Rome TV Show - "The Cutting And Stabbing, Et Cetera" - Rome Photos & Videos, Rome Reviews & Rome Recaps | TWoP

I gave "A" grades to two episodes of Rome. One of them was the Season 1 finale, "Kalends Of February," in which Julius Caesar is murdered (spoiler!). The second one was the second-season episode called "Philippi." It stood out for me largely because it marked the first time (and, as it turns out, the last) that Rome actually came off of enough cash to put a credible representation of a large-scale battle up on the screen. I kind of still can't believe it. Not long after the recap went up, I got a very nice email from the director of that episode, an industry veteran named Roger Young. Like any appropriately shameless recapper, I asked him for an interview. A week later, I took my lunch break, walked to my car, and moved it to the top level of the parking ramp to optimize cell phone reception. It was from there that I reached him at his home in California. M. Giant: How did you get involved in directing this episode of Rome? Roger Young: The usual way. Well, actually it wasn't the usual way, now that I think about it. What happened was, they were looking for somebody who could do a larger episode because they hadn't done anything as big as the battle [of Philippi]. It was getting kind of late in terms of bringing somebody in, and an Assistant Director, an Italian AD that I had worked with often -- Sergio Ercolessi, who was the first AD on one of the units the first year -- had told one of the producers, a guy named Gene Kelly, that I was very good with big shows. And Gene mentioned this to John Melfi, who is one of the Executive Producers. John was in L.A., and so he called my agent and set up a meeting. I met him at a restaurant. We had a cup of coffee and it lasted an hour and a half or something. And he said, "So, get on a plane." So I did. MG: Were you familiar with Rome before? RY: Yes. I was not familiar in the sense that I'd watched every episode. I had watched early on and found it fascinating and beautifully done. But I hadn't gotten hooked so that I was watching every episode. But I was familiar enough with it that I could go in. And then of course, when I got [to Italy], I watched every single episode, including the ones that they had partially finished for Season 2. MG: This was your first episode of Rome, but you mentioned that you've done a lot of bigger projects. I noticed a lot of period pieces on your CV, like movies about Hercules and Jesus and Moses. How does Rome compare to those kinds of projects? RY: Very favorably. I had worked in Italy quite a bit. I had a three-year deal with an Italian company called Lux. And even before that deal I had made several movies with Italian crews, so there were a number of people on the Rome crew that I knew. Of the movies that I had done that were period and biblical films, I had also done a miniseries with Peter O'Toole and Charlotte Rampling called Augustus. It's the same story, just a little bit later in Octavian's life. So I was very familiar with that territory and with that part of history. Of course the two soldiers, Titus Pullo and Vorenus, are fictional characters, but the rest of the people are real, so I knew that story. In terms of production, I was pretty used to big things with big sets because all the stuff that I've done -- biblical stuff and Augustus, et cetera -- were all the same level. You know, big sets and quite a bit of money spent. So it was not only comfortable, I loved it. I really had a great time there. MG: How was it different directing a one-hour episode instead of a whole two-hour movie or even a miniseries? Did you have similar resources to one of those longer pieces? RY: It was different only in that you're playing catch-up, in that everybody else around you knows a lot more about the series and the characters and the people than you do. You're coming in as the visitor instead of the creator. Because when you're doing a miniseries or a movie, you're in on the ground floor. You're there for the first draft of the script and you have a lot of time to make changes in the script and you're involved in the casting of every single part. Of course [on Rome] I was involved only in a very few parts; everybody else was cast. You're just kind of thrown into the deep end of the pool. That can be difficult if the producers are not sympathetic to your plight. But these guys were. They very much understood my needs. They were not bothered by the fact that I was asking them a thousand questions. Because a lot of it has to do with nobody understanding that there's an awful lot of unspoken things that you don't understand as the new director. And a lot of those things have an awful lot to do with how something should be played. So I was constantly saying to them, "Look, this line, he could do it this way, this way, or this way," and I would literally act out the line. I said, "Tell me how this relates to the history of the series. Do you want him to be this kind of person, or at