His Dark Materials: Ruth Wilson on Mrs Coulter | BFI & Radio Times Television Festival 2022

[Music] i'm very excited about this panel actually um because i am a huge fan of this this adaptation i was a huge fan of the books and i think i always kind of thought nobody's ever gonna be able to put this on screen properly and they have i think i've really pulled it off um so we've had two two series so far and there is the third and final one coming up um in the autumn can't wait so uh fans will know that the main antagonist the baddie is mrs coulter glamorous power hungry and ruthless we also know that there are two sides to mrs coulter there is of course her and her demon the golden monkey um a sort of alter ego extension of her personality in animal form we will discuss which and how um in this uh in this panel um so ruth and the three people on the stage actually created mrs coulter it's been very much a kind of a group effort um before we start talking let's see some of mrs coulter's most memorable moments from the first two series here's the first clip lyra this is mrs corter i am not used to the grandeur of this at all i can teach you to wield power over all of them what a lovely surprise hello girls when every child's nightmare there's an element of truth stop that you're hurting us lyra tell me where she is i will destroy all of this we cannot allow this woman to take control tear everything apart you used to want to change the world come with me and we will change them all you are not nor have you ever been my equal [Music] we love her we have to do whatever it takes to keep her safe fantastic stuff but so ruth let's start with who is mrs coulter on the page and how did you go about you know bringing her to life so when i was first asked to do this i hadn't actually read the books which uh to my shame and i didn't know who mrs scalter was so i started reading the books and just fell in love with her instantly and i'm sure many of you have read the books and she remains i loved her because she remains a mystery on the page she is obviously horrific in many ways um and she the way she's described as being sort of a cesspit of moral filth and i thought well that's really exciting to play you know me and my parts so um i i sort of and reading further you think well there's actually a really interesting dynamic with her with these demons and that's why the books are so unique and why i was drawn to them was because there is they are one of the same thing her monkey and mrs coulter and so i thought in exploring this character i had to explore both those characters and to work out how they're yin and yang or how they are symbiotic and i thought that was a real challenge not only in working on the day with uh special effects and all sorts but actually in the psychology of who this human is um and i love the fact that she's an iconic villain she's sort of beautiful and glamorous and horrific and cruel but there's by the book three if you know book three she becomes heroic so i there's a journey a huge journey to play so there's all those things really excited me um and i thought i'd never done fantasy before as well so i thought there's real freedom and fantasy to explore those things because you i mean usually a an actor builds a a character sort of pretty much on their own with all the writer and the director uh but creating mrs calls has been a very different process hasn't it because of the monkey yeah and i didn't quite realize that until probably two weeks before we started shooting i suddenly oh yeah so i started doing my usual work which is going through the book pulling out what philip's using philip's words and story and characterization as an um and then of course when you're building a character on every set you do work with a costumer costume designer and makeup artist and the writers um in the early stages but then of course you have this other added character who is with you all the time and in the book it felt like this character was different to others the demon the monkey was not only vicious and cruel and mean but didn't speak didn't have a name i thought this is really fascinating it's clues to who mrs coulter is that she has she hasn't named her demon she doesn't speak to it or doesn't allow it to speak so something really fascinating in her own psyche wrapped up in that and i knew that we would have to be i wanted that to be the center of who she is and so i knew i'd have to be working alongside not only on the day again with a puppeteer but also it's going to be how it's perceived on the screen at the end and how that's created by russell at the end um when the monkey that your guys see so it was a really i realized how collaborative this was going to be and actually that really excited me even more because i don't know it's just it's much more thrilling to be working and have friends working on it with you and coming up with ideas well let's talk about the look of it first because i mean i think it looks absolutely fabulous and then that's partly due to to to caroline mccall's work as a costume supervisor so uh caroline um let you know let's start from the from the outside in and and talk through the process of creating um the the look and i just want to read a quote from philip pullman when he describes mrs coulter she was beautiful and young her sleep back hair framed her cheeks she had an air of glamour that lyra was that lara was entranced she could hardly take her eyes off her so i mean where do you you know you you see that on the page where you then look for inspiration to recreate that visually well for me you know that statement just led me to old hollywood glamour and looking at all the icons of um the golden age of hollywood so you know marlena dietrich grace kelly katherine hepburn um you know a myriad of these amazing women who um was all about their appearance and then when ruth was cast then i was trying to draw a similarity between ruth and and who mrs cooter would be and then that led me to hedy lamarr who at the time in her career was seen as the most beautiful woman in hollywood and she would walk in a room and it would stop and that's the kind of effect that mrs cooter had to have also having a golden monkey as your demon means that you're never going to hide in the shadows you're always going to command the room you're always going to command attention but what we find very interesting about hedy lamarr was that this beauty was a facade really for what she was really interested in she was a um a scientist and inventor and she invented a telecommunication system with radio waves um from for missiles but was never recognized for that and that