04x10 - Look Who's Talking

Episode transcripts for the TV show, "Doctor Who: Confidential". Aired: 26 March 2005 – 1 October 2011.*
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Series is described as focusing on the human element of the series, Confidential features behind-the-scenes footage on the making of Doctor Who through clips and interviews with the cast, production crew and other people, including those who have participated in the television series over the years of its existence.
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04x10 - Look Who's Talking

Post by bunniefuu »

Good luck, studio!

'For the first time on Confidential,
we hear from the sound teams who
put the hullabaloo into Doctor Who.

'A day trip to disaster leaves
the Time Lord lost for words.

'Thankfully, behind the scenes
an army of audio engineers are
speaking the same language.'

The horror
of what is happening to him

is doubled because we know
he's not in control of events.

♪ I will sit right down

♪ Waiting for the gift
of sound and vision... ♪

The Doctor is possibly
more scared than he would
be facing a legion of Daleks.

Tell her to stop.
She's driving me mad. Make her stop!

Make her stop!
Stop her staring at me. Shut her up!

That's impossible! Impossible!
I'm telling you...

Stop talking. Just stop talking.
Shake, shake, shake! Six, six, six!

THEY ALL SHOUT AT ONCE

Stop repeating!

The unsung heroes, and I have
said this many times,

is the sound department.

Both the on-set recordists and
the post-production, which is an
immensely complicated process.

Action.

I'm telling you to stop!

There were
slightly different challenges,

and they involved departments
in ways that they hadn't before.

Usually, they're about how we're
going to blow up that Cyberman

or how we're going
to hang off that spaceship.

It's quite good to give the sound
team some things to worry about.

You know, put them to work!
Not that they don't
work hard enough already.

On Doctor Who, we have
a team of sound editors.

They lay up, on average, about
soundtracks on a Doctor Who,

and then you come to
a bunch of things on the desk.

That'll be dialogue,
sound effects, music, Foley...

I mix them all together
to produce a coherent soundtrack

for transmission on the telly
that pleases everybody.

They sl*ve away at this programme
and it's a noisy programme.

We push and nag them
to fill in every sound.

Never be dominant on a close-up of
someone else. Yes. It's confusing.

Absolutely. Marvellous.

'Once the pictures have been
perfected, the sound team lend
their ears to those tracks.'

This episode is quite different
to other episodes because...

there's not many
monster noises to design.

There's not lots of crowd effects,
but it's a psychological one.

This is something that we haven't
touched on on Doctor Who before,
normally you have to do a werewolf,

or a beast, but this one,
because it's dialogue-driven,

that's why it's quite
difficult and quite different.

It's your idea! You thought of it!

Professor, help me! When I first
read it, I was just thrilled by it,

that we were doing something
that different and quite bold
in Doctor Who terms.

I also remember thinking,
"How are we going to sh**t this?!"

You've got a character
who repeats everything.

BOTH: Bananas.

The Medusa Cascade.

On first glance, Sky
gets dragged into repeating

the words of
every other character.

I didn't know how on earth

we could film that, or how it's
going to be possible to learn.

It's more of a psychological
horror than you traditionally get

in Doctor Who, and I think it's
quite a grown-up script, I think
it's scary in quite an adult way.

I'm just travelling. A traveller,
that's all. Like an immigrant?

Who were you talking to?
You were talking to someone.

Who was that? There's an
interesting study of human
behaviour and this whole idea that

you look for a scapegoat
if you're in a situation that scares
the living daylights out of you.

You're gonna look for
an explanation and then you're
gonna look for someone to blame.

Doctor, you've been loving this.
Oh, Jethro, not you.

Ever since the troubles started,
you've been loving it.

I think he absolutely taps
into human nature, really.

We are pack animals and if we're
threatened, we do gather together.

You do seem to have
a certain...glee.

All right, I'm interested.
Yes, I can't help it.

'Over the next few weeks,
the Doctor Who cast and crew
will cram themselves

'into this claustrophobic
Crusader set.

'It's enough to drive anyone crazy!'
Action.

What did they say?
Did they tell you? What's wrong?

Oh, just stabilising,
happens all the time.

I don't need this.

I'm on a schedule.
This is completely unnecessary.
And you seem so... Thank you.

It's a really claustrophobic
episode, it's a small set,

it's even smaller
when it's full of the crew,

and that
all helps to feel hemmed in.

There actually is the feeling

of a lack of oxygen and a lack
of space and nowhere to go.

Out there, all there is
is the darkness and the danger.

Day three in Crusader ,
the crew and the cast

are still talking to each other.

It's the entrance, can he get in?

I feel quite claustrophobic now
as actress, having been in there

for a week cos I'm taken from my

hotel in the dark, brought here in
the dark, spend all day in the dark,

in this claustrophobic thing, and
then driven home in the dark. I've
got no idea what Cardiff looks like.

And the script itself, it's built
that way, you feed off of each

other's tension, so the more nervous
one person gets, it's infections.

Claustrophobia is very infectious,
so inevitably it's gonna end bad!

'And making all the right noises is
sound effects editor Paul Jeffries.'

I'm the sound effects
editor on Doctor Who.

