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To boldly go… again

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Alongside the cast and crew of Star Trek: Picard, Sir Patrick Stewart opens up about returning to the lead role after 18 years and explains why this series marks a new direction for the storied franchise.

As far as Sir Patrick Stewart was concerned, the Star Trek chapter of his heralded career was over. From his first appearance as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship USS Enterprise, in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, he appeared in all seven seasons of the sci-fi series, plus one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and four feature films, culminating in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis.

It took some persuading, but thanks to executive producers Alex Kurtzman, Michael Chabon, Akiva Goldsman and supervising producer Kirsten Beyer, he has now returned to the role after an 18 year hiatus for Star Trek: Picard, the first series in the franchise to be named after a character rather than a starship or station.

“I’m on record as having said, ‘Nope, no more Star Trek. I said goodbye to that, I’m proud of everything we did but I’m done with it.’ Then Alex, Akiva, Michael and Kirsten began talking to me, and they talked and talked about Star Trek in a way I had never imagined before,” Stewart recalls.

“As I reflected and talked to my own team about this, at the end, I realised it was something I had to do – and what a smart decision that was! We wrapped filming our first season at the end of September and I was as happy with what we’d done with that as anything in my career.”

Set at the end of the 24th century, 14 years after Picard’s retirement from Starfleet, Star Trek: Picard opens with the lead character enjoying a quiet life with his dog, Number One, on his French vineyard, Chateau Picard. But when he is sought out by a mysterious young woman, Dahj (Isa Briones), in need of his help, he soon realises she may have personal connections to his own past.

Star Trek: Picard begins with the retired starship captain on his vineyard in France

“I feel I have been preparing to shoot Star Trek: Picard for over 30 years,” Stewart jokes, speaking on stage at the London premiere of the series. “There was a quality about him, a feeling I had about him from the very beginning, which was unlike any acting experience I had had before. When these people came to me and pitched an idea, I was all ready with my speech of refusal. Indeed, I insisted through my representative that I would meet them face to face and tell them why I was going to say no.

“I did my best, and then I do remember Alex saying, ‘Can we just talk to you a little about our idea?’ And he talked and talked. They all got my attention. When the meeting was over, I asked my agent to ask them if they could put on paper the things they said to me because I’d like to study them more closely. The last thing I felt I wanted or needed was to return to Star Trek.

“Two days later, 35 pages showed up. I read them and I was hooked, because what they were writing about was an image of the future of Jean-Luc and the world of Star Trek, which I have never envisioned before and thought could not be possible under the overriding rule of what Star Trek is and what it isn’t. These guys were breaking those rules again and again. That’s the kind of stuff that interests me and, with increasing excitement, I signed on.”

The fact that Star Trek: Picard would provide the next chapter of Jean-Luc’s life was what appealed so much to the actor.

“The world has changed since we finished The Next Generation,” he continues. “I was intrigued by that and the challenge it presents Jean-Luc when he was no longer an authority figure. Doing this again became irresistible because there were so many transformations in the character, his behaviour and what he believed in.”

Sir Patrick Stewart was initially reluctant to return to the character he last played in 2002

From the first episode, it’s easy to see why Stewart was drawn to his character’s new adventure, opening with Jean-Luc taking long strolls through the vineyards and haunted in his dreams by the mistakes of his past. A television interview forces him to face the reasons for his retirement head-on, while the arrival of Dahj causes him to shake off the dusty shackles of life after Spacefleet and throw himself into a new mission.

Kurtzman, who has been involved in rebooting the Star Trek franchise with two movies and another series, Star Trek: Discovery, says Stewart threw down the gauntlet to the producers and challenged them to do something that hadn’t been done before.

“I didn’t want to do just season eight of The Next Generation,” the exec producer says. “This is the next chapter of this man’s life. He’s living with regret and loss in a way that is profound. The idea he has this opportunity, in a very unexpected way, to right wrongs he feels he was a part of, it’s a second chance to make amends.

“It’s a beautiful story. You almost never get to tell that story. Jean-Luc is 92 years old in Starfleet years. How many shows allow you to tell the story from the point of view of someone who’s looking back on their life and giving them one last chance at hope? That’s really what we wanted to say.”

Goldsman, who has been involved in Star Trek: Discovery and the Short Trek companion series, agrees that the creative team were keen to respect the period of time that had passed since Jean-Luc was last seen on screen.