invention led to wi-fi um and so there's this side to mrs cooter as well this glamour and um then the intelligence and it's a powerful look isn't it i mean we look at that look at those shoulders and so on i mean there's yes and there's also there's a sort of softness about hetty as well that we liked um that she has famously has the center parting and the soft hair and she you know not the kind of hardness of marlena dick trick perhaps or some other hollywood stars there's something and he would be drawn to and appealing about her which was also really important so she was my main um who i mainly drew on at the beginning of the process and then we kind of peppered as we would go through the series different kind of icons of hollywood and what sort of world were you going for i mean how do the costumes reflect the social conventions of this parallel universe because i mean there's a sort of there is a hint of sort of 1940s about the way mrs coulter dresses well first of all um i looked at what technology was available in lara's world because it's very different to our world and i took the i took the invention at bolvanger um as something kind of 1960s space um sort of space age and so that the magisterium could fail have more of a slightly 60s silhouette and then kind of work back from there so and so the magisterium this version of the church rules this world so there would be conventions to how people dress and that all led me to kind of 20s 30s 40s 50s um but it shouldn't feel like any particular decade there's things drawn from all those decades and so it should feel familiar but not that you're actually in um in that decade and so the men have starched collars they're more uptight because of the church and then the women would have to have their head covered outdoors their shoulders covered their um knees covered but then we played around with that with mr scooter because mrs culture always breaks the rules i was saying something about the um hair and makeup on it is that i always felt that i love this center parting on hedy lamarr because for me it felt slightly controlling as well there was something i wanted to get across with her that she always had to maintain control and there was a sort of strength to her in that as well even though it's soft and i needed her to appeal to men and children she's a master manipulator so it's all about image it's all about how she puts herself out there and each room is very she's it's contrived she's going in there to have an impact and to leave a mark so i wanted her hair to be soft and fluffy so that kids would want to touch it i wanted we were discussed about putting jewels on the um on the costumes or or sort of like shiny jewels in order again kids want to touch it or it's attractive wanted the silhouettes to be quite sexy and certainly in male dominated environments she's breaking the rules but she's able to get away with it and so all those men that are oppressed you know this woman come in it's again making an impact in that way so there's a real sort of sense that everything's she's controlling her image in order to have an impact and manipulate people uh and that was really key and the sort of center party was about symmetry it's like i want to create a symmetrical image with her that looks a little bit weird as well as beautiful in a way um so hedy was a perfect kind of inspiration for her that's fascinating about hedy lamarr i didn't know that what about the color palette um caroline what let me talk us through that how it's changed through this through the three seasons well we started off um with this sort of peacock blue outfit for many reasons because it draws a little on the golden monkey it kind of tones with a little bit of blue that's there but also that is that sort of a magisterium color it's kind of an under the radar association with the magisterium color that we pepper through you'll see a little bit more of that in series three and and then lyra is red her opening outfit is red and her burgundy red and pinafore but mrs cooter's whole agenda in the beginning is appealing to lyra so her wardrobe um in the first few episodes is all kind of aurora borealis colors all parts you know the northern lights where lara wants to go everything has this texture to it that you want to touch and then when lara disappears and mrs cooter goes into red which is lara's color and then at different points they mirror each other so there's the famous scene where both in blue when the monkey attacks and um and then in series two when lara chooses an outfit it is that kind of blue jacket and then at times they're in the same and and then at times are completely different um but yeah so we punctuate a lot of story arts yes costumes yeah as as as well um okay well um ruth so the outer mrs coulter you know this this elegant charismatic woman and then the inner mrs coulter who um uh as you said is described as a cesspit of moral filth she's misunderstood yeah yeah i mean um yeah yeah how do you find how do you find a way into empathizing with a character you know quite as ruthless and evil as that i mean it's always my job to find the other side of a character like that and it wouldn't be that interesting to play for three seasons if it's just pure evil and she never came across to me like that she came across in the book there were mysteries about her and vulnerabilities about her and i think again those key um things came across within the relationship with the monkey she's quite violent towards the monkey um and like i said she doesn't name him or doesn't talk to him and that to me suggested a sense of shame or a sense of self-loathing the monkey is herself in some ways and every day she's got to exist with herself and if she can't name herself or can't let herself speak some part of herself can't speak that to me suggests that there was some sort of level of self-loathing with her um so you know again i had i was deep dive of working out what that might be but that filters into every scene that she plays it's like a sort of a jekyll and hyde thing almost like two sides of her personality is that how you see it well not necessarily i just see it that they it's it's they're they're one so they understand they come into the room there they understand the what every room they go into i felt there's like a public and private side of mrs coulter and the public side is uh they conduct themselves really well they're a really good team and they can manipulate the people and the rooms they go into but when they're at home it's again being with oneself it's and whether she can bear to be with herself so we early on in the process uh well one we decided