Tunnel Vision
Renee O'Connor takes five minutes away from the directing chair to tell Kate Barker just how much fun she had helming Dangerous Prey.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 16
At the end of Xena's fourth season, Renee O'Connor showed just how versatile actors can be by making her mark as director of the episode Deja Vu All Over Again. Having survived that ordeal, she recently returned to the helm, directing the sixth season episode Dangerous Prey. “It was totally moody and dark,” she says of the episode, and in some instances the description is literal.
In Dangerous Prey, Prince Morloch is hunting Amazons, and Xena's efforts to
help out her friends lead to a chase through mazes of low-lit, watery catacombs. O'Connor recalls one particular day of filming when finding just the right combination of lighting for the studio- built caverns was a Herculean task.
“It was bizarre,” she remembers. “The director of photography, Aaron Morton, and I were both risking new sorts of ideas. We were using hard sources of light from above down into these dark tunnels because we wanted to go for this sort of film noir effect. So every time we went for a new set-up, there would be a lot of time spent for the lighting to be perfected because it was so specific. We were getting something like one shot an hour, which is slow for this show. But it was really fun and exciting!”
Exciting may not have been the first word to come to mind when, at one point, they were shooting in a particularly dark part of the tunnels and the lone figure in the darkness was less than clear on the camera monitor. “My stomach churned when I suddenly couldn't see Lucy's face in any of the shots!” O'Connor confirms. “I thought, 'Oh, I hope this is going to work...'
“I said to Aaron, 'It's really, really dark,' and he said, 'Don't worry; it'll be fine,' and it was! He was really cool about it. Right before we started shooting he gave me this poem by Rudyard Kipling, 'If', which talks about keeping your head and having enough patience for everybody. So I just kept that in mind the whole time.”
So has O'Connor learned anything new about directing from her experiences on Dangerous Prey? “I just realised how enjoyable acting is!” she responds, laughing. “Compared to directing, it's just playtime!”
O'Connor smiles, and it's obvious that, whether acting or directing, she finds it all enjoyable. “Directing is really different,” she agrees, “but it's still all great fun!”