(the first part of this interview took place while Rob was in his car with Lucy)
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 17
SD: You, Lucy and Renee just did the commentary for the DVD of the director’s cut of “Friend In Need.” Rob, you’ve done it once before, right?
Rob: I did it for Evil Dead. You know what, it was nice. It’s always nice to spend time with Lucy and Renee in a professional capacity, not just a personal one.
SD: Over the six years the show was on, did you ever think about how you might end the show?
Rob: We did. I certainly thought at various times that it only seemed right that, one, Xena receive redemption because until she was fully redeemed the series couldn’t end. And, two, it seemed like such a violent character had to come to a violent end in the universal scheme of things. As R.J. Stewart and myself started the story meetings, we said, “We're going to kill Xena.” Originally, both Xena and Gabrielle died.
SD: Why did you keep Gabrielle alive?
Rob: It would have been a total failure for Xena if, after all their journeys together, Xena's big redemption ended up in the death of Gabrielle.
SD: Why would Gabrielle spending the rest of her “afterlife” with Xena be a failure for Xena?
Rob: I liked in the last two episodes that Xena was trying to teach Gabrielle the final bits she needed to be a warrior. And then, if Gabrielle had gotten killed, Xena would have failed in -
Lucy: - Passing on the mantle.
Rob: Passing on the mantle. I saw that as a failure.
Lucy: It wouldn’t be a hopeful ending.
Rob: I always thought I set up Gabrielle: Warrior Princess at the end of “Friend.” That Gabrielle is going to go off and -
Lucy (sings): “Righting wrongs and singing songs.”
Rob: - continue to service the memory of Xena and that which she had been taught. For me it would have been wrong if they both ended up dead.
SD: Is Gabrielle a warrior now? She spent the whole series finding better ways to solve problems than by fighting. What was Xena's line at the end of “The Price”?
Xena: “They’ll be back. Maybe not this year, but some day.”
Gabrielle: “Can anyone stop them?”
Xena: “Yeah. It won’t be warriors. It'll be someone like you. I just hope that wherever the Horde is from, they have a Gabrielle.”
Lucy: There are many different types of warrior.
Rob: My feeling is that ultimately Gabrielle, at the end of “Ides of March,” learned there are things you have to be willing to fight for. Even if that fight is futile, you have to be willing to fight. That is her personal cross to bear in as much as she, even through the sixth season, questioned herself, “Did I do the right thing? I killed the wrong person. Is the path of the warrior leading me against my nature?” She keeps coming back to the fact that there are things in life worth fighting for.
SD: That was one of the major discussions among viewers, who is Gabrielle now? Many of them thought she wouldn’t simply be what Xena was, she would have Xena’s skills with her own compassion —
Lucy: That’s right. A wiser kind of warrior than Xena ever was because Xena comes from a history of destruction and -
Rob: Hey! This is my interview.
Lucy: Sorry.
SD/Rob: (laughing)
Lucy: She's an evolved warrior.
SD: She was an innocent village girl. She wasn’t someone who had been overtaken by power and ego. They each have their own way of defending good.
Lucy: That’s right.
SD: Speaking of redemption. Rob said Xena was so bad, this was the only way she could be redeemed. Just how bad was she?
Rob: Xena may have been egocentric and corrupt, but she recognized goodness. And, in the finale, because she had seen something in Akemi that was good and clean and pure, even though it was mixed in with Xena's profit motive at the time, Xena was able to be duped by the goodness. I think that's what makes Xena not your run-of-the-mill warlord.
SD: That's an interesting phrase “duped by goodness.” Just how calculating was Akemi?
Rob: She knew how to play to Xena’s ego and was able to manipulate Xena to get what she wanted. She was quite manipulative, yet, at the end of the day, Xena did what was right for the Xena character.
SD: And for all those souls.
Rob: All those souls.
SD: Akemi said to her kidnapper when Xena boarded their ship and wanted to buy her, “You won't kill me. Xena won’t let you. Because in her heart - she knows that she will soon love me.”
Rob: Right.
SD: If you've been watching the show from the beginning, it’s not surprising that card was played. But why would Akemi say something like that about someone she’d never met. What was Xena’s relationship with young girls like Akemi, Anokin (from “Adventures In The Sin Trade”) and Gabrielle? Why was she attracted to them?
