A very important meeting today! Thanks to the miracle of Zoom, director Mike Edwards and the scriptwriter (yours truly) were able to confer with Sir David Suchet about the film’s narration.
We have known from the beginning that the Narrator would be a major “character” in our story … the single voice you’ll hear the most, your guide and companion through our complicated tale. It’s more than just “telling the story.” This Narrator will have to express a point of view, a perspective shared with the audience — without telling the audience what to think or how to feel. Striking that balance is a subtle art, something that most people — even accomplished actors — simply cannot do.
But Sir David is one of those people who can. And that’s what we talked about today: how exactly to achieve that balance of information and emotion. It was a delight to hear his desire to bring exactly that kind of empathy and passion to the telling of this story.
And for me, as a fan of his for many years, what a delight it was to experience what a lovely man he is, warm and kind and thoughtful… and to know that his personality will come across in his performance of this often-challenging script.
We’re still “on hold” with our distributor, so we can’t make an official announcement about who they are — not yet! But we can say they’ve surprised us with the request that we present our story in a different format that we’d planned … a different running time, sharing different content.
This poses interesting challenges. Once this distributor has had their chance to air the series (in the TV biz that time period is called a “window”), we’ll be free to offer it to another distributor, very likely in a different form.
Anticipating this, we’ll be asking Sir David to record several versions of the narration. For example, one that might have a “closing narration” that comes at the one-hour mark, and another in which that narration is not heard at the one-hour mark, but a different one is heard at the two-hour mark. My job right now is to prepare those script versions that can be “mixed and matched” to meet future needs.
It’s all very complicated and delicate and it is a huge comfort to know that we are placing this burden on such strong shoulders. Whatever version of A TRAIN NEAR MAGDEBURG you see, you’re going to be transported by the classically-trained and world-renowned voice of Sir David Suchet.