NEMO MARTIN
Hello friends! This is Nemo Martin, creator of Trice Forgotten. I wanted to come in and thank you for checking out our swashbuckling adventure!
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Now please, enjoy the episode.
[SHOW THEME - INTRO]
SIVA
Rusty Quill Presents: Below Decks: a Trice Forgotten Deep Dive.
Episode One: Authenticity in Historical Fiction.
[THEME FADES]
[INSIDE A SHIP. MUFFLED, THE LAPPING OF WAVES, THE CREAKING OF WOOD IN THE WIND, THE SQUAWK OF SEABIRDS.]
RAFAELLA
Hello and welcome to the first episode of Below Decks, where we dive into some of the research, questions, stories and generally interesting tangential things that went into making Trice Forgotten. I am Rafaella, my pronouns are she/her and they/them, and I am one of the writers on Trice Forgotten and also, excitingly, the director for the series.
For our first episode I am absolutely thrilled to be joined by Nemo and April. Nemo and April, would you introduce yourselves with your pronouns and tell us a little bit about your relationship to the show?
NEMO
Sure, I’m Nemo Martin, my pronouns are they/them and I am the creator of Trice Forgotten and the lead writer. Yay!
RAFAELLA
Yeah, so “relationship to the show” is kind of an understatement for you, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
NEMO
Yeah, I’m the captain, really, and this is my ship and I’m very excited.
APRIL
Captain Nemo!
NEMO
Yeah, I’m throwing the champagne bottle directly at the hull and wishing it – no, wait, but then I would be – oh God, I’ve lost the whole metaphor, oh no!
[CHAMPAGNE BOTTLE SMASHING AGAINST HULL]
APRIL
The metaphor, it’s gotten away!
[LAUGHTER]
NEMO
I’m drowning! Oh God!
RAFAELLA
And April?
APRIL
Yeah, so I am April Sumner, I am the executive producer at Rusty Quill, so all of the shows we make I basically oversee and make sure that they happen and attach all the teams to it. It’s been a delight working with both of you on this.
RAFAELLA
Lovely. So for our first episode today we thought we’d talk a bit about ideas around accuracy and authenticity and issues around those things that might arise in making – not just in historical fiction, but especially in historical fiction like this, which I think it’s fair to say has a slightly alternate-history vibe to it that is definitely not your regular pirate narrative. It’s set in a non-western setting and with predominantly queer characters. So, what does authenticity and accuracy, what do those things actually mean when we make this kind of historical fiction?
So, I wondered if, Nemo, to start with, you would tell us about what authenticity and accuracy meant to you when you were conceiving this, and maybe you could talk a little bit about pitching the show?
NEMO
It’s really interesting how authenticity has changed for me during this whole process. So, a bit of Below Decks facts: when I was first pitching this show it was a lot more food-based, food-orientated, and that’s kind of lessened. There’s still quite a lot of food mentioned in the show as it is now, but there was a lot more about it, and so a lot of the reading that I was doing at the beginning was about colonisation’s effect on food and global food and stuff like that.
And one thing that really helped me when I was thinking about the show was this article that I read by Coral Lee. So, what was central to writing Trice Forgotten as a “authentic show” was squaring the thought that authenticity is a strange word to use when human culture has always been about exchanges and conversations and relationships. And in this Coral Lee article, one quote that stood out to me was: “the idea of ‘authenticity’ suggests one institutional individual has the power to define what is authentic while others do not.”
My mantra in Trice Forgotten has always been: read as much own-voices as I can; read about the relationships that people have had throughout time, especially ones that aren’t super written about or in a lot of media, and to explore those relationships, I guess. And that became what “authentic” was to me.
RAFAELLA
So in light of that, then, maybe this is a nice segue into talking about the research that went into this. Because the flip-side of that is even though, exactly the saying, Nemo – authenticity is a funny word to talk about in the context of exchange, and that’s something that we’ve found really, really applies to this universe that you’ve created. Nonetheless, there was a huge amount of research that you did, which was a privilege to look at the reams of research that you did for this.
