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Cinefantastique
October/November 2003
Agent Provocateur
by Edward Gross
Transcript thanks to kzingirl, Vartan Ho #7! :)
THE SECOND SEASON OF SUPER-SPY ADVENTURES ON ALIAS SHOOK UP THE ESTABLISHED
DRAMA, OPENING UP NEW OPTIONS FOR SERIES CREATOR J.J. ABRAMS.
Graduate student by day, secret agent by night.
On its most basic level, that was the premise behind Alias in its first season, as Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) had to balance an education with a career in espionage, working for a secret branch of the CIA known as SD-6. Believing she is fighting against America’s enemies, Sydney eventually learns that she is the enemy, carrying out covert missions designed to topple the government rather than save it. In response, Sydney, along with her spy father Jack (Victor Garber), become double agents for the CIA, attempting to dismantle SD-6 without raising the suspicion of its leader, Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin). In between, she must deal with growing feelings for her CIA “handler,” Vaughn (Michael Vartan), and the fact that her mother Irina Derevko (Lena Olin), a KGB killer, has come back into her life and Sydney simply doesn’t know whether she can trust her.
That complex paradigm pretty much carried Alias for its first season and a half, until series creator J.J. Abrams, with an episode titled “Phase Two,” jettisoned the SD-6 aspect of the show and sent virtually everything spinning on its creative ear.
“We considered the things that turned us on with Alias, the things that we love, the aspects of the show that got us excited,” Abrams explains. “Very few had connections to the problems we were having that prevented us from doing certain stories. Not to mention the fact that it was hard to deny the evidence that viewers were having a difficult time comprehending the show. When you look at it and say, ‘It’s a show with good guys pretending to be bad guys, many of the bad guys are pretending that they’re good guys, and quite a few of the bad guys don’t even know that they’re bad guys’ — that’s a difficult premise for anyone coming to the show from episode two on, because if you don’t make it clear in every episode, they’re going to be lost.”
Executive producer and frequent director Ken Olin opines that Abrams had become extremely cognizant of how confusing the show could be due to the sheer quantity of story that had to be told in 44 minutes.
“In every episode, we were getting into a situation where we had to say, ‘This is what’s supposed to happen, this is what will happen, and this is what you are going to have to make them think happened,’” Olin explains. “That’s a lot of time that’s being spent servicing the model of the show and not necessarily telling stories that you want to tell. And it becomes redundant as opposed to, ‘Move forward, go get this, bring this down.’ After a year and a half, the conceit ran its course, and that’s one of the reasons it was restructured a little bit.
“That’s where I think J.J. was willing and eager to meet [ABC] halfway,” Olin continues. “Their concern was that it was becoming so complicated for an audience to follow. I think there was an agreement about that in the sense that there could be a way to tell these stories more clearly, that we could keep Sydney in jeopardy, and we could keep the emotional stakes high. We could do it in a direct way that wouldn’t compromise the complexity of the character, but we would still tax the viewer’s mind. There’s still a lot that happens, and there are still enormous twists and turns within the context of each episode. I think in some ways they are probably more emotionally direct. J.J. does not want to be emotionally obtuse; that was not his purpose. But I think sometimes, online, there’s been a little bit of a bad rap given to him about compromising the vision of the show. He will never, ever shy away from taxing people’s minds, but he recognizes that we were in the middle of the second season and what was involved in keeping this going was taking so much of our time and effort that we weren’t really moving forward.”
Abrams interjects, “The longer the series went on and Sydney didn’t bring SD-6 down, the worse she looked as a spy. And the longer the series went on and she wasn’t found out as a double agent, the dumber SD-6 looked. That was one of the issues that existed. Then there was the question of why the CIA would allow them to exist in their form, knowing about them and where they are. Also, the fact that you love [unwitting SD-6 operatives] Dixon [Carl Lumbly] and you love Marshall [Kevin Weisman] — but they’re supposed to be the bad guys — made it difficult for people to watch the show. Plus, they didn’t even know they were bad guys, so it made them look stupid as well.
“We had too much story to do per episode in the mission and countermission, and ultimately wanted to get Sydney and Vaughn together, but couldn’t do that in a way that we felt was appropriate. Sloane was relegated to simply giving missions and being behind a desk with few exceptions. So there were all these reasons that we felt the show needed to free itself.”
