CNN INTERVIEW 1999

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=125 BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <IMG SRC="31282770.jpg" border=0 width="130" height="119" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> CNN INTERVIEW  1999</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <IMG SRC="31540f00.jpg" border=0 width="320" height="240" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"><IMG SRC="3174fdf0.jpg" border=0 width="335" height="223" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>CNN INTERVIEW AUGUST 1999</B></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> </B></div> <div> <B>Those wired walls of Section One are closing in.</B></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>The dark domain is centered on a great-hall hub, observed from an elevated control bridge and riddled with gleaming tunnels. This post-modern bunker glows and hums with intrigue. Pools of light. Glistening slate. Winking video monitors. Toronto-based designer Rocco Matteo's epic environment for USA Network's espionage melodrama "La Femme Nikita" is one of the most agile characters in the show. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>It's the spies stalking his stony surfaces who are starting to feel the squeeze. They're caught in a latter-day "Huis Clos" of their own success. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Three seasons and 66 hourlong episodes have taken a toll on these artists. What seduces their viewers -- this luminous dance of sex, power and techno-tactics -- is precisely what's becoming harder to sustain. The company is keenly aware that in the upcoming fourth season, the real work begins. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"I don't have any idea where the show will go next season," says Peta Wilson, who plays the title role. "This is the first year I've said that, too." (Read our special interview with Wilson.) </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>The actress is as serious in interview as she is in character. She knows what draws the show's core of Internet-fluent fans. A lot of them are the action-adventure boys, sure. But a considerable contingent is made up of sophisticated escapists. At first, they may have been come-hithered by Wilson's wiles. What they stay for is the creative team's allegiance to a dire scenario. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>If you're new to the show, you may find its open misleading: You have to get past that lurid shot of a street-urchin Nikita holding up the bloody knife that got her "falsely accused of a hideous crime" and inducted into "the most covert anti-terrorist group on the planet." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Once an episode begins, you'll find the kid stuff is over. Nothing here is so campy as that open. The rare joke is inevitably bitter. The characters find few places to hide. "La Femme Nikita" is so addictive to so many because it's played very much for keeps. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"We pride ourselves on making the smart, unexpected choices," says Joel Surnow, the show's executive consultant. "Our heroes don't have to be heroes." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>And they're not. They scheme. They deceive. They kill. Often within the computerized confines of Matteo's Section One. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In a season-ending round robin of conversations, the show's artists talk of nothing so much as that narrowing range in which they function. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"The way it's ending up" this summer, says Wilson, "there's not much more I can play." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Out of the box </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Wilson and her cohorts are on their production break now. Some are staying in Toronto, where the show is shot. Several are traveling. Others are taking short-term acting assignments. One is working on his restoration of a 19th-century farmhouse. Until shooting starts again in October, they're free of the swank, sealed society their characters inhabit. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>But as the third season's closing episodes play out over the next four Sunday evenings (10 p.m. ET), these people say they're contemplating the velvet trap the show's ingenuity has sprung on them -- and the aesthetic ironies they'll face when production begins for January's start of the fourth season. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"When you have a show that has a lot of sexual tension between your two leads," says Joel Surnow, "there's a desire to have it resolved. But at the same time, you don't really want it resolved. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"In our show, not only is there that kind of tension, but there's also tension among all our characters. Section One is a very oppressive place. The mood that pervades the show drives our fans, and maybe the actors, too, to look for some kind of peace, to look for a solution to the problem of being in Section. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"There's a desire on the audience's part to see this thing move forward. To see things change. The problem for the writing staff is that if you change it too much, you lose what the audience watches for." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Quebec-raised actor Roy Dupuis plays Michael, Section's top operative and Nikita's love interest. He goes into a long, searching pause worthy of his laconic character when asked what the program means to its most dedicated viewers. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"I think I'd have to say the show puts morals and logic in opposition," he says. Dupuis' melancholy Michael, more than anyone else in the show's unfolding story, acts out of searing choices -- love vs. duty, compassion vs. authority, efficiency vs. casualties. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"We do certain things, not because we feel they're right but because logically they're better," he says. "Or because they seem to be better in the larger picture. Does this come only from instinct? Or from religion? In a world that's changing so much as it is now, that's what I think I see in it." </B></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Someone else's shadow </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"La Femme Nikita" bases its premise and characters on Parisian writer-director Luc Besson's "Nikita" of 1990. It was released in 1991 in the United States as "La Femme Nikita." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In that film, Anne Parillaud plays a different lead, an urban-feral punk correctly convicted as a cop killer. The series' Nikita, Wilson's character, is innocent -- wrong place at the wrong time -- and thus more sympathetic from the outset. In both cases, Nikita is "imprisoned" in a shady government espionage program and trained as a sharp-shooting agent. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Surnow's television rendition has, in a couple of episodes, followed the film closely. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Nikita's introduction to the work of an operative, for example, honors one of Besson's most memorable sequences. Over dinner she's handed a gift, beautifully wrapped. She pulls at the bow, touched. Unwraps the box. Lifts the lid. It's an automatic pistol. She's ordered to assassinate a fellow restaurant customer, at point-blank range. Her escape car will wait only two minutes. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In a later episode, the series recalls the film's assault made on a VIP who's targeted from a hotel bathroom window. On both the large and small screens, Nikita has an uncomprehending boyfriend in the hotel suite with her, a man endangered by what he might find out about her. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In a nod to Besson this season, Surnow's writers revealed for the first time -- and shortly after Bastille Day -- that the TV show's spy base, like Besson's, was located in the French capital. The streets fluttered with Seine-side tricolor charm. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>But with typical "Nikita" fatalism, that telling shot of a sunny Eiffel Tower came just moments after the facility had been evacuated and blown apart. Section One had been exposed and its self-destruct explosives detonated by its own people. By the end of the episode, a new Section headquarters was being manned -- and the audience once more was in the dark about its location. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"But I like Paris," systems mastermind Birkoff (Matthew Ferguson) said ruefully. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"So you'll visit," said munitions chief Walter (Don Francks) with a matter-of-fact shrug. No sentiment. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Hand to hand </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Section One is run by Operations, played with determined precision by Brooklyn-born actor Eugene Robert Glazer. At his direction, strike teams of agents are given hologram-aided briefings, then dispatched on international missions against terrorist cells. You catch direct mentions of Hamas; you guess at references to the Basques' ETA; you assume you've heard allusions to Osama bin Laden. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>But those action sequences aren't the real engine of "La Femme Nikita." Here, the internal power plays are the point. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"My suspicion," says Ferguson -- whose young hacker-genius character Birkoff is featured Sunday in an episode called "Any Means Necessary" -- "is that this is all too familiar to people who work in the corporate world. It's the ruthlessness of losing your job, of losing yourself. Our metaphor is being 'canceled' by Section. You lose your life. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"There's the trouble people have in running relationships in their work," Ferguson says. "The question of putting your work before your relationships. What we do on the show is heighten that reality." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Among Operations' chief assets in heightening that unforgiving reality is Madeline, his key associate, a former lover and sometime rival. In Besson's film, she was named Amande and played as a kind of waning-Collette by the ubiquitous Jeanne Moreau. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Here, she's transformed into Section One's chief strategist, a younger and more imposing woman. Canadian actress Alberta Watson gives this Machiavellian role such an incisive reading that her Madeline has become a bafflingly sympathetic character. She's an accomplished torturer and a rigorous mercenary, an admirable logician and cold as ice. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"Alberta will continually try to push Madeline to be more humane," Surnow says with a laugh. "But when she does, she loses the character." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"The emotional parameters are pretty small," Watson agrees. "And I do think what I'm doing with her is colder than she was in the film. It seems pretty clear to me where I have to go with Maddie. Or where I can't go." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Like her colleagues, Watson concedes, "I have no idea on development" of the show past this third season's conclusion. Most of the actors are on four- or five-year contracts. Should the show continue to thrive on USA Network, Watson says in her character's relentlessly rational cadences, so will her Madeline. If not? Well, it's called being canceled.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Slipping into darkness </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Watson, Surnow, Ferguson and Wilson all credit Dupuis with what may be the show's most potent weapon: its playing style. It's not from Besson's film. It originates, like Matteo's setting, with the television program. And what you're seeing on the show is unusual for a commercial series. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"La Femme Nikita" is a work of modern mannerism. That's a 20th-century phrase coined to refer to a 16th-century European art movement in which realism was deliberately "mannered," or distorted. A mannerist work warps everyday expression. There's often a sense of neurosis to it. On some level, it hurts. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"The challenge and the choice I made at the beginning," Dupuis says, "because of the situation Michael is in, was to take away any small, normal gestures. Actors usually use natural gestures to give life to a character. But you rarely see Michael look at his watch to get the time. And yet I still have to make it look human." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Why impose such an artificial playing style on the work? "I don't think you can still be normal after killing so many people," Dupuis says, "and not of your free will. We're all in prison. That's the difference between our reality and 'Mission Impossible.'" </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Dupuis' response to this dilemma is the fierce economy of style you now see in his, Watson's and Glazer's characterizations. To some degree, Wilson's Nikita deploys the approach, too, as she navigates the hostility around her. "It's all those blank stares and slight moves," as Surnow good-naturedly puts it. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"I know the producers were pretty scared at first," Dupuis says. "It's not something you see on American television. The producers were scared until they saw how much interest was on Michael. Then they were glad." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Surnow wholeheartedly backs up Dupuis on this: "At first, when we were shooting a firefight," he says, "we had arguments about this. Roy would just walk away as Michael. He wouldn't run. I'd tell him that was ridiculous. I'd say, 'You've got to run. Bullets are flying. Michael has to run.' But what he was doing was right. It's not real-world logic we've got here." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>All good things </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Ferguson's character Birkoff has a story-line advantage, he points out, in the third-season development of a friendship with the older weapons wizard Walter. "When small things like that open up," he says, "it feels like a great leap because the show's so mannered." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>There may be more such openings to come, with return appearances by Birkoff's cyber-competitor, Kris Lemche, as hacker-prodigy Greg Hillinger. Lemche is in Sunday's episode and in "Three Eyed Turtle" on August 15. "The episode on Sunday (in which Birkoff must infiltrate a terrorist cell as an anti-government cracker of computer codes) will have a lot of impact on where my character goes next year," Ferguson says. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>But Watson, for her part, is adamant: "I have no idea on where the story or Maddie will go next. I never watch the show, in fact. I think I just sat down with Joel (Surnow) about a month ago and he finally said, 'This is where we're going' for the rest of this season. The writers put a huge amount of effort into it. Sometimes it's a mess, and they straighten it out as we go." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Dupuis may be more satisfied than the others with the tight fit of the show's range. "I don't see Michael moving too much inside Section," he says. "I kind of like the mysterious stability that Michael has. He's evolved, in 15 years in Section, as the perfect operative -- except what he feels for Nikita. That duality (affection vs. profession) is what's interesting." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>This summer, Dupuis says he's working on his restoration of an 1840s farmhouse in Quebec. "And I might travel. I've been thinking about Nepal, Tibet, maybe China -- I'd like to see what's there before the Three Gorges dam project floods it. Maybe some acting work. There's a small underground movie I'd love to do but I don't know if I have enough time. Whatever 'underground' means anymore." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Ferguson -- who says he's far more into sports than the computers his character revels in -- has plans to head for Los Angeles. "I'll look for other work; stage, TV, film, anywhere they'll hire me. You know, Peta was over at my house and we were saying how fun it would be to do a different show, different characters, all of us together." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>And Watson says she's working on a film this month -- "Desire," a project with director Colleen Murphy, who directed Watson in her Genie-nominated work in "ShoAny means necessary." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>The actors are outspoken in their regard for each other. And Surnow -- saying he's proud of what he and producer Jamie Paul Rock can do on an annual budget of about US $1 million -- knows how important the show's casting has been. Each actor, he says, is close in temperament to his or her character. As Watson puts it, "You're getting a piece of each of us." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Surnow brings the wise calm of Section One's "Oversight" division to his artists' talk of nerves about the future. "Listen," he says. "After the first eight episodes, I thought it was all over." That was 58 shows ago. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"We've just brought in new writers, strong ones," he says. "We're about eight or nine stories into the fourth season of scripts now, and we're not losing steam. Rocco's set is an incredible world, we have everything we need right there in Section, our own USS Enterprise. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"And we pride ourselves on operating in this narrow bandwidth." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>So like most strong creative endeavors, "La Femme Nikita" in its new maturity is not only broadening its appeal to a wider viewership, but it's also deepening into an education for its artists and audience. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"I have so much still to learn," says Ferguson. "I need to watch more, listen more, see how I'm doing." </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>"Teach the audience," Peta Wilson says. "That's how you do it. Don't just give them what we think they want. Raise them up."</B></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> </B></div> <div> <B> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="626" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="VOID" RULES="NONE" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=CENTER HEIGHT= 20 WIDTH="622"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="20" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="622" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> </TABLE></B></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <IMG SRC="4de35190.gif" border=0 width="309" height="25" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"><IMG SRC="4de35190.gif" border=0 width="309" height="25" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <div>      </div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>                  T.V. Hebdo Nov. 16.1999                                                          </B><A HREF="id87.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="TV HEBDO Nov.16, 1999"><U><B><IMG SRC="1bd50280.gif" border=0 width="80" height="40" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></U></A><B> </B></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>