Femmes, Family and Fate
In the second part of our exclusive interview with Rob Tapert, Xena's executive producer looks to the future of the show and Renaissance Pictures' other projects. Interview by Joe Nazzaro.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 11
As the fifth season of Xena drew to a close, the Warrior Princess and her long-time companion Gabrielle were trapped 25 years in the future after being placed in suspended animation by the war god Ares. When they awoke, Xena's daughter. Eve, now fully grown, was a ruthless soldier for the Roman army, going on a bloodthirsty killing spree before finally seeing the error of her ways. When the dust finally settled at the end of season five, most of the Olympian gods were dead, as was one of Xena's oldest and closest friends. To say longtime fans of the show were shocked would be an understatement of mythic proportions.
So what happens now? Do Xena and Gabrielle return to their own time? How many Olympians actually survived the final battle? And just where does the adult Eve fit into the ongoing storyline? The man with all the answers is Executive Producer Rob Tapert, but while he’s willing to drop a few hints about things to come, most of that information will have to remain under wraps for the time being.
With production of Xena’s sixth season now well underway in the wilds of New Zealand, perhaps the most pressing question to ask is this: will season six also be the last? “I’ll be 100 per cent honest on this one,” replies Tapert without any hesitation. “I believe Lucy and Renee would like it to be the last season. They have done the grind, and I can’t imagine two stronger women in the world, both physically and emotionally, who would put up with this.
“Right now, the studio is undecided,” he adds, “and Tribune, our major carrier, is also undecided. There also may not be time slots available for Xena that are good enough to justify its expense if the WB Network [which airs such series as Buffy, Angel and Roswell in the US] expands and things like that. So at this time, I don’t know.”
In terms of the overall direction of the show, according to Tapert, there will be less emphasis on complex, multi-episode storylines in the sixth season, and a greater emphasis placed on the show’s emotional core, namely the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. “I don't think we’re going to play a huge arc in the new season like we’ve done in the past few seasons,” he explains. “I’ve received numerous letters, and it’s always been hard for me to confirm or deny what people ask in in their letters, but they felt the Xena/Gabrielle relationship was screwed up in the fifth season, in that they didn’t talk to one another, and Gabrielle never brought up the issue of her evil daughter. So what we’re going to try to do going into the sixth season is make sure that the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, within the confines of doing an action show, is still front and centre.”
That said, the Xena team is cooking up plenty of surprises for the new season, as well as lots of the eye-popping action that has become a trademark of the series. “I think R.J. [Stewart, who leads Xena’s writing team] had already let the cat out of the bag on this, but we’re going to do our version of all of Norse mythology meets Beowulf.” Tapert reveals, “We’re working on those scripts, and I’m pleased with how that's turning out.
“We’re flirting a little bit with some things that may be blasphemous to some, which is that at the end of last season, Xena was given the power to kill Olympian gods. Now she’s like the CIA operation who has had a hit put out on her. So those who are worried about our Christianity slant are going to be shocked that we could be so irreverent. We’re also playing with a little mini-arc that we’re shooting right now with Gabrielle coming to terms with killing, and then, because we have a greatly reduced budget this season, I’m going to find a way to tell a bottle show.”
Not surprisingly, so-called ‘bottle’ episodes - self-contained stories that utilise a smaller group of actors and a few standing sets in order to stretch the budget - have always been difficult to do on Xena. “I keep working on how to do them, and I’ve yet to crack the nut,” Tapert admits. “The truth is, I continue to think of it as an action show when we don’t have action in it - for example, there really wasn’t any action in the Xena story Lifeblood, or in the previous episode, Kindred Spirits. I just went ‘Uggh!, That’s not what I want to be making’.”
One of the boldest moves for the next season is to keep Xena and Gabrielle a quarter of a century into their own future, a decision that effectively removes most of the supporting characters from the first five seasons. “Twenty-five years have come and gone, and a bunch of things have happened. So Xena and Gabrielle start to look at their past and what’s happened, and lo and behold, they discover that many things have happened, and this causes them to take action,” Tapert reveals. “We didn’t even touch on those 25 years in the wrap-up to the fifth season. It was just a way to jump-start Xena’s relationship with her daughter.”
Noticeably absent from season six will be the bumbling Joxer, who had been a fixture of the series since Callisto nearly five years ago. “Ted’s contract was over,” explains Tapert, “but I love working with Ted, and I’d love to bring him back. I’ve got a couple of stories that would allow us to use him without going back in time, but his run came to an end and it’s time to do something different. I think Ted found it an incredibly frustrating year for him personally. It was hard being away from America, and he didn't feel that in three years his character got to grow or change as much as he wished, but it’s not my job to grow the sidekick character.”