Rob: I think Xena sees in these young women a portion of that which was in her before she became a warlord. The innocence of youth and that which Xena lost in her life as a warlord.
Lucy: She’s drawn to it.
Rob: She’s drawn back to it as a way of making herself whole or complete. It’s that which she's lost. That’s what those characters represent.
SD: It’s an interesting point seeing that Xena lost her childhood defending her family, village and neighbors. She set out to do something right and good and ended up living a harsh, murderous life.
Rob: And in these characters, she sees that and she wants to, I think, protect those young girls so they don't -
Lucy: She wants their respect too, she wants to mentor them.
Rob: She wants to mentor them, but, on an even deeper level, she wants to make sure they don't fall into the traps she fell into.
SD: That’s an intriguing aspect of mentoring. It's adults that mentor children and they know all the traps they fell into when they were young.
Lucy: I think Xena doesn’t want to mentor them because she wants to be a teacher. She is drawn to their respect and wants to be respected by someone who is good and innocent. She has never had anyone truly love her in a non-sexual, non-avaracious way. Never had anyone love and respect her. And these young people, she craves their indulgence.
SD: Do you remember me talking about the young deaf child I taught who would crawl into my arms and it was the purest expression of love.
Lucy: Right.
SD: She didn’t know who I was, what I am, whether I’m bad or good, rich or poor, famous -
Lucy: Right.
SD: And how good that made me feel.
Lucy: Xena doesn’t even understand where that comes from. But it’s that lost piece of her potential she’s drawn back to again and again. If she understood it more, she’d be jealous. But she doesn’t.
SD: In terms of redemption, do you feel there’s a line of villainy you can't come back from? One of the things that some people took out of this is, “I've led a bad life and the only way out is for me to die because that was the way Xena went after spending six years paying back for her bad deeds.”
Lucy: No.
Rob: No. That’s one of the things I wish I’d had more time to fix. Xena had to die for the souls to be avenged. But that’s not the message I wanted people to take away from the series. Truthfully, on a TV schedule, by episode 21 and 22, you're moving so fast in the story. That was one bug I wish I could have gotten out - that it was vengeance or an avenging thing. We never wanted to say that. Xena certainly remade herself. I look at it now that she had been totally redeemed and she had passed on her skills to Gabrielle. Her mission on this earth was done.
SD: You were more focused on the line Xena said to Gabrielle when she stopped her from pouring Xena's ashes into the fountain, “But if there is a reason for our travels together, it’s because I had to learn from you, enough to know the final, the good, the right thing to do.”
Rob: That’s really what it was. I have to say it’s a shortcoming of the script that the only way she could accomplish this was through the spirits being avenged. If I’d had more time to work on the script, we would have found another way to achieve the same goal of Xena being dead and having to make a choice to stay dead so that the greater good could be served.
SD: For many people, that line Xena says to Gabrielle at the end is the message they took away from the finale. It was an act of love.
Some people were taken aback by this rule that Xena had to stay dead for the souls to be in a state of grace because this is the set of rules in this time in Japan. Because we’ve never been to this land in the series before, it came out of the blue. If we’d been to Japan earlier in the series, Xena would have been thinking, “I’m going to have to go back to Japan to help Akemi and I know that one of the risks there is they have this rule in their afterlife about souls needing to be avenged by the death of the person who was responsible for their death.” That might have been a forewarning.
Rob: Probably. But R.J. and I had talked for years about going to Japan and never found the right moment, the right story. As we moved toward the finale, it all came together.
SD: But you still wish you could have gotten rid of the word “avenged”?
Rob: Yeah.
SD: Do you remember telling Lucy Xena was going to die and what her response was?
Rob: “Cool, Rob.” From the beginning, Lucy was very supportive of that decision. I think Renee had a moment of disbelief, but Lucy was supportive from the word go that her character was going to die in the season finale. Am I recalling that right, Luce?
Lucy (chuckling): I'm not talking. It's your interview.
Rob: (laughing)
Lucy: Yeah, I just thought it was the strongest choice. And as an actress that’s the way I’m always drawn.
SD: You certainly knew it would be an incredibly dramatic moment for your character.
Lucy: That’s right.
SD: Holding hands and walking off in the sunset has its attractions, but it's not as much fun to play.
Lucy: Doing the hard acting is what I’m attracted to.
SD: If Lucy had stood there and said, “Oh, God, Rob, we can't do this?” Would it have had any effect on your decision to kill Xena?
