Here’s a new interview with Ron D.Moore from Variety
From Variety:
Starz’s “Outlander” has seen its heroine, Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser (Caitriona Balfe), navigate the battlefields of World War II to the emotional minefield of the 18th century Scottish Highlands, facing threats too numerous to list — but her greatest challenge came not from a physical fight, but the struggle for her husband’s Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) soul following his rape and torture at the hands of Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall (Tobias Menzies). It’s a confrontation that’s been building all season, hinted at but not fully realized in the penultimate episode and brought to gut-wrenching life in the finale in some of the most shocking and affecting scenes ever aired on television.
To break down the many shocking developments in the season finale, Variety spoke to showrunnerRon Moore about tackling the challenging subject matter and adapting Diana Gabaldon’s most potent prose for the screen, as well as his plans for season two.
Read more after the jump!
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Since Diana’s novel is told solely from Claire’s perspective, we don’t find out what happened to Jamie in Wentworth until after he’s been rescued in the book — did you have any temptation to keep Jamie and Black Jack off-screen for most of episode 115 to build that tension, or did you always plan for it to unfold the way it ultimately did?
I think we decided that pretty early. It was one of the reasons why back in Episode 9 we opened on his point of view and opened up the show, so it gave us permission to do that kind of thing, because we wanted to be able to do that once we got to this section in the story. In the [finale] you see that it is more flashback and he’s remembering, but it allowed us to play those scenes in a different way because if he’s telling Claire the story and then you’re flashing back from his perspective, it’s also influenced by what he would tell her and what he would verbalize and what he wouldn’t. By doing it objectively, it gives you a chance to just play the scene and see what’s happening in real time. It also meant that when Claire’s creeping through the fortress there’s a tremendous amount of tension because we know what’s going on in that cell and you’re waiting for her to get in there, and it just felt like a really good dramatic construct.
What was your experience of filming the scenes between Jamie and Black Jack in that cell?
All season long we obviously knew where the story was heading, so there had been a lot of conversations in the writers’ room and conversations with the cast. We all knew where this was going to lead to, so we had given a lot of thought in leading up to those events.
Then as we got into that last block — because we shoot them in blocks of two, so 15 and 16 were shot together by the same director in the same span of time — we set aside extra rehearsal time for them so Tobias and Sam and Anna Foerster would go off and they would rehearse alone and we carved that extra time in the schedule for them to do that. Then at a certain point they brought myself and Ira Behr, who wrote the first episode and co-wrote the second one, and they showed us all the scenes. They had walked through them all, they’d rehearsed. Then we discussed it, we had conversations. So there was a lot of preparation and a lot of thought.
We built the prison cell set on our stages here at Cumbernauld and it was a heavy thing. They were physically dark — there wasn’t a lot of light in there. The stage around it was dark. The crew gave them space. The crew knew what was going on. They were psychologically prepared, but it would be very long, draining, emotional days. When we were done with that section everyone was happy to be out of that prison cell. It was a genuine sense of release once we had completed it.
Read the rest of the article here
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