Behind the Scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace - Part 11

Unused excerpt from a version of the script for The Girl in the Fireplace:

The Doctor: How long d'you wait? Rose: Five and a half hours The Doctor: Great! Always wait five and a half hours. Where's my horse? Mickey pops his head out of the police box doors. He's got a shovel. Mickey: We are not keeping the horse! He disappears again. Rose: We're dropping him off in a field somewhere, okay? The Doctor: Okay! Next field we find. Rose: Good! The Doctor: And what about the horse? Rose: Funny guy! The Doctor: I know! Okay, into the TARDIS - with you in a sec!

Behind the Scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace - Part 10

In Doctor Who Magazine #363, Steven Moffat took over Russell T. Davies' "Production Notes" column to discuss the filming of his Season Two episode:

I'm on a train galloping home from Cardiff (I always think of trains galloping, sorry, it's my column this issue, I'll write what I like) with my six-and-a-half-year-old son curled on the seat next to me, reading an Action Man comic. He's been to the studios to see the Doctor. THE Doctor. Actually, the new Doctor. (Blimey, we have new Doctors now. It seems like just the other day, we didn't have any Doctors at all, now we have new ones. Like there's a supply! What other show does this? After 16 years, the Doctor is back!! And again!!) And what you want to know, like we always wanted to know in the long, breathless wait for Da New Guy (11 months for Peter Davison, oh, I remember!) is whether he's any good. Don't know how you grade these things, but here's a judgement. Five minutes after meeting him, Joshua Moffat (6 1/2) attached himself to David's leg, and remained there for much of the day. He doesn't weigh that much, Joshua, and David forgot he was there a couple of times. See if you can spot which takes those are. Now that I call an endorsement. Hitching a leg-lift - that proves the new Doctor's got the kids ("I'm the Lord of Time, hop-on!"). And let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've run round a big shed in Wales trying to scrape your offspring off the knee of your childhood hero.

Behind the Scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace - Part 9

Excerpt from David Darlington’s interview with Steven Moffat in Doctor Who Magazine #364 - January 2006 (and Darlington’s official site):

DWM:  Given that it [discovering that Christopher Eccleston was leaving the show] happened the day you were sitting down to start work [on the script for The Girl in the Fireplace] - did you still sit down and start work that day?

DWM:  Yes, I did. Because there’s a certain amount of Doctor Who work that is going to be the same whoever is playing the Doctor. 'They walk out of the TARDIS and something dreadful happens to them’… it wasn’t a huge adjustment. I had my chat with Russell, which wasn’t very long, about how things were going to be with David Tennant now playing that part. So: still not posh, still none of that faux-eccentricity. I sat and watched Casanova, and got used to the idea of him being the Doctor, and I wrote my episode completely separately from Russell writing his, and when we compared episodes we’d written the same Doctor, it was very similar. In fact, I think we’d written, on one occasion, the same line. I think David maps very easily onto that part - so much of what he does is a bit Doctor Who-ish, you know?

DWM:  And have you seen him in action yet?

Moffat:  I haven’t seen film, but I was at two readthroughs, including the readthough for mine, and it was amazing. On readthrough performance alone, David is the best Doctor ever. He’s one of those dazzling technicians, in that he can do anything with a line, he really can do anything with a line. Now, a certain amount of Doctor Who dialogue is inevitably going to be 'There’s a spaceship over there, let’s go and look at the spaceship’, and David can find ways of undercutting it and spinning it. He puts a lot of very good spin on his dialogue, and I think he’ll be astonishing. I think he will conquer the world as the Doctor. But you’ve always got to wait and see - one of the things with David is… do you know David?

DWM:   Actually, yeah, I’ve worked with him!

Moffat: …of course - one of the things is that David in person is just an incredibly nice bloke, an extremely courteous, kind, pleasant man. With a Paisley accent, which is kind of weird. Have I told you my funny story about his Paisley accent?

