, many months. The thought behind it being that it's dark and that instead of all that talking and instead of all the analyzing and... That it just be, "Let's break it down to just you and me in the dark and we have what we have. We'll never lose that." And I love... It was your line that you put in when she says, "Find me. Find me in the dark." Because it all boils down to that. If he can just forget Jack Randall and just... Even in the dark, this is the woman he loves, who's carrying his child, by the way. And we didn't want to shy away from having sex even with her pregnant belly. We wanted that to be part of it. Cait felt very strongly that pregnant women are sexy and that we didn't want to hide her belly during the sex scene or anything like that, like a lot of network shows do. We wanted to celebrate that and show it's part of their love. And I love this scene. It was a very... We weren't sure which episode they were finally gonna reconnect.
MOORE: Yeah, we kept moving around in the overall structure about when their intimacy would resume. And it took a while before it landed here. And I'm glad it did. It does feel... It feels organic to where the story is.
GRAPHIA: Yeah.
MOORE: 'Cause now they're operating more as a team. They have to get more as a team from this point forward. And then once we decided... Once we found this nook and said, "Let's have sex here." Then that feathered really easily into this next sequence, when they're lying there and have this nice little moment and then hearing the footsteps on the roof. And then Jamie following them out to the bedroom.
GRAPHIA: It's the start of the healing. It's not like one time having sex they're... That he's fixed or it's done. But I like that he says that, because it's just like, "We've reconnected now. We can weather anything." And at least the healing has begun.
MOORE: Yeah. This scene of Charles coming through the window is definitely out of the book. I think one of the key differences in the series versus the books is, in this section of the story in the book, it was still being told entirely from Claire's point of view. So it was the first time in the book actually... When he comes through that window, that was the first time the reader ever met Prince Charles. Like, that was his introduction as a character.
GRAPHIA: I think it was... That's right. In the book it was the first time we met him.
MOORE: 'Cause Jamie had met him, been meeting him.
GRAPHIA: That's right. Jamie had met him off camera, off page and told Claire about him, but we'd never actually met Charlie in the book until this moment. We did preserve that Claire has not met him. This is the first moment Claire has met him, so it's quite an introduction.
MOORE: But it was an interesting thing. As we structured it, we had to keep in mind that in the book version, this was his intro. So you were meeting him for the first time, so it had a different resonance in the story and a different dramatic moment than it would for us in the TV show. 'Cause we've met him a few times, and now he's coming in and this scene had to be about more than just intro-ing Charles.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, we couldn't meet him in this sort of buffoonish way or this whole thing of the rebellion. If we showed Charlie as too much of, just as a clown, it would've been like, "Why did people follow him? Why did he..." We had to show him in those meetings earlier to show that there was something about him that people wanted to follow him. He was smart about certain things.
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: He did have a gravitas. He had two sides. He couldn't manage it. But this was a fun scene to play, 'cause she's like, "It's Prince Charles." Also, Andrew Gower was awesome in this scene, because he did his own stunt. And we said... You know, we brought him in basically and, like, "You're going to stand on this railing outside the window, on our stage, of course. And we're gonna dump water on you, because it's raining outside. "And then we're gonna throw you through the window and Jamie's gonna tackle you." He did it over and over, about 10 times. And he was a real trooper about it. And it looked great.
MOORE: I love that. He just instantly starts commanding them in their own home.
GRAPHIA: Yeah. And then, of course, he starts ranting about his mistress, which we don't know, at first, who it is.
MOORE: Yeah, I don't remember in the book version of events when they connected Charles to Louise. I don't think it was from this scene, though.
GRAPHIA: I don't think it was from this. And I can't remember. But, of course, the famous... God is forever testing me, placing obstacles in my path. I've overcome every one of them. I'll overcome this one too. I won't be deterred. Mark me, I will win her back.
GRAPHIA: Of course, when Claire sees that it's a monkey bite, that's when she puts it all together. So here's, of course, where they...
MOORE: Yeah, now putting all the pieces together for the dinner party was something we spent a lot of time figuring out. There was an early version of this where actually they were gonna invite King James to the dinner party, right?