Rob: I doubt it. Meaning, I can’t imagine that Lucy wouldn’t have liked it. But had she just said, “No,” we would have tried to find a way to make that decision work for her because, one, we knew that we wanted to do it and, two, I thought it was the right thing for the character and the right thing for the show. It wasn't the right thing on Hercules, to kill him. But it seemed right, for the violent character of Xena, to have a violent end to her TV career. We certainly would have tried to make Lucy see why the series should end that way.
SD: When you told the studio, what was their response?
Rob: They got the first draft of the script and I got a call from the head of syndication questioning me about whether this was a good idea and if it would affect the reruns. I told him we’ve killed Xena five times and Gabrielle three times, Iolaus eight times and Herc a couple times. My feeling is it sets up the franchise in such a way that there’ll be a “want to see” as to what happened after this. People wondering, “How will they bring her back?” I think it’s opening a door as well as closing one.
People wondering, "How will they bring her back?” I think it’s opening a door as well as closing one. He agreed and we moved on.
SD: I didn't know Xena was going to die before I saw the finale, but I had an idea she might. I wondered if you could make me believe it this time. If she was going to die, I wanted it to rip my heart out and I wondered if you could do that seeing as the characters have died before and always came back. And you did. I still can't watch the end without crying when Xena stops Gabrielle from putting the ashes in the fountain and seeing Xena’s face in the sky. And the “If I only have 30 seconds to live” scene also gets to me even though I've had to watch the episode at least a dozen times for work.
Rob: You know what, I still can’t watch Xena saying to Gabrielle, “You taught me to do the right thing.” Every time I see that I start to well up. And this was during the commentary when we were talking while the scene was playing out.
SD: Did you really?
Rob: I've seen that scene 150 times and it affects me every single time because it’s genuine.
SD: For me, it’s the words and the looks in their eyes.
Rob: Yep!
SD: So, you decide to go off to Japan for the last episode. In the behind-the-scenes footage on the making of “Friend In Need,” you mentioned a movie called A Chinese Ghost Story. What’s the connection between “Friend” and that movie?
Rob: There were very deliberate parallels between the two. The first two horror movies Sam Raimi and I did, Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, had a very great influence on Hong Kong filmmakers. They’ve been quoted, in a film series that came out of England, as saying, “When we saw the Evil Dead movies, we thought we know how to take that style of filmmaking and apply it to traditional Hong Kong cinema to give it a new spin.” So it was me doing a tribute back to the people who did a tribute to us. I also liked the chance to use some elements in Chinese Ghost Story that worked well in the story we wanted to tell. And it’s a great way to get people into as many different costumes as you can. I enjoy making people look really ugly or really great.
SD: Although no one was complaining about the outfits Xena and Gabrielle were in, is it safe to say a traditional samurai warrior would not leave her midriff bare? Beauty reigns over logic? (laughing)
Rob: (laughing) Something reigns.
SD: There were no other regulars from the series used. Was there discussion about using Ares or Eve or anyone else from previous episodes?
Rob: The only character we talked about possibly using was Varia. That was when both Xena and Gabrielle were going to die. When Gabrielle wasn’t going to get killed there was no reason to use Varia and there was no way to service another story. At the end of the day, in order to fit the time limit I had with two episodes, I sacrificed some story points I wanted to keep.
SD: The torch would have been passed to Varia?
Rob: Yeah. It would have been a disservice to her character to put her in without a good story.
SD: Was there any talk of using Jacqueline Kim (Lao Ma in “The Debt”)?
Rob: No.
SD: Does the back story with Akemi take place before “The Debt”?
Rob: Hmm. Let me figure this out. I believe for R.J. and myself, “Friend” takes place after “The Debt.”
SD: Xena knew the pinch so it took place after “Destiny.” But there’s no reference to Chin in the back story.
Rob: No, there wasn’t. Our thinking was that from Xena went into the back story for “Sin Trade.”
SD: So Xena’s story would have gone from M’Lila (“Destiny”), to Lao Ma, to Akemi and then Alti (“Sin Trade”).
Rob: And then she went off to the Valkyries.
SD: I heard that Adrian Brown, the actor who played Yodoshi, was injured at the end of filming and that necessitated some reshooting of Xena’s final battle with him?
