From: mike.dickson@almac.co.uk (Mike Dickson)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.prisoner
Subject: MCGOOHAN INTERVIEW    4/9
Date: 23 Jan 93 18:27:00 GMT
Reply-To: mike.dickson@almac.co.uk (Mike Dickson)
Organization: Almac BBS Ltd. +44 (0)324 665371

>>> Continued from previous message

 Troyer: It was harmless...

 McGoohan: it was fun, yeah, it was fun. And takin' whatever you put
           into it, that's the reason for it. Then we sorta stuck the
           figures up and all that and put some other concepts in which
           have other levels, sociological levels, which you can take
           what you want out of them.

 Troyer: Can you make a decent creative enterprise, build one, in any
           medium, without building it on several levels at once?
           However much of it is conscious or unconscious?

 McGoohan: It's very, ah...a lot of it was conscious, in my case. Of
           course, other things happen. F'instance, a t'ing happened,
           the balloon thing, which has been made a great deal of...

 Troyer: "Rover."

 McGoohan: "Rover," yes. Now, the reason that happened, again, it's
           like the Western. This, ah...We had this marvelous piece of
           machinery that was being built which was gonna be "Rover"
           and this thing was like a hovercraft and it would go
           underwater, come up on the beach, climb walls; it could do
           anything. The was our original Rover. By the first day of
           shooting, unfortunately, the engineers, mechanics and
           scientific genuises hadn't quite completed it to perfection.
           (Troyer chuckles.) And the first day of shooting, Rover was
           supposed to go down off the beach into the water, do a
           couple of signals and a couple of wheelspins and come back
           up. But it went down into the water and (laughter all
           around) stayed down, permanently. And then we had to shoot.
           We had Rover in every scene that day. So we had no Rover and
           Rover didn't look as though he was going to be resurrected
           at all. So we're standing there. My Production Manager,
           Bernard Williams (wonderful fellow), standing beside me, and
           he says, "What're we gonna do?" And he went like that and he
           looked up and there was this balloon in the sky. And he
           says, "What's that?" And I said, "I dunno. What is it?" He
           says, "I think it's a meteorological balloon." And he looked
           at me. And I said, "How many can ya get within two hours?",
           ya see. So he says, "I'll see." And he went off and he
           called the meteorological station nearby. And I did some
           other shots to cover while he was away and he came back with
           a hundred of 'em. He took an ambulance so that he could get
           there and back fast because it was quite a ways to the
           nearest big town. And he came back with them and there were
           these funny balloons, all sizes, and that's how Rover came
           to be.

 And sometimes we filled it with a little water, sometimes with oxygen,
           sometimes with helium, depending on what we wanted him to
           do. And in the end, we could make him do anything: lie down,
           beg, anything (Laughter)...Really. We used about six
           thousand of them...

 Troyer: Did you really?

 McGoohan: Oh, yes. They're very, very fragile. They break very easily.

 Troyer: So you'd lose a lot of scenes, then, when you were shooting in
           a boat...

 McGoohan: We always had another one standing by, back-ups, all the
           time, yes.

 Boy: What interested me was the style in which it was done and the
           whimsy and the hundreds of little touches, but from what
           you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been
           accidents. You know, the white balloon was a accident and
           you happened upon the Village...

 McGoohan: Oh, yeah...

 Boy: And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.

 McGoohan: Yeah, but you...no, no, no, no...There were these pages,
           don't forget, at the very beginning, which laid out the
           whole concept; these forty-odd pages laid out the whole
           concept. That was no accident.

 Boy: No, but the little touches...

 McGoohan: Those things come anyway.

 Boy: But I haven't seen them come very often in any other series.

 McGoohan: But they come because you're looking for them, you see. I
           was fortunate to have two or three creative people working
           with me, like my friend that I said saw the meteorological
           balloon. And wherever one could find these little touched,
           one put them in. But the design of the "Prisoner" thing,
           that was all clearly laid out from the outset.

 Boy: And the style of the way...

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