NEMO
Yeah, to the point where my current Google document is about 150 pages of quotes and that’s not – yeah, I’ve done quite a lot of reading. I don’t even know where to start with it… I guess there are certain different groupings in reading and research that I’ve done for it.
So one of the big things is that I worked for seven years at the Natural History Museum, and so through that I talked to a lot of people, a lot of the curators and the staff there, about people that they had found in the margins of their own research. And so I really did start with this idea of – like, “there are people behind the white people,” and that was really foundational. Who are these people behind the white people? Who were the “boys” who were out there doing the research, collecting these specimens, putting down knowledge that they had known for hundreds of years – culturally had known for hundreds of years – but it only became scientific fact when written down by a white man?
RAFAELLA
Do you want to just explain the concept of the “boys,” the local “boy”?
NEMO
Sure.
RAFAELLA
Because that’s as embodied by Siva in our show.
NEMO
I think the first person that I found who was considered a “boy” to a naturalist is a person called Ali Wallace. And he was a local child when a naturalist called Alfred Russel Wallace met this boy called Ali and gave him his surname, Wallace. And so this person’s job, Ali’s job, was to basically go and find specimens, birds, fish, whatever, plants and bring them to Alfred, and Alfred would then write down what they were and do comparisons and stuff like that.
And that’s just one person that we have named. And I was so interested in this concept of a “boy” because I’m sure that Ali was – I mean, eventually became a man, right? But it’s such a colonial practice to call colonised men as “boy” as a way of holding power over them, and to ensure that any knowledge that they have is lesser.
APRIL
Sort of infantilises them a little bit?
NEMO
Yeah, exactly. And with Siva that was always a thing – one of the big things with Siva’s arc is his arc as a “boy,” how he transforms when he understands what it means to be termed like that.
And it’s quite funny in my head – I’m quite in fandom and there’s the concept of like, “this is my sweet little blorbo, my little meow meow, my boy, my child…” And it’s really difficult because I’m like – actually, one of the fundamental things about his character is that I don’t want him to be a boy by the end of this. I don’t want people to consider him a boy.
APRIL
It’s about growing, right?
NEMO
Exactly, yeah. But at the same time he is, he does need to grow on his own side as well.
[LAUGHTER]
APRIL
He has his own growing to go in a different… and actually I think that brings up a really good point, because particularly while we’re talking about authenticity and what that means with these stories, is – like, it is a fictional story that we’re telling, but at the same time, these peoples and identities and circumstances are very real things that happened. These are real people, in concept anyway, who have dealt with these kinds of situations of being infantilised or called a “boy.” But that doesn’t take away from the fact that that character’s “truth,” so to speak, is that they still have growing to do, but that is separated from necessarily their identity that’s put upon them from the colonist circumstance.
And I read the first pitch that came in for SEAS back when it was called “Seven Seas and How to Eat Them” – which was a great title, by the way, less applicable at the moment, but great – and I think one of the things that we’ve really been tackling since concept-to-now, getting into editing and releasing of the episodes, has been treating these characters with real weight to their stories and real individualism to them. So the sense of authenticity comes through the fact of the loads of research that Nemo did at the initial concept stage, and from the writing stage and throughout that – but also all of the work that has gone in from the production stage through our historical consultants, our sensitivity consultants, to make sure that we have as many – and our writers, like Raf and Morgan also wrote episodes for us – to make sure that we had lots of people with lots of different experiences that can put their voices into these characters.
NEMO
Yeah. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that one of the big things, in this first season at least, is the characters are all struggling against the stereotype that has been put upon them and how they interact with a world where sometimes it is legitimate to have to act in a certain way in order to survive. The story and the characters have changed quite a lot since I initially pitched it, especially because of sensitivity and things that I’m not and have never considered. There are story arcs that have been fully taken out and walked away from or hedged for further research before we could put it in. I mean, I’ve definitely expanded a lot of my knowledge, I know that I’m still not a hundred percent perfect, no one can be.