GRAPHIA: Right.
MOORE: 'Cause James was gonna be in Paris.
GRAPHIA: They had intercepted a letter via Fergus that... Where Charles talked about how his father was gonna be snuck into town and they were gonna have a dinner party for King James, who was gonna drum up money and support for the rebellion. And the dinner party was originally gonna be with James and Charles, father and son, king and prince. And Claire and Jamie were gonna have to try to host that and meet James.
MOORE: And it was a similar motivation. It was still to try to make... Charles look foolish, yeah.
GRAPHIA: To make Charles look bad. In front of his dad. But it was more a father-son story about how Charles was embarrassed because his father didn't believe in him. But we went away from that in order to use our... You know, keep the focus on Charles, not the king, and to use Sandringham, who was already our character that the audience knew. This is where they decide to use Louise. And Claire... I think they both feel really bad, having to deceive these people that they've made friends with. But they have to justify that it's for a greater cause.
MOORE: I love this transition and then this whole sequence here of setting the table. The director, Doug...
GRAPHIA: This was Doug's idea, to do this setting of the table and sort of the... We had to get Claire out of the house so that she could be gone for the preparations, because she has to reappear, of course, just in time for the party. This courtyard is all shot inside.
MOORE: Yeah, this is all interior.
GRAPHIA: It's interior on our set. Now, this is in Prague.
MOORE: I love this little scene.
GRAPHIA: It's a great scene. This was actually Matt Roberts' idea. He loves Murtagh and he champions Murtagh a lot in the writers' room. And this is the one scene probably that was not really integral to the plot. It's a pure character scene, and sometimes those get cut for time, but this one was just so...
MOORE: I loved it. I just wouldn't cut it. I was like, "No, we're not gonna cut this."
GRAPHIA: You wouldn't cut it.
MOORE: "We've got to find other things to cut." I didn't want to cut this. It's just such a great interaction between these two. It tells you a lot about Fergus. It tells you a lot about Murtagh, actually.
GRAPHIA: I mean, Fergus grew up in the brothels, so ironically he knows more about women than Murtagh does. Murtagh's a bit of a fuddy-duddy with women, although now he's in this little téte-á-téte with Suzette. And we thought this would be awesome... Fergus has all these observations about women.
MOORE: I love that ultimately it gets to this Suzette thing. That's the best part. "What about Suzette?"
GRAPHIA: Yeah. Right. Yeah. "What about her?"
MOORE: "She isn't in love. She loves every man."
GRAPHIA: I know this scene was written as... They were throwing knives at onions. And we called it "the onion scene." But then when we got to Prague, apparently they didn't have onions. And I remember seeing the dailies, 'cause Matt supervised this, and I remember saying, "What is that orange thing?" And he's like, "It's a squash! What do you want from me? We didn't have onions in Prague."
MOORE: "We don't have big onions."
GRAPHIA: This is Monsieur Forez and this is from the book, that he is able to stop pain - by using sort of a primitive... A primitive form of acupuncture... A form of acupuncture that Claire didn't know about. So she learns something here from him.
GRAPHIA: This was our very first day of shooting, the first day of the block was this.
MOORE: Was it? This is day one?
GRAPHIA: Yeah. And all they shot that day was the hospital and it's because it was back-to-back with the hospital scene from a previous episode. And I love Mother Hildegarde. She's probably my favorite character from book two. And it also wasn't really integral to the plot. I mean, Claire, we had to get Claire away from the house before the dinner party. But there was talk of cutting this and I fought for it, 'cause it's just purely selfish. I was like, "I have to have Louise de la Tour..." I mean, Frances de la Tour not Louise de la Tour, in my episode, because I just love the actress. This was shot at Glasgow Cathedral, in Glasgow. It's a gorgeous church, but we converted it to have it look like a hospital, a charity hospital. And...
MOORE: The hangman's grease thing is so gross.
GRAPHIA: Oh, yeah.
MOORE: It's so... That's out of the book, right?
GRAPHIA: Yes. That's in the book, that they used hangman's grease from the rendered criminals.
MOORE: Yikes!
