HIGHLANDER WORLDWIDE WORKSHOP: AUCTION/ADRIAN PAUL ON DIRECTING

By Abbie Bernstein     March 03, 2005

At the start of the auction designed to raise funds for the workshop itself and future Highlander Worldwide events, emcee John Bierly warns, "If you thought the concert last night was silly, wait 'til you see this."

Showrunner David Abramowitz, swordmaster F. Braun McAsh and actors Elizabeth Gracen, Peter Wingfield and Adrian Paul all take turns as auctioneers. Highlights of what ensues include Gracen realizing that her handwritten notes are all over one of the scripts being auctioned off, Wingfield playfully threatening to stab Paul with a replica sword, asking, "Would it add to the value if it had Adrian Paul's blood on it?" and Paul modeling MacLeod's leather coat from the film HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME. "The coat comes on its own, not with me in it," he cautions. There is a loud sigh of disappointment from the audience. "That was exactly the reaction I was hoping for," Paul grins.

There's a shout from the crowd: "How much with you in it?"

"I don't think you have that much," Paul replies. The coat goes for $680.

Particularly hot items are the disposable cameras that the convention staff have given to the actors at the beginning of the workshop Paul, Wingfield, Gracen, et al have spent the weekend snapping candids of one another. One of the cameras goes for $1,500; Gracen's and Paul's together fetch $1,600.

When the auction concludes, Paul returns to the stage to discuss the four episodes of HIGHLANDER that he directed.

Paul recounts a series of mishaps during the shooting of "Homeland," the Season Four opener, with MacLeod returning to Scotland in the present to confront the Immortal who killed his adoptive father the episode was Paul's directorial debut. During one sequence, it was raining so hard that the director's voice couldn't be heard. The helicopter containing the camera flashed its light to the crew on the ground once for "Action" and three times for "Cut!" Paul wound up waist deep in a stream during one take when his horse bolted and threw him, and conditions were so wet that even the camera got soaked. Paul and Co. wound up flying to the pub where the company was headquartered in order to use a hair dryer on the sodden equipment.

The "ring of fire" at the end of "Homeland" is not one of Paul's favorite Quickenings, the actor acknowledges. The fire looks rather like what it is a controlled blaze on a track. "We couldn't have explosions in a nature preserve," Paul explains.

Someone asks why MacLeod's sword, usually mysteriously absent until the moment of need, is carried visibly throughout "Homeland." "I had an issue with 'Where does the sword come from?'" Paul concurs. "[Executive producer] Bill Panzer said, 'When they need it, it's there.'"

The logistics of "Modern Prometheus" were fairly complex, Paul points out. "It was an eight-day shoot [with a] carriage race, two swordfights, two Quickenings and you need to do coverage of everyone in the scene. Five people in a scene you have to do coverage on all of them."

To prepare for the episode, Paul says, "I read the entire Byron memoirs, a 500-page book. I saw this as very poetic. I wanted to put his poetry in there." Originally, the fight between MacLeod and Byron had no dialogue it was Paul's idea that both characters should quote from Byron's poems as they duel. "Bill Panzer said, 'We fight, we fight, we talk, we talk nothing in between.' I thought, 'Let's make it different.'"

For the scenes with Byron, Methos (acting at the time as Byron's doctor), Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Mary's sister Claire, Paul observes, "This is, to me, a play. Notice this [scene with all five] is all one shot. You cannot do a shot like this if you don't have good actors. The actors played it like it was a stage play it gave me a feeling of the romance of that [19th-century] era. The [scenes] in the present are very different it's jagged, you don't know where you are."

Paul also directed "Revelation 6:8," the second half of the two-parter where we learn Peter Wingfield's Methos used to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. MacLeod squares off against the chief Horseman, Kronos (Valentine Pelka). "I have never been more drained than when I finished 'Revelation 6:8,'" Paul says.

Asked about the submarine base setting for Kronos' headquarters and the climactic battle, Paul notes, "You got lucky. Sometimes you get exciting by one thing somebody did. The day we did the double Quickening [MacLeod kills Kronos just as Methos kills the Horseman Silas, played by Richard Ridings] it's something that we'd never done before. We'd never used four cameras before. When you look at the scene, you don't get the effect of the sound in that room [at the submarine base]."

Swordmaster F. Braun McAsh chimes in, "There were two unaccounted-for torpedoes." The pyrotechnics from the combined Quickenings were so intense that at first the crew thought they'd inadvertently detonated the missing torpedoes.

To be continued...