The series also sees the return of Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine

“We didn’t want to pick up right on the heels of The Next Generation, we wanted to acknowledge that for both Sir Patrick and the character, 20 years had passed,” he says. “The plans we make rarely line up with the outcome, so as much as Jean-Luc might have left Star Trek: Nemesis thinking he was going one way, life took a different set of choices. We felt that to restart him at his ancestral home gave us some grounding and a way to celebrate him for folks who knew him but also introduce him to those who didn’t.”

Stewart wasn’t the only one who didn’t think the series would materialise from those early conversations. “It was completely unexpected and nothing that even in my wildest fan boy dreams have I ever had the hutzpah to imagine might come to pass,” admits showrunner Chabon, who says he was “lured in” by Goldsman and joined the team when it was already in the early stages of trying to evolve the next Star Trek series following Discovery.

“There were so many dozens of times in the course of making this show that I said to myself or Akiva, Alex or Kirsten, ‘I can’t believe I get to do this’. I still can’t, but it’s true.

“We’re fans. We are steeped in Star Trek and we put everything we love most about the show, every iteration of the show all the way back to the original series, into our work on Picard. We also want people who don’t know the show at all, people who don’t like Star Trek or never watch Star Trek, so we’ve tried to make the show work for those people as well.”

Beyond Stewart, the cast brings together a blend of familiar faces and new arrivals. Returnees include Jeri Ryan, who reprises her Star Trek: Voyager role as Seven of Nine. Jonathan Del Arco is The Next Generation’s Hugh and Brent Spiner appears as android Data.

Stewart’s Picard finds his quiet life interrupted by Dahj (Isa Briones), who needs his help

Among the newcomers are Michelle Hurd as Raffi Musiker, who shares a “complicated history” with Jean-Luc and Starfleet, while Harry Treadaway and Evan Evagora play Romulans Narek and Elnor. Alison Pill is synthetics expert Dr Agnes Jurati.

Similarly to Stewart, Ryan says she thought she had said goodbye to her character 20 years ago, and initially didn’t think talk of a return would lead anywhere. “When I was approached about it two years ago, I thought it was a joke. I laughed – I thought it was really funny – and they said, ‘No, we’re serious,’” the actor recalls.

“They pitched the general direction the character was going to go in, which was surprisingly intriguing to me because I thought I was done. Then I thought nothing was going to come of it. People pitch ideas in Hollywood all the time and nothing ever happens.

“Then, cut to a year later, and I’m backstage at the Creative Arts Emmys with Alex getting ready to go on stage and he turns around and says, ‘We’re talking a lot about Seven of Nine in the writers room.’ I was like, ‘Oh, so it’s real? OK.’ It never occurred to me it would actually happen. I’m so thrilled and grateful that it did.”

In contrast, Treadaway was given a speedy introduction to the world of Star Trek. “I remember a phone call early on, lying on my back looking at the stars in Devon while Alex was talking me through what Star Trek was and what the world and this version was,” he remembers.

The Star Trek: Picard cast line up at the show’s premiere

“I was really coming at it from a very unknowing place and I decided to take that and use it to my advantage rather than anything else. I was fresh-eyed and it just blew me away. I was aware of the heritage and what this world has meant to so many people for so long. It’s an incredible thing.”

Airing on CBS All Access in the US, Bell Media and Crave in Canada and in more than 200 countries worldwide on Amazon Prime Video, Star Trek: Picard is produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment. Distribution is handled by CBS Studios International.

The weekly roll-out of episodes – the series debuted last week – means fans won’t be able to binge the entire season straightaway. But with a second season of Picard already commissioned, the good news is they won’t have to wait another 18 years to see Jean-Luc back on screen.

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Homecoming queen

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Award-winning actor Julia Roberts makes her television debut in Homecoming, Mr Robot creator Sam Esmail’s mind-bending psychological thriller. DQ hears how they transformed an award-winning podcast into Amazon Prime Video’s latest original series.

If the knowledge that Amazon Prime Video’s latest original drama comes from the creator of Mr Robot and is based on an award-winning podcast wasn’t already enough of a reason to tune in, add into the mix the fact it is also Oscar-winner Julia Roberts’ first foray into television and Homecoming becomes the latest must-watch series.

