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Gareth Davies - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001

From the BBC to Buffy
  What's your background and what kind of Producer are you?

I was originally at the BBC many years ago, and have been in the United States now for quite a few years.

I’m the [what we call] the line producer, basically. Joss and the writers come up with the script, they give it to me and the Heads of Departments and we then decide how to put the thing together and how to make it. We are the practical guys who put the things together.

Bigger and better
  How has the Buffy studio grown over the years?

There’s a series of three stages here, three warehouses I should say and we have a lot of footage. I think we’ve got something like 44,000 square feet but when we started we only had one third of this.

We originally built part of the high school, the Bronze and the Master’s lair. So, everything else was on location and being a vampire show it was all night in the cemetery until dawn. We were night after night until six in the morning; it was really horrible.

We were picked up originally for 12 shows, which was a short season. Then when the show went on and was successful, they brought it back. At that point Joss wanted to make his life a little easier and not spend all night in cemeteries, so we took the area around about and we made this street (Sunnydale High Street), we made the alleyway down there outside the Bronze and then we took half the car park and made it into a cemetery. So, most of the work we do these days is actually done right here.

Then we expanded, took over the other two warehouses so now we have a pretty big area. 44,000 square feet is a lot of footage. Every time we re-work the street, we re-work the alleyway. We change things. We change the cemetery and we still go out on location a certain amount, probably two days an episode, but not the six days like it used to be.

High School is Hell
  We heard it could be a nightmare filming at Torrance High School?

It depends whose version you hear. From an actor’s point of view, sometimes it’s tricky, particularly when the show starts to get known because there’s the kids hanging off balconies shouting "Hey Buffy, Buffy, Buffy," - that sort of thing.

On the other hand, the school was very helpful to us and things went basically fine there until the end of the third season when she was leaving High School and we blew up the High School.

Unfortunately, when we warned [the residents of Torrance] we were going to blow it up, we neglected to say when, and when it went up at five a.m. in the morning … Torrance is still upset with us actually, we’re back there next Friday and I’ve already heard of one phone call from some irate lady saying ‘You should be punished for what you did three years ago.’

From an actor’s point of view it was tricky, from our point of view it worked out quite well. We would give them money, needless to say. We refurbished all the seating in their auditorium, for instance, and we put benches out for them. We did a lot of things.

There was a caretaker in charge of the school who thought we were wonderful because we put him on our payroll. When we were there and he made everything work. So, from my point of view,it was a great location, from some of the actors, it was problematic.

Headmaster
  What are the cast like to be around?

I think my position with them is I’m headmaster. They’re basically great. [With] all casts, when you work with them for a number of years, there will be moments when you can kill them. I’m sure there’s moments when they would definitely like to kill me.

But as I’m older than they are, I’m the ‘headmaster’ as I call it. It’s a very good group. Sarah is quite an extraordinary actress and I also think that Nick Brendon is the guy that I’ve always wanted to see break out. Not only is he a great looking guy - and I think he’s actually probably a better looking guy than we portray him because we portray him as a much younger sort of guy -but I always think of him as like a Cary Grant sort of character. He’s got the humour, he’s got the looks. In the future I wouldn’t be surprised to see him break out.

Make-up Madness
  What are the most tricky things you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis?

It’s a challenge because it’s never straightforward. Each episode has its own challenges. We used to say ‘problems’ but we decided we were using that word too much.

Some episodes, for instance, can be very heavy CGI (computer-generated images). We’ve done episodes that cost over two hundred thousand dollars just CGI.

Other episodes are very heavy in prosthetics - the designing of the prosthetics, the sculpting of them and the making of them. It’s not just a question of making one thing. If you’ve got a principal [actor] and then you’ve got a stunt man who doubles him and then maybe they work four days… You start multiplying this with the number of prosthetics that you actually need and it can become huge.

