Questions appropriated from an interview with Patrick McGoohan by writer/TV host Warner Troyer that was originally broadcast on TVOntario . The interview was conducted for the Ontario Educational Communications Authority with the participation of a studio audience in 1977.
Answers - circa 2006.
TROYER: I guess the first thing I should tell you is that your guest and mine is Patrick McGoohan. Mr. McGoohan, known familiarly to his friends as No. 6, was the creative force behind, the executive producer of, and in several cases the script writer of a series called "The Prisoner," which appeared on television a number of times, not least notably on this network. Mr. McGoohan has come here from Los Angeles to meet you and talk to you and to me. And to meet a group of Prisoner, ah, club groupies, some of them from Seneca College which has been operating a course based on the series, some of them from OECA, and some other people, and we're going to talk about "The Prisoner" and I suppose the obvious first question is: Where the hell did that idea come from? How'd you get started?
SARAH: Actually, I'm not really Patrick McGoohan. To tell you the truth, I watched a lot of "The Avengers," but not so much "The Prisoner." I'm familiar with it. I know it has a lot of fans, like the "groupies" of Seneca College. So did "The Avengers," I guess. Whenever I told people I watched "The Avengers" they'd ask if I also watched "The Prisoner"....
TROYER: Just that? With T.V.? With society, or you?
SARAH: Um, I watched it with a T.V....
TROYER: "Danger Man."
SARAH: No - it was called "The Avengers."
TROYER: Was that a personal thing in terms of your reaction to society or was it more of an observation? Do you feel you're being...
SARAH: Actually, I just stayed up late a lot in high school, and one night I saw on PBS that there was this cool old show in black and white at, like, midnight called "The Avengers." And after "The Avengers" was over, came "Star Hustler," with Jack Horkheimer, which was great! The theme song was that Debussy song. I always think of that when I hear that song. Then after that the station would go off the air for the night with the national anthem and the flag waving.
TROYER: You didn't initially want to do 17 films?
SARAH: 17 films? I guess I would watch 17 episodes - wait, are we talking about "The Avengers" or "The Prisoner"? Because I know there are 17 episodes of "The Prisoner."
TROYER: But you did ten in two days? Ten outlines?
SARAH: No, I would watch "The Avengers" once a week... on Sundays.
TROYER: How would you have described or explained the concept of the series to those writers, the first time you sat down with them, what did you tell them?
SARAH: You must be talking about "The Prisoner" now. I would say that it's about a guy who wakes up a prisoner on a desert island, with all his stuff. And every time he tries to escape, a big white ball chases him down.
TROYER: What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...
SARAH: It's funny, actually, when I graduated from high school I started working with a couple of screenwriters who were supposed to adapt "The Prisoner" for film, and I did a bunch of research to inspire what the Village was like. They wanted different prison households to be essentially stuck in time from the decade at which they were imprisoned.
TROYER: To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?
SARAH: Oh, it wasn't so bad. The one screenwriter of the partnership that I mostly worked with was pretty nice. And I liked hanging out in the library. This was before the internet was so prevalent.
TROYER: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
SARAH: Well.... It was a prison, right?
TROYER: Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)
SARAH: No, not really. It's just a show.
TROYER: But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?
SARAH: Um. Sure.
TROYER: How much psychic attrition is there, spiritual attrition in not rebelling? How much do you give away or lose? How high is the cost of not rebelling every time? Not complaining every time?
SARAH: Well, you could argue that when you feel like rebelling, perhaps the thing to do is really to just consider it sticking to your guns. Rebelling sounds so juvenile. When I feel indignified, I think the best thing is just to let that be known, and why, and to let the indignifier know that I don't deserve that kind of treatment.
TROYER: Do you have ulcers?
SARAH: No.
TROYER: Bad ones?
SARAH: No, not at all. I get stomach aches sometimes.
TROYER: How many scripts did you write? Your name was on two.
SARAH: I wrote three scripts.
TROYER: So how many all together?
SARAH: Three. Two in college and one after. Well, not including the short ones. I wrote about 4 or 5 shorts too.
TROYER: Which ones? The last one...
SARAH: The features were: "Ohio," "Dewlaps and Bag Balm" and an untitled one I worked on with those aforementioned writers.
TROYER: What's your response to what could really only be adequately described as a "cult" which has grown up around the series, a kind of mystique about it, here and in Europe?
SARAH: It's so mod and ahead of it's time. There's a very retro cool factor to the show.
TROYER: They were angry?
SARAH: Who?
TROYER: Why? Why were they angry?
SARAH: Who are you talking about?
TROYER: It was themselves.
SARAH: Oh.
