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BERLIN STATION Q&A w/ Richard Armitage, Michelle Forbes and Cast + Making of the Series
Maj Canton - December 14, 2016
BERLIN STATION premiered Sunday, October 16, 2016 on EPIX. This contemporary spy series takes a look at the activity of an American CIA office on a global stage in the midst of an investigation into a now-infamous whistleblower. This case and the myriad of others the Berlin Station team takes on are international in scope and are as riveting and real as today's news headlines. Filmed on location entirely in Berlin, the city provides a rich and layered tapestry for the narrative, and the visuals are cinematic. On November 17 -- just halfway through the first season -- EPIX renewed BERLIN STATION for a second season of 10 episodes.
On December 18, 2016 EPIX premieres the Season 1 finale, “Oratorio Berlin.” In this episode Daniel leads the Berlin Station crew in gathering evidence that will illuminate Langley's role in the Iosava rendition; Hector takes a new approach to atoning for bad behavior; the Shaw mantle is passed.
This past August at the Television Critics Association (TCA) Summer Press Tour, EPIX presented a BERLIN STATION panel that included stars Richard Armitage, Michelle Forbes, Richard Jenkins, Rhys Ifans and Tamlyn Tomita. Here are a few highlights (edited for clarity and readability) from that panel.
Question: Does this sort of material require extra work on your part where every line may have a double meaning and different intentions depending on who you are saying it to?
Rhys Ifans: In any good script the lines always have a double meaning. That's what makes a story exciting and engaging, certainly for an actor. And none of us, very rarely mean what we say or say what we mean in life. Never mind whether you are a spy or an actor or dare I say a journalist.
Question: Richard, you've played the spy game from a more, action-oriented direction. I'm sort of curious about the fun of playing a character that is not the action kind of spy. He's basically a nerd.
Richard Armitrage: It was the thing that initially attracted me to this script and to this story. With this character in particular, I really felt like we were going to explore a human being who had flaws, and we were taking him into an environment where he was going to be challenged and stretched in a kind of post-technology society whereby the security services can't rely on those things anymore and they have to answer the game and face their opponent as human beings and seeing how those flaws affect what it is they do. So it was far less action-based and much more an intellectual game, which really fascinated me.
Question: Mr. Jenkins, you get to play a philanderer this time, which I don't think you'd always get cast as. Is that kind of interesting to do?
Richard Jenkins: Yeah. I take the Viagra, and then off we go. Only in a TV series would a woman like Tamlyn Tomita fall in love with me! I mean, come on. It was a tough duty. Somebody had to do it. I did it, and it was great.
Question: Ms. Tomita, what can you tell us about your character?
Tamlyn Tomita: The interesting part when I read the script is how an integral component she is in running the station and that she knows each of the characters, not intimately, but intellectually, and she has to serve them. And for Sandra Abe to have the piece of information she has about each of these characters, it can be weaponized, for lack of a better word; but it can also be utilized to benefit the goodness, the wholeness of the station. So I think her character can be interpreted as a little bit ambiguous because she's having an affair, which is revealed quite early on in the series; but whether or not she serves her country or serves her man or serves her station is left for the viewer.
Question: What did you know about spies and espionage before you took on the roles?
Richard Jenkins: Not a lot. We live in that world through the script, and you start not to trust anybody. I don't understand how you live your life as a spy and then live your life. And we did meet a couple of CIA people there, who are just these folks who have jobs that happen to be CIA agents, but you know that it's so much more than that. It's a fascinating predicament to be in. And trust in this series is a huge issue. There's a lot of betrayal and interesting betrayal. You just happen to be in the middle of it. Are you really my friend? Were you my friend? Can I count on you? And it changes constantly.
