Here’s a new interview with Ron D.Moore from The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal:
Let’s not mince words here: The season finale of Starz‘s swashbuckling adventure-fantasy series “Outlander” was dark. Like, painfully dark. Most of it entailed the psychological, physical and sexual abuse of protagonist Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) by the sadistic Redcoat captain Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies), and the staunch resolve of Jamie’s time-traveling wife, Claire (Caitriona Balfe), who refused to let her husband succumb to his demons after he was rescued from Wentworth Prison.
Needless to say, showrunner Ronald D. Moore, who also co-wrote the finale, “To Ransom a Man’s Soul,” had a lot on his plate when prepping for both this episode, and the equally disturbing penultimate, “Wentworth Prison.” But it may surprise you to learn that for all of the upsetting material Moore had to tackle from author Diana Gabaldon‘s original “Outlander” novel, it wasn’t the abuse scenes he was most dreading (hint: the scenes in question featured a certain hairy farm animal native to Scotland).
Read more after the jump!
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As a bookend to our chat with Mooreshortly before the mid-season premiere back in April, Speakeasy recently caught up with the “Outlander” series creator to discuss the two final harrowing episodes of the show’s debut run. While speaking with us by phone from Scotland, where the second season of “Outlander” is currently in production, Moore discussed the challenges of bringing such raw subject matter from the page to the screen – and how even he, the ship-loving showrunner, couldn’t hitch a ride on the boat that brought Claire and Jamie to safety in the last moments of the finale.
An edited version of the interview follows.
When approaching these final two episodes, knowing the graphic content involved, what did you want to see in the finished product?
Ultimately what you want is a sense of truth in these scenes. We’re dealing with very heavy stuff, very psychologically difficult material, and this is the culmination of an entire season of storytelling. It was really important that you neither shied away from [the explicit scenes], nor did you do it gratuitously, and that you found what each character wants, what each character was terrified of, what was happening psychologically between [Jack and Jamie], and what were the rhythm of those scenes, so all the scenes didn’t play the same. You wanted an ebb and flow of terror and horror and pain and quiet and reflection and hope. We knew that this was the end of the story, and we spent a fair amount of time gearing up to do it. So when we got there, we were ready to dive in and just give it our all. The cast was fearless in their performances and the director was committed – and, it was just one of those things where we really wanted to make this work.
Because these episodes are so different from the rest of the season, how did you prepare for them in comparison to the others?
We set it up so the cast and the director (Anna Foerster) had extra time to rehearse, just off by themselves, which was not a normal part of the process – because we wanted them to have that time. So Tobias and Sam and Anna would work alone on all of the scenes from both episodes, really work through the material. And then, once we got to shooting, we set up the production in such a way that the scenes would be shot chronologically, instead of doing them out of sequence, which is what you do typically in film and TV.
Read the rest of the article here
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