this moment is he colder than that? Is he feeling what I saw in Episode 4?" Those sorts of questions, to them, are obvious. But to somebody who hadn't hit all the discussions that go on that bring about that line, it's not obvious. The worst thing you want is, two days after you've shot something, to have some producer come to you and say, "Why'd you have them do it that way?" And you say, "Well, I thought that was what the line meant?" "No, no, no, see, because he lost his sister..." You know, that sort of thing. I find that I really have to bug them with a lot of questions and make sure I understand, not so much how to do something, but exactly what the tone is that they're looking for at that moment. The other thing is that you want to be a part of the look of the picture as it's been through all the other episodes. You can't come in and establish your own style. You're basically following the style that's already been set. I mean, you can -- obviously, when you're on the set, you can do what you want -- but it's just not fair to producers to try to jump out on a limb and say "Look at me! Look at me!" You're part of the series. MG: How does Rome compare to some of your other work in episodic TV that you've done in the past? Like, back in the day when you did Lou Grant and Knots Landing. RY: I don't know why they put Knots Landing up on IMDb. I did one episode of Knots Landing about a million years ago and I think it was maybe the second episode. I didn't do much episodic television because when I started out as Associate Producer on Lou Grant, one of my jobs was bringing in directors. And I had been a director in commercials and in live television before that. They knew that I wanted to direct, but we went through the whole first season with established directors. And then the second season we had a director fall out and they gave me the shot. And I ended up directing, I don't know, thirteen or fourteen episodes of that. And then I did the pilot for Magnum [P.I.], and that was a two-hour, and that sort of took me out of episodes and moved me into movies for television. So I hadn't had a lot of episodic experience for a long time. In fact, I'm looking to get back into episodes now. MG: Oh, really? RY: Yeah, because the movie business is just...it's just dead in television. MG: I suppose so. Are there any particular shows you have your sights set on? RY: I loved HBO, so obviously anything they do, I would love to do. They were really, really great people who really cared about what the director thought. On Rome, they brought me into a lot of meetings where it wasn't necessary to bring in the director unless you cared about what the director thought about something. Sometimes in television today, the director is just not as involved as he should be. It's become such a producer-writer medium that sometimes there's not the respect of the director that there should be. Now, that's starting to turn around again. It used to be that it was very heavily toward the producer-writer and the network making every decision. And now I see some movement back toward the director being part of the creative decisions and being asked his opinion. Because obviously, in the end, he's the one who has to make it happen. So yeah, there are a number of things that I would be interested in, just because there is so much good work that's being done on television today. MG: Plus HBO gives you a lot more freedom in terms of what you can put on screen than what you can in broadcast. RY: Yes, and in fact, I'm guessing that HBO encourages that. Because they definitely want to have their own personality, and they have a very expansive niche in the television landscape, so they want to keep establishing that all the time. I don't know if you saw last night's episode, but it was pretty out there in terms of what they show. MG: Uh, yeah. I was glad I wasn't watching it with my parents. RY: [Laughs.] Yes, they certainly push the boundaries. There's no apology for it, and there shouldn't be. When you're tuned in to Rome, you know what you're going to see, and if you don't want to see that, you shouldn't tune in to Rome. MG: You were saying earlier about this episode being pretty big. So they had a vision early on that the Battle of Philippi was definitely going to be an integral part of the episode? RY: Yes. Their whole plan was to open it up and do a very big episode with as much of the battle as they could get done. Because those battles, in reality, they were hundreds of thousands of people. And so they were trying to show you that in one final episode, actually. MG: So a lot of that was digital, I take it, with the big sweeping shots of the armies? RY: Yeah. They had a whole unit by itself that took, I think, maybe a hundred and fifty soldiers out and moved them all around the plain and had single shots of guys riding on horses, and, you know, and then they put that all together over a period of months and make it work. MG: So [the whole battle] was a second-unit production, or were you on the