What are the particular challenges of the episode currently being filmed?
As a matter of fact Doug Petrie’s episode (Flooded) is one of the few episodes which is fairly easy for us. In the sense that there’s one demon and there’s not much in the way of CGI. In fact, I don’t think there’s any CGI in this one, so this is one of those few episodes where we get to take a breath.
Having said, we started the season with a two-parter which was horrendously over budget, but Fox has always been terrific in that if I promised them that ultimately we’ll make the money back, they’re okay. So long as at the end of the season we come out at our [budget] pattern we’re fine.
[Bargaining] was a case where we had so many stunt men and we were also doing a lot of night exterior [filming]. We had motorbike demons, so we had this great flood of demons on motorbikes that were going everywhere - including tearing up a grave where Buffy was buried and everything like that.
There, the problem became "Where do you do that?" – in that you need a location but, believe it or not, you couldn’t do it at Warner Brothers back lot (for instance) because they have trouble with the neighbours. You couldn’t go to Griffith Park which is the other place in Los Angeles - this huge park with many different looks that we use a lot - because, again, they were concerned about tearing up the grass, problems like that.
That [also] became a huge number of stunt men, a huge number of prosthetics and a lot of night exteriors that you’re trying to shoot at this time of the year. It doesn’t get dark until 9pm and it’s light at 5am.
Ironically, later in the year when it gets dark earlier, we’ll probably be writing episodes that need a lot of daylight.