Described as a mind-bending psychological thriller, Roberts plays Heidi Bergman, a caseworker at the Homecoming Transitional Support Centre, which helps soldiers transition back into civilian life. It’s there that she meets Walter Cruz (Stephan James), a soldier eager to begin the next phase of his life, while overseeing Heidi and the facility is Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), an ambitious company man with questionable motives.

Julia Roberts and Homecoming director Sam Esmail

Four years later, Heidi has started a new life, living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and working as a small-town waitress, when a Department of Defense auditor (Shea Whigham) visits with questions about why she left the Homecoming facility. Heidi soon realises there’s a different story to the one she’s been telling herself.

The series is based on the podcast of the same name created by writers Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg and is rolling out in more than 200 territories on Prime Video tomorrow. Mr Robot’s Sam Esmail is the director and executive producer and the cast includes Jeremy Allen White, Alex Karpovsky and Dermot Mulroney.

Esmail admits he is used to listening to non-fiction podcasts and documentary series, but fell in love with Homecoming’s radio play style. “It was scripted, it had actors and it was great. It was like this throwback to an old-school thriller that was steeped in characters, as opposed to the action-thrillers of nowadays,” he says, speaking at Amazon’s Prime Video Presents event in London. “I binged it in one sitting and then I binged it again and I thought there was something here to really do something special as a TV show.”

But adapting an audio drama into a television drama meant Esmail had to find a reason why it now demanded to be a visual experience too. He explains that while the podcast looks back on events in the past, the series is able to be with the characters in those moments, where “the suspense and the tension could be really amped up.” He also found inspiration in the visual dynamics of “old-school throwback thrillers” that he loved to watch growing up, citing “the old masters” such as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma and Alan Pakula, who Roberts worked with on 1993’s The Pelican Brief. “The [visual] language was already there, so it was really exciting,” he says.

Similarly, Roberts liked the way the podcast harked back to a time when families would sit and listen to a story together, whether it was a book being read out loud or a radio play, forcing the listeners to use their imagination to build the world being described to them.

Roberts plays two versions of the character Heidi in different time periods

“I think that’s where inspiration as artists starts – imagining what it would look like and what it would sound like if you were doing it,” the actor says. “So I was really attracted to that. When Sam called me, we seem like different people, we’re kind of the same but my hair is much longer! Instantly we were like 20-year friends and so it seemed really clear that this was going to be a match and it was going to work bringing it to television, because TV is not for the faint of heart, for sure.

“Workload wise, we were very efficient, we were very aligned with our cast mates and crew and it made the days so the page count was very high. The days were very efficient and we had a great momentum all the time.”

In Homecoming, Roberts says she plays two characters – two versions of Heidi in different time periods that are signified by different frame ratios – which she says was a “great, fun challenge” for her. “There was some organisational stuff that I’m not used to,” she says of jumping between the two during filming. “Sam kept me on track with a map of, ‘Here’s what we know has happened and here’s what we don’t know has happened and here’s what we think might have happen later.’ So there was a little bit of that.”

Both Esmail and Roberts praise their fellow cast and crew, with both picking out production designer Anastasia White in particular for the way she physically built the world of Homecoming. She had previously worked with Esmail on Mr Robot.

“The one thing I wanted was to build the set. I didn’t want to go out and find the location because of the camera movements. I really wanted as much control as possible,” Esmail says. “I think we shot like 70% of the show on that set, so it was really critical. We sat down and talked about it and, honestly, it was one of those things where I told her the tone, the theme of what we’re going for in the story and she took it and ran with it.”

Sissy Spacek, an old friend of Roberts, plays Heidi’s mother

Roberts recalls one rehearsal where, surrounded by plywood, tape and chalk marks on the floor, she had to pretend to walk down some stairs and through a room that hadn’t been built yet. “I thought, ‘How will this ever work in a week?’ And then we walked into this facility. It was breathtaking, truly.”

About her co-stars, Roberts says James is “just terrific. The highest compliment I can pay as a person is he’s always on time and the highest compliment I can pay as an actor is he is incredibly prepared. When you are those things, that leaves space to be creative and have fun, and that’s what Sam really encouraged and nourished in all of us – to fill the space the way we felt confident about. The space that he made was so unique and present, we felt like we lived in this special land – Sam Land.”