Rob: Yes. Adrian broke his ankle walking to the set in the final sequence for the big action scene. We shot some of his closeups in a wheelchair. Venant Wong, the guy who played Morimoto, tore his Achilles tendon warming up for the big fight scene with Gabrielle. After six years and very, very few injuries to actors, two of the guest actors in this episode got hurt. I really believe it was because they wanted to do such a good job and please us. It made them tense. It wasn’t on the set they were injured, but going to the set.
SD: How did that affect the shooting of Yodoshi in the final battle?
Rob: If you really look carefully, you will see that he’s doubled for everything except his closeups.
SD: You said in an interview before the finale aired that you weren’t going to kill the characters.
Rob: I hate to be a liar, but if I had said, at that point in time, that we were going to kill Xena and Gabrielle, there would have been such an uproar. And it would have undermined my desire to surprise the audience. It would have gotten writing campaigns and it would have affected how people viewed the last half of the season.
SD: In the director's cut, you made a change at the end. Instead of Gabrielle being alone on the boat, we see the two of them together.
Rob: The little change I made was my response to the fan reaction. I knew that it would be a heartbreaker. We wanted the audience to cry. I wanted to cry. But I didn't know that it would totally sour all six years of the Xena experience for some people. That they wouldn’t be able to look at the show without pain. So my feeling was, if I can do something to lessen that bitter pill, I wanted to. That’s why I adjusted the final shot on the ship. If I had known the response to that scene of Gabrielle alone, I would have done it the first time.
SD: Are Xena and Gabrielle still together for you?
Rob: Absolutely. They’re off in sub-Sahara Africa and Gabrielle is talking to Xena. But Gabrielle is the one in the driver's seat.
SD: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. (laughing)
Rob: That’s right. (laughing)
SD: Is that a personal belief of yours that you keep your loved ones with you?
Rob: It’s not a belief of mine, but it’s something we have said in Hercules and Xena since the beginning of the shows. The dead can hear what you say. It’s a strong emotional point. I think there are a great many people who do believe that. I don’t know if I believe it, but it’s comforting to think that.
SD: Did you discuss possible reactions among viewers?
Rob: I tossed and turned internally and went back to R.J. a couple times to ask if he thought we were making a mistake. I look back on decisions we’ve made on the series and there are one or two really big things that spun us in directions that, on hindsight, I might have changed what we did. I’m not saying I would have made changes, but I might have.
SD: You explained Xena’s breast scar. How did that come about?
Rob: I knew we were going to have this big fight and I thought it would be fun for the audience who cared that we could give them that explanation without going out of our way. It was a bonus for the fans without being a distraction for everyone else.
SD: There was much debate over who was responsible for the deaths of the 40,000 in the fire.
Rob: As we were doing the commentary, I asked Lucy and Renee, is Xena guilty? And Lucy said, she was probably guilty of second degree murder. My feeling is it’s the drunk driver situation. Xena was drunk and out of control, she blew fire which then spread. Her actions, born out of rage, put other people in jeopardy.
SD: One point of view was that she was defending herself. If the villagers hadn’t attacked her, she wouldn’t have retaliated.
Rob: Right, but once the ashes blew away, the villagers were satisfied and had stopped attacking her. She struck out in rage after the villagers had accomplished their mission.
SD: You could look at it that Akemi was responsible. She used the pinch to kill her father, which caused Xena to be carrying Akemi’s ashes for burial in the village graveyard. If Akemi hadn’t killed her father, Xena wouldn’t have been in the situation which caused the fire.
Rob: You know what, certainly Akemi is culpable. But it was Xena who did the action. Xena took responsibility.
SD: As she did with the fire in Cirra that killed Callisto’s mother and sister which was started by the soliders under Xena’s command? Even though she didn’t order them to set fire to the town? Bottom line is the fire came out of her mouth.
Rob: The smoking gun led to Xena.
SD: Those 40,000 people — I wish they hadn’t been so anonymous.
Rob: Me too. In the confines of an 84-minute television show and the extreme rush which we were faced with after working on the musical that didn't come to fruition, I wish I had been able to humanize some aspect of them. It was a script failure. But there were so many aspects that even came before that that I wished I had had more time to spend on.
SD: Was that a plot device used in A Chinese Ghost Story?
Rob: No. The similarities with that movie were the teahouse scene and the anklet jingling calling forth Yodoshi.
SD: So when you decided Xena was going to die, you had to have her die for something.