set for that, too? RY: No, part of the battle I did, and part of the battle -- the CGI stuff, of course -- they did. And part of the live battle was also done by Jim Dyer, who was also one of the executive producers. Obviously, all of the stuff with the actors, I did. And some of the battle -- the cutting and stabbing, et cetera. But a lot of that was also done by Jim's unit. MG: A lot of our posters noticed a visual echo between Brutus's death and Caesar's. Was that intentional? RY: Yes, it was. MG: How much freedom versus guidance did you get? Did you find a good balance? RY: It was terrific. As I said before, I asked an awful lot of questions every day in the prep, so that I could get a real feel for what they were seeing and what they expected. And then there was absolutely no interference. Quite the contrary. They were there encouraging me on a daily basis. And so I felt that I had an awful lot of freedom within the guidelines of the history of the series. I really had a great time. They were really great people. MG: You don't see a lot of battles on this show, but you see so much detail in terms of sets and costumes and extras and props, that it's clear that's where the budget goes. Did you get a sense that any of that being taken away from in order to pay for the battle sequence in this episode? Or was there a larger overall budget for the whole episode? RY: It was a larger overall budget. Nothing was denied me at any point. If I felt it needed a CGI shot here or a bluescreen there, it was no problem at all. If I wanted a crane, the crane was there. I think what you're referring to, actually, is that the series did tend to be very tight. And I asked them about that, because as I watched the first season it seemed to me that they weren't showing off the sets in the way they could. And I wanted to know if that was the style they were looking for, or if it just happened to fall that way, or if that was the way they were editing it. And the answer was, "No, do what you think is right. If you want to open it up more, do it." And they welcomed that, and I think my episode was a little more wide open than what they had done in the past. MG: Are you saying the sets actually look better in real life than they do on the show? RY: I'm just saying that it didn't seem to me that they were showing the sets as much, in terms of wide shots. Because the sets are glorious. They're terrific. MG: Especially the Forum. RY: Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to shoot in the Forum very much. I can't think of any place where I was limited off the top of my head MG: I noticed we didn't see the inside of Cicero's house, but stayed in his back courtyard. RY: That was actually my choice. I just felt like the whole thing would play better outside. I think I was taken to his interior once, but I decided that it was better outside, and they agreed. MG: Tell me more about directing that scene. RY: I really liked that scene, and those two guys [Ray Stevenson as Pullo and David Bamber as Cicero] are terrific. We shot that in one day, that scene. And the Director of Photography scrimmed the whole top of that set so that the sun would stay similar throughout the day in terms of its effect on the actors' faces. Obviously we added the peaches to the trees and all of those things. It was just a fun scene to do. I did one thing that they didn't put in the [final] cut, when [Cicero] steps over and says, "Wait just a minute, don't kill me yet." When David, who plays Cicero, stepped away from Pullo and looked up at the sky, I did a crane pullback on him at that point. Which I thought worked because it was like he was getting very small and sort of disappearing. And they cut it with him looking at a hawk soaring in the sky. It worked equally well either way. I think that was the only thing they changed in my cut. MG: So I take it you would want to direct another episode if this hadn't been the last season? RY: I'm very, very sorry it is the last season, because I would love to do more of these. MG: Did you work directly with Jonathan Stamp, the historical consultant? Was he on set? RY: He was on set occasionally. He wasn't on set all the time. But in the pre-production, I had full access to him and I was asking a lot of questions to make sure I had it right. But as I said, I'm kind of familiar with that era. MG: You mentioned in one of your emails that you're going back to Rome this week. RY: My wife is Italian, and we live there part of the time, so we go back and forth, yeah. MG: That must make it easier when you shoot on location over there. RY: Yes, it does. It's very pleasant. The only problem is I still don't speak Italian, even though I've worked there many, many times. MG: So what are you working on ? RY: I don't know. I'm still looking around. I just wrote a script about the beginnings of the Mafia for an Italian company. I'm waiting for their notes and we'll see whether that goes forward or not. MG: In English, I take it? RY: Yeah. MG: Good luck with that. RY: Thank you.