GRAPHIA: Um... But this is one of my favorite, favorite moments, uh, when she tells Claire, "You're a great deal better than nothing." It's just such a superb compliment but said in such a casual, tossing-it-off way.
MOORE: Yeah. It's a lovely moment between these two women.
GRAPHIA: Yeah. We actually cut some of that scene, because she went on to tell Claire that she really should think about being a doctor someday and offered to arrange for her to apprentice with a doctor at the Royal Academy of Medicine in France. And Claire said she'd love to, but she's with child and concentrating on her family right now. And we had to cut that, but that was in the first draft.
MOORE: I remember there being a lot of tedious conversations and plotting, trying to figure out the timing of these events. When the carriage was sabotaged. When they discovered it. How long to the dinner party? Where was Jamie? Who had arrived at the dinner party? How long would it take Claire to get to the dinner party?
GRAPHIA: How long would it take her to get home? Is the sun down yet? Do the French have dinner at 5:00 or do they have dinner at 10:00 at night? Of course, we solved that by having the Duke be the first one to arrive, because he's so enamored of Jamie that he shows up early.
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: And this, of course, is a moment where Jamie meets Alex Randall. And the look on his face, he just literally has a shiver. You see how his shoulders go up?
MOORE: I know. It's really nice.
GRAPHIA: I love how Sam did that. It was just a little shiver of, like, "Ugh. This is the brother of Black Jack."
MOORE: Yeah, see, we had to go to the clock. So then, you have all these conversations. "Well, what time does the clock say?"
GRAPHIA: Actually, I think the clock's...
MOORE: "How much light is coming in through the windows? Is it after sunset?"
GRAPHIA: Yeah. I think Elicia, our post production, sent me some QuickTimes of these clocks, because it turned out the times were a little bit off.
MOORE: Yeah, they were off.
GRAPHIA: And we actually had to adjust the times to make this work. Actually, that's the names of my grandparents...
MOORE: Is that right?
GRAPHIA: ...that I used as names, 'cause they were French and I used their names for some of the guests.
MOORE: Aw! I didn't know that.
GRAPHIA: This dinner party... And we're gonna see the table in a moment. It seats 16 people. And I remember, we had to have a lot of conversations with Gary Steele and Terry, because we didn't know how many people would actually fit at the dinner table. It seats 16, but because the dresses were so wide, we could not have eight women and eight men. So, we actually brought the table down to the prop room and then brought in 16 extras, and we dressed them all and we sat them at the table to figure out... And I think we figured out we had cut out four women and 10 men. Or whatever. I can't do the math. But anyway, we could only have a limited number of women because of the bigness of the dresses. We really just wanted Claire and a couple of the wives and Louise. We had some of the men bring male guests with them. Like, the General brings his aide instead of a woman, so we could fit more people, 'cause we wanted the maximum number of people. But it was fun because we put the place cards out, too, and we had to figure out who would sit where.
GRAPHIA: This was shot in Scotland.
MOORE: This is in Scotland, yes. This is actually outside the Duke of Sandringham's house, in Scotland, right? It's that same...
GRAPHIA: Yes, the place we shot the Duke of Sandringham's house had a little alley out back and we...
MOORE: Hopetoun House.
GRAPHIA: Hopetoun House. And we just used this little, short alley. And actually, this was a whole night shoot. We started at dark and we didn't have enough hours of darkness to shoot this, so we actually had to cover with black tarps. Instead of them actually attacking Mary in the alley, they start in the alley, but they pull her into this little side cubby, niche kind of, and that we covered with tarp to make it night, because we actually didn't have enough hours of dark to shoot this sequence. I do love, Claire, when she says, "Alex Randall," and Mary says, "Is there another?" And Claire goes, "Holy shit, yes, there's another, but you don't wanna know about that." Now these guys are not actors. They're all stunt guys who are dressed as the attackers, because we needed stunt guys for the attackers. But they weren't actors, so we just had them yell stuff, and then, we replaced their voices with the French. Yeah, except for Danton.
MOORE: I was gonna say, "Danton is Danton," right? Yeah.