APRIL
Yeah, no one person is going to have all of the knowledge of the world. That’s the neat thing, is how all of these characters are different. Almost all of them are mixed-race in some way or have some type of mixed influence in their lives, which – I think that was really a good way for you to build into that.
RAFAELLA
Picking up on that, both of those mentions of “no one person can hold all of the knowledge” and also April, as you said, the huge team of people who have come to work on this, in terms of sensitivity consultants, in terms of our consultants on accent and on language – we have characters speaking different languages – and the way that the show has progressed. I wondered if either of you wanted to talk about that process? And through casting as well, we’ve revised who some of these characters are. Was that a surprise that that happened, or was that always the plan to go, “alright, well, we’ve got a starting point and actually we’re going to grow this through the people who are involved?”
NEMO
As a writer I’ve always been the kind of person who loves it when actors come in and go, “Actually I think this is what my character would say,” and I’d be like, “Hell yeah, dude, go for it.”
This is, again, touching on authenticity and stuff like that. I have written quite a few things and I think that it’s really frustrating sometimes – I’ve been commissioned quite a few times to only talk about being a British mixed-race white and Japanese person who is non-binary, who is neurodiverse and all of those things, and writing things about yourself… I mean, I don’t want to retraumatise myself every time by having to only write about this one kind of thing! And it’s also kind of like, I’ve not exhausted that, but I have friends! I like to write about my friends. I have experiences, I have family, I have –
APRIL
Nemo, T-shirt, 2022: I have friends.
NEMO
I have friends.
[LAUGHTER]
I swear to God I have friends, I swear, please believe me! But I have friends who have never seen themselves in media, and I’ve seen people lament things that they wish they could have, and I like to write those things about them. And when an actor comes on and they are of a culture that I am not a part of and they say “Actually I’d really like it to be like this,” then I’m like, “It speaks to you in a certain way, then it should speak to you in a certain way, and you can build on this.”
And I haven’t been a part of the recordings but I’ve been – like, the cast have been telling me about their experiences and what they’ve been writing and I’m like, that is fundamentally the spirit of the show, is bringing all of these people’s excitement and changing our language and stuff like that. So yeah.
RAFAELLA
Some of my favourite conversations we’ve had during recording, especially early on for obvious reasons, have been about accent. And a lot of our actors – well, not lots of them, but a fair chunk of our actors – are speaking languages as their characters that they don’t speak themselves or are encountering pronunciations for the first time. And those have been very joyful conversations where the actors have either gone, “Okay, I’m going to go away and talk to someone for whom this is a language that they speak, I’m going to listen to them.” Or they’ve come in and quite rightly gone, “Okay, well, my character says this, but actually this is a second language for them,” or “This is not originally where they come from.” And being able to work through the idea of – horrible, horrible cliché – that this region of the Indian Ocean is a melting pot of lots of different people from lots of different places who have not just a primary cultural language but a secondary and a tertiary and a fourth-ery one, I don’t know what the – quarter?
APRIL
I don’t think any of our characters are from one singular place or, you know, haven’t left it to meld into other cultures or things like that.
RAFAELLA
Yeah, absolutely. You get lovely character notes where you get to hear a character speaking a language and it is what is supposed to be one of their first languages, and then another character speaking the same and you know that it’s not their first language, so that’s going to affect, you know – do they know how to pronounce this actually “accurately,” to go back to that word.
NEMO
One of my favourite terms is, it’s a term I learned from my South East Asian friends, called Rojak languages. And so Rojak is a salad in Indonesia and it’s like, loads of – it’s like a mixed salad that you mix it together. And so a Rojak language is like a language, maybe used in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, which has so many, again, “melting pot” languages where everything is tossed together into a beautiful tasty salad as it should.
