TICKET TO RIDE

DIRECTOR BEN CHESSELL TAKES THE TARDIS BACK IN TIME IN HIS TWO EPISODES

- DARREN SCOTT

What can you tease about the episodes?

I got sent scripts and I read them and went, “These are crazy. These are wonderful, ambitious, in some ways quite nutty scripts.” Episode two is madcap and bold and unexpected, and loony in a really sharp and interesting way. We’ll have sequences that you’ve never seen in a Doctor Who episode before. Episode six is a more classic Doctor Who episode, but it’s romantic and funny and frightening.

Is filming in real world situations complicated?

Recreating ’60s London is tricky. Most of the location shooting is done in Cardiff – it really wouldn’t have been helpful to shoot in London anyway, because London doesn’t look like that any more. So we found streets that gave us some features – you can get streets that’ll give you maybe six good buildings and then you have to use visual effects to remove the buildings that wouldn’t have been there, and you can bring in foreground elements.

So there’s a scene where the Doctor and Ruby leave the TARDIS and cross the road on the way to Abbey Road Studios, and there’s a shot that looks right down the road. We picked that particular intersection because in the foreground, a lot of those buildings were genuine ’60s buildings.

Then we bring in some cars and then the rest of it is something that we build in post production: the deep background, because obviously the London skyline is wrong, and you have to do some replacement and some building. So you try to get as much real world as you can, and then use digital effects and matte paintings to fill in the gaps.

With music being a focus, do you have to work further ahead?