Rob: Absolutely. And we had to have her die in order to service the greater good. So that those souls could move on to a happier place. It could have been one person, ten people or 40,000. She had to die for the greater good and remain dead for the greater good. That was the dilemma we got in that we never solved. That it wasn’t about vengeance.
SD: Xena set off an atomic explosion when she threw her chakram at the barrels of - whatever they were filled with.
Rob: That was the director wanting to attribute to Xena the world’s first atomic blast. There was a progression in that sequence. At first it was impersonal. A giant blast kills a bunch of people, then Xena has a bow and arrow, then she’s fighting hand to hand with lancers. Everything goes from being wide, impersonal and anonymous to her going hand to hand, being stabbed and then getting her head chopped off. Which is the most personal moment.
SD: Gabrielle could hug Xena, but Xena couldn’t take the chakram from her. Why?
Rob: Because the chakram is what defined Xena the Warrior Princess. It represented Xena in a physical form. My feeling is that Xena could hold Gabrielle which is an emotional attachment, but she was no longer physically able to embrace those things that Xena did in her previous incarnation. It’s something that didn’t make sense in our world. My rationalization to Lucy and Renee was that Xena could hold on to things emotionally, but wasn’t able to handle that which physically defined her.
SD: Akemi manipulated Xena when they first met. What debt did Xena feel for Akemi that made her go back to Japan when Akemi’s ghost summoned her?
Rob: Well, isn’t that a good question. (laughing) I believe Xena genuinely felt something for Aemi and she failed in her mission to properly bury her ashes. In a drunken rage, Xena was unable to place Akemi’s ashes in the family shrine. Instead, she spilled them and burned down the town. After that incident, Xena jumped aboard a boat and took off.
SD: Wearing that great Kabuki makeup.
Rob: I loved that makeup.
SD: Another discussion among fans was that if Xena had been sober during that scene, then she would have been more responsible for setting the village on fire.
Rob: Xena, drunk and out of control, used fire and then drunkenly rambled off paying no attention to the consequences of the actions she initiated. Is she guilty? She's as guilty as any drunk driver.
SD: As guilty as she feels?
Rob: As guilty as she feels.
SD: In “Fallen Angel,” my impression was that Xena was redeemed when she became an archangel.
Rob: Was she totally redeemed at that point? I don't think so.
SD: And did she believe she was?
Rob: Certainly not or the series would have been over. (laughing) And not in the minds of the writers. She defied the Heavens. In “Fallen Angel,” my feeling was Xena proved too much for the Christian God to handle.
SD: There were debates going on between strong women must die versus strong women make the hard decisions.
Rob: It’s not that strong women must die. It’s that we always based Xena and things that happened to her as if she was a genderless action hero. Whatever happened to her are the same things that would happen to a Mel Gibson or a Stallone character. At the end, I thought Xena’s decision was more like that of Socrates and Jesus than Thelma and Louise. This was someone who, for the greater good, had to die. Like anyone who gives their life for a cause.
SD: Speaking of the greater good. That subject came up a number of times in season six. For example, in “Legacy,” Gabrielle thought she should pay with her life for accidentally killing the innocent boy, Korah. There have been a number of times in the series where either Xena or Gabrielle wanted to give their own life up in payment for some action. And the other would always talk them out of it saying that wouldn't change anything.
Rob: This time, Xena knew exactly the consequences. If Gabrielle had died in “Legacy,” it wouldn't have solved anything.
SD: It wouldn't have released 40,000 souls into a state of grace.
Rob: Right.
SD: In “One Against An Army,” Xena said she was through paying for her past.
Rob: That was to make Gabrielle feel good because Xena just couldn’t leave her. (laughing) I don't know what to tell you about that. It's great when the show all works to support itself. However, when individual bits contradict previous episodes, for the greater good of the series, I have to let that happen.
SD: An ongoing series isn't a book or a movie where you can play with the beginning, middle and end and make it all agree. A television show can be cancelled at any time, it can be extended at any time.
Rob: That's right. And if there’s a story you want to tell, sometimes the characters have to service that. And I find it more reflective of everyday life where there are often contradictions in people’s actions and statements.
SD: The finale almost seemed to be a retelling of the series in a stand alone movie form - from thousands dead by Xena’s hand to burying the armour to the love between Xena and Gabrielle to dying for the greater good to the Higuchi fire standing in for Cirra. Someone could have seen “Friend In Need” and know the entire story of Xena that has played out over the past six years.