to have puppeteers come on and that was a real relief for all of us because it was like wow i'd have to act with a tennis ball which was was going to be the case at one point i tell his ball on a street um but bringing puppeteers in and bringing someone like brian in meant suddenly we could really explore that relationship and explore the levels of mrs coulter and the psychology of her well we're going to drill down into in into that in the monkeys and we've got two short clips here which illustrate the relationship between mrs coulter and and and the monkey the two sides of her her character um if you like so if we could have that second clip now [Music] [Music] uh uh [Applause] yeah i was just and we said we're going to talk about the puppet now because i'm sure there's a misconception by lots of viewers that it was all done with special effects but as you say there is a puppet much easier than acting with a tennis ball um did that really really help as a performer yes yeah definitely i mean like it becomes a real living thing i mean a tennis ball is just a tennis ball it's very hard to believe in it but um when brian would work with the puppet it becomes a living breathing like partner and character um and i was going to say in the books it was really interesting because the book always in a way mrs coulter was always the sort of good version or the outward appearance the beautiful one the kind of one that seemed nice and sweet to the kids and it was the monkey that was the evil cruel dark side of her and i remember early on thinking that's not going to be that interesting to play either for me or monkey over the course of three seasons so actually what you see on the screen is it's they're both quite complex and they can both be both those things and that's much more detailed and as brian and i started working together we could find loads of levels of that but that's why it was so essential having a puppeteer there it felt like ue could really discuss and get deep into the psychology of this character and put things on the screen which even though we're not they're kind of hints to mrs coulter and her past rather than explaining the story brian how do you see the monkey this is a hard thing for me to express because i both close well no i both live in the world of mrs coulter as in monkey i had to accept that monkey is a part of mrs coulter so i need to feel comfortable giving ideas and expressing how i feel which is something so alien for puppeteer very often we have to be invisible what we do is seen but what we are is an invisible part of that so to have to have to for ruth to trust me to do that and to bring those ideas to the table is very um embarrassing i think is a good way to put it it's it's embarrassing because explain it's a very private thing uh coming from an acting background acting is a very private thing and the ideas that you have in your head don't always need to be talked about you just need to have them inside of you you need to live them so to embody somebody else to join somebody in the journey of making that character and making those decisions together it's a private life that i don't talk about very often either it's it's monkey is a part of me now so i feel quite protective over him and um and i really care about all the animators and the people that have put monkey to the place that he is on screen because it's so many ideas coming together so the puppet for me is number one on a base level always a technical thing when we're doing reference puppetry it's technical it needs to embody the space it needs to give the actor something to work with it needs to give camera something to see but after that what we were doing on this is actually creating a character which we could hand over to frame store and then they take further so it's it's a very special middle world that i live in so it's still being the post-production and we're going to come to that in a minute but i i actually have some really exciting news sort of the last minute this is we have an additional guest at this panel um i think brian's gonna bring out now yes it's very exciting why everyone wants me here that's the funny thing yeah [Applause] [Laughter] just like he's bringing out a corpse and it is until it comes to life until brian touches it he's dead and for those of you who are nervous he has been checked for monkey pox um he's gone the health and safety no problem monkey is clean he's got this very inquiring expression hasn't he look at his eyes it's like looking at us it upstaged me in every scene we should do we should also talk about the magic of puppetry here because you're looking at the monkey on you you're not looking at the massive guy next to it right and that's because there's something about how puppeteers like brian operate these things where you just want to put emotion onto the thing that they're operating it's incredible and i don't know quite how it works it's a bit of magic and it's a bit of old magic which i think is really beautiful and the the addition of puppets came in quite sort of late into the production process didn't it you weren't originally going to do that so i mean what how did that how did it lead to that it was the first director was tom hooper and he wanted to work out i mean what's so essential about these books is the demons and work out what that demon world is and what it looks like and how we put that on screen um and we i think he was playing around with a number of ideas um and then puppets he decided actually maybe we should bring puppets in and once he did it was a no-brainer i think for everyone for you guys for us because he does not only is it easier for us to work with as actors on the day but it like creates a guide for the cameras and then of course it's much easier for frame store to have a guide when they're doing it in post so it was a it was a really great marriage and a really great decision actually so brian how do you work with ruth on set i mean in terms of movement and so on early on when we were rehearsing we had to go through the ideas of what it was to have a demon which specifically is an animal so what are simian movements what does that should i put monkey away for now is this is this two [Music] he doesn't speak shut up monkey um so we we played around with lots of ideas of uh how to move and where the crossover is between the monkey and mrs coulter when those different um embodiments take over between them because they share sometimes when they're far apart there's a there's uh a depression and i don't just mean emotional depression i mean there is an uh an energy depression so the playing around between distance and