The actor, whose storied film career includes Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich and Notting Hill, reveals she prepared for her role as Heidi with numerous wig fittings and trying to understand the character’s strength and vulnerability. “I absolutely adored the relationship with Heidi and her mother, maybe because I’m in love with Sissy Spacek,” she continues. “I have known her since I was 13 years old so she might as well be my mother! But nothing makes it easy to act with Sissy Spacek. On the first day, everyone was like, ‘It’s Sissy!’ ‘Yeah I know, she’s right next to me, keep your voice down.’”

“We were all having a moment,” jokes Esmail, adding that he didn’t hire a composer for the series because he wanted to keep the music authentic to the visual style. “All the music is from the old classics and a lot is Pino Donaggio, Brian De Palma’s composer. We used one of the big scores from Carrie in the show, which Sissy’s also in. It’s very meta.”

Homecoming also sees Roberts reunite with her My Best Friend’s Wedding co-star Mulroney. “This was Sam’s dream to bring us back together. He gets all the credit,” she says. “I’m a huge My Best Friend’s Wedding fan, it’s one of my favourite romantic comedies. It’s very deliberate.”

Bobby Cannavale plays the head of the Homecoming facility

Homecoming premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, when Roberts sat down to watch the first four episodes and discovered Whigham “steals” the show. “I realise if I hadn’t been working so hard as an actor, I would have been paying a lot more attention as a producer and done something about that,” she jokes. “But since I didn’t, he’s so fantastic in this and it just speaks to the brilliance of Sam that he cast each part so perfectly, so specifically. Bobby is so terrific but Shea, this funny little investigator person, he just is magnificent. It makes the show such a fully realised universe of people. It’s incredible.”

With her first role on television, Roberts says she can’t say she’s worked in the medium, thanks to Esmail’s efforts to shoot the 10-episode series as a movie. “A lot of our crew I know from movies and the way we filmed it, we didn’t film it one episode at a time, we filmed it in blocks and in locations, so it was very much like a movie,” she adds.

Esmail is now working on the fourth and final season of Mr Robot, which is due to debut in 2019, but he hints that a second season of Homecoming is also in the works. Following in the footsteps of dozens of Hollywood stars now regularly appearing on television, perhaps Roberts will now make her home on the small screen too.

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Ready to Rock

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Shooting a reimagining of the iconic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was challenging but highly rewarding for cast and crew. DQ reports from the set of the six-part drama.

Primly dressed as a schoolteacher, Yael Stone is standing in front of a classroom of young girls in a historic building in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, speaking gravely about Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Playing religious studies teacher Dora Lumley, she draws a comparison between Jesus’ place of entombment and the caves of Hanging Rock, from where three students and a teacher had mysteriously disappeared a few days earlier, on Valentine’s Day 1900.

“Don’t be a doubter, like Thomas. Believe in Jesus and the dead will rise again,” intones the actress, best known as inmate Lorna Morello in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. That prompts one girl to cry out: “They’ll come back here even after they’re dead!”

After numerous takes, each flawlessly delivered by Stone, director Larysa Kondracki calls cut on a pivotal scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock, FremantleMedia Australia (FMA)’s six-part reimagining of Joan Lindsay’s iconic 1967 novel, which previously inspired Peter Weir’s classic 1975 movie.

Amazon Prime Video came aboard as the US partner to the drama commissioned by Australia’s Foxtel in a deal trumpeted as the biggest ever for an Australian series in the US, surpassing SundanceTV’s investment in Top of the Lake: China Girl. Sales to several other key territories are pending, negotiated by FremantleMedia International.

Amanda Brotchie, one of three directors to work on Picnic at Hanging Rock

While the budget is under wraps, another investor, state agency Film Victoria, estimated the production would inject more than A$11m (US$8.8m) into the local economy.

Directed by Kondracki, Michael Rymer and Amanda Brotchie and scripted by Beatrix Christian and Alice Addison, the high-end production is the first of a number of adaptations of Australian novels planned by FMA.

Jo Porter, FMA director of drama and one of the show’s executive producers, says: “It’s our first internationally facing drama production made in Australia. We want to make projects on home ground using Australian creative talent. We have optioned a few other books. Picnic is the first of what we hope will be many more of these ambitious projects.”