Also absent this season will be most of the Olympian gods, although Ares and Aphrodite were able to survive the events of the fifth season finale, Motherhood, and Tapert insists that there are a few others as well. “We’ve still got Aphrodite’s son [Cupid] and the Furies; there’s a whole pantheon left in place. These are the ones who came after Eve. The truth is the damn gods never really played. Ares and Aphrodite played on Xena, and the rest of them didn't pop up until the middle of this season. We played very little mythology before then.”
Needless to say, the absence of such long standing supporting characters as Joxer, Autolycus and Salmoneus means the two leads will have a good deal more screen time, and that means a much longer working day for both of them. “The thing we totally forgot about (and Lucy and Renee have not!) is that by having those side characters, we’ve had other stories with Xena and Gabrielle away from each other. That meant we could start or finish the day with somebody else and their story. But because Xena and Gabrielle are tied into a lot of scenes together this year, it's going to be harder and harder to have them not working 14 hours every day.”
That’s not to say there won’t still be a few returning characters, including Eve, who finally reached an emotional reconciliation with Xena by the end of season five. “Eve is still there, so she’ll come and go,” he reveals. “She’s going to continue on and so is Joxer's son Virgil.”
Another element that will factor into the storytelling for season six is the fact that Xena’s parent programme, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys recently ended. In spite of working with a different writing staff for each show, Tapert says it was inevitable for similar ideas to pop up at the same time; when you add in the occasional crossover, things got even more complicated last year. “At times, we did find ourselves telling the same story on both shows. There's something that happens in Hollywood all the time, which is that five scripts about bombers come out at the same time. There seems to be a collective psyche, and then of course when it’s me and some of the same people in the same room, it's very easy to take the germ of one thought and put it into another and not really know you’re taking it from the other.
“There was meant to be this giant over-arcing story a few years ago on Xena and Hercules,” says Tapert, citing a specific example. “But then Kevin [Sorbo] wasn’t able to be in those episodes, so we had to totally trash that game plan. And then I thought, ‘we’ll try it for the end of Hercules and this past season of Xena with the end of Herc leading up to it and hopefully have Xena and Herc crossing over into each other's show, but it didn't come to fruition.”
In addition to Xena, Tapert is of course also currently executive producer on the two new half- hour shows Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525, which air in the US under the umbrella title, ‘Back to Back Action’. “Numbers-wise, I guess they're performing the best of any of the new shows to come out this year,” Tapert acknowledges, “but that’s always a somewhat dubious honour. I had hoped they would perform a little better, but the compatibility of the two shows has certainly come into question, meaning one is SF and the other is kind of a comedy. So there’s the question of how well they go together. I like both of them a lot, but I don't know that they necessarily cater to the same audience.
“We originally planned Amazon High as a half hour series to go with Jack of All Trades,” Tapert reveals of the spin-off Amazon series which never came to fruition, “and then I kind of got cold feet and switched the idea to Cleopatra 2525. I thought it was going to be too hard to create something that felt new in an ancient world. I saw all the stuff that was coming this season - Beastmaster, The Lost World - and went, ‘Gee, that was never going to distinguish itself as something new.’”
Right now, Xena and Cleopatra are shooting simultaneously in New Zealand, the latter using some members of the old Hercules crew, who will then switch over to Jack in mid-season. Other key personnel have recently jumped ship to the big budget Lord of the Rings trilogy currently filming in New Zealand, but Tapert is somewhat pragmatic when the subject of crew loyally comes up. “I've had a change in attitude during the life of Hercules and Xena because everybody who started out in both shows has left to go to other places. Many people went to work on Lord of the Rings and left Xena, and it's a weird thing, but I felt a little bit that I shouldn't be trapped by being loyal to a crew, because they’ll take off when they need to.
“It will be interesting to see what happens to the New Zealand film industry when Lord of the Rings and Xena are over. A few years ago, when we had Young Herc, Xena and Hercules, we employed probably half the people working in film in New Zealand. We’ve all learned that everything works in streaks of feast and famine.”
Tapert currently spends most of his time in the Auckland area, not just because of his duties as producer but also thanks to his marriage to Lucy Lawless and the joys of fathering young Julius Bay Tapert. Asked how he manages to juggle work and domestic life and still give sufficient attention to both, his answer is simple: “I have to delegate a little bit more, but besides that, I probably don't waste as much time. It's forced me to get a little more organised, which means I probably spend less time staring at the ceiling and thinking about putting ideas on paper.”