TROYER: D'ya know what's really interesting, to me, is a number of my friends and colleagues who watched the entire series told me, after the last show, that they were angry because they hadn't found out who No. 1 was. That went by quickly and they refused to acknowledge it.
SARAH: I can imagine that would be frustrating. But isn't it a trick question?
TROYER: What is your response to all the analysis and all the philosophizing and criticism of the series? People have tried to make so much of it and to find so many levels of meaning, to parse it in so many directions.
SARAH: Yeah, that sort of comes with the territory of something becoming a cult fave.
TROYER: (Chuckling) Or more pompous?
SARAH: I guess it's the pompous part of something becoming a cult fave.
TROYER: Some questions...over here...
Girl: How did you feel about the response to "The Prisoner" when it was first shown in Britain?
SARAH: I wasn't actually born yet.
TROYER: Did you get any special kind of response from politicians, from bureaucrats, people in the kind of corporations we all know and hate?
SARAH: I don't know....
TROYER: Uh-huh. Was there any one that was more fun for you than the other? Was it fun playing a Western?...a western hero for a few...(SARAH: I, ah...) a few scenes?
SARAH: That sounds fun.
TROYER: It was harmless...
SARAH: I'm sure.
TROYER: Can you make a decent creative enterprise, build one, in any medium, without building it on several levels at once? However much of it is conscious or unconscious?
SARAH: That's a very complicated question... build a creative enterprise on many levels? I think I consciously build creative enterprises on many levels at once, but even more levels arise from my unconscious as I proceed.
TROYER: "Rover."
SARAH: What?
TROYER: Did you really?
SARAH: Did I?
TROYER: So you'd lose a lot of scenes, then, when you were shooting in a boat...
SARAH: Oh, I'm sure that was tough, yeah.
Boy: What interested me was the style in which it was done and the whimsy and the hundreds of little touches, but from what you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been accidents. You know, the white balloon was a accident and you happened upon the Village...
SARAH: You mean the big white ball that rolls out into the ocean?
Boy: And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.
SARAH: Incredibly.
Boy: No, but the little touches...
SARAH: I'm with you.
Boy: But I haven't seen them come very often in any other series.
SARAH: No? No, probably not.
Boy: And the style of the way...
SARAH: VERY stylish.
TROYER: Was it a series, do you think, which had an appeal, a kind of narrow-gauge appeal, chiefly to people in the upper twenty percent of the intelligence quotient bracket or whatever?
SARAH: Oh, uh, yes definitely. I mean, anything where the main characters' names are numbers.....
TROYER: Yeah, I meant that.
SARAH: Uh huh, exactly.
Second Boy: One analogy that comes up, from literature, is with epic poetry, or with an epic. And "The Prisoner" seems to have all the qualities that belong to an epic, including the kind of structure which you ended up with: the thing that began with seven parts and ended with seventeen.
SARAH: Well, when you've got a good thing going....
Second Boy: There have been a few peculiar epic works which have done that sort of thing or been on the way, Spencer's "Faerie Queene" for instance, or Tennyson's "Idylls of the Kings" ..."Idylls of the King" which became a twelve-part non-epic with all the properties and qualities of an epic. I have one question based on that perhaps peculiar observation, and that is: one of the figures in some of the epics, like the "Faerie Queene," is the dwarf who accompanies Una and is the Redcrosse Knight where the idea for Angelo Muscat come from?
SARAH: Oh, sure.
Second Boy: Is there a literary image...
SARAH: Oh. Yeah.
Second Boy: I was just curious, because there were so many images of all...of all the figures that are in the series that are...that have literary connections, whether of not they're deliberate...(SARAH: Yeah.)...deliberately connected or not doesn't really matter, does it? There might be an element...
SARAH: Totally. There's totally a LOT of literature in it.
Second Boy: No, doesn't matter at all.
SARAH: Oh. It does.
Third Boy: Mr. McGoohan, my question deals with religion.
SARAH: .... Yeah?
Third Boy: I understand, in reading a little about you, that you're a very religious man, and my question pertains to "Fall Out." I have interpreted a lot of the acts as being...having this content. I'm thinking specifically of the crucifixion of the two rebels, of when their arms are drawn apart, the temptation of No. 6 by the President of the Village, of the temptation of Christ...
SARAH: No, actually, I'm not very religious.
Third Boy: ...."Drybones," all of that. First of all, would you agree with my idea that that is intentional? That it is...
SARAH: "Drybones"?
Third Boy: When I speak of religion, I mean a moral attitude towards life.
SARAH: Oh, OK. Yes, I suppose there is some relevance there, definitely.
Third Boy: OK, then, is it fair to say that No. 6 draws upon that? Is that the source of his defense? Is that how he gets up in the morning and faces another day in the Village?