The cast is headed by Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer as Mrs Appleyard, an English widow who moves to Australia and creates the Appleyard College for Young Ladies. Lola Bessis (Cassandra, Swim Little Fish Swim) plays Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers, mistress of French conversation, music and dance. Anna McGahan (The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Kettering Incident) is Miss Greta McCraw, mistress of geography and mathematics, and Sibylla Budd (Tomorrow When the War Began, Winners & Losers) is Mrs Valange, mistress of art and literature.

In the key roles of students are Lily Sullivan, Madeleine Madden, Samara Weaving, Ruby Rees and newcomer Inez Curro. The top-notch male cast includes Don Hany, Harrison Gilbertson, James Hoare, Marcus Graham, Mark Coles Smith, Jonny Pasvolsky and Philip Quast.

Anna McGahan as Miss McCraw

The idea to revisit Lindsay’s novel germinated internally at FMA and the rights were secured from Barbara Mobbs, literary agent for Lindsay’s estate. Fremantle developed the project with Christian, who wrote the series bible and the first episode, and Addison.

“Bea [Christian] is a deep thinker with a beautiful sensitivity,“ Porter tells DQ on the classroom set at the heritage-listed Wattle Park Chalet, which was built in 1928. “She has a unique way of seeing the world and the human psyche. Her writing is quite lyrical, at times strange and wonderful, with a contemporary feel which is such an organic fit with Joan Lindsay herself.”

Several broadcasters were interested in the project – which explores the fallout from the disappearance of the girls and teacher – but FMA’s relationship with Foxtel, for which it produces the female-prison drama Wentworth, helped cement the deal. Foxtel greenlit the show after Screen Australia approved its production investment in September 2016. Although that was before any cast had been attached, there was an understanding that a marquee name would be hired to play Mrs Appleyard.

The producers also wanted a female lead director who had experience in big-budget storytelling and would be able to attract a big-name cast. Christian Vesper, FremantleMedia’s executive VP and creative director of global drama, suggested Canadian filmmaker Kondracki, based on her work on such shows as Better Call Saul, Legion and The Americans.

Larysa Kondracki and crew on location at Hanging Rock

Kondracki is a fan of both the book and Weir’s film, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian cinema since she did her Master of Fine Arts graduate degree at Columbia University. “What [writers] Bea and Alice have done so beautifully in the scripts is to capture a kind of novelistic quality,” she says. “Our task was to create a world that you want to spend time and linger in and get to know these characters. We have tried very hard to root all the ideas in the book, especially Joan Lindsay’s interesting take on the understanding of time and its impact on civilisation.”

Fellow director Rymer, who spent some years in the US directing episodes of series such as Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Hannibal (which he also exec produced), Longmire, American Horror Story and The Killing, was planning to come back to Australia to set up a TV series when his agent sent him the script. “My first instinct was, ‘Why would you want to do that, a remake for TV?’” he says. “Peter Weir’s film was powerful and worked very well. What were we going to add to it?”

Five or 10 pages, in however, Rymer says he found the script “very intriguing – not what I expected to read.” He also suggested bringing on board Brotchie, who was hired after the Australian Directors’ Guild (ADG) objected to Kondracki on the grounds that she did not meet the net employment benefit test set by the country’s immigration department and questioned why an Australian female director was not employed. When Brotchie signed on, the ADG withdrew its complaint. Subsequently, funding agency Screen Australia affirmed it would change its guidelines to rule out financing Australian television projects, excluding coproductions, if a foreign director is attached.

The LA-based, Melbourne native Brotchie had directed two episodes of Girl Boss, a 13-part Netflix comedy inspired by the true story of Sophia Amoruso, a digital entrepreneur who founded the fashion e-commerce site Nasty Gal.

Star Natalie Dormer (far left) films a scene for the drama

“I read the novel as a teenager and loved it, and I loved Peter Weir’s film,” she says of Hanging Rock. “The idea of being part of such an iconic Australian show was thrilling. On Girl Boss I was working on a similar budget level with a fantastic team and all the big toys. It’s the same skill set.”

Before signing on, Brotchie spoke to Porter via Skype, and arrived in Sydney a week before shooting was due to start to meet Kondracki on the set. Porter was impressed with Brotchie’s expertise in tackling her first drama after directing the Australian ABC comedies Lowdown and This is Littleton, observing: “She certainly held her own and has delivered a really lovely episode.”