closeness when they're trying to be on guard they need to be close and they need to be quite um engaged with everyone so we played around being monkeys on the floor together which was again a good yeah both you and ruth pretending to be monkeys yeah there is a video footage of this because i would like there's nothing thank god no no was it was lots of david attenborough watched a little bit of that yeah now we spent it was the week before we started maybe a week or two weeks before we started shooting you guys already started shooting i came on month into the shoot and we got together in a room and i think i wanted to bring some monkey moves in because i just thought there's something if the monkey's your demon there must be something in you physically that comes out sometimes and we also wanted to play i wanted to get our dynamic and our energy between each other so we were literally in a room sort of playing with each other and being in a space together and trying to it's very it's very drama school i mean presumably because the monk you know yeah yeah brian would teach me monkey moves um which were just very it's very subtle can you give us an example yeah this is where brian comes in uh for example if if we were in a scene and she was getting very emotional and she she said i need some i need something extra then uh when going to pick up a water instead of picking up a water as this you would just find something loose in the wrist so that kind of when uh when a monkey or an ape is doing something there's there's a looseness so instead just grabbing it from here which is controlling and looks a bit strange and odd and alien so it gives it that difference or spreading the legs rather than being in a proper pose you could you could be in a much more powerful position and there's one where i think in moments of vulnerability like foot goes to the side which is sort of what monkeys do as well the same found the sort of their feet kind of fall in so you have to look out for it but there's moments within the show that i'm doing those things which give me it gives me something else to play but also it's reflective of something emotional going on with her um so it was all those really wonderful discoveries that we were finding and we also felt it was like wasn't it tension between the two of us the idea of tension which again comes from theater and working on in space with another actor but it's the idea of how you know if you're close or there's some kind of energy between you and we were working with that in a room so the idea that there must have been something between them i feel that the demon can separate from her which is again unusual and only other witches can do that and as you find out in another season lyra has to learn to separate from her demon and so we think well mrs coulter must have done that some process in her life which is it's agony so there's trauma there massive trauma so again it was about how the two of us had learned to separate and then when we come back together is it the same or is the mistrust or is there something else going on there so when we're in a room we were working out what they feel like when they're close together and it felt like there was a tension there was an alertness there was a slight anger or resentment between the two of them when they were distant they felt flat and de-energized and so that helped us work out in a public and private setting how they were together publicly they were alert they're on you know on show and they were kind of energized and direct when they're at home they were separate they couldn't be in each other's space and they were more de-energized and flat and slightly depressed so it kind of helped us work out how in those scenes to conduct ourselves physically and emotionally i'm interested brian you were you were an actor beforehand presumably that kind of really helps with this part being a both property around an actor yeah well one of the nicest days on set is when we were doing a very emotional scene and i it was um it was one of the moments one of the first moments that we see mrs coulter and monkey come together and actually share a moment that's not undermined by something else impeding or mrs quilter changing her mind and at the end of the day ruth just said you're just a fantastic actor and i thought all right money well spent then oh he is and it's like i loved our scenes it was the best bit for me of the whole show was working with my monkey and and we'd sort of would approach each scene it's like right bry what we're going to do today so it's like you know there's other things happening in the scene but really for me the focus was right what a monkey and i doing and so we'd collaborate on every scene and even if monkey didn't end up featuring in that scene he was present for me which is essential to that character i mean there's not a scene that i don't know where monkey is and where i was sat basically because every single scene i was within five feet of of being able to speak to ruth so everything would be discussed and i would be hiding somewhere i can tell you in all the scenes where i'm hiding what's going to happen to monkey now where you've shot the final series do we have to wait and see [Laughter] good and bad i may have to ask monkey's agent um so he's coming with me everywhere i go um russell dodson let's talk about building the monkey in post-production because what we see on the screen is is created in in in special effects isn't it in frame store it is indeed yeah it's a kind of a recreation of the work that these guys do yeah now i think we have a clip of the monkey being created and we're going to watch i want you to to talk us through it and this is the monkey being built you know and how you find this sort of palette of expressions and face shapes face shapes because you've got to hit that familiarity haven't you between it both being sort of human and being an animal so i think we'll keep the house lights up i'm gonna talk over this yeah try and look away while talking forwards so um when we make it we have to get really anatomical so we end up with something that really operates like a monkey so we actually start from the skeleton upwards and we have a really amazing team of fundamentally like mathematicians who work out how you can rig all the bones so that it operates exactly like a real animal and then we have another team of people who then apply all the muscles and we have to make sure that all the muscles preserve their size and scale when they flex and bend because you can see the muscles shifting around under the skin which you can see now so we have to make sure all of that stuff