DWM:   Not that I recall…

Moffat: Sue [Vertue, Steven’s wife and noted TV producer] and I were at a wrap party for Sue’s sitcom, and we got back very drunk. So I staggered upstairs to get my messages, and I hear this message that I assume is from me! It’s this Scottish voice going 'Hello, it’s very late…’ - and I assume I’ve left a message for Sue and forgotten about it. ’…Ah, Steven, yes..’ - and the voice starts raving on about my script. And I think 'F**king hell - I’ve phoned myself about how good I am! My ego has got so big it’s phoned me! This is unhealthy, I’ve got to see someone…’. And then at a certain point he remembers, in that scatterbrained David way, to say 'Oh, it’s David Tennant, by the way…’. But then, of course, I was incredibly thrilled to have a message on my answerphone from Doctor Who himself. Saying I was clever! But anyway, as I was saying - in person David is this very pleasant, quite good-looking bloke. On screen, a whole new thing happens, he becomes quite mad, quite dangerous. His eyes become different, and you think he’s actually got a touch of the Chris thing, of being slightly scary. There’s something odd about his eyes, and his edgy, brittle manner that I think becomes very arresting and quite powerful…

DWM:   It’s really noticeable in Blackpool, where it’s a very small performance in physical terms, he’s not throwing himself around like on Casanova, but you can’t take your eyes off him.

Moffat:  Exactly. And he was up against David Morrissey, who’s fantastic, and stole the show from him. He is absolutely making his presence felt, which is just astonishing. And even as Casanova where he’s playing a loveable, affable bloke, underneath it he’s got this dangerous thing. It wouldn’t surprise you if he turned round and was quite mean to you - and I think that’s probably quite close to his Doctor. I think the Doctor should have that thing that he’s not just 'nice’, although he is very nice he’s also slightly dangerous. What I liked about Chris was that there was something about Chris that was slightly mental - his Doctor, you’re not quite sure where you are with him, 'I like you but I don’t quite know where I am with you’. There’s a moment in The Long Game where he’s saying goodbye, and then as they turn away he suddenly becomes serious - and it’s not an ordinary actor that can do that, that can just turn the temperature like that. And I think we’re going to see David doing the same stuff - that’s what he’s got to rise to, but I think he will. More humour, obviously - he’s funny, David, and it would be daft not to use that.

Behind the Scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace - Part 8

Excerpt from David Darlington’s interview with Steven Moffat in Doctor Who Magazine #364 - January 2006 (and Darlington’s official site):

DWM: You were talking about the new series having a new Doctor, which is obviously one of the biggest stories of the year for Doctor Who. How early in your writing process did you find out that you weren’t writing for Chris?

Moffat: Oh, at the same time you found out! In fact, I didn’t even see the headlines in the papers, Paul [Cornell - writer] told me, he phoned me up or got me on Yahoo Messenger or something, ‘Have you heard the news that Chris has quit?’. And I was literally, that day, sitting down to start work on The Girl in the Fireplace. So I had to email Russell, in my usual grump, saying 'What the f***’s going on?!’. And he said 'It’s too long to explain - phone me!’. I knew who it was, insofar as any of us had any doubt who it was going to be. A fantastic case of somebody simply casting themselves! By common consent, the entire nation said 'It’s David Tennant, isn’t it?’. I think I told you that after watching Blackpool I emailed Russell - I’ve still got the emails - and said 'Well, there’s Doctor 10’ and he emailed back, saying 'You’re the fourth person to say that’…

DWM: Well, I was saying 'Oh Doctor Who’s on’ every time he’s appeared on TV for about the past eighteen months. How little I knew…

Moffat: But there is something very, very Doctorish about David. And look at Blackpool and Casanova… I haven’t actually asked anyone on the production about this, but I don’t think there was a great deal of debate about who to cast. And he’s known to love it, he’s known to be a fan, therefore he will give it the full-blooded attention that the part requires. And I suppose there’s also the question of what other actor of his level - and he is actually a very high-level actor now, having played the lead in several major BBC dramas, he’s now a major name, he’s all over the shop - what other major star was going to take over from Chris?

