|
| "Fear me. I've killed all of them." |
As with all episodes, Neil Gaiman's "The Doctor's Wife" has experienced cuts from the earliest drafts: scenes that proved non-essential, characters that weren't interesting, and plot strands that were never quite tied together. That's just the way of scriptwriting. But Gaiman explains in an interview with Newsarama, found via io9, that his script suffered from extensive cuts, valuable minutes that we as viewers may never be allowed to enjoy!
He began by reiterating the background of his story.
"It stars Suranne Jones playing a character named Idris who may turn out to be an old acquaintance of the Doctor’s with a new face. It co-stars Michael Sheen as a mysterious baddie called The House. It begins on a junkyard planet out on the very edge of the universe and I thought it would be fun to start in a junkyard just because Doctor Who started in a junkyard. So this does."
Then he explained the true nature of working on Doctor Who.
"You know, there are three scenes in ["The Doctor's Wife"] that were written by Steven Moffat pretty much the day of shooting when they went, ‘Well we can’t actually do this scene that Neil’s written because we don’t have that day to get to that location. What can we do?’ And Steven would come in and read what I’d written and turn it into a scene in the TARDIS.
"But that’s all part of the nature of making television, you have X number of...you’ve 14 days to shoot in, you have your X amount of money and you have your limitations and what’s glorious about the finished episode for me is, I don’t look at it going, ‘Oh my god, I miss that scene’ or ‘I miss this bit’ even though I know we don’t have...I know that there were scenes that we shot, the finished episode from the first cut was 56 minutes long and they had to take it down to about 43."
Without ample time to air the episode, the production team had no choice but to hack away at unnecessary scenes. That included reducing the roles of two fun characters.
"Uncle and Auntie played [by] Adrian Schiller and Elizabethe Berrington — they were wonderful, they were so funny, they were so brilliant, they had all this great stuff and it's not really there anymore. There's a flavor of it and you can get to see it but their scenes wound up going because other stuff was more important. But there's no sense that you're going to walk away from the episode going, 'Ah, I wish with had more Uncle and Auntie stuff,' you walk away going, I hope, ‘What a great episode!'"
Nevertheless, it seems that this will be Gaiman's first and only episode.
"I was very determined that if I was going to write an episode of Doctor Who, it was going to have everything in it. So it's funny and it's scary and it's exciting and it's heartbreaking and it has running down corridors and there are places where I kind of hope that it may add to the giant Doctor Who mythos because you always want to leave something nice behind you. But really what it is is just, you know, somebody who's just always wanted to write an episode of Doctor Who, just writing an episode of Doctor Who and being indulged by the BBC in this folly."
Will we ever get those lost 13 minutes of "The Doctor's Wife"? It sounds as though these scenes were all shot and completed before being turned down for the final cut; but will we ever have the opportunity to watch the extra Uncle and Auntie scenes, the additional banter between the Doctor and Amy, the brilliant but lost words of the great Neil Gaiman? Please, BBC, expand the Deleted Scenes section of the series DVD!
8 comments :
Gaiman, a word for you:
NOVELISATION.
im sure they will be on the dvd
He famously had to trim a lot of stuff out of his original script as well to get it down to the super-lean version that was still too long. I imagine he'd enjoy the chance to expand the story in another format.
Then again Combom, last year the DVD had no deleted scenes so I'm not too sure whether we'll ever it in that format :(
Really? Not even those ones from The Hungry Earth that were shown on Confidential?
Nah, not even those... there were no deleted scenes :(
Can we campaign for not just deleted scenes but extended episodes? I want my DVDs to be of the BEST versions of the episode, not the trimmed-for-slot versions!
I'm surprised it's not even an extended episode. I mean, I agree with cutting out a lot, but not even to 50 minutes? That's just robbing us of "Doctor Who"!
Post a Comment