Interview with Joe Ahearne, September 2000 - Part 1 of 4

Interviewer	Tell me about Ultraviolet, or 'Crossing The Line' as it used to be called. Tell me about how it came about, where did it come from, and how did it come to be?
Joe	I'd always wanted to do a vampire thing from a long time ago. I wrote a vampire screenplay in 1987 and then I wrote another vampire idea, a treatment for a one off film in 1991, 92 maybe. Both of which wouldn't get made partly because they probably weren't very good, but also because they were a bit controversial. One being about a biblical setting and the other being a Northern Ireland setting and I think that some people felt the idea of using vampires as a metaphor for those situations was a bit too shallow. So I came back to the idea again in around 1995 when I came to London to look for some drama work - I'd been working documentaries up in Bristol for a while and my agent said, stop writing screenplays, they're a waste of time, they're very difficult to get off the ground. Write something that can be done as a series because British television really are much more interested in stuff that can be run for a long time rather than doing a one off film. So I sat down and started to think of ideas that I could do a series on and I wasn't that interested in doing cops or doctors or lawyers or, what's the other one, army. I meanŸ I'm sorry, all the stuff that World does. Mainly because I didn't think I'd a very good job at that kind of stuff because I'm not a very character-based writer. I'm more interested in kind of the plots and the ideas and stuff. So, I started to think about what stuff could interest me, and vampires came up again and I tried to think of an idea that you could do about vampires on a long-running basis. And bear in mind that this was beforeŸ I don't know if it was actually before Buffy came out but I hadn't seen Buffy and I hadn't seen Angel and that kind of thing. Vampires on telly is quite current now on televisionŸ
Interviewer	None of those were out at the timeŸ
Joe	And so the first idea I had was to do a vampire detective. So I thought you'd have the vampire as kind of a slightly good guy, slightly bad guy. But I abandoned that because I thought they would never be able to film it because it would all have to be done at night and in my, kind of, limited experience in production time with it, you couldn't schedule something that was all shot at night. So I went the other way and thought about, how would you do it if it was a team of people that hunted vampires, and at that time I hadn't seen that before. And also I wanted to do something that was vampires, but modern, which my Northern Ireland story I feel was going to be like that. So I wrote about 3 or 4 pages on the idea of being a contemporary vampire unit that went round hunting vampires. And the idea was to do something that was serious, not camp. No vampire jokes and not gothic. There had been a few modern vampire updates kind of over the years, but it tends to be things like, you know, Dracula AD 1972 where it was, you know, Dracula alive in 1972 but still running around empty houses and grabbing the girl and waiting for the guy to run after themŸ Great stuff but not what I wanted to do. So, I wrote 3 or 4 pages on that. Also I suppose I should mention that Interview With A Vampire was something that had come out literally a year or two before, and that kind of jogged my memory because I thought that was brilliant and it was just like one simple twist which was, let's do the whole story from the vampires' point of view. So the vampires were the heroes and in fact everything was set at night. But it was a movie and you can do that in movies. And that kind of reminded me that it was such a good myth, you could do lots of things with it so I thought, well is there a twist that I could do that would be as potent. And I think the main idea was to do something about vampires now if vampires really existed. So, if vampires did exist now and they had existed for hundreds of years, probably as in the UFO stuff in America which X Files is based on, presumably the government would know about it and they wouldn't be running around with mirrors and garlic and crucifixes and whateverŸ they'd be modern weapons. So I got into how you'd update the weapons and so on. And so I wrote something very brief, 3 or 4 pages and I brought it to World Productions because I had a very slight 'in' there which was that I'd done a short film a few years ago which had had a couple of stars from Between The Lines in it. So I managed to get in and see Tony Garnett and I had a couple of meetings with him and he was quite interested. So I went away and wrote a screenplay, a kind of 90 minute pilot, and then at that point the exec producer Sophie Balhetchet had joined the company and she was very interested in the idea and so then it kind of moved over to being her baby and we took it from there, really.
Interviewer	I'm just letting you ramble, that was lovely. OK. And then we had the whole filming, so we know all about that and casting and everything, because we've actually seen it now. So you'd written your six and you'd filmed those and those had gone out. Were you pleased with what you had done? How did you think it all looked? I mean, did it come out the way it was sort of formed in your memory?
Joe	Yeah, it did. I mean it kind of evolved over the scripting process, because the original pilot I'd done was a bit more of an action thing and a bit more superficial. And there was less kind of attention made to the characters and psychological stuff and although I was trying very hard to veer away from it there was a bit more tendency to camp humour and stuff, but it's very hard to avoid when you're doing vampires. But in the process of the writing we sort of moved away from that, which I think was the right decision because also it was being pitched at Channel 4, the minority channel and, you know, had to fit into the kind of programmes that they did. I didn't want to do a Buffy style thing and I didn't think that a Buffy style thing would have gone down well there. But having said that I think they've just bought Angel which is the spin-off to Buffy and they're going to be showing that. So, yes, in the writing it sort of evolved into being a bit more psychological, a bit more, you know, less rip your head off and stumps spouting blood kind of stuff and more, a bit more serious. And in the shooting it was pretty much as written. I mean there wasn't any improvisation. It stuck pretty close to the scripts. It was cast with actors who were reallyŸ who took it seriously to the extent that people did buy it. They bought it because of the actors, because they didn't camp it up and they played it as for real. And a lot of the reviews that it's got have kind of pointed that out, saying that you do believe it because of them. Principally because it's such a bizarre concept, for British television. I mean, you know, Americans don't have a problem with this kind of material, but you don't get much of this done on British TV. And by the end of it, yeah, I thought it really worked. I think it got better as it went on and certainly the last three or four episodes, I think, are better than the first two. I was pretty happy the way the first two came out but I think the writing got better and the whole thing sort of gelled more. It quite often happens with series, that you do the first one to find your feet and then it really starts getting good, you know, after that. You know, like in This Life the second series was the one that people latched onto. Not the first series, it wasn't great it was just that you've got to know the characters more, everything's just a bit more confident. So by the end of it I was, yeah, I was pretty happy with that. I thought it worked well... To be continued.

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