WITH its modest Victorian architecture and silver spire, the small Catholic church by the railroad tracks in Vancouver, British Columbia, could be any rural house of worship. Today it's a crime scene in Tacoma, Washington. Uniformed police direct a tall, dour looking man toward the scorched grass where a priest has been burned at the stake. As officers sift through the ashes for evidence, the man and his colleagues huddle nearby, shaking their heads in disbelief.
Then a slow moving freight train, about a quarter mile long, rumbles down the tracks beyond them, stops and idles noisily. The uniformed officers look confused. The serious group in plain clothes relaxes. The spell is broken.
Despite all the plans made for this day's filming, nobody expected a Canadian train to park itself in the middle of an important shot. But the wayward train is probably the only thing that's been left to chance regarding Millennium, the new Fox suspense series that has earned critical applause and strong ratings in the US and which started on RTE this week.
The show's creator, Chris Carter, began The X Files three years ago and watched it become a surprise success. Millennium follows in that show's footsteps. Lance Henriksen, who has appeared in the films Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Hard Target (1993) and Powder (1995) plays Frank Black, a retired FBI expert on serial killers who joins a shadowy consortium called the Millennium. Their purpose, Black tells a colleague, is not to sit around and wait for a happy ending" while faith is destroyed by the evil in the world.
If The X Files, with its offbeat humour and conspiracy theories wonders about those things that go bump in the night, Millennium explores the darkness and embraces it. The show's title refers to the thousand years mentioned in the Book of Revelations, Carter says, but the definition also includes a time of reckoning, righteousness and happiness. He describes Millennium as a very adult show along the lines of NYPD Blue and Law And Order.
"I would like it to have an effect on adults, Carter says. "Where The X Files can be scary and a good thrill and a fun ride for everyone, I think Millennium is scarier because it is even more real." Though audiences may expect a Chris Carter show to have some kind of supernatural element, Frank Black's talent is not supposed to be a kind of ESP. The show's technical adviser, Bob Stair, a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, says criminologists are smart but not psychic.
A profiler tries to think like the culprit," Stair says. "And the way Millennium shows that is with these little flashes in Frank's mind - no smoke and mirrors, no real out to lunch stuff. The physical evidence gives him hints, and based on his long years of experience, he can then visualise what could have happened." Though the flashes in Black's mind may be gruesome Millennium has already been criticised for its stylised violence - they are not the main event.
Carter says he's more interested in showing the aftermath of amoral acts than the acts themselves. "The most interesting aspect of violence is the effect it has on people, not the actual violence, which is strangely mundane these days, because you see so much of it", he says. "Younger kids should probably not watch the show. I'm certainly thoughtful about those things. But I really think a kid is better off educated and scared than stupid and vulnerable."
Carter sought out Gary Wissner, the art director of Seven (1996) to give the Millennium pilot a similarly menacing look. The show's cinematographer, Robert McLachlan, has the challenge of, photographing Frank Black's frightening world without making it so gloomy that viewers' are turned off. "The hard thing for me is to make it dark but still visible," says McLachlan. "When I was watching Seven, even though I know it was a dark movie, some of the time I just wanted to yell at them: Turn a light on, for heaven's sake! It's got to feel natural."
Vancouver doubles for the show's Seattle setting, which is known for McLachlan favourite kind of weather - rainy, overcast and generally threatening. Frank's home, a restored Victorian - house in the suburbs, is painted in warm shades of gold and yellow. "The home is the only place, you'll see any sort of colour saturation," the cinematographer says. "The farther he gets from home, the darker the show will be." McLachlan eyes the cloudless sky with something like disappointment. "I hate shooting in bright sunlight," he says.
In Frank Black, Carter has created a hero who is "very bright, and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, certainly the future of his family . Megan Gallagher, the red haired star of It's Garry Shandling's Show and last season's Nowhere Man plays Black's much younger wife, a psychiatrist social worker, with Brittany Tiplady, a five year old Canadian actress, as their young daughter. Carter had asked Henriksen to appear as a guest on The X Files, but the actor's agent always declined, saying Henriksen was not interested in television work. At the end of 1995, when Carter heard that Henriksen was filming a movie in Vancouver, he sent a note to his hotel asking him to consider the script for Millennium.
"I wanted a man who looked like he had been through the tortures the lessons of evil, said Carter. "He sees criminals who have absolutely no conscience, and he knows it's his life's work to stop these people - not with a gun, but by getting into their heads." Though Henriksen has played many policemen over the years, he and Carter rely on the expertise of Stair, a former crime scene expert who spent 26 years policing Canada's western provinces. "I spent my days doing what Frank Black does, without all the psychological profiling," says Stair. "Crime scene examinations have gotten so sophisticated, and audiences expect things to look realistic."
The freight train, which has been idling noisily for about an hour, slowly moves away The actors resume their places, and shooting begins. A properties assistant approaches Stair and asks him to look over a burned highway flare, which Black will discover in the ashes. Beautiful!" says Stair. "Excellent. That's just what we're looking for. The crime scene tells all."