GRAPHIA: One of them is the leader. They did a great job, but it was actually so upsetting to watch in person. I remember the crew and us being very, like, just to see poor Mary attacked like that was very brutal.
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: The Comte St. Germain shows up, and he's a surprise guest. And that woman is his wife. I had a really great time watching the people when we released the photos of who was at the dinner party, long before this season started. All the fans were trying to guess, "Who is this woman at the dinner table? Who is she?" And the answer, they'll find out in this episode is she was the Comte's wife, which is something Diana had in the book, but it was only one sentence. And Diana herself actually forgot it. So when I wrote in the script that the Comte brings his wife, Diana actually sent a note that said, "The Comte doesn't have a wife." And I said, "Actually, he does. It's in the book. You wrote it." And she laughed and said, "Oh, my gosh, I forgot it. I forgot that he had a wife, that I wrote that," which is understandable, considering how gigantic the books are and how many she's written.
MOORE: And how long ago...
GRAPHIA: And how long ago it was that she wrote it. But he did have a wife and we were like, "Perfect, we'll put her in the dinner party." And everyone was trying to figure out for the longest time who that was.
MOORE: I think, originally, the General was a much older gentleman. And then we made him younger so he could actually participate in the fight later on, right?
GRAPHIA: I think so and the fiancé of Mary, as well. And then here comes Louise, of course. With her husband. I don't believe we meet the husband in the book, but...
MOORE: Yeah, I think he's just referred to.
GRAPHIA: But we wanted this train wreck to happen. Where Charles has to see Louise after she's jilted him, and then he lingers, of course, a little too long.
MOORE: I love that.
GRAPHIA: It becomes a little uncomfortable. I love this actress. She's awesome. Claire. Her name is Claire Sermonne?
MOORE: Yes.
GRAPHIA: And also, the costumes, I have to say, in this dinner party, the Prince, I love what he's wearing and Louise just looks stunning. Just amazing.
MOORE: Yeah, whoever does the costumes does a real...
GRAPHIA: I don't know, but we should probably keep her.
MOORE: We should probably keep her around.
GRAPHIA: I love Suzette. Here she comes out and we... This wasn't in the script, but they improvised it, she's upset.
MOORE: Oh. This wasn't in the script? With Suzette?
GRAPHIA: Well, the part where she cares about Murtagh, that she's worried because she's with Murtagh and that's a secret. There was a lot of funny discussions about where the back door of the house was, because they were supposed to come in the back door, but we didn't know exactly where the back door was. We didn't really have a back door. We had a side door. We had a front door. They couldn't come in the front door or everybody would see them. So we just kinda... I think we just kinda...
MOORE: We staged in the courtyard, and we say there's a back door.
GRAPHIA: We just winged it and went, "Go in there. Go up to the door."
MOORE: "Go that way." Yeah, "Take the back staircase," wherever that is.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, and there was a lot of discussion about who or why they would cancel the party. And in the book, I think you did have some wonder of... That if this rape happened, why wouldn't they just cancel this party. And here we didn't want it to be that Claire is saying cancel the party, and then, Jamie was saying it must go on. We flipped it. And we had Claire saying... "No, there's too much at stake. We have to go ahead with this party."
MOORE: Yeah, I felt like in the TV version of events, that the party had to have a huge sort of plot reason to happen. Yeah, Claire driving us forward.
GRAPHIA: We also had to see Claire putting on that crystal she always wears.
MOORE: I thought that was important, too. I was glad we were careful always to include this idea that... what to our point of view in the 21st century is, to look back, that they really did think that the victim of the rape had been ruined. And that she was a ruined woman.
GRAPHIA: She would never marry. She would be ostracized the rest of her life over it.
MOORE: And the craziness of that, in our point of view. And from Claire's point of view.
GRAPHIA: And Claire is shocked to find out that St. Germain is there. He wasn't an expected guest. The Duke invited him.
MOORE: Yeah, Terry designed the necklace and the crystal. And there was a lot of discussion with her about, well, what kind of crystal would it be?
GRAPHIA: I really liked it. In fact, I'm wearing a crystal today.