DWM: And given that it had been someone as big as Chris, it needed to be someone that big again

Moffat: …And someone that good again. And Chris is a phenomenal actor…

Behind the Scenes of the The Girl in the Fireplace (Part 7)

Excerpt from the DVD Commentary with David Tennant, Phil Collinson (Producer) and Sophia Myles (Madame de Pompadour)

[ concerning the clock on the spinning fireplace ] David Tennant: It is worth charting, if you're as pedantic as I am, the clocks - when they're broken and when they're not, and when they spin 'round. Phil Collinson: Yes.  Did we ever get it wrong? DT: I remember having long discussions with it, the assumption being that on Reinette's side it would get fixed, but on the side that span out it would remain broken so that when you span back it would be broken on that side but then fixed again on the other side until is span back...   It's the sort of thing that interests me on a long shooting day PC: [laughs]  As if you haven't got enough to do -------- [ talking about the Doctor being intoxicated (or not) ] DT: Lots of debates on this scene as to how drunk one can... whether he is being drunk or just exuberant or... PC: Yes.  What do you think? DT: Well, ultimately it's all a ruse, isn't it?  So I thought play it to the hilt, really, because in a few seconds we'll see that it's all just to get through the defenses of the clockwork men, but I know that we did have a bit of a debate as to whether the Doctor could be seen as intoxicated, didn't we? PC: Yes, we did.  I think ultimately you're right.  It's a ruse to get though the defenses of the clockwork men DT: Yeah PC: ...and actually it's terribly funny DT: I think Steven Moffat wrote it drunk, certainly. It was in the stage directions, wasn't it? PC: Yeah.  He'd had a few banana daiquiris. DT: Yeah [ all laugh ] -------- [ talking about actually David riding the horse and the horse not being allowed in the ballroom ] PC:  You did have to learn to jump on the horse, didn't you? DT:  Oh yeah PC: You properly went to a paddock with a green screen and jumped.  Dear goodness - the stuff we've put you through... DT: [ laughs ]

Behind the Scenes of the Girl in the Fireplace (Part 6)

Excerpts from “Doctor Who: The Inside Story” by Gary Russell:

Steven [Moffat, writer] claims Russell [T. Davies, showrunner] didn’t really give him a storyline. He just mentioned Madame de Pompadour and asked if Steven knew that there had been a clockwork chess player around at the time? “I liked the idea of the clockwork man but realized that if the story only was about a clockwork man, it wouldn’t be about Madame de Pompadour. There’s only forty-five minutes, so I made the clockwork men just idiots really. They didn’t even have a decent plan, just an intrinsically gruesome one.”

[on Arthur the horse] I wrote a draft, when we thought it was going to be impossible to do the horse-through-the-mirror sequence, where Arthur the horse winds up in the TARDIS stables. But Russell wouldn’t have that. Why not? Why can’t he have a horse - he’s got a motorbike! In the shooting script, it was emphasized that Arthur was a sort of temporary companion. When the Doctor goes out and sees Reinette in the garden and hides, as he turns to go back to the time window, he meets the horse’s rider who says, ‘Have you seen my bloody horse? I’m going to thrash it within an inch of it’s life.’ The Doctor says, ‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t said that,’ and walks back through the time window. Then he says to the horse, ‘Rule one is you don’t wander off,’ which makes Arthur now officially a companion of the Doctor. There’s a few more gags with the Doctor saying, ‘I keep humans, I keep horses, what the hell?’ I thought it would be quite fine to stick him in the TARDIS stables and occasionally bring him out, but they didn’t go for it.”

Behind the Scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace (Part 5)

From Starburst Issue #337 - interview by David Richardson:

[Discussing Moffat’s first draft of the script for The Girl in the Fireplace] By this stage, incoming Doctor David Tennant hadn’t even shot one frame of film. In fact, he hadn’t actually officially been cast.

“He’d been nowhere near Doctor Who,” Moffat concurs. “I had met David before that once, and I’d seen him on the telly. But the Doctor is the Doctor - Russell [T. Davis, showrunner] has been saying this a lot and it’s absolutely true. The trick is not to make a new Doctor, the trick is to make the audience think it’s the same man. That’s the prize - you allow the difference in the actor to make the difference.”

Since then we’ve seen Tennant’s confident debut in The Christmas Invasion, and it’s clear that he’s already up there with the best of his predecessors. Was Moffat surprised by any aspects of the actor’s interpretation of his script?

“In the details of his performance he’s a constantly surprising actor,” he enthuses. “How he plays with language and how he inflects a line is really clever and lively and precise.  In the generality of how he plays the part, you’ve seen him already, he plays the Doctor as you wish the Doctor to be.”