One would think that with executive producer and leading lady living under one roof, it's difficult to avoid talking about Xena at the dinner table every night, but Tapert says that shoptalk hasn't been a problem yet. “Lucy and Renee leave at 6:00-6:30 in the morning and they get home at 7:30 at night, seven days a week, and do ADR and read-through and rehearsals for fights and all that kind of stuff, so we say, ‘How was your day?’, ‘Oh, it was good. I liked this and that’, and we kind of leave it at that.
“I'll tell you, though, yesterday, Fins, Femmes and Gems was on television here in New Zealand,” he remembers, “and Lucy had never seen it before. So we watched it and she howled at it! She generally doesn’t watch the bulk of the episodes; she’ll catch bits and pieces as I’m doing my notes on them, but she doesn’t want to know what’s coming up because it generally means wet, cold or uncomfortable, so she just says she doesn’t want to know!”
If the sixth season of Xena does indeed turn out to be the last, have the couple started thinking about life after the show? “We’ve talked about it,” Tapert admits, “and we have a home in Los Angeles and a home here in New Zealand. Daisy, my stepdaughter, is in school here, and I don’t think it would be healthy for the family to separate and be in Los Angeles unless Daisy was there, and I don’t know that she's going to do that. I'm entirely content to stay here for a couple of years and work on things, and it’s certainly a great place to shoot. Lucy has a bunch of offers for sitcoms and other things, and I think she's thinking about maybe taking a year off and seeing what happens. I know she'd love to do some features, but right now, she’s just putting her head down and doing this season.”
Tapert spent much of his early career working on feature films, but that emphasis has now shifted to television. “In the future, I may do features on a limited basis with my partner Sam [Raimi],” he ponders, “but the beauty of television is you get to produce all the time. Even if you did one movie a year, you’re doing two hours of film a year, as opposed to 40-50 hours of film a year in television. I love producing, and I'm not sure that all the time that gets spent on features makes the product any more or less entertaining than a television show.”
So four or five years down the line, once Hercules and Xena are no more than happy memories, where does Rob Tapert want to be? The answer is a simple one: “The truth is I’d love to be doing television shows in the SF/fantasy genre.”
SIDEBAR: The Way, the Truth and the Light
One subject that Xena continues to explore is comparative religion, whether it’s the Olympian pantheon of gods or, more recently, the onset of Christianity. That exploration has also led to some controversy, notably during a trip to India in the fourth season, which resulted in some Hindu viewers objecting to the subject matter in question.
Tapert concedes that religion is a tough subject for some people to deal with, “But what can I say? It's one of those chances you take. Look, I’m guilty,” he concedes. “I like giant backdrops, and the birth and death of religions and the various icons that play into those religions are great pawns, so to speak. I enjoy doing that. It’s like historical fiction in a funny way, which is one of my (and R.J. Stewart's) favourite forms of literature. Yes, we got burned on some aspects of our Indian episodes, but it’s weird: they actually picked on the wrong one. The Way was not the one they should have picked on. I really enjoyed that episode, but the one that was really the most sacrilegious towards the Hindu faith was Devi.”
While Tapert predicts that some of the Xena episodes now in production may shake things up in the religion department once more, this won't get in the way of them telling interesting stories. “We may take a tiny bit of heat from somebody, but we play the microcosmic things that are the problem with any organised religion when somebody is making the decisions.”
SIDEBAR: Amazon High
Rob Tapert on the spin-off series that never was.
When Hercules: The Legendary Journeys began drawing to a close after six highly successful seasons, the producers started to put together plans for two-half hour action-adventure series to fill that gap. The first was Jack of All Trades, starring Bruce Campbell as a 19th Century swashbuckler; the other was going to be Amazon High, a series about a present-day girl who finds herself transported back in time where she encounters a tribe of Amazons.
“We had actually been working on the scripts for Jack and Amazon High for almost two years,” Tapert reveals. “We then sold them a year and a half ago at [the television trade fair] NATPE, but I then got cold feet on Amazon High.”
Although an Amazon High pilot was ultimately shot, the series never reached fruition due to a number of factors, including the loss of several key cast members. “A bunch of the people who I really liked working with weren't going to be available to star in it,” he remembers. “Claudia Black, who was going to play the woman who I called the ‘earth mother', is now on Farscape, and Danielle Cormack wouldn't make a series deal. So we didn't have those two people who I really like a lot and are really talented actresses, and instead of going forward and doing Amazon High without them involved and re-crafting the whole thing, I thought, ‘Let's just start a new show.'”
A big chunk of the Amazon High pilot was later used as flashback material in the Xena episode Lifeblood. “I had spent too much money that season,” Tapert explains, “which meant I had to do a bunch of things to find a way to save money. So I did some smaller shows and also used Amazon High in order to get myself back on budget.”