MOORE: Oh, yes, you are.
GRAPHIA: This is more of a typical crystal.
MOORE: Which is clearer and faceted...
GRAPHIA: But we didn't want it to look like that. We didn't want it to look like it came out of a trinket shop in San Francisco, in Haight...
MOORE: New age-y, yeah.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, we didn't want it to look new age-y. And the crystal she found is more like a quartz. Like, it's solid, but it can still change color. It still shimmers.
MOORE: It feels raw.
GRAPHIA: And it feels hefty, like it has some gravitas to it, whereas these just seem a little trinket-y, you know? I love how when Claire was walking to the dinner party, she walks fast 'cause she's hurrying, but right before she gets there... She just slows down. She just slows down to compose herself. And the shots from behind... And I just love that Cait made that decision.
MOORE: I've said it many times, Cait always knows exactly where she is in every scene, emotionally.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, she does stuff that's even not on the page that... She just makes decisions. Every decision she makes is... Feels right and true to character. And she never disappoints. I love this little transition here. Now, they were supposed to... Claire was supposed to share a look with Jamie after that, after she found out that Louise had told her husband about the baby. She was supposed to nod to Jamie, like, "The plan's a go. Bring up the pregnancy at dinner." But Jamie was in the back of the... Trailing in the back and they couldn't make eye contact. So that was shot before and we had to remember that we... Because we'd missed it there, we're gonna have to do it later. And I'll point it out when they do it at the table, but it was added at the table because we couldn't do it on the walk-and-talk. This is a beautiful sequence. Doug Mackinnon did a great job in choreographing and staging this dinner party. It's an extremely complicated scene to do. Look at how many people are in this, how much food and utensils are involved. The food is all real.
MOORE: It was all cooked by our people in the production...
GRAPHIA: It was all cooked. Like I said before, it was like a chess game, figuring out who would sit where. We weren't sure if Claire and Jamie should be at the heads of the table or should the Duke be at the head, since he's the guest? But we put him in the middle, with Charles across from him so they could interact. We had to have the Comte next to Claire, of course, so they can interact, because she suspects he's behind the attack on the street. We had to have Louise across from Charles in his eyeline, so that it could bother him to be looking at his mistress.
MOORE: Oh, and talk a little bit about the courses and the way that the French did it.
GRAPHIA: Yeah, we did some research and our historian, Danny, had some fascinating research that it wasn't like in England. It wasn't like Downton Abbey, where they served the courses separately, where they'd bring out one course, eat, and then take all the plates away, wait a little while and bring the second, that the French were much more, you know, joie de vivre, and into pleasure. And that they would actually just bring out mounds of food all at the same time and just enjoy. So we don't have a lot of servants. We don't have a lot of formality here. The French, it was very different and we wanted to play that...
MOORE: It was more sensual than it was about...
GRAPHIA: More sensual, exactly.
MOORE: It's really kind of... When you do... It's one of those odd things that you don't think is complicated, but when you're just doing a scene where you've got, like, four people around the table...
GRAPHIA: Oh, It's hard to do four people.
MOORE: It's hard to do four people. It's hard to even describe why, but it's about eyelines and where you set the camera and what direction they're looking, and how that cuts later.
GRAPHIA: Right, it's a nightmare to edit, yeah.
MOORE: And when you have this many people, it's like a mathematical equation, trying to figure out where everybody is and where they're looking, on what line. And making sure that you're tracking it all. And where's the camera, on what shoulder?
GRAPHIA: Yeah. I know that Doug put the camera on one side of the table and shot everyone on that side, and then, had to move the camera and shoot everyone on this side.
MOORE: It takes forever.
GRAPHIA: But we had to do take after take. And they had to tell jokes and they had to eat. And they have to match what they're eating. And I love this here, because there's a whole layer of subtext going on between Charles and Louise and Claire, who knows this. And now I think it's coming up where Claire gives Jamie the nod to go ahead with their plan, which is to mention the pregnancy and which will make Charles lose his mind. There she goes. And then he, quite innocently, congratulates Louise's husband, which Charles is, like...
