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Amber Benson - Co-writer/Director

Recording Ghosts
  What were your favourite memories of the last two days?

Amber Benson: It went a lot more quickly than I thought it was going to. I thought we were going to go over.

Chris Golden: So you were lying the whole time. You kept saying 'It will get done' so you were lying.

AB: Oh yeah totally. I didn't think it was going to get done at all, I thought we were going to have to have another day.

CG: You convinced me, I believed you completely. But see, she made it come true though. It all got done.

AB: I knew once we started working on the action sequences and we were just ploughing through them and that we weren't having to take them piece by piece that we were going to be fine.

CG: And we were very lucky with the cast.

AB: Oh my gosh, we had the best cast of actors. I mean seriously, they're all excellent, excellent actors and kind wonderful people.

CG: And they all seemed to have a good time.

AB: Yes, they did, and we had a lot of sexual innuendo jokes, it was a lot of fun.

CG: Oh no, it was very innocent.

AB: Very innocent, yeah. Tamara, never comes... Poor Jasmine, we were harassing her.

CG: Everybody is amazingly professional.

AB: We had an amazing group, everyone from Fictionlab and our Studio Managers Roger and Rebecca and Mark, they all know what they're doing and they made it very easy for us to come in and get what we needed.

CG: I want to be a Foley man when I grow up, it's the coolest job in the world.

AB: Did you see the lettuce being ripped apart? He knifed a lettuce with a spoon and twisted it and then he ripped it. It was the most disgusting awful sound ever.

CG: Do you know what he's having for dinner tonight?

AB: Yeah. Salad.

Tarts with hearts
  Did you get to play in the Foley room and tinker around with all the bits and pieces they had in there?

CG: I did sneak in there for a minute.

AB: The best thing is that Chris actually made an appearance in the production, he's in our brothel scene.

CG: Yes, what did you say? I was the biggest, hairiest prostitute in France.

AB: I think we had half the cast and half the group from Fictionlab in the brothel scene pretending to be French prostitutes and customers.

CG: I slapped my prostitute, I don't know what happened with that.

AB: Who did you slap?

CG: In the middle of it I just thought that probably some prostitute would be slapping her client and I just did that right in the middle of it.

AB: Oh you were the prostitute, you weren't the one getting slapped. So you were slapping yourself? Okay, that's nice. Better not tell your wife.

CG: She knows what I'm into. So, next question.

Tea and no sympathy
  Did the cast get to socialise after the recording sessions?

CG: I really like it that in England a pub is a prerequisite after every recording day. That we have to go to the pub and get Amber drunk.

CG: That's not just the recording days...

AB: That's just a general thing here in England. It's been a lot of fun, I've had more to drink than ever before. And lots of tea.

Script to tape
  Did you make any changes to the script as you went along?

CG: I think there's a definitely a progression. The characters become things you didn't expect, relationships develop and you see things. You get to the point where you have to go, 'You know, we put this in here and we weren't even aware that it was here'.

Grin reaper
  Do you have any other anecdotes about the recording?

AB: Well the funniest thing ever was trying to get poor Rory, who is our Balberith, to choke on his own fire, stagger and then throw up the three ghosts that he had just eaten. He thought I asked if he would snore, and so he wanted to know what part of the script he was missing.

CG: Does that mean we shouldn't tell the raper story?

AB: Poor Leslie Phillips, one of his lines is 'staved off the reaper' but apparently Leslie was very busy that morning, and he came in and said he 'staved off the raper'!