works so that you don't get lost in wondering why something looks strange and then the hardest part is when we add the fur so what we do is we start with a sort of a limited amount of fur because it's too much or still with them we actually have people that genuinely give the monkey a haircut and a hair brush in a computer and every single twist and knot and matted part is a choice it's a choice about how we want that monkey to look and then eventually we fill all the fur in so you get the full density of an actual creature which is there and fur is amazing because actually like we have to also work out the fact that light with every hair you have on your on your head light either travels through it bounces off it or goes into it bounces around and comes back out and those three things give you the look of fur so when you look at something like this the amount of love that goes into it to make it respond to light so it looks like it's in the scene and to make all the fur move and simulate against the muscles that are moving underneath it and the bones is phenomenal and that's before we even do a shot it's a real it's like a proper deep dive and there you could see the way the monkey and mrs colton were sort of walking almost you know i mean in tandem but yeah i think i think the the the big takeaway for me on the show apart from sitting here and realizing how unbelievably fortunate i think i feel to be working with these guys when i hear them talk it's amazing um is the biggest and most exciting challenge of this show which i found out very quickly when starting is the duty of care that we have to to the cast so if you uh what do you mean by that okay so if you have ruth wilson who just brings the a game constantly and is incredible and doing a lot of really emotive work and your job is to stick a monkey in the shot with her sticking a person next to her the whole time exactly you can like i suddenly realized that if me and my team do our jobs incorrectly we can undermine ruth's work rather than what i consider to be sort of flavoring or seasoning on the scenes um so what we end up doing is we end up having i have very much you know if you imagine on set there is very much uh kind of an actor director relationship and when we get back to the studio that starts again so we first we have to look at the scenes and i have to remind myself especially because when you edit a scene sometimes the meaning or tone of his edit and edit can change the meaning and tone of a scene but then what i have to do is i have to sit down and i have to remind myself in the same way that i think you guys do of what everybody's goals are in a scene what's mrs court are trying to get out of other people and then what i then have to do is i have to take brian's the mannerisms because obviously we don't have like a moving face moving expressions and all the details of a monkey but what you have is you have something when you look at it and it's the amazing thing about puppeteering is that there is a um it's a bit like when you look at like the eye of a cow you could show someone the picture of an eye of a cow twice and say it's a sad car or a happy cow and we put the emotion onto it so what i have to do is i have to take what brian's done see what that makes me feel i have to see what ruth's doing and see what i think she's trying to get out of the scene and i also have to knowing because me and me ruth and brian did a whole deep dive conversation after filming so so so so so ruth came into frame store comes in came into post-production as well which you wouldn't normally do as an actor would you no i've never done that before and you never usually see the process of that as an actor you're kind of just you finish your job when you go home and leave it to them to do the edit but how could you add to that process you're sitting there you're seeing the monkey on screen you sort of say actually can you make the monkey look a bit angrier here no we just talked about the psychology we talked about what brian had done in every scene how it approached it what we were trying to get across what was going on underneath again even if it wasn't completely clear and explicit on the screen was what we were doing and that gave we recorded it didn't we we sat down for how many hours and went through all the scenes i think or a lot of the scenes and explained what we were trying to do in those scenes so then it gave russell and his team a guide as to what what the intention of that scene was yeah so we shared that whole recording with my animators who we work with and then what i do is i kind of when i brief them instead of saying put that leg here put that leg there i i offer them up a perspective on the scene based on all of this knowledge and they've also listened to ruth's perspective on the entire character and brian's and they offer me back a performance and i say whether i think the energy or the tone or the rhythm of the thing is correct to kind of and actually a lot of the time most of my notes are take stuff away like we like we're not here to dominate the scene we're here to be part of the scene and we're here to add a touch of subtext if we can now i think i think we need to we need to watch another scene actually here and this is from season two and it's mrs coulter having confronted lee scorsby played by lynn manuel miranda in his prison cell um and and i think this will help explain a little actually how brian and ruth work together so if we could have that uh clip now i will rip out every nail and i will break every bow and it won't break me and you know it won't because it wouldn't break you either you can threaten me torture me but i will never tell you where lyra is because my life is worth one tenth of hers it's been a long time since you talked about him i know you did good [Music] so i was kind of fascinated by monkey putting putting his hand up there and hold it like can you talk us through that is that there's a few moments in the earlier clip as well of me ripping up the pillow in the room there's a few clips that come from again a a sort of psychological um understanding of mr c that i had to place on the character i wouldn't i don't think philip would necessarily agree with this background story but i had to find some truth to her and i felt there was something interesting that there had been a trauma in mrs c's life at some time when she was young and because of the whole books which deal with sin redemption and a child's sexual becoming with lyra growing into a sexual age i thought it there must be something about abuse with her and whether it's sexual or it's violent or it's vocal or verbal abuse i