MOORE: I mean, if you go back and you watch this sequence and you just think about where everybody's looking... The audience has to know exactly who he's looking at in that moment. When he looks to the right... In your mind, somehow you've held in your head the order of the dinner party. Without even trying, you just, as an audience member, kind of know where everyone's roughly seated. And you have to kind of be able to track, when they're looking off camera, who they're looking at and who they're reacting to.
GRAPHIA: I love this one, when he says... Then when, the turn comes when he says, "But of course... The world is not always happy."
MOORE: It's like, what is he going to say next?
GRAPHIA: And then he says this great phrase, which is porca miseria, which is Italian. And I looked it up, because, of course, Charles was raised in Italy, so he speaks Italian. And we didn't subtitle that, even though we subtitled the French. Everyone thought, "Oh, they'll get it. The audience will get it." But it means, "Misery is a pig," which basically is an Italian way of saying life sucks. And I love that Charles says that and I love when he says that Louise's husband is indeed a man in the dark. It's a very dangerous liaison, this. In fact, I went and watched that movie.
MOORE: Did you?
GRAPHIA: I hadn't seen it in years. Just to get the flavor of all the subtext that can come in these kind of proper social settings where there's always another layer of intrigue going on, politics and sexual politics. It's very important to set up that the Comte knows what this stone... Exactly what it is. He knows it's not a necklace. He knows it's for poison and he knows she got it from Master Raymond. I love how he eats. He just...
MOORE: I know. He's really good.
GRAPHIA: He's very good. He's such a nice guy. And he's actually French, which I embarrassed myself greatly one day by... Every time we decide what should be in English and what should be in French, and if we switch something to French at the last minute, we had to let the actors know so they could practice, 'cause most of them weren't French. And I went to his trailer and knocked on the door and I said, "I'm sorry, we've changed this scene. You've got to say it all in French, so I hope you can learn it by tomorrow." And then he answered in some big, long French and I was like, "Oh, you are French, aren't you? Sorry about that."
MOORE: Okay, this is the pivotal thing. This is straight out of the book. They come in, they have to mistake, you know, the interaction between Alex and Mary as... Some of them have to mistake it for him attacking her and it leads to this brawl.
GRAPHIA: This brawl, we had to practice so many times. We had to... Dominic, our stuntman, choreographed it. And we didn't want it to be a serious brawl. That was actually your point, was if...
MOORE: That was my note. I said if it's a serious brawl, Murtagh and Jamie would kill all these guys.
GRAPHIA: They'd just kill everybody in two seconds. So we kind of went with this, Three Musketeers motif.
MOORE: It had to be a little lighter.
GRAPHIA: A little lighter, where they're just fighting. And it was so fun to walk in that room the first day and go... Look around and go, "Okay, what can we break? What can we throw?" And it was a beautiful set, of course, so I'm sure Gary Steele was like, "No, don't break the candlesticks. Don't knock over this couch." But we rehearsed it a lot of times, 'cause it was very...
MOORE: The fights take forever to shoot.
GRAPHIA: Fights are hard to shoot.
MOORE: This is a very Three Musketeers moment here, with the cord from the drapes.
GRAPHIA: Yeah. Merci.
GRAPHIA: We always had this idea, by the way, that the show would end on Fergus slipping into the dinner table and eating a big old turkey leg or something. And we ended up with a little bit of a different ending. We cut back to Claire, but we didn't want to lose this moment, 'cause we always loved it. This was also your idea.
MOORE: Yeah, that the kid...
GRAPHIA: The kid comes in, drinks a little wine. I think we made it lamb chops instead of...
MOORE: Yeah.
GRAPHIA: We found out they didn't have turkeys in Scotland. They were like, "There are no turkeys. We can't have turkey leg." I'm like, "All right, it's a lamb shank or a leg."
MOORE: "It's a leg.It's something."
GRAPHIA: "It's something." One of those big things that you see at Renaissance fairs. That's all we care about.
MOORE: And there you have it. That's Episode 204. Well, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Toni.
GRAPHIA: Thank you very much.
MOORE: We'll talk to you again soon in Episode 205. Until then, good night and good luck.