Rob: Yep. I wanted to find a way, without derailing what we were seeing, to harken back to all those things in the series to give some payoff to the regular viewers. But really, “Friend” was designed for the general public who have tuned in to Xena throughout the years - maybe 7 to 10 times a year - who heard it was ending and wanted to be there for the finale.
SD: One of the jobs of someone putting together the finale of a show that has been on for six years is to try and draw attention to the end of the show. To go out with a bang. That's the business part of show business.
Rob: Yep. That's right.
SD: I mention this because there were discussions about what did the creators of Xena owe their audience.
Rob: Who’s my audience? The Xena/Gabrielle fans, the Xena/Ares fans, the action adventure fans, the Joxer fans, the T & A fans.
SD: Who did you make the show for?
Rob: We made it for ourselves and we tried to give those particular groups each an acknowledgment that I appreciate they’re with us. We tried to plant things and have them pay off. The finale was to reward the fans, but please the overall audience.
SD: The “kiss of life” sequence, was that how you envisioned it?
Rob: You know, I had something in my mind that was crystal clear. That it was more of a kiss of life as opposed to dribbling water from one mouth to the other. But I had not properly communicated that to Lucy and Renee. On the day, I said, “No, you’ve got to kiss Xena.” That was a difficult moment because neither Lucy nor Renee were prepared for what I was asking for. Eventually, I got what I needed and wanted, but it was a bit of miscommunication on my behalf as to what I was looking for in that scene.
SD: It was the reverse of Xena waking Gabrielle in “Return Of The Valkyrie.”
Rob: It was.
SD: I found seeing Xena’s beheaded body a bit rough. Was that how you had envisioned the scene?
Rob: Lucy and I were debating today whether one shot of Xena’s headless body would have been enough. I was concerned people wouldn’t recognize what they were seeing. I had asked for a shot that showed two arms extending out of the bottom of frame and you would think, “Oh the head's missing.” You would never have seen the neck area. They shot it a different way for all the reasons that can happen.
SD: Everything in the show was leading up to her being beheaded, but I would have left the shot out simply because I don't like looking at that sort of thing. My imagination filled it in without the visual.
Rob: I personally, creatively, didn’t care either way. I had the debate in the editing room with two women in post production. One thought I should cut it, the other thought it was important to keep it.
SD: There were some viewers who couldn't get past that scene. For them, it didn't matter what happened in the rest of the episode. They were too shocked by those scenes.
Rob: I’m sorry those people couldn’t get past it. Perhaps I lost sight of people’s sensitivities. We took people to Japan and played that aspect of the culture at that time. The greatest honor you could give to your fallen foe was to take their head. The reaction of some fans to that caught me more off guard than anything. It was a great honor in that tradition and we knew it would get a rise out of Gabrielle.
SD: One of the things that happened with this show is that the quality of work of everyone on the show both in front of and behind the camera was so good, that the emotional ties for some people became very personal. It's a testament to the characters you created and the work of Lucy and Renee that many people took the death of the character and a scene like the beheading so much to heart.
Rob: I don’t know what to say about that. That this should taint their feelings toward the series forever is a shame.
SD: I forgot to ask. Did Gabrielle kill Morimoto at the end?
Rob: Yes, in my mind, she absolutely killed him. Although, Renee didn’t know she killed him. We only discussed it today. That's why I say that. (laughing)
SD: Did other things come up when you were doing the commentary that surprised you?
Rob: Yeah. I thought Gabrielle refused to kill Morimoto after the rain battle because she wasn't a cold-blooded killer. Renee said, “No, no, no. I didn’t kill him because I didn't want to give him the honor of dying like that.” I now saw on her face that that’s how she had to play it because she couldn't play it the other way. But in my mind, going into that scene, it was that Gabrielle wasn’t going to kill someone who was down on their knees with their head down. That Gabrielle wasn’t that kind of person. Renee and I had a dichotomy as to how we viewed the scene.
SD: It’s ironic. It doesn’t change the motions or the words, just the motivation behind it.
Rob: Right.
SD: I wanted to talk about a couple scenes that were left on the cutting room floor. Like the “Cherry Blossom commercial” you kept referring to in the behind-the-scenes footage.
