Production
The storyline to "One Last Dance" was somewhat based on the Iranian Embassy Siege, which took place in London on May 1980. Writer Simon Mirren noted the episode was hard to write, since he had to add two main storylines and tie them together - the Consulate siege and the bank robbery. Mirren was concerned that adding too much dialogue explaining certain aspects of the storyline would make the episode "silly". In the original pitch of the consulate siege, the terrorists were to abseil down from the roof, but was changed in favour of a ground assault. The police officer in the Consulate, Steven Burrows, was originally written to conceal a gun, and feeling guilty about never using it, but was cut.
Katie Jones was cast as Leyla, one of the episode's primary antagonists; Jones was cast because the producers were impressed by her performance, and the accent she used during the audition. Some of the opening scenes were to involve the rebels speaking Kurdish, but out of the cast members who play the rebels, Karzan Krekar was the only one who could speak it; Krekar taught the other members how to speak their lines in Kurdish. There was some concern that too much Kurdish was spoken in the scenes, which the producers feared would draw away the audience; some of the dialogue was cut down for filming. Furthermore, some of the additional scenes with Kurdish being spoken was actually improvised. An actual news anchor from London Today was cast for the news reports in the background; the producers used an actual anchor to make the report more believable.
The episode was filmed after the following episode, "Traitor's Gate". Filming took two weeks to complete. The methods of Marks following Tessa in the beginning of the episode was suggested by an ex-MI5 officer, who was a source for the series. Director Rob Bailey taught Keeley Hawes how to lockpick a door for Zoe's operation. Parts of the episode was filmed where Matthew Macfadyen wore sunglasses. The reasoning is that Macfadyen burst a blood vessel on one of his eyes, and the sunglasses were used to hide it; they would be used again for episode 5, "The Rose Bed Memoirs". The Turkish Consulate were filmed in two separate locations; the interior was mainly filmed in a local council building, while the exterior was filmed in a building in Roehampton. Three camera crews were used on the exterior shots.
Three hours of filming was dedicated on the top floor of New Zealand House with Macfadyen, Firth and Jeremy Bulloch. However, they filmed the scene at the top of the building, where heavy wind took place; the actors on set had to raise their voices in order for the sound unit to hear them. This is the first episode David Oyelowo used a gun. All guns used in the episode are real, but decommissioned from service. In order to maintain gun safety, at least two weapons experts are on hand to train the actors during rehearsal. The moment where the rebel gets killed by the sniper was meant to include blood splatter for realism, but was cut because the producers thought it would be too violent.
Read more about this topic: One Last Dance (Spooks)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)