And some people, you know, learning languages and trying to recall languages, trying to find your identity when you’re taken out of that, that’s all like – diaspora is obviously a big thing in this, yeah. It’s just really exciting that I got to write this.
– I say, as if I didn’t pitch it, but. (laughs)
RAFAELLA
That does segue into something lovely that I’ve been thinking about in relation to these ideas of authenticity and accuracy, which is a third word that sometimes comes into this conversation is “universality.” Things that are universal. Which is a really tricky and I think more-problematic-than-not concept, because very often it – everything gets collapsed into the identity and experience of being a white western man and those experiences are “universal.” Hamlet gets to be universal, but there are certain things that I…
Just thinking about the diasporic experiences, my family is Jewish on one side and Italian on the other side and when I was writing the beginning of episode 2 when Siva is with his Nani, that is based on – Nani as I wrote her is based on my Italian nana. And it’s a scene of cooking and it’s a scene of a grandmother figure being like, “Oh God, you’ve got no respect for me.”
[LAUGHTER]
There are some shapes of experience, I think, that carry across different diasporas and different global experiences. And it’s been absolutely similar to what you were saying, April, to get in touch with those and go, “Oh God, I really do access my two cultures through food.”
APRIL
Yeah, yeah.
NEMO
Yeah, food is clearly so intrinsic.
RAFAELLA
So I want to go back and pick up on something else earlier you said, Nemo, because we’re definitely writing ideas of colonisation in this slightly alternate-history universe but that is a hair’s breadth away from our own universe. So I wondered if we could also talk a little more about queer characters within this universe – but also I know as well that we’ve definitely got neurodiverse characters in this show, without necessarily the language of saying that they’re neurodiverse, and to talk about that.
NEMO
Yeah, it’s been really interesting because – like, I know that it’s going to be fairly obvious that a lot of these characters are autistic and that is on purpose. And it’s really hard when you don’t have the in-universe language to talk about those things. Noor is written down on their character sheet as being non-binary, but that’s never said as a word on the show. And it’s not that I think that these words didn’t exist at the time or these concepts didn’t exist at the time, but it has just been a really interesting conversation about language and how we use it.
And asexuality is a big thing that I’ve been thinking about in these characters as well. Transness, I mean, Elizabeth in the first episode: Elizabeth doesn’t use any pronouns and it’s really hard when I as a human being, and in a lot of my writing that is set in the contemporary period, would have characters just say “My pronouns are they/them” or “I don’t use pronouns.” In this I had Elizabeth be like, “Call me ‘Doctor,’” and that is respected.
And it was foundational when we were creating this bible – I was like, we’re never going to have a transphobic hate crime happen on air. Noor is gendered in a certain way in an episode; there’s never going to be like, “Oh, you’re a trans person, and so I’m attacking you for that.” Same way for race. I mean, it’s hard because we’re talking about colonisation and all of the characters in this, again, alternate time period have to consider what race they are because that’s the world that they live in.
APRIL
I think that brings up a really good point too, because one of the things that we’ve discussed a few times and I think part of why we wanted to add in these Below Decks context episodes, is so that we can talk about these things that we don’t necessarily want to talk explicitly about in the series, for multiple reasons. Because I know that there’s a lot of ideas that we’ve had for the characters and a lot of things that we want to explore, particularly around race and gender, that if we were to actually explore it authentically within the series could end up retraumatising some people. So we have to take some creative liberties in order to make sure that we’re being able to make something that is entertaining and something that people can engage with while still not overlooking the real aspects that would have existed around trans identity and racial identities, particularly in exploring those within colonial context.
And we, I think, have done a lot to try to make sure that we’re addressing them without being harmful, and I think that that’s something that we’ve been really active about making sure that we’re focusing on throughout the whole of the series. But I think that it’s been really good that it’s been a conscious decision.
RAFAELLA
I think where both of you have found the balance absolutely beautifully is that these queer characters get to live their queer lives.
NEMO
Yeah.