SARAH: No. He just gets up and goes about his business. If there are parallels to religion, that's because the stories of religion are archetypal - Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Islamic, etc. Depends on the tone.
Third Boy: Would you say that there is a distinct lack in the rest of the villagers? Are they soulless beings?
SARAH: Oh. I forgot to mention Scientologists. There are soulless archetypes in religious as well. Not that that has anything to do with Scientologists.
TROYER: I used to think that television commercials were spiritually healthy because they made us skeptical and that that was probably a very good thing to learn very early on.
SARAH: That's very interesting. And that is an incredibly positive spin on a horrid necessity to keep the world of television alight. That's like saying getting a stomach flu for three days every week is necessary for us to enjoy life.
Fourth Boy: There's one sequence you do with Leo McKern where he says, "I'll kill you." You say, "I'll die," and he says, "You're dead." Is that a figure of speech or was there an underlying thing happening there?
SARAH: Who's Leo McKern? Um, that sounds pretty good. I'd like to see that episode.
Fourth Boy: Yeah, 'Once Upon a Time'.
SARAH: ... in the future.
TROYER: Much as he cracked in that final episode.
SARAH: Whattaya mean?
TROYER: I was wondering about how much intensity there was in that. I know that acting is always an enormously intense experience but in that head-on two hander where there was so much dynamic pressure. Obviously, it was real.
SARAH: I'm sure there was some acting going on.
TROYER: Were you a different person when you came out the other end of that series?
SARAH: I think I need to see all seventeen episodes to come out the other end.
TROYER: Beyond that?
SARAH: Well, maybe I'll have dinner or something.
TROYER: It wasn't purely psychoanalysis?
SARAH: A good show might be able to teach something about life to you, but it's all in one's own interpretation. Certain parts of any good story speak to different individuals in different ways. With these morsels of one sided communication, we grow.
TROYER: What about the notions that some actors, some people in other creative endeavors have, that we all have a finite bank of energy that each time one brings some of it up there's a little less left for next time, or for the other end of the road.
SARAH: No, no, no. That is not true at all. You're talking about selling out. Selling out is simply when one gets to a certain point in their life and everyone is blowing so much smoke up their rear it's hard to judge one's own work. It's not like you run out of ideas. If that were true we'd have used everything up years, millennia, ago. Staying fresh and innovative takes a special sort of strength to self-edit creatively.
TROYER: So the creative urge is a muscle, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets.
SARAH: Oh, that too. Yes, if you cave to those who just want to curry favor with praise, you are losing that muscle.
Fifth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, when you began "The Prisoner," you began it in a decade in which a lot of people were used to secret agents. You very neatly saw the next decade coming. I thing you saw Watergate; the enemy within as opposed to the enemy without. I don't know if you can answer this, but if you were going to do the series again and you had to look aged to the 80's and you were thinking in terms of what you see as being the real enemy, not the storybook enemy but the enemy that's really going to hassle us. If you were going to look into the 80's now, what would you look to?
SARAH: I see a lot of hairspray, leg warmers and fluorescent colors.
Fifth Boy: Do you think maybe there's going to be a strong popular reaction against "Progress" in the future?
SARAH: No way. Progress is unstoppable. I used to wonder that too. But then I had a conversation about it with my father and he said something that has always stuck with me. He said that progress is cornucopia-shaped, with more progress comes even more progress, expanding outward.
Sixth Boy: We tend to view the threat, the Village there, as sort of a thing as something external like Madison Avenue, the media. How responsible are we for accepting this? Where do we become involved in being "unfree"?
SARAH: By all means, please, do as much as you can to prevent being "unfree." If you feel unjustly "unfree" you should do something about it. Personally, I don't like the idea of mainstream advertising very much, but then sometimes it amuses me. I end up avoiding and ignoring it as much as possible unless it catches my fancy like a short film might. But I dream of a world where there is no mainstream advertising - where it is considered old fashioned and plain wrong to erect a billboard in front a perfectly good view. I have not, however, dreamt up the way to enact this dream yet.
Sixth Boy: Did you regard the Village as an external thing or as something that we carry around with us all the time?
SARAH: I think the fact that we find out that Number One is the main character in the end (oops, did I spoil it?) speaks to the latter.
TROYER: Do we?
SARAH: Some do. Sure.
TROYER: Well, I know who the idiot is in mine.
SARAH: In your... what?
Seventh Boy: Is No. 1 the evil side of man's nature?
SARAH: Oh, come on. You expect me to answer that? Try again....
TROYER: Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?
SARAH: Well, I guess I'm not the only one spoiling the ending. Um, did I know? No, actually I, personally, was not born when these series were written.
TROYER: When did you