Rob: That never got shot. I crafted in my mind a feature film for this finale and ultimately I had to make a TV show. The compromises I had to make to make my feature film into a TV show were so painful, it took me a couple months after this to have any appreciation, artistically, for the finale. Before that, I only saw in my head what I wanted to do and the compromises I had to make. It was a very painful process.
Unlike when I directed “Paradise Found.” That was an exercise for me in how do you tell a story in six days. Everything was on a lesser scale. So, going in, I made all the compromises in the initial planning stages. In this, I refused to make those compromises until lunchtime every day when I was just throwing out what I wished to do and trying to figure out what I absolutely had to do in order to get the basic story elements told.
SD: There were art department meetings and production designs for that Cherry Blossom scene.
Rob: Oh yeah. (sigh)
SD: What was that scene about?
Rob: That moment was Xena in the woods when the drums are pounding after she buried her outfit. She takes out her sword and when we first hear the drums, they shake the petals off of a Cherry Blossom tree. Xena starts to do a ballet with her sword that catches all of the petals midair as they’re falling.
SD: There was also mention of an “ice skating” scene in the behind-the-scenes footage.
Rob: That was where Xena and Gabrielle are reunited in the Land of the Dead. Xena takes Gabrielle on an “ice skating on top of water” sequence at the teahouse. What it was going to be was Xena stepping onto the water, taking Gabrielle's hand and pulling her toward her. Gabrielle starts to sink and Xena pulls her up. While Xena is holding on to Gabrielle, they spin on top of the surface of the water doing that skaters' death spiral in a joyous reunion.
SD: That would have been beautiful. I can just see it.
Rob: (laughing) I can too.
SD: Anything else not filmed?
Rob: There was a huge sequence that I wanted to do of Xena and Akemi coming ashore for the first time in Japan. They're in a boat at night and they come under fire. The boat tips over and they fall under the ice and climb ashore freezing. Akemi is hurt and Xena pulls an arrow out of her leg. They end up at a peasant farmhouse.
SD: What was at the farmhouse?
Rob: They're visiting Akemi’s grandparents’ home. I had to kill that. All I really needed to show was Xena getting the sword.
SD: When did Xena know she was going to die?
Rob: It was a dawning process. My belief is that when Xena hears about Akemi in the teaser, she knows something bad is going to happen. Xena knows for sure she’s going to die when she has the talk with Harukata and she’s told that only another spirit can kill Yodoshi.
SD: I realized after I’d seen it that I wasn't quite sure when Xena knew she had to stay dead. I didn’t think she would have sent Gabrielle off if she thought it was a fool's errand.
Rob: Xena didn’t know she had to stay dead forever until Akemi tells her in a scene that's off screen in Act Three of the second episode. Just before they turn into birds.
SD: And Gabrielle’s already started her journey by that time.
Rob: Right. I added the bird scene back in the director's cut.
SD: Why was the air date of the finale changed to June?
Rob: It was originally scheduled for the end of May. I needed more time to finish the effects. Deep Space Nine had run their series’ finale in June and did very well because there’s less competition in the summer. Then we had to avoid Mets' games in New York.
SD: Harukata said only a ghost could get close enough to kill Yodoshi. Akemi was a ghost. Why couldn't she kill him?
Rob: Because she wasn’t good enough, (laughing)
SD: (laughing) She wasn’t a Warrior Princess.
Rob: Right.
SD: I loved the tattoo on Gabrielle’s back.
Rob: I liked that too. We were talking about that during the commentary. I could have spent a whole week shooting that scene. That was another place I had to make massive compromises to just get the basic idea that she has a tattoo.
SD: I found that scene similar to what you had the camera do in the yoga scene with Gabrielle in “Paradise Found.” Caressing the lines and shapes of the bodies.
Rob: I know. I love all those lines and shapes and bodies. And I think I do a good job of making people look very good or very ugly.
SD: I don’t know if you have an answer for this question, but it's something a fan noticed. Akemi was trapped under the ice in the bathtub. What was the urgency to free her? Can ghosts drown?
Rob: I don’t know. (laughing) That certainly is a good question. I was hoping the audience, in the frenzy of what was happening in that scene, wouldn’t think, “Hey, what happens if a ghost drowns?” My feeling is that they are manifest flesh and blood bodies by Yodoshi, therefore — oh, I don’t have an answer for that. (laughing)
SD: (laughing) Okay. I just had to ask.