RAFAELLA
It’s not certain TV shows I could name, they are like, “It’s so beautiful because, you see, we imply it but we never say it.” And it’s like, yeah, so we never get to see queer characters doing anything queer. And the absence of contemporary language in the show is going back to this idea of accuracy. Maybe someone wouldn’t have used the term non-binary, they probably would have used something not dissimilar to that.
APRIL
There are some characters that are coming up that I think that they’re addressed really well with like, “I have specific non-binary-esque pronouns.”
RAFAELLA
We also have characters – I can’t talk, I can’t name names – but we have characters also who, in future episodes, we will see them in romantic and/or sexual relationships with people of the same gender. And when we’re not using specific words from the LGBTQ+ acronym there is – I’m very hesitant over using the word “freedom” because I feel like it’s an argument that’s used against in a queerphobic way – but there is a lovely, very transgressive and freeing about having a cast of characters who are like, “Yeah, I mean, I’m just going around living my gay life,” you know? And it’s there and it’s on the page and it’s in the podcast.
APRIL
Yeah, and that I think that that’s – from the Rusty Quill perspective, when we were actually looking at what series we want to commission and what we want to look into, one of the things we were particularly drawn to this is like, a) particularly, Nemo, how you spoke about the project and your obvious knowledge and research that went into it, but also that concept of the fact that – there absolutely were queer people in the 17-1800s, and being able to actually explore what those lives might have been like or could have been like, is just a really great thing to actually get a chance to highlight and show a little bit more light on.
RAFAELLA
That’s actually a very nice segue into – I want to go back to asking you a specific historical question, Nemo, from your research, which is the time period we’re in is a little bit of an amalgam of almost a span of a couple of centuries but it just suddenly occurred to me. Is there something that, I mean, a lot of the – you can absolutely challenge this from a historical perspective – that a lot of the very, very rigorous binary Christian moral code colonisation is a Victorian product, and we’re slightly pre-Victorian insofar as we’re matching ourselves up to actual periods in history. Did that come into it at all?
NEMO
Vaguely. So there’s a concept called “Pax Britannica” and it’s a period between 1815 and 1914, which is Britain’s imperial century. And so vaguely in my head this show has aspects of it that are on the early side of that, so 1815 to 1840. There’s no specific date that really it’s set, but I would say 1840s is kind of where we are.
And it’s really, sometimes dates are really – have to be very specific because of things like, “when was slavery abolished.” Like that is – well, no singular date, “when was slavery abolished” is a really difficult question. It’s very long, it’s a very big question. But there are certain dates where a law went to pass and things like that and I didn’t really want us to be having to fit things into like, “This specific thing happened on August the 4th, 1833,” but equally things that really excite me are things like stamps.
RAFAELLA
Nemo, I have friends T-shirt, I have friends.
APRIL
I have friends, and just pictures of stamps.
[LAUGHTER]
NEMO
Okay, but – oh my God, best story, one of the first things that I did when I was researching this thing was that I was – you know one of those websites that you find and it is clearly made in the early 2000s and it has got loads of little pictures?
RAFAELLA
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the abandoned GeoCities, the ancient ruins of the internet.
NEMO
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s these stamp collectors that I found who had loads of original stamps from the 1830s and stuff like that. And so I was like, “No way that this email still works. Clearly this has been abandoned hundreds of years ago and these people are probably dead.” But I emailed this really nice couple and was like, “Hey, if I was trying to send a letter from here to here in this time period what stamp would they have used?” And they got back to me in like an hour and they were like, “Hi, we don’t have the exact answer to this but we’re going to look through every book right now, we’ll come back to you in a couple of hours.” And literally four hours later they were like, “Here’s the exact stamp they would use, it’s in this book, here’s a scanned copy that we’ve found for you, I hope that answers your question, please let us know if there’s anything else that you want.” And it’s just these people who love stamps and it just really excites me and –
APRIL
There have been some delightful people working on it.