thought there must have been something in mrs c's life i didn't wasn't specific about where that came from but i thought that kind of filtered into some of our scenes and again it wasn't explicit it was just my kind of way in to her it made sense of bulwanga it made sense of why she wanted to separate demons from children because she felt the demon was the sin it made sense of why she had that relationship with monkey she kind of hated herself there was shame attached to herself and there was self-loathing attached to herself so it kind of made sense of all that so some of these scenes slightly reference that which again in not an explicit way so the bedroom scene we had a scene that both brian i sort of came up with the logic of this scene that she's angry about loss of lyra of like failing in a way and lacking control and there's something in the bedroom that seemed quite weird and so we had monkey almost representing a sort of whatever male version coming into the scene closing the door and she's ripping the pillow up it's quite dark but it gave it lent something that again was mysterious an audience might go what's that about and we never tell them really what it's about but that's the clues to who she is and then in this scene again it seems quite childlike that she's looking at the wall i thought there was something about child trauma with her so that we wanted this lin manuel and that's in that scene is talking about his father being abusive to him and he says you know you know you've been there you understand or something so again it was the idea of going back to some sort of trauma of mississippi and monkey is there at that moment leaning and being a comfort to her and she accepts it for the first time or one of the first times often she bats it away she doesn't want to be close to him or to herself in this moment she actually connects and it's that's the start of the journey of their in a way their reconciliation throughout the next season too actually i mean what's interesting about monkey compared to lyra's demon is of course monkey doesn't talk yeah which i guess makes both of you your jobs kind of even more important because it's all done in the movement isn't it really and the expressions this is why i feel strange talking about it in real life because there is an amount of that that has been taken on into my body rather than my voice i don't have to ex i don't express myself through thoughts even when we would talk through scenes or when we would talk through what was happening often what i do is i would just go well it's kind of like when you and that's sort of the language that i would just use and they would go oh yeah we get it okay fine yeah great we can go with that um but it's pretty weird i mean what does that mean [Laughter] so but he's right about sir i'm going to interrupt but it's right about saying this stuff to you because actually it's very personal and i wouldn't you know in some ways you have to find we all have to find ways into a character to give story and depth and give a journey and it's quite vulnerable telling you those things because they're not necessarily they're not what phillip necessarily wrote but it was a way to access and to create a mystery and give depth to those characters so in some ways it's like asking us to reveal and we are here revealing some of the secrets of what we do behind the scenes which you may or may not agree with but it's how we created it um and so that's it's it's interesting revealing that it does feel a bit vulnerable doesn't it saying what we do and how we accessed it i think the thing oh sorry i think the thing about having a limited palette as well is really exciting like if you strip away certain things that you can work with it really makes it's a bit like when you when you hear about people who have lost a sense and it heightens all the other senses and so the way that i have to work with my team is i think very alien to the way that i think ruth would see it but i i sort of have to break a performance down into different things so i the way i discuss it with my animators is i break a performance down to body acting head acting and face acting because when i animate anything whether a character is talking or not to be honest i always turn the sound off and i go can i understand what this character is saying or feeling by body language because we we recognize body language we recognize a slight move forward or a slight pull back or a slight of the head and all these very tiny details and actually the thing i care least about in all the characters is their face because if you're trying to take up an animal you know and turn it into a character without breaking the kind of the the sense of reality that it's still an animal you have to be very very very delicate so we start with the body and i'm like okay does the body feel like it's a questioning body or does the body feel like it's a curious body and they go right now how do we accent that with a little bit more with the head and then eventually we go right now let's bring the face in so that we don't have to do too much with it because it's the face that can hit the uncanny valley really quickly so i have to i mean i'm sure that's a very strange feeling you just have to it's the idea of working like from the opposite end basically to try to try fundamentally to do it with as little as possible so that again we don't upstage anyone we don't we don't go off in a different tangent and we allow the audience when watching it to put their emotion onto it as much as we're trying to give them a hint of what to feel which is so interesting because that's what a puppet is it's a neutral face it's a neutral mask that you cast your emotions on to so there's a project it's very special that process that you showed us that on screen of developing among people in the hair online how long does all that take um i can't give you the numbers for that when we did the bear yorick yes one person sat down to make to do that stage which isn't animating anything you don't have a shot to look at by the end of it if one person sat down to make yorick we worked out to be about 280 days of work wow i mean this is the thing that this is the thing that like this opportunity is always my favorite thing because i get to tell people that visual effects does not involve pressing a button there is not there is not an eyebrow move on a monkey that happens without someone making a choice and then moving it it's no different it is no different well i mean hang on it's very different but it's it's analogous to ruth deciding to raise an eyebrow to do something like someone has to choose it which is