Midnight was an interesting
one for us sound guys.

There's different things going on,
but we've got something outside,

we've got a monster outside
and the imagination runs wild.
You don't know what it is.

It's the sound man's job
to try and feed the imagination,

and try and satisfy
the imagination as well.

If it sounds slightly wrong,
the illusion's broken

and nobody cares
what's outside any more.

So now we come to the crescendo.

The monster's getting closer,
and now instead of being like a

heartbeat, it's more like footsteps,
getting faster and faster, running.

It all goes bang.

ADR stands for a*t*matic
dialogue replacement,
and it's a necessary evil.

'It's no secret that David Tennant is
rather reluctant at recording ADR.

'In fact, you could say
he's quite vocal about it.'

I don't enjoy doing ADR,
which is no secret to the people
who have to record it with me.

I find it difficult and frustrating,
because you're not there, you're
not in that moment any more.

You're not looking that
other actor in the eye.

You're not experiencing that story
in the way you experienced it
on the day that you sh*t it.

And actually, what
you're trying to do is
recreate something artificially.

What happens is, you record sound on
set, obviously, you have microphones
and sound recordists there.

And they will get the best
possible recording of the sound on
that day, that they possibly can.

But there are a number
of reasons why that sound
might ultimately not work.

There might be a plane going
overhead, which you just...

And you didn't have time
to do another take...

Hello...

You know, if you did, on
the day, you did some strange...

way of...saying a... sentence with
funny little pauses that you put in
on the day, because that felt right

at the time, but if you are then in
a recording booth six months later,

trying to...recreate
the...strange...pauses that you did,

and trying to match it
to your own lips

that you're watching on the screen
at the time, it's a curious process.

And the cold...and the diamonds...

On an episode like Midnight,
because so much of it is to do with

overlapping dialogue, dialogue that
has to be simultaneous with another
character's dialogue, inevitably

there will be a bit of that
necessary. But I do get a bit grumpy
sometimes when I'm recording it.

BOTH: The more we talk,
the more she learns.

Now, I'm all for education,
but in this case...

Maybe not. Let's just move back,
come on. Come with me.

Everyone get back,
all of you, as far as you can.

It's amazing how lacking
in authority the Doctor
becomes in this episode

because his words don't feel
like his own any more.

He says all the things the Doctor
normally says, the speeches that
take control of a situation,

that normally win people over
and they don't work.

And they don't work because someone
is saying it as well behind him.

My name's the Doctor.

My name's the Doctor.

OK, can you stop? OK, can you stop?

I'd like you to stop.
I'd like you to stop.

It was so funny when Russell
sold this idea to me,

when he first talked to me about
writing this kind of script.

He said to me, "Ask me a question."
I said, "What's your name?"

He said, "What's your name?"
I said, "What?" And he said, "What?"

I said..."Oh, I see." "Oh, I see."

The thing that kids do, they say,
"Go to bed." "Go to bed.

"Shut up." "Shut up". He carried it
on for about four minutes

and after four or five minutes,
I was like, "Stop. I'm freaked out."

When someone keeps doing it,
it drives you mad!

When a kid really sustains it
for five minutes,

five minutes is enough,
it drives you bonkers!

It's like a dripping tap.
And I think for a sense,

for those minutes,

the people in that Cruiser go mad.
I think he drives them all mad.

Why's she doing that?
Why's she doing that?

She's gone mad.

Stop it. Stop it.

I said stop it. I said stop it.

I don't think she can.
I don't think she can.

Why it is so annoying
when someone does that?

I think...it robs
you of something, it sort of...

We are our voices and...and...and...

somehow it's like
it's taken away and it's mocked.

Action, Liz and Lindsey.

Stop talking!
Do you hear? Stop talking!

Action, Lindsey.

Stop talking!
Do you hear? Stop talking!

I'm standing behind a monitor
so basically my head -

I've never been a monitor before! -
is a monitor and...

when I do my first little section,
she then repeats

so she gets the same intonation,
rhythm and pattern.

Make her stop! Make her stop!

Great, like that. Great!

There's no room for error because...

you have to say exactly what someone
else is saying. You can't...

make any sort of slip ups,
put a "the" in at the top of a line

or an "and" where it shouldn't be.
It has to be absolutely precise.

Doing that all on your own,
it probably would've driven me mad.

BOTH: Hush, now, hush!

She's doing it to me! Just stop it
all of you, just stop it, please!

The most difficult sequences to sh**t
were the ones where I had to be

absolutely in synch with David. Is it
Sky? That was wrong, wasn't it?

So are you. Yeah.

Pick it up, please.

Russell rather kindly
gave us the square root of Pi

to learn to decimal places.

For someone who scraped through
their Maths Higher,

you start by learning it, that's
the first obstacle to get over.

BOTH: ...

Wow. Wow.
HE LAUGHS

BOTH: The square root
of Pi is . ...

It's . ...

.. .

And so on.

So I can, but the thing is...

on recall, I can get it
at a certain speed,

but David and I
had to do it like that,

and I had to really, really keep
going through it in my head

to make it come out quickly.

.. ...

Wow.

Sorry!
LAUGHTER
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