NEMO
Yeah, yeah, for sure. In the series you won’t see the exact stamp that I am talking about, but know that I know what stamps there are on the letters that are being sent.
APRIL
That is a very important behind-the-scenes fact.
NEMO
Yeah, know that I am clear which characters are autistic and asexual and what stamps are used.
APRIL
These are all very important information. (laughs)
RAFAELLA
I also feel like, again, going back to our authenticity versus accuracy, I think that exposes that they are different things – exactly the fact as you said, Nemo, that we’re not having to go, “Well this law was enacted on this date and I have worked out it’s exactly three years and seven months since that happened in the timeline of the show.” But what we do have is stamps, but what we also have is so many of the communities that are represented in the show are real historical communities of people – often mixed communities of people – that came together. And again, I’m being vague on purpose because this potentially contains spoilers for future episodes – but mixed communities of people that came together, that lived together all through the last few hundred years. And being able to place them side-by-side allows you to make a story out of them in a way that didactic bowing to “no, it’s our universe and these are the dates” wouldn’t allow so much.
NEMO
Even stories these days – like, it’s almost a trope of itself nowadays that you have this single person of colour friend who is by themself in a white friendship group and families. Especially media that does explore diaspora and stuff like that, there have been some really beautiful films and TV shows that have come out recently that are own-voice shows. Everything Everywhere All at Once recently made me cry quite a lot, it was very relevant to me. But I have never seen really a family like mine, which: I have family that are Singaporean Tamil who live in Vietnam who are mixed-race, and I have family who are Japanese from all over Japan, and I have family who are white Australian, and I have family who are Hong Kong Chinese, and my school – when I was in secondary school – my friendship group was majority Afro-Caribbean second generation or Sri Lankan second generation or Gujarati, and in that friendship group I was the whitest person.
I really just wanted to have a friendship/family group that was like mine, and to have these people have failures and it not just be a like, “here are these glorious people of colour who can do no wrong.” They get on each other’s nerves and they piss each other off and they don’t know how to interact with each other a lot of the time. But fundamentally I do think that they do love each other and they’re learning how to love each other in a world that hasn’t allowed them to love themselves. And I really wanted them to support each other, or maybe because they’ve never been supported by other people and – yeah, I mean, that was why I created this show.
APRIL
I’m getting all emotional from this again, I love listening to you talk about this series. I’m loving this too because everyone is getting an insight into, like – we’ve been working on this series for a year and a half now, I think, Nemo, it was two Christmases ago or whatever that we actually first started talking. And it’s just the passion that you have for these characters, and that’s what makes them authentic, that’s what brings the reality to them, because they’re real to you and they’re – hopefully to our audiences as they’re listening to it, it becomes real to them too.
NEMO
I have friends, their names are Alestes, Baker, Noor.
[LAUGHTER]
They’re real and I know every fact about them and, in fact, I have been told that I need to make my show bible shorter, because –
APRIL
I do – this is sort of a side note, but I do digital art and stuff and so I follow a lot of digital artists and I think they get that way about their OCs sometimes, their original characters. They’ll be like, “No, I know everything about them and they’re wonderful and I need everyone else to love them too!” And yeah, but I think these characters have some real life to them and I also love them very much.
NEMO
Yeah, I’m really excited. I hope that there will be people who enjoy these characters as much as I do. And working with Raf and Morgan as well was so beautiful because they have developed a lot since I first wrote them, and handing them over to Raf and Morgan, I wasn’t scared at all, because I love them both as writers and the way that these characters have flourished under them as well. Raf and Morgan’s episodes, I’m like – I read them and I was like, “Wow, these are my favourite episodes.” And the character journeys that they go on and stuff, yeah! And so I’m really excited to see how listeners will interact with this as well and how these characters will flourish in fandom. I’m really excited for that.
