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Highland adventures
13 June 2014
13 June 2014: I was told that executive producer Ron Moore might arrive for this interview in a kilt. And, still at the very beginning of his Scottish adventure that could run for the next eight years or more, he did. "There's nothing like walking down the streets of L.A. in a kilt," he says. "You notice heads turning constantly but - typical because everyone is too cool - no one says anything".Which is the complete opposite of the fan/media frenzy surrounding the release of Sony Pictures Television/Starz series, Outlander, in the U.S. on 9 August. Asia will follow; the series has so far been acquired by China's Sohu and Australia's Foxtel. It doesn't hurt that Gabaldon's eighth book in the series, Written in My Own Heart's Blood, has just been released, giving her fan base even more to get excited about. Gabaldon's fans everywhere have their eyes locked onto what Moore does with a beloved story many have followed since the first novel in the series was published in 1991. The books have been translated into 34 languages in 38 countries, including Indonesia, Japan, China and Korea. Meanwhile, fans are soaking up trailers, release campaigns, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and stories like the one going around about Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin asking Gabaldon how many episodes she was getting for season one and, when told 16, responded, 'What? They only gave me 10!". Moore has promised over and over that Gabaldon's first book - Outlander - is this debut series' bible. "We decided very early on that we wanted to be as faithful to the book as we could," he says. "The challenge is how to stay in the lane as you make changes along the way."Starz has put a lid on details of what's in/out/changed, but Moore is very clear about creating a story that works for television, "to discard plot elements that don't go anywhere, to focus on the central drama". There are scene...
13 June 2014: I was told that executive producer Ron Moore might arrive for this interview in a kilt. And, still at the very beginning of his Scottish adventure that could run for the next eight years or more, he did. "There's nothing like walking down the streets of L.A. in a kilt," he says. "You notice heads turning constantly but - typical because everyone is too cool - no one says anything".Which is the complete opposite of the fan/media frenzy surrounding the release of Sony Pictures Television/Starz series, Outlander, in the U.S. on 9 August. Asia will follow; the series has so far been acquired by China's Sohu and Australia's Foxtel. It doesn't hurt that Gabaldon's eighth book in the series, Written in My Own Heart's Blood, has just been released, giving her fan base even more to get excited about. Gabaldon's fans everywhere have their eyes locked onto what Moore does with a beloved story many have followed since the first novel in the series was published in 1991. The books have been translated into 34 languages in 38 countries, including Indonesia, Japan, China and Korea. Meanwhile, fans are soaking up trailers, release campaigns, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and stories like the one going around about Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin asking Gabaldon how many episodes she was getting for season one and, when told 16, responded, 'What? They only gave me 10!". Moore has promised over and over that Gabaldon's first book - Outlander - is this debut series' bible. "We decided very early on that we wanted to be as faithful to the book as we could," he says. "The challenge is how to stay in the lane as you make changes along the way."Starz has put a lid on details of what's in/out/changed, but Moore is very clear about creating a story that works for television, "to discard plot elements that don't go anywhere, to focus on the central drama". There are scenes all through the series that weren't in the book "but could have been". Whatever the creative team did or didn't add, "we are always at pains to get back to the book's version of events," he says. Outlander opens in 1945. Royal Army combat nurse Claire Randall and her history professor husband Frank are reunited after World War II, and are on a trip to the Scottish Highlands. Then Claire walks through a stone circle and lands in 18th-century Scotland, meets Jamie Fraser, is forced to marry him and falls in love...23 years later, Sam Heughan, who plays Jamie, is listed as one of the summer TV schedule's sexiest men, Moore's feisty Claire (played by Caitriona Balfe) is more than standing her own in a rough man's world, the series has its very own tartan, and the beautifully shot Scottish Highlands have become a character in the show.Moore describes Claire as "a woman who has been flung back in time and is smart enough not to walk around asking for the telephone or do dumb time-travel things... She's not trying to be super hip and contemporary. She is a Royal Army nurse from World War II. She has gravitas and a skill set and is grounded, and she's in love with this man and trying to get home and making the best of this difficult situation".Sticking to Gabaldon's plot presents "a very different set of challenges than when making a show out of thin air every week, where you sit and throw things at the board and someone can throw out an idea... and you go 'oh my god, let's just change everything and do that'," Moore says."This is different. We're trying to maintain the integrity of the story because there are people who love that story... our obligation is to try to make the best version of this material as we can," he says, adding: "Sometimes the struggle is that you know it worked on the page and it's not going to work on screen, so you try to find a bridge to cross over".Like Claire, he seems a long way from home with historic fiction/romance. The closest Outlander gets to his Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek career credentials is a thin vein of time travel beneath the epic adventure and love story.Moore says shifting gears "is not that big a difference... The science fiction pieces that I've done were also just period pieces. They just happened to be in the future as opposed to the past. The challenge of writing and producing are the same, you are still creating a universe that doesn't exist, that's different from the day-to-day reality the audience is experiencing. I like the creation of a world that might have been, that could have been".The central drivers of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander are similar, he says. "In Battlestar, it was moving towards a goal, towards getting to earth and what they thought earth represents. It's similar here in that Claire is always trying to get home. That informs what she is doing and in each episode you ask yourself how does this advance her goal in getting home. It's useful to be reminded of that, to remember why she is here, what she's trying to do".Perhaps the biggest challenge is that there is no home base. "There isn't the police station, the school, the hospital. The show travels... That sets up a variety of production challenges that are unusual. Typically a TV show relies on going back to standing sets, the cast and crew get familiar with it and it helps speed and efficiencies. For Outlander, we are continually moving on so it's like creating 16 different movies as opposed to a recurring television show... It's more expensive, more complicated and it takes a lot more planning," he says.Moore is not expecting audiences to have any prior knowledge of the period. "Claire is the central character and the audience learns everything from her perspective," he says, adding: "We don't presuppose knowledge on the part of the audience".He's also not wading into censorship issues that may crop up as the series makes it way around the world. "I don't have an opinion one way or the other," he says. "That's all up to the territories and what the sensibilities of the audience are. Obviously as an executive producer I want it to air as we made it, because that's the best version of the show."He has, himself, snipped here and there on occasion. For a special cast/crew screening, "I decided to cut some of the nudity because the cast was there and it might have been awkward. And it played perfectly well. [Early on in the series] you can cut the sex scenes in a way that is tasteful and not lose any of the story".The big idea is to do one season for each book, although Moore says some of the books may be split into two. If things work out, he's looking at the next decade of his life at least. It is, he says, "not such a bad deal."