Voilà un extrait du rapport qu'une fan a fait sur sa visite du Comic Con du 28 Juillet : elle raconte qu'au début de la conférence, a été projetée aux fans une vidéo relatant le "script-to-screen" du dernier épisode de la S2 : cette vidéo explique quels étaient les premiers objectifs de cet épisode et le script original mis en oeuvre par E Kripke : certaines parties de ce script original ont été tournées, mais, à cause du temps limité et du faible budjet, le script original a dû être considérablement modifié. Les projets initiaux étaient vraiment ambitieux et on aurait pu avoir un épisode de six heures (!!) avec des effets spéciaux dignes de Star Wars... Et on apprend aussi pourquoi John ne s'adresse pas vraiment à Sam durant cet épisode... Et ce n'est pas par manque d'amour pour son fils, mais plutôt parce que Jeffrey Dean Morgan (l'acteur qui joue John) n'a pas tourné sa scène avec Jared (en tout cas en ce qui concerne la scène que l'on voit dans l'épisode final)... On pourra voir cette vidéo dans le DVD S2 :
The script-to-screen feature – The Episode From Hell – was delightful. In it, we learned that Eric’s original script for the finale was, roughly in Robert Singer’s words, “A six-hour miniseries, which then was successfully cut down to a two-hour feature.” Of course, from that, they had to cut it down to a single hour, which apparently involved much conference-calling, hair-tearing, and burning of midnight oil, and even at that it was running over budget. In Eric’s original script, each one of the five churches anchoring the points of the devil’s trap contained a holy relic of some type to power the defense, and Jake’s mission was to go from church to church destroying the relics to break the protection, with the Winchesters, Bobby, and Ellen trying to anticipate his moves and playing increasingly desperate catch-up. Sets or locations for each of the churches, together with near-misses and interim fights, were major components of the time and the cost, and it was the masterstroke of someone suggesting that the churches instead be connected by railroad tracks defining the parameters of the devil’s trap that saved the day. Railroads were a perfect touch of the American West, the use of iron to bar demons fit with the show’s mythology, and myriad individual encounters between Jake and our heroes could be cut down to one. Kim Manners was credited with creating the stand-off between Jake and the others by having Jake force Ellen to hold the gun to her own head, and the defining scenes took shape. Footage shot in the writers’ room demonstrated that questions such as how and why Dean could get a year of life thrown into the deal when his father had died immediately, for example, actually did get hashed around, and weren’t simply glossed over.
The availability of Jeffrey Dean Morgan for his scenes was another major issue. To fit into JDM’s schedule, they shot JDM’s scene with the boys six weeks ahead of the rest of the episode. Many of the script changes apparently didn’t happen until after those scenes were in the can, and since JDM wasn’t available for any reshoots, technology had to play a role. For example, the earlier script used during the JDM graveyard shoot included a climactic slugfest between Sam and Jake, which ended with Sam very bruised, cut up, and bloody. The video shows that Jared was in post-fight makeup, covered in blood, when they shot the final scene of John’s farewell exchange of looks with his boys in the graveyard. In the final script, of course, the hand-to-hand battle with Jake was eliminated in favor of Sam shooting him, which meant that Sam wasn’t bruised and bleeding at the end. They reshot with Jared in front of blue screens, with no one else present, trying as best as possible to match his steps forward and establish his eyelines to Jensen and Jeffrey using green tennis balls on poles mounted at the head heights and relative positions of the two missing actors in the scene. Then they digitally erased the original bloody Sam from the scene, and rotoscoped the reshot Sam in over the holes left by his original appearance.
To make matters even more complex, given that they had only four nights in which to shoot the main graveyard sequence, and that they were shooting late enough in the spring that the nights were getting pretty short, they elected to do daytime shooting with an eclipse effect provided by lens filters, but that meant that their original graveyard location – which had no trees or anything else to provide shadows – wouldn’t work visually, and they had to search for a second location. In the end, given the weather and the time, that one didn’t work either, and they had to re-create the original graveyard as best as possible on the soundstage. Kim Manners reported that the truckloads of tons of dirt dumped on the soundstage floor smelled suspiciously of manure, which apparently contributed to the amusement of shooting the scene. All in all, it sounded like a major challenge.
And here’s a tasty tidbit: from a couple of pages of Eric’s original script, flashed up on the screen during the feature, there had been dialogue between John and the boys – well, Dean at least – in the long version. It wasn’t clear whether the concept of words exchanged survived at all, but the brief flash I remember seeing had Dean asking John if he was okay. I didn’t see the line where John would have responded, unfortunately.
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