Rob Harris |
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| A&E: How is this ship different
from the Grand Turk? Rob Harris: This is a much bigger ship. The last series was a frigate. This is a 74 gun ship, which is basically the battleship of the time, so it's three times bigger. A&E: Who would have been on a ship like this during the Napoleonic Wars? RH: Eight hundred fifty people lived on it, sailed it, fought on it. So it was absolutely a sea of people. Seventy four gun ship means 74 guns. It was a huge firing platform. Lots of sailors to man the rigging, to do all of the sailing, lots of Marines, so it was very, very busy. A&E: Were there any difficulties here with bad weather? RH: Because we are quite high up in the most easterly point of Spain, there are very high winds. We had trouble on the night shoots and the weekend night shoots when we had storms and rain and wind. Because on a ship, when there is lots of wind, the wind hits the ship, but the ship moves. But when the wind hits the ship, because it's concreted down, it doesn't move, so there was the possibility at one point that it might not be here the next morning with the force nine gales. A&E: What was the biggest challenge in designing this ship? RH: Obviously, the scale of it, building it on an island--and quite a rugged part of the island--where there wasn't any access to all the things we want. It was a question of materials, getting it built, and just making sure it stayed here for the time of filming. A&E: What will you do with the Renown when you're done filming? RH: It's going to be stored not for the next story but the story after it. It's on a very similar ship so it's going to be stored here on Menorca. A&E: I bet nobody got seasick this time, right? RH: People did start to feel sort of, um, seasick in the night when the wind and the rain were coming in and everyone was running around. But nobody was actually seasick. A&E: Have the cast and crew preferred filming here or on the Grand Turk? RH: I think the general consensus is that they prefer not to be seasick...and they got a lot more done than when they actually filmed at sea because it certainly depends on the weather. You can spend a week not being able to go out to sea and also because you are filming on land, you can actually get better shots. A&E: What will you shoot at the studios in London? RH: We're doing all the below-deck stuff, with the gun deck and the hold and the orlop deck hold. We'll work on the Pinewood [Studios] tank with the models. We have large, 7-meter models of these ships, which we will insert into the story. A&E: Why do you think people are so interested in these ships? RH: I think it's the history. It's the fact that they were made out of huge lumps of wood, and they took hugely skillful people to actually make them and very skillful people to sail them. And you don't go and turn your engine on and drive off; you've got to actually be a part of it in order to make it work. |
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