RAFAELLA
At the risk of this becoming too much of a love-in, I will just say when you asked me to come on board with this series I was absolutely thrilled and I was a little bit scared because I was like, “Oh, I really feel like I’m entering into a universe that I don’t know anything about apart from ‘I love pirates,’” and as soon as I read the show bible I was like, “Oh, I know who they are, I know who these characters are.” And this has been one of the most fun writing jobs I’ve had, honestly, because – yeah. They are just so clear and alive in who they are.
And then – also then having the privilege of getting to be the director of the series as well, getting to see new things in the characters that the actors bring to them. There’s this whole side of Noor that Gigi, who plays them, has brought to them, which – where it has almost had me, only in my episodes that I’ve written, just rewriting little bits on-the-fly kind of thing like, “Oh yeah, could you say this instead?”
APRIL
Getting to watch the actors and how much they’ve been able to build on and put into those characters has been really great, and this casting process – circle back because I think we talked a little bit too about casting – was like, the casting process for this took a long time, probably twice as long as our normal casting processes, because we really wanted to make sure that we found the right people for it. I know Nemo did a really great job of us just sitting down and being like, “No, I think we can get a better person for this role,” and I think the cast that we’ve had and getting to watch them bring those characters to life and getting to watch what you’ve been able to pull out of them, Raf, has been an absolute treasure.
Ha! “Treasure.”
[LAUGHTER]
But yeah, I know – Vic, who plays Baker, I know that was one of the ones where we actually went in and changed a little bit of Baker’s backstory, because Vic was so right for that character and we wanted to make sure that that was still authentic for that person to be playing that character. And I think that was probably one of the ones that obviously it’s going to be touched on and stuff later, but yeah. We’ve changed some directions with where we were going with some of the characters to make sure that it fit with the people who were playing them, and that’s been a really great thing to get to be a part of.
NEMO
And those casting things made me go back to my research and think about, push it further. And I am really excited to think about these characters again and to develop them further and – yeah, it’s just so cool to work on this show.
APRIL
These episodes are just going to be like, “I love working on this show.”
NEMO
Yup!
RAFAELLA
Just to add another one in, when we were recording today and one of our cast members – this is just to give you listeners a sense of how many happy tears have been shed in this production – one of our actors went, “Yeah, so I was reading the script the other day, I was in bits.” So it’s spreading, it’s spreading through the production. Everyone is very emotional all the time.
APRIL
Yes, I’m looking forward to making more of these.
NEMO
Oh God, agh! It’s so cool I get to write this show, I’m so – and I mean, this is my first real credit. And I was so scared throughout this process because as a writer, have written things before and have been in some writer’s rooms before, but I’ve never been the showrunner before. I’ve never created – I’ve never had a show that I’ve created have so many people work on it. And, yeah, it’s just really exciting. That’s not what this episode of Below Decks is about, but I have learnt a lot, I have grown a lot and I’m really excited. And thank you to Rusty Quill for seeing someone who had basically no production credits and being like, “Yeah, we’ll put time, effort, and money behind this.”
APRIL
Thank you for pitching it to us.
RAFAELLA
You are an extremely generous showrunner and also have not yet got annoyed at me messaging you going, “Yeah, so this bit of currency, do you say it like this or like this, what’s this word, Nemo?!”
NEMO
Oh, the currency, oh God. Like talking about authenticity and accuracy, my God, if anyone who has a special interest in currency wants to, frickin’ come on board. Jesus.
APRIL
There’s been some very niche topics that have come up in development.
I have a question for Raf, if you don’t mind? I was going to ask, in terms of us talking about authenticity and what that means – you’ve done a lot of work in bringing under-represented characters to stage and to life and things like that. So what does that mean to you then, in terms of authenticity of the characters and from a director’s perspective, or from working with these performers who are playing these characters? You wrote a couple of the episodes and now you’re moving to directing, so you talked a little bit about changing some of the lines of the ones that you’ve read, but now that it’s actually – we’ve recorded quite a bit of the series now – I’m wondering your thoughts on how that process has evolved, particularly moving from writing to directing?