Rymer concurs: “She got a lot of nuance and intimacy out of the actors, her shooting style was strong and simple and she knew what she wanted. Her biggest challenge was that she would plan very meticulously and then everything would be up in the air.”

Among the directors and producers, there was a 95% consensus on casting, according to Rymer. The process was complicated by the fact multiple other high-profile shows were casting at the same time and several actors dropped out due to scheduling problems, but they got the cast they wanted.

Kondracki directed the first three episodes, Brotchie helmed episode four and Rymer picked up five and six, although occasionally each worked on the others’ blocks.

Director Michael Rymer during filming

In Weir’s film, Mrs Appleyard was played by the then middle-aged Welsh-born actor Rachel Roberts, so Dormer is a generational change. However, Porter says: “We did not deliberately go young. What we wanted was someone who had command and strength, and Natalie has that in spades.” The timing was also fortuitous because Dormer was looking for her next major role after playing Margaery Tyrell in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

McGahan, who plays the teacher who vanishes with the girls, marvelled at Dormer’s performance: “She makes incredibly complex choices and can execute them with no problem. Her craft is so exact. She had these complex monologues addressing the students, which required a lot of camera angles and very long days. Without a complaint, she would repeat these monologues flawlessly over and over again and would never drop a line. When the camera started to roll she was completely transformed, impenetrable.”

Similarly, Stone was impressed with the way Dormer brought out her character’s “truly chilling, quiet velocity.” The New York-based actress, who was born in Sydney, was keen to find another Aussie project after playing a cop in Deep Water, Blackfella Films’ miniseries commissioned by Oz pubcaster SBS.

For her audition tape she stuffed her lower jaw with toilet paper and adopted a nasal tone to impersonate Miss Lumley, a character who lacks authority, is unable to communicate with her fellow teachers and is not respected by the students. Then when she arrived on set she expected to be able to use prosthetics, but was told the budget did not stretch that far, so she used paper towels. Her performance starts out as comical but at the end will likely elicit tears from viewers, according to Porter.

Madeleine Madden’s casting as student Marion Quade marks another departure from the book and movie as the series’ only Indigenous character. “Marion prides herself on her intelligence and is really aware of the social prejudices of the era,” says the 20-year-old, whose credits include Tomorrow, When the War Began and the Indigenous series Redfern Now and Ready for This.

“Her father is white and her mother is Aboriginal. She is put into the school to be hidden away. This makes her aware of challenges that are unique to her and do not apply to the other girls.” As a further twist, Marion has a romantic relationship with one of the women in the college.

The logistics of filming in and around the labyrinth of Hanging Rock, which is 70km north-west of Melbourne, and numerous other locations in the state of Victoria and around the city, proved challenging for cast and crew, including director of cinematography Garry Phillips, production designer Jo Ford and costume designer Edie Kurzer.

Porter says: “It’s been physically a really, really demanding shoot. We’ve been out in the bush and we spent a full week at the rock, with three units filming up there at one point. No wonder Peter Weir was 23 when he made the film, because you have to be a mountain goat, going up and down that rock.”

Kondracki devised a novel plan to elicit ideas from the cast and crew, offering a bottle of wine in return for innovative suggestions that ended up on screen. The best involved creating a “curtain” of water for one scene filmed on the top of the rock, which entailed several crew members lugging 1,000 gallons of water in buckets up the 106 metre-high rock.

Each director had a different filmmaking style, which was embraced by the actors. McGahan describes Kondracki as “a radical, a fire; with her, you get all this adrenaline,” Rymer as a consummate professional and visionary and Brotchie as an actor’s director who involved herself in all the choices the actors made. The partnership with Amazon Prime Video also enabled the producers to increase the shooting schedule to 13 weeks and to extend the second unit’s workload.

Weir’s film famously ended without revealing what happened to the missing teacher and two of the girls (one returned, but had no memory of the event). The series, launching down under in 2018, canvasses various possibilities: were they kidnapped? Did they escape? Did they go into a time warp? Were they abducted by aliens?

Rymer says: “We put a lot of emphasis on character, who these girls were and what they wanted. Hopefully what we say is more interesting than what happens to them, and we preserve the mystery. Hopefully viewers will be at the water cooler arguing vehemently about what happened to the girls.”

More broadly, Kondracki adds: “For me, the show is not about what happened to the girls as much as why they wanted to climb the rock in the first place.”

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