Inspirations - Warriors' Gate

Auteur: (noun) - from the French for "author". In cinema, an auteur is a director who has so much influence upon all aspects of a production that they can be seen as the film's author. The phrase was popularised by the director Francois Truffaut in an essay he wrote for Cahiers du Cinema in 1954, entitled Un Certain Tendence du Cinema Francais. Basically, you can look at some movies and know just from a few clips who directed it, thanks to visual style, a repertory company of regular actors, or even a concentration on the same subject matter. Terry Gilliam has a unique visual style in his fantasy films; Tim Burton movies invariably feature Helena Bonham-Carter and Johnny Depp; Woody Allen for the most part films contemporary New York set stories, featuring someone based on himself - usually played by himself.
Prior to making Warriors' Gate, his only story for Doctor Who, director Paul Joyce showed a number of films to his team by way of explaining what he wanted to achieve. Some of these films influenced the look of the story.
Warriors' Gate is the first of two stories written by Stephen Gallagher - although it was heavily reworked by the script editor (Christopher H Bidmead) and the director.
The story opens in a manner seen only once before in the series - in the story which opened this present season. Then, we had a long, slow pan across Brighton beach, taking in a number of TARDIS shaped beach tents before finally settling on the TARDIS itself. Here, we have a long, slow set of hand held camera shots exploring the corridors of a spaceship. One of the films which Joyce had shown to his team was Last Year at Marianbad (1961) which was directed by Alain Resnais. The opening sequence of the film consists of over 5 minutes of the camera exploring a huge, opulent hotel. More relevant to a Doctor Who story, Ridley Scott's Alien also opens with a lengthy sequence of the camera roaming through corridors and rooms of a spaceship - taking its time getting to the cast members.

The hotel in Last Year at Marianbad is set in ornate formal gardens - just as the realm beyond the mirror in the Gateway appears to be a stately home in similar manicured gardens. The realm beyond the mirror is also a monochrome world - and most of Joyce's film choices were B&W movies of the 1940's and 1950's.
Two films by Jean Cocteau provide inspiration for Warriors' Gate. The first is Orpheus (1950), which is set in contemporary Paris but based on the myth of Orpheus and his decent into Hades to save Eurydice. In this mirrors feature prominently. Supernatural characters can pass through mirrors to another dimension in the film, whilst ordinary mortals can't. Cocteau said "We watch ourselves grow old through mirrors. They bring us closer to death". Needless to say Orpheus doesn't have many jokes in it... In fact, all of the films Joyce chose to reference are highly regarded visually, but are criticised for being very much triumphs of style over content. Last Year in Marianbad is especially regarded as an incredibly dull movie.
The other Cocteau inspiration, especially for the leonine Tharils who appear in the Doctor Who story, is 1948's La Belle et la Bete (or Beauty and the Beast). The make up for Jean Marais' Beast is based on a lion. The Gateway is also reminiscent of the Beast's castle home.

Apart from the visuals, another theme runs through this story - namely theories of chance. The I Ching is specifically mentioned, along with the tossing of a coin to determine courses of action. The I Ching is over 2000 years old - the oldest written Chinese text - and is a form of divination. Carl Jung used it in his theories of synchronicity. At one point Romana dismisses chance as "Astral Jung!". Jung was interested in the concept of the collective unconscious. This story was originally going to be called "The Dream Time".
Some see I Ching as a precursor to modern computer logic - and we all know how passionate about computing Bidmead is - whilst others saw it as holding back technological development in China, as though a form of superstition.
Some of the character names reference scientists and cinematographers. The captain of the privateer is Rorvik (named after science writer David Rorvik), whilst his underling Sagan is named for cosmologist Carl Sagan. On the Tharil side, Biroc is named after cinematographer Joseph F Biroc, and Laszlo after his colleague Ernest Laszlo. Both of these worked with director Robert Aldrich - another favourite of Joyce.

Gallagher's initial draft was written more like a novel than a TV script. It already included some of the Cocteau imagery, which Joyce picked up on.
The production of this story was a troubled one. Joyce was very slow in organising his camera plans, and his assistant Graeme Harper had to complete these in order to be ready for studio. The complex set for the privateer was deemed unsafe, as it consisted of a lot of scaffolding which wasn't properly secured. Joyce then elected to shoot "off set" - capturing the studio lighting rig through the flooring for instance. This led to an argument with the head of the lighting team. Deciding to record the story as though it were a film led to Joyce falling seriously behind schedule. Things came to a head and John Nathan-Turner removed him from the production. Harper took over, though Joyce was later reinstated. Later, JNT had to answer to his boss as the lighting director had lodged an official complaint, and he acknowledged that Joyce had not been the best choice for a Doctor Who story. He wasn't invited back. Director Lovett Bickford had tried the same filmic approach on The Leisure Hive, and had run into the same problem of falling way behind schedule - and he also directed only the one story.

Bidmead and Joyce had reworked his material so much that when it came to the Target novelisation of this story, Gallagher reinstated much of his original ideas. JNT had a watching brief over the Target books and insisted that the novels had to reflect what viewers had seen on screen - so Gallagher had to hastily rewrite it.
At the conclusion of the story, Romana and K9 are written out of the series. K9 has been damaged yet again - this time irreparably - but he will function normally on the other side of the mirror in the Tharils' domain. Rorvik and his slave trader crew have been killed, but many more of Biroc's people remain in bondage in E-Space, and Romana elects to stay behind with Laszlo to free them. She's trying to avoid having to go back to Gallifrey (having been summoned home at the end of Meglos).
The Gateway also acts as means of exiting from E-Space back into N-Space, out normal universe, so this trilogy in a pocket dimension comes to an end. As we've mentioned before, JNT had only grudgingly agreed to a story arc, on the condition that it was a brief one.
One final reference - as the Doctor bids farewell to his companion he tells her that she was the noblest Romana of them all. This is a play on Marc Anthony's description of the now slain Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as the noblest Roman of them all.
Next time: an old foe returns, and gets a new body at last...