Michelle Forbes: I didn't know that much about the spy genre. It wasn't a genre that I turned to on a literary level. But what really interested me, was the psychology behind the people who choose to do this for a living and live not only duplicitous lives but multi-duplicitous lives and have to navigate not only the ever-shifting loyalties that are happening within your station and within the closer world that you are living in, but also the global stage. And how do you, at the end of the day, keep your own identity? And that requires an extraordinarily flexible mind, a spine of steel, or you are a sociopath. So this is tough crap. Okay. But it's not unlike what we do as actors, except there's a huge human cost. It's a life-or-death operation rather than what we do. We play pretend. We go home to our safe lives. How do you maintain a steady moral compass when you are oftentimes, asked to betray your own ethics in order to achieve a certain goal? These were all important questions for me, and I learned a lot while we were there for five months.
THE MAKING OF 'BERLIN STATION' FEATURING SHOWRUNNER BRADFORD WINTERS AND CREATOR OLEN STEINHAUER
To shoot BERLIN STATION, the team had to find the best artisans in Germany to build a great show. Although the series was shot throughout the city of Berlin, the production needed a studio base and Studio Babelsberg seemed the clear choice. As Executive Producer/Showrunnner Bradford Winters explains, the team never regretted that choice: “This crew continually blows me away,” Winters points out. “You come to shoot abroad and you just expect, perhaps naively, perhaps somewhat arrogantly, it is going to be a bumpy road. But working with Michael Scheel as our line producer, production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and his whole crew in set design and art production, we could not have been more happily surprised. It’s just the smoothest ship. Every time I show up on set, I’m blown away by their work, also by the locations department on this show. I will forever tell anybody: If you want to make a show anywhere abroad in Berlin, here is your crew.” He was equally impressed with the work of DOP Hagen Bogdanski: “It literally is just art watching the dailies before these things ever get cut together into an episode.” Winters’ really wanted to surprise the audience: “When you see this show, you just will not believe the places we have gone, the things that we have gotten access to. I think the audience will be thrilled to see BERLIN STATION once it is on screen.”
BERLIN
As principal photography was set to begin in November 2015, production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and location manager Angela Mages had recce with Steinhauer and the writers to scout Berlin for shooting locations. Berlin has a lot of different sides. Mages showed the writers around Berlin to inspire them and highlight the city’s diversity.
BERLIN STATION is a contemporary spy series so the production designers wanted to showcase known locations in Berlin as well as lesser-known spots in the city. For Winters, the great thing about Berlin is how richly it plays into the thematic concerns of the show: “Berlin is a city whose history is so layered,” he notes, pointing to the history of Berlin being the capital of the democratic Weimar republic, Nazi Germany and later the communist East German Republic at the same time. “When you walk around this city and you see those layers at every turn, it inspires you to play to the same effect with the characters. Because with the spies, there also are these multiple layers of who is the real character beneath it. It allows us to plum those kind of metaphorical depths which we love in the show.” Steinhauer also found inspiration in real situations while he was in Berlin: “There’s a movement in Berlin for Germany to offer asylum to Edward Snowden. I frequently came across stickers supporting the case and these stickers became the inspiration for our ‘I am Shaw’ posters. That’s another reason Berlin was a great place to tell this story”. The writers also wanted to incorporate breaking news events into the episodes. BERLIN STATION includes frequent references to political and current events, such as the Boston bombings, to maintain a contemporary feel. Winters: “We are looking to the news and doing our best to keep up with it. We were shooting the pilot in December 2015 when the terrible attacks in Paris happened. Knowing the show was going to air in the aftermath, we worked with this news in the writer’s room. We certainly tried to keep current.”
BUILDING THE CIA STATION AT STUDIO BABELSBERG
Principal photography took place both on location in Berlin and at the city’s famous Studio Babelsberg. Since 1912, film history has been made in Studio Babelsberg’s legendary stages and backlots that have captured the work of notables such as legendary directors Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (Nosferatu), and actress Marlene Dietrich who shot The Blue Angel at the stages. In 1924, the young Alfred Hitchcock worked at Studio Babelsberg as an assistant director and is known for stating: “Everything I had to know about filmmaking I learned in Babelsberg”.
http://www.tvtango.com/news/detail/id/655/berlin-station-qa-w-richard-armitage-michelle-forbes-and-cast--making-of-the-series
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