why you know i love yorick by the way he's like you know i think most people's dream husband um the the um i mean i if to be honest if he rocked up i'd be like i look at my wife and look at yorick and i'd be like i don't know it's a tough call these two actually they used to do fights fair fights i wonder where the footage of that is the fair fights and they'd have to do it physically themselves first they loved it there was a lot of tussling going on between those two working out the physicality of things like you know people tend to be monkeys playing to be bear fights so it's just absolutely yeah i can tell you this there's nothing quite as like sort of arresting as watching the video of like yourself who's not a fine physical specimen wrestling are like a ripped stunt guy and going like yeah i so here is the clip of mrs coulter and the monkey from season one attacking the egyptian boy in her apartment remember that very dramatic scene oh not so easy to escape me sent you egyptian boy i asked who sent you boy there is no way out of here so this is just you and me have you any idea how much pain i can cause you i betrayed my family from no one [Music] can i just yeah say something about this because as a crew working on the show you know we'd see all the puppeteers on set we you know russell wondering about but we didn't know what what it was going to be like and then i think that's the first scene that you showed the crew that russ got that together and he showed the crew right this is what it's going to be and i mean did that make a complete difference to you yeah yeah because it was just incredible absolutely incredible and you know as a crew behind the scenes to get to see that and know wow this is going to be good um it was brilliant actually just seeing that amazing art deco apartment that mrs coulter lives in i mean presumably when you're designing the costumes that comes into it as well doesn't it that the the surroundings it's got the costumes have got to go with the monkey with the character with the set yeah well joel the production designer he wanted the apartment to feel really controlled as well a very controlled um environment so it's mostly sort of marble and quite cold and then he would come and get um sort of samples of the fabrics that i was using and there's there's a scene when you're in the blue dress with um mcveil and they picked out all the same colors in the painting so it's it's just as controlled as it could be i was initially scared because i like i say i thought i was gonna have to act with a tennis ball and i thought i've never done that i that sounds awful um and it's obv i'm gonna be bad at it but obviously like i said when brian came on when the puppeteers came on and then when you meet the whole team no it was a joy and it was like i said the best bit about the whole show for me yeah i always thought i mean that's why she's so fascinating she is uh a villainous mother and that's really hard to see on the screen i suppose and it's for me it was about finding out why a bit or suggesting why and then seeing moments of vulnerability with her so that you can even if she's so horrific you can slightly empathize or you can you know there's some bits about her you've realized wow there's um there's a reason why she's like this that's always very vital for me and that's where you're gonna find a really complex character on screen and how to put one on there but i loved how quickly she could shift and that conflict as soon as lyra comes into her life everything goes out the window she thinks she can control this kid and like probably most parents your kids are the thing that really challenge you the most because you they reflect yourself or you see parts of yourself in them and they constantly surprise you and you adore them as sometimes get really frustrated by them so i think that she didn't quite understand what she was dealing with when she thought she could take on her daughter i don't actually know what that means so for the uninitiated can you just explain yeah sure um the the process of shooting visual effects i mean really what we try and do is not be in the way but the truth is is when you have to do something this complex it's kind of hard not to be so we have this process uh that we do um where brian will go in and he will do what we call the puppet pass right which is where we establish the rules of the scene and we um and you know get a few good takes working where everybody knows what's getting going on and they've got their muscle memory and they've got their eye lines and then what we do is we cruelly take the puppet away and um either replace it with a little eye line sort of thing or we um nothing and hopefully the idea is by then everybody has to do it all over again absolutely um that's why we're trying to keep the puppet pass to a minimum um but the um and then what happens is that means that what we don't have to do is a really complicated thing which sounds very mundane but if you've got a puppeteer standing in a room with a fireplace casting shadows all over the room if you can get rid of the puppet but you can't get rid of the shadows and then you put something in and everyone's like why is there like a shadow of a dude on the wall right so you say so so it it that's how you can end up you know on a show like this our duty is to get as much character on screen as possible and i'm not going to surprise anyone by saying that visual effects cost money so what we have to do is we have to try and be as efficient as we can so that actually we're doing the stuff that's important and not the stuff that's mindless so fundamentally we set up we set a series of rules which by i'd say like week two the directors were saying okay we need to do this pass and this bars and this pass and to be honest in the end we probably use about 60 clean pass and 40 we just paint brian out because i want to make it very clear that we can't do our jobs if fundamentally ruth doesn't feel like she's managed to find the most truthful performance because otherwise you know we could put it in and if it doesn't work it doesn't work so this trio is the reason why we get to do our jobs properly and our job is just to try and give you guys the most unobstructed route to it and there are some moments where new sort of physical moments things like touching the monkeys really hard because again the imprint or the shadow or the fur is very difficult to then paint afterwards so it would be so odd wasn't it like trying to stroke a monkey's head and you have to sort of do a vague thing when it's not there yeah it's kind of it's a weird process but these guys make it look easy