Also, you then get into a tremendous number of make-up guys. We’ve had as many as 44 make-up people on an episode. Two episodes ago (Bargaining parts one and two) we had ten demons fighting with the Scooby gang, which is seven people. So, there’s 17 principles and each of them has a double, so you start multiplying this by the number of make-ups you need and it gets huge.

Smells like team spirit
  A production team culled from the movies

This is a very busy show from the Art Department point of view. The show we’re just prepping right now has six new sets to build. That’s a lot of sets, you know. The Art Department works the whole time. Luckily, we’ve got a production designer - Carey Meyer - who is quite wonderful.

We’ve managed to keep the group together since the beginning. We’ve got the man who did Schlindler’s List and he’s done major features, but we managed to keep him with us.

The set decorator’s another one who is a big feature man, but we managed to keep them together. The reason I’m still here is it’s fun. Some shows are really dreary to do and after a while you think "I need to do something different," but this one’s been fun.

Tall story (Spoilers)
  Special effects for The Gift

The crazies were building this tower to the sky - this tower to the other universe - and at the very end of the season we needed an actual tower.

We had seen pieces of it which we built here - which were always at ground level - but now we needed this huge imposing tower. So, in one of the neighbouring areas of Los Angeles called Vernon (which is very industrial), we found a company which had what looked like a huge oil derrick in its front yard.

It was used for testing oil drills or something like that. We went to them and had to get permission to get up on this thing, which was again problematic. It had been there for years and they had to have an engineer check it structurally and say it was safe and all the local authorities had to sign off.

The Art Department went down and covered this thing with the rubbish and stuff that [the crazies] were building this out of and then we had a platform at the end of it. One of our characters - I won’t tell you the name - has to be marooned on a diving board which comes right from the top of this thing, but we were down on the ground and we had to shoot up and so we made a model of this particular character.

She had a long skirt on, and when we put it up there, we put it up there days before we had to shoot it. It sat up there for days and of course, when you’re on the ground and you just happen to look up, you see a plank with this girl marooned on the end of it.

Because the wind was blowing her dress, she looked like, not only was she up there, [but] she was moving!

We called the local Vernon police department, who were quite casual about the whole thing and said "Look, if you get complaints about a lady…"

Also, we were concerned about traffic, [drivers] suddenly being distracted by seeing that thing up there, but they were quite casual about it. They said "Okay, fine, fine, fine" and they never told us they had any complaints or anything, but when I went out there, and was miles away, I looked up and I saw this poor woman up there billowing in the breeze and thought "We are so lucky it hasn’t caused accidents or something". That tower continues on into the sixth year, which we’re doing now.

Budget-busting Buffy? (Spoilers)
  What are the particular challenges of the episode currently being filmed?

As a matter of fact Doug Petrie’s episode (Flooded) is one of the few episodes which is fairly easy for us. In the sense that there’s one demon and there’s not much in the way of CGI. In fact, I don’t think there’s any CGI in this one, so this is one of those few episodes where we get to take a breath.

Having said, we started the season with a two-parter which was horrendously over budget, but Fox has always been terrific in that if I promised them that ultimately we’ll make the money back, they’re okay. So long as at the end of the season we come out at our [budget] pattern we’re fine.

[Bargaining] was a case where we had so many stunt men and we were also doing a lot of night exterior [filming]. We had motorbike demons, so we had this great flood of demons on motorbikes that were going everywhere - including tearing up a grave where Buffy was buried and everything like that.

There, the problem became "Where do you do that?" – in that you need a location but, believe it or not, you couldn’t do it at Warner Brothers back lot (for instance) because they have trouble with the neighbours. You couldn’t go to Griffith Park which is the other place in Los Angeles - this huge park with many different looks that we use a lot - because, again, they were concerned about tearing up the grass, problems like that.

That [also] became a huge number of stunt men, a huge number of prosthetics and a lot of night exteriors that you’re trying to shoot at this time of the year. It doesn’t get dark until 9pm and it’s light at 5am.

Ironically, later in the year when it gets dark earlier, we’ll probably be writing episodes that need a lot of daylight.