Extraction points
Extraktoři (The Extractors) director Roman Kašparovský opens up about the challenges of filming the Czech spy drama overseas and why he chose to ground the series in reality.
Even the most ambitious television series are rarely able to compete with the budgets afforded to big-screen action franchises like James Bond, Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible.
So when director Roman Kašparovský boarded Czech spy thriller Extraktoři (The Extractors), he knew he had to push the boundaries of what he could achieve with more modest means.
His solution was to create a realistic, naturalistic aesthetic for a story that is set between Prague and Pakistan, where two kidnapped women are being held hostage. With the help of the US Army, the members of a covert Czech intelligence team set about rescuing them while unofficial diplomatic efforts are conducted through a Turkish humanitarian charity.
“Czech James Bonds are different from usual James Bonds, so we tried to do as much as we could to show how it really works,” Kašparovský tells DQ. “Even smaller countries have their own agencies, and one of their main purposes is to take care of their citizens abroad in need. If somebody gets into trouble abroad, your country is able to go there and help them.”
At the centre of the series is Leona Váchová (played by Pavla Gajdošíková), an intelligence officer in the department of international relations and information. The leader of a newly created extraction team, she is charged with supporting Czech nationals who find themselves in danger abroad, but when her personal life takes a turn for the worse, she must face up to a deep trauma she has long suppressed.
Joining Leona are Petr (Jan Révai) and Ted (Jakub Štáfek), secret service operatives with military training, while Viktor Suk (Ján Koleník) is a public prosecutor who is facing up to his own dilemmas.
Kašparovský was first approached to direct the six-part series by producer Adam Dvorák, and after reading four scripts and an outline for the whole show, the director quickly signed on with a vision to shoot large parts of the drama overseas – something the director describes as a rare opportunity in Czech television.
But unable to film the hostage scenes in Pakistan or Afghanistan, where some of the story is set, three alternatives were put forward: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkey. The latter eventually won out.
“I’ve been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, so I have this experience of what it looks like. When I spoke to my producer, I realised we couldn’t go back and shoot there, and Turkey came out as the best solution,” he says. “We went to Turkey, we searched for these locations and I saw what I had in my mind when I thought of Pakistan and Afghanistan. When you watch those locations, you don’t have a feeling it was shot there [in Turkey].”
To emphasise the Turkish scenery, a small filming crew utilised natural light and a documentary-style approach to the visuals, which also helped to differentiate that part of the story from scenes set and shot in Prague.
“We tried to use more colours in Europe, more lighting, and what we went for abroad was naturalistic lighting and a little bit more documentary-style shooting and not so many colours, not so saturated,” he explains. “That was the main difference, so when you start watching the show, you know where you are.”
On set, Kašparovský also alternated between two types of camera to distinguish the types of shots he wanted. One was used to capture the environment and atmosphere, while another was used during faster-paced action sequences.
Perhaps his most important decision, however, was to shoot all the Turkey scenes first, before returning to Prague to complete scenes where Leona is dealing with more domestic matters – at work and at home.
“On the last project I did in Afghanistan, we shot the movie and then went to Afghanistan [for additional footage]. But when we got there, I couldn’t match it with the stuff I already had from the Czech Republic,” he says. “It’s much easier to adapt in the Czech Republic. So I said, ‘Please, let’s go there first and shoot there, and let’s see what we come up with. Then if we lose something, we can fill it in the Czech Republic, but we’ll have more possibilities.’ So that’s what we did.”
Notably, that decision – backed by producer Movie – also allowed him to shoot the storyline involving the two kidnapped girls in largely chronological order.
“If you go chronologically, you evolve,” he says. “For the actors, it’s much better because they’re getting closer and going inside their characters. They get the chance to live through their characters.
“What was also fantastic was we had the chance to shoot on locations where there was no [mobile] signal. You had to wake up at 5am or 6am and then you sit in the car or van for an hour-and-a-half to the location and there was nothing there. The actors, all of a sudden, feel like being abandoned, being separated from their social life.
“Sometimes you have great actors who drink coffee in their trailer and then they go to the set and all of a sudden they can completely break down. That’s the way it is, that’s why actors are amazing. But somehow this helped them to go deeper into the characters. It helped them get there faster. That’s how we approached it – a naturalistic way of shooting, a small crew and a very realistic locations.”
To connect the two seemingly disparate parts of the story, Kašparovský decided to link the plight of the hostages with Leona’s own circumstances, presenting her as a woman in a male-dominated world.
“That seemed pretty interesting and it was something new to the Czech public because I had never seen anything like that,” he says. “She is also a mother and has some skeletons in her closet. She has to face them and somehow compensate for the things she maybe did wrong in her past.
“Then it was about finding the right actress who we could follow through her life as an officer in Czech Republic who then goes abroad to save those girls. That was something really interesting for me, thinking about connecting these two parts [of the story]. We separated the visual style so everyone could see immediately this is Prague and now we are here in Pakistan, but something has to connect it, and that was in the power of the actress.”
Gajdošíková proved to be the perfect choice, filming scenes in Turkey before returning to Prague to fill in the gaps.
“That was not such a big deal, and in the Czech Republic I tried to accommodate the schedule so we would also have some of the lines chronologically,” the director notes. “We had to go according to location, so we shot in the Extractors den chronologically to have the development of the characters, so the actors would feel closer to their characters. If you shoot every day on different locations, you lose more. It’s much better if you have one location and film from beginning to end. That was the idea.”
Shooting abroad and filming a spy drama on a modest budget meant Kašparovský had to overcome several challenges to make the series, which debuted on European streamer Voyo last year and was screened as part of Berlinale Series last month. Keshet International is the distributor.
“We’re not able to shoot Mission: Impossible. We’re not able to shoot James Bond or Jason Bourne movies. We don’t have the budget for it. The reality is the budget is what it is, and I thought it was a good thing,” he says. “In this case, I thought it would be much better if we go for reality.”
That meant balancing scenes of characters sitting behind desks with more exciting prison scenes or foot chases. “But whatever you see is reality,” Kašparovský adds. “If you see this, that’s because it really happens this way.”
tagged in: Extraktoři, Keshet International, Movie, Roman Kašparovský, The Extractors, Voyo