afterwards so it's um they cover up any of my bad and backstage we do also have the special grey sock which has held many a prop for among the greatest the greatest i think we spotted the grey song yeah yeah strangely the more technical it gets the cheaper the thing brian uses gets so it's like if ruth has to like give the monkey something it's like you've got the grey sock brian yeah there it is actually it's quite interesting because which season is it this season yes we make a reference to her mother um and so caroline can answer those questions too because we actually have some sort of outfits that uh are her mothers that are sent to mrs coulter so i in my head it's linked up the magisterium and the church and that she is i think mrs coulter's mother was very much part of the church so actually represents for her kind of rules and patriarchy and and i think that mrs coulter was always a disappointment to her mother in that way um but you'll see that my reaction to those outfits is not necessarily very nice you know am being reminded of my mother again and her power and her influence can you tell us about the outfits or without giving too much away or is that well i think without giving too much away she's um no i think it's all right um that i think for her mother is meant to be incredibly religious but also i think very much about appearance so i think this whole facade of appearance comes from her mother and we have so there's a moment where this outfit's meant to encompass a lot of what we've seen before um so we've got half the people that create mrs coulter on on the stage here but there's also of course the writers and um and the editors and everyone else involved so what was great about season two was in the book mrs quarter doesn't feature much actually but the writers and the producers wanted to put her in and keep her connected to lyra throughout that journey in season two so it was like okay and philip gave us license to explore her meeting other characters which was brilliant and they were the most exciting scenes actually in season two for me it was because we could kind of have more play with it and discover what that might be um and of course mrs malone or mary malone we had to work out what mrs coulter now looks like in will's world which was really fun and how in contrast what she sees in will's world that she doesn't have in her own and actually does that inform how she is throughout the rest of the season and in season three that she's learned things from in there about um society that she doesn't have in her own um so that was fascinating and caroline can talk to what that outfit looked like and then with lee as well that was great fun because again we explored the psychology of these two characters and what they shared um and they would never usually meet so it was really fun i got to work with lynn and being a big fan of his so that was all down to really jack and the producers and philip who allowed us to kind of explore the dynamic of those relationships so um mrs cooter crosses into our world and boreal has supposedly bought the selection of clothing not quite knowing what she would wear um but we wanted to keep we wanted to keep the essence of mrs coser so you know she needs a shoulder and um and she's only uh before then you've only really worn trousers at home so i thought well obviously in our world mrs cooter would wear alexander mcqueen so uh that's what she wore should i do puppets first you do puppets i'll cry for a little bit yeah i know we can talk about it um so puppets wise uh essentially the way the direction would go is that ruth and i would have a discussion about what was happening per scene so we'd get an idea of what we wanted and what we thought should be happening um often i would then go to russ or one of the effects supervisors on set and say what do we have money for literally how many shots per the demons do we have because sometimes we'd have okay you can have three shots and wide you can have two shots in close and that's it you can't go any more than that no interaction brian no interaction no interaction please no interaction so then that would get brought onto set we would do the first passes because i was supervising all the puppeteering i would get to feed that in um ruth and i would make sure that we were happy and directors would give any notes that they have and we would just tailor that all together so that's essentially the working process between ruth and i then going to vfx making sure we can accomplish it and then getting direction from the directors and making sure it lives within that world and lights and camera and everything else technically um yeah it's going all right i mean it's tricky i mean like that if if you ever want to get stitched up read the description of the malefore in the book and then go cool let's have a go um it's going well i mean you know i think everything is about adaptation and you know when you're doing this and and taking the essence of what something is um if we did exactly what is described in the book you probably won't want to watch it um because it would just be too weird and there's a sort of a certain um grace and elegance about them that we need to try and find and that's what we're currently doing day in day out until october there was a bit of a process of working out how would the move and i was somewhat concerned at one point that elliot would have broken limbs i mean yeah there was a point okay so for those that don't know they're like kind of sort of like giant horse-trunked horse animal that has a diamond-shaped skeleton it doesn't um and um and uh also rolls around on wheels so there's no problem with that um and at one point one of our puppeteering team turned up with a malefic puppet head on the end of a bike and went what do you reckon i was like i mean that's a cool idea but someone's gonna die so we um we we didn't do that but it's going fine i mean it's a cool challenge and we'll sort of you know we'll disappoint some people and make other people really happy i guess tease up the final season perfectly i'm afraid we have run out of time so i'd just like to thank you the audience and my wonderful panel for explaining the creation of mrs coulter to us so well thank you

Channel: BFI

Views: 21,200

Keywords: British Film Institute (Publisher), British, film, institute, films, movie, movies, cinema, BFI, Ruth Wilson, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman, books, writing, YA, fantasy, culture, SFX, puppetry, animals, monkeys, acting, directing, CGI, Radio Times, TV, Television, BBC

Id: mF2lhM26b00

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2022