RAFAELLA
Well, the thing I’m always interested in, I think as a writer and as a director, is surprise. Which goes hand-in-hand with the idea of suspense, but I like to think of it as surprise. I like the moment when a scene or a line or a character just swerves in a way that you’re not expecting them to swerve. I think there’s a real pleasure as an audience member in being able to predict the actions of a character only so far. So if you can predict some of their actions it means that you know them, you can anticipate their responses to things, which means you understand them on some level, no matter what kind of character they are. And then the moment where they step away from what you expect them to do becomes all the more exciting.
And I think that is really the guiding principle that I have used, especially in bringing under-represented characters to stage, because that’s – or to audio, as the case may be. It’s exactly as Nemo said: we have characters here who are fighting against the stereotypes that they are perceived as, or even if it’s not as conscious as that, live in a world that is happy to be reductive about them. So the idea of surprise, the idea of stepping away from what you anticipate that someone is going to do, I think becomes even more important for these characters. And actually that works both ways, that’s both – on a meta level you might come into a piece like this and go, “Oh, I bet they are going to subvert expectations and da da da.” And that’s what leads to what you were thinking about, “Look at this flawless cast of people of colour, like, look at these flawless queer characters,” but actually, no – sometimes the thing that is a surprise is they make a wrong choice for themselves or for someone else.
So yeah. And so that’s a really long answer, but that’s the thing that I’m most interested in dramatically, and it’s the thing that serves these characters really well, just finding an unexpected colour.
APRIL
Their flaws make them authentic.
RAFAELLA
Their flaws make them authentic. But also just the unexpected colours in them, sort of going – it’s great to give a character who maybe is usually more serious and just throw them a very funny little line where you’re like, “Oh, that’s another little side to that person I didn’t know was there.” That to me feels very true to life and is very nice to discover.
I think we shall draw things to a close, this has been a lovely and unexpectedly self-gratifying first episode.
[LAUGHTER]
NEMO
Good job, us.
RAFAELLA
Well done, us.
APRIL
Well done.
NEMO
We’re so excellent and great and we can do no wrong and actually all of our characters and all of us are flawless and no one can criticise at all, so.
APRIL
I actually like to think that we made the opposite argument – the characters are flawed, and I think the important thing to leave off with is that we’re not going to get everything right. We’ve put a lot of effort into this series to make sure that we can get things as accurate or as authentic as possible, given the fact that it is fiction and it is these characters’ truths. But we aren’t speaking for any particular people, we’re just trying to bring the stories that we know to life and make those real.
RAFAELLA
I hope what we have shown is that if you bring us some new information we’ll grow what we have.
APRIL
Yeah. And maybe it’ll be about stamps.
RAFAELLA
And maybe it’ll be stamps.
NEMO
I, every episode from now on, it’s just going to be about stamps – I’m going to – that’s a Nemo promise.
[LAUGHTER]
APRIL
We’ll start talking about a Patreon thing. Maybe we can give you your own stamp show on Patreon?
NEMO
Please do, yeah.
RAFAELLA
Let’s bring episode one to a close there. Episode one of Below Decks: in which Nemo has friends.
[LAUGHTER]
NEMO
God, I am never escaping this. So yeah.
RAFAELLA
Goodbye from me, Raf, and just… goodbye!
NEMO
Bye!
APRIL
Goodbye!
RAFAELLA
Bye!
NEMO
Thanks for being my friends, guys!
[LAUGHTER]
[SHOW THEME – OUTRO]
SIVA
Trice Forgotten is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. The series is created by Nemo Martin and directed by Rafaella Marcus. Today’s episode featured Rafaella Marcus, Nemo Martin, April Sumner, and was edited by Nico Vetesse and Catherine Rinella.
Trice Forgotten is produced by Ian Geers and production manager Natasha Johnston, with executive producers Alexander J Newall and April Sumner. To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit rustyquill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us @therustyquill, visit us on Facebook or email us at mail@rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.