As co-executive producer Alex Kurtzman explains it, everybody was on board with the transition away from the SD-6 story line, though a few people had some trepidation over it occurring so early in the series’ run.
“At first it was, ‘God, are we going to make a decision that dramatic?’” Kurtzman reflects. “But then it was, ‘We can tell the same stories as long as we don’t compromise the essence of the show, which is the fun of the show.’ To a degree, I think the complication of the show is its success.
“One of the things I hear a lot is, ‘I didn’t really get it, but that’s fine.’ We knew we had to keep that aspect alive and at the same level of intelligence. Streamlining was the key. As a result, we got to focus more specifically on tracking Sydney emotionally, as opposed to locking on missions and countermissions. I loved that we have her working specifically for the CIA. I think the stuff with mom and dad and Syd — the evolution of the family — was really amazing. The first year was more of an experiment, like how are we going to tell our stories? What kind of stories are we going to tell? How are we going to balance Sydney’s life with her double life? In the second year, it felt a little more fluid to me.”
His producing partner, Roberto Orci, concurs, noting that the show’s subtext seemed to come much more into the forefront once the dramatic shift happened storywise. “In the first year,” Orci says, “we knew the show was about a dysfunctional family — about a girl and her father. The stories were much more independent and more ‘spyish.’ Whereas in the second year the subtext of the dysfunctional family came completely to the forefront with the addition of the mother and the addition of Vaughn and Sydney’s relationship being consummated. So the spy stuff became more secondary.”
For Abrams, the evolving characterizations and their ensuing relationships were the highlights of the second year, making the show more satisfying to him than it was in year one — and that’s saying a lot.
“We went deeper with Sydney and Vaughn, and Sydney and her father certainly came to a new understanding,” he says. “Sydney and her mother — clearly that relationship didn’t exist in the first season and that was a very important relationship for us. I thought we got to see Sloane be brilliant and manipulative and ultimately lose the most important thing in the world to him — his wife. And in taking revenge and hitting rock bottom, realizing his true purpose and getting to that next level, which we were just getting a hint of at the end of the year.”
THE VILLAIN OF THE PIECE
One of the real questions about the reconfiguring of Alias’ premise
was the role that Sloane would continue to play. Interestingly, he has
become even more of a threat despite the fact that he doesn’t have the
resources of SD-6 behind him. In essence, the character was like a caged
tiger in the old setting – dangerous for sure, but contained. What would
happen to him without any constraints?
“It’s very difficult to keep a serialized villain, and it was quite a task
to keep someone around who could be a recurring bad guy,” Orci muses. “With
Batman, the Joker goes to jail, and you get rid of him for fours shows.
With Sloane, who is around every week, you have to sort of split the difference
in victories between him and Sydney. Ron Rifkin is such a great character
on the show that we were committed to remembering that he was the soul of
SD-6, so keeping him alive was the most interesting challenge. He was the head of
it the whole time, but when you make such a monumental decision – that
we’re going to get rid of this organization that’s been there from the beginning
– you start to get a little bit of cold feet until you think better of it. So
it’s sort of a re-realization.”
Adds Abrams, “It was great to play the twist that SD-6 was gone, but that
the virus in the form of Sloane still existed. The question was: Where
would he land and what was going to be the new disease? The fun of the show was,
on the one hand, we’re changing that office that everyone is familiar with
and the names of these organizations are gone, but the source of the
malevolence and the antagonism was still alive and well. In fact, by the
end of the year it was stronger than ever. Suddenly, it was everybody against
Sloane. What’s interesting is you think the series exists to take down
SD-6, but I think that was an illusion, because the show is, ultimately for us,
bigger and deeper motivation. And wait until you see what happens in season
three. The way the series begins in year three, because of Sydney’s point
of view, the show is so much like a pilot of a new series. Sydney is so in the
dark at first, and though it is helpful if you’ve seen the show before,
because things will have even more meaning, it’s fascinating to come into
this world. Sloane is a character who is in a place now that I think is
fascinating for a first-time viewer. If you’ve watched the show from the
beginning, to me it feels like such an incredible ride to witness the
evolution of this guy, from what he was when we first met him to who he is
now and beyond.”
PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY
Anyone thinking that all this talk of drama and character interaction has
taken away from Alias’ action quotient hasn’t been watching the
show. If anything, the show’s setting and outlandish stunts – including an
airplane action sequence in “Phase Two” that looks like something out of a
James Bond film – have intensified from what they were in year one.
“We were trying to accomplish, day-to-day, the kind of things that J.J. had
written in Armageddon,” Olin enthuses. “First of all, we finally
began to realize what was and was not possible. Our producer, Sarah Caplan,
is really brilliant at solving some of these problems, and there are
astronomical logistical problems. People jumping off buildings and shooting
out windows is pretty major. Two years ago, Sarah and I would read the
scripts and say to J.J., ‘You can’t do this.’ But then we began to figure
out how we could. J.J. was always pushing the envelope in terms of what we
could do visually. He’s very experienced about matte paintings and CGI, and
he just wasn’t going to be constrained that way. I think one of the things
that Sarah Caplan has done that’s just incredible is realizing, ‘Okay, this
location can work if you do this and this and this with it.’ Once you’ve
plummeted down an elevator shaft, climbed a mountain in the Himalayas and
had a street scene in Bangkok, and it’s all in the same hour, it becomes
part of that world. I think we’ve just gotten very experienced at doing
it.”
Caplan adds that the routine of the series has given the crew the ability
to cope with whatever idea is thrown their way. “The second season was an
easier year for us in some respects, just because the first season in the
first few episodes we weren’t quite crewed in the right way,” she says. “So
it was hard for us to cope with everything. It was very difficult on
production. By the second year we knew exactly what we needed to have in
place in order to catch any fly balls that came our way. We were pretty
much ready to do anything, with the possible exception of ‘Phase Two.’ That was
crazy, because it had to be done so quickly. It was being prepped while it
was being shot. As soon as the day’s cutting was done, it was off to the
composer to see what he could come up with for that particular piece. J.J.
spent the whole time in the cutting room during the shooting, which was
very unusual. Still, I think we managed to pull it off.”
The same could be said for the other departments, which found the creative
process not necessarily easier, but certainly more efficient. In a sense,
no matter how intense things became, there was a certain optimism among the
crew that they could pull it off. For production designer Scott Chambliss,
for instance, there was no longer the drive to be absolutely precise in his
efforts to re-create a foreign location, which is something he felt during
the shooting of season one.
“Because it’s so much about making a grand statement really fast, it was
simpler for me to go after locations, architecture and buildings that had
some piece to them that the camera can spend two-and-a-half seconds on and
go, ‘Okay, now we’re in Afghanistan,’ and build around that, knowing that
if they turn the corner over there, they’ll see the 101 freeway,” he laughs.
“That was one things that shifted in year two. I think my own process was
much faster at being able to judge what was going to work. The other thing
that changed for me particularly is that I started thinking in much more
abstract terms in creating sets for a lot of the scripts. Instead of being
so literal in trying to capture the look of foreign countries or types of
structure, I went very much more into creating mood or feeling or texture.
It’s not so abstract that the audience goes, ‘What is this supposed to be?’
It’s not going off to fantasyland, but just enough where they say, ‘Oh,
it’s a dungeon,’ or ‘He’s being held in laboratory.’
“With TV, you have to do that anyway because you don’t have the time or
money to be literal,” Chambliss continues. “We started there in the first
season. This time, I kept pushing in that direction to see how far we could
take it before it all fell apart. We wound up doing, for the last episode,
this Swedish nightclub, this white thing where Jennifer Garner was in this
blond wig, and it was all very Danish-modern and looked super groovy. We
did it in the hallway of an old post-office building that, when we were
location scouting for something else, I walked down and turned a corner and the
whole thing felt like the Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey set. It
was just a hallway, and it perfectly fit our shooting schedule. You know, in
the second year the show changed in that we had a year’s worth of experience in
terms of what the other departments deliver, so we’re able to tailor our
work more closely together and not be confused when somebody asks for
something additional or wants to subtract something we had put in.”
Muses Olin, “I can’t imagine the show being any more ambitious than we’ve
already done. But one thing that might be surprising to people is that when
we’re in the editing room, and it’s J.J., myself and the editors and we’re
trying to figure out how to make a sequence work, the thing that’s always
held at a high standard is the performance. It’s not really so much the
technical execution. We have a crew that is so accomplished in terms of our
abilities to realize these different sequences visually. It’s always a
thing of, ‘What’s the best performance?’ and really trying to be true to that.
Whatever the truth of the character’s experience of the situation –
that’s always the biggest challenge.”
TIME TRIPPING
Reconfiguring Alias once in the second season wasn’t enough for
Abrams, who decided it was time to shake things up again in the finale,
which had Sydney discover that she has been missing for two years and that
a lot has happened in her absence – not the least of which is that
Vaughn had gotten married.
“On the shows that I’ve been involved with before,” Olin says, “there was
always a poicy that you can’t just blow out all of your stories too
quickly. You have to hold back, unravel things slowly. The thing that has been so
incredible about Alias is just the opposite. It’s like, we’re just
going to go for it. We’re going to blow out as many stories as we can tell
and do as much as we can do. When you say, ‘You already did that in the
middle of the season this year, how can you do it again?’ Well, that’s what
we do. I think it’s a continuing part of the [reinvention] that began with
the fall of SD-6.”
There are, he explains, certain elements of the show that would take a long
time to transpire by way of straight storytelling. Things can flash-forward
two years to a time when a lot of those story elements have already taken
place.
“I think we’ll discover the things that have transpired through Sydney’s
point of view, which is very much the way the show began,” Olin offers. “I
think you’ll see that a number of things have changed, and we’ll go through
and experience that with her. I think it’s good, too, to emotionally land
the show back on her. I think we wanted some of those changes to have taken
place, and we didn’t want to spend a long time or half a season putting
those things in place. They’ll already be there. And even though I know
it’s going to get everybody upset about Vaughn being married, I also think one
of the things that’s great is we didn’t spend so long with their romance that
it sort of overstayed the welcome there. I think it’s probably more
romantic to want for them to get together and get back together, and the
price they have to pay to do that, than it is to just get into something where we
deal all the time with the relationship that’s working and in place. I
think it’ll end up being incredibly compelling and romantic.
“Thirtysomething was very domestic and internal and about the
emotional life of those characters,” says Olin, who played series lead
Michael Steadman. “It was very much about sex and marriage. This show is
really not about that; it was never intended to be about a romantic
relationship. It was supposed to be part of it. You know, the relationship
she wants to have with Vaughn, the relationship she wants to have with her
father. But it’s still very much an action-oriented, heightened-reality
show. In most series, unless it’s a show about two people being together
and the price they pay to stay together, it’s more exciting to want them to be
together and watch all of the things that they need to overcome, the
obstacles that are in the way of their coming together, as opposed to,
‘Okay, they’re together.’ In the long run it’s going to be very
interesting.”
Although Abrams refuses to divulge specifics about Alias’ third
year, he does say that the writers’ approach to the show will be different than
it has been in previous season and that the stories written for each character
will reflect that change.
“What I can say is that given the two-year gap, it forced us to discuss the
characters in a different way,” details Abrams. “It wasn’t like we were
talking about the characters as thought they hadn’t existed before or were
trying to figure them out in a way that was as efficient as possible. Nor
was it continuing from where we left off. It was unique in that we were
suddenly looking at characters that we had lived with for two years, had
more or less not lived with for two years and were now picking up again. It
forced us to not only talk about their history prior to the series, but
obviously their history in the two years prior to season three. It was
interesting.
“It made us question not only what the characters were going through, but,
working backwards, who the characters were to begin with, even if it
meant re-examining who they were in a way that we might not have done just
coming into a normal season three. Suddenly we’re like, ‘If that’s what
Vaughn is going through, what does that mean about who he was for the first
years of the show?’ It’s cool thinking of arcs for the characters more
specifically than we had, in more detail than we previously had. It was
helpful. What I love about the show is you get the intrigue, you get the
world of espionage and this very twisted, interpersonal soap opera.
“My goal at the beginning,” Abrams closes, “was to do a B-genre show as an
A-list show, and we got to deal with very pulp story lines and treated them
with as much commitment as a typical quality legal or medical show might.
It’s escapist entertainment, but, hopefully, it’s done well enough so
people watching it don’t feel it’s a guilty pleasure, just simply a pleasure.”
© Cinefantastique 2003
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