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Miracle Day: Bill
Pullman plays Oswald Danes, a convicted child killer
farmer, I do sit indoors.’ At the end of the day, I might as well be at the north pole if I’m sitting in front of a keyboard.” He’s in the middle of buying a
house in Swansea and admits he misses British TV, but he has been trying to bring some of its techniques to the US. He ran a kind of hybrid writers’ room for just four weeks, and instead of working out every little detail, he gave the team more respon- sibility than usual. “Quite a lot of them expected it to
be very rigid; some US writers’ rooms can be very hierarchical, where they wouldn’t let a junior writer speak. It’s hilarious – too much testosterone – but it’s what I went there for.” Buffy’s Jane Espenson and Torch-
wood scribe and Camelot creator Chris Chibnall (“he always gets left out of interviews”) helped Davies storyline the 10 eps. Espenson then joined the writing team and Davies brought John Fay (Mobile, Children Of Earth) over from the UK after Starz execs looked at his proposed team of writers and wondered why there were no Brits on it.
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Davies adds: “When the writers
were going off with their synopses, they’d ask if they were allowed to change the order. I was amazed – are you asking permission? That’s what I expect. I want the 2am brainwave that changes the episode.”
Anglo-American model The result was the “very extraordi- nary” situation of having nine of the 10 scripts written before production began. Although the bulk were shot in the US, there was three weeks of block shooting in Wales. “No one in the US had ever done
that before and it was really funny – they literally didn’t think it was possi- ble,” Davies says. “There were still alterations later, but I wanted Wales all the way through the series, not vanishing after the fi rst few episodes, so they had to be ready for the shoot. I’d do it again – we’d just have to warn them next time.” On the fl ipside, he wishes he’d been
on set more often, and bemoans the lack of prep time given to directors. It feels a bit as though Davies and Gardner are hoping to uncover an
‘I wanted Wales all the way through the series, not vanishing after the fi rst few
episodes’ Russell T Davies
Torchwood (from top): Gwen with Sgt Andy (Tom Price); with Rhys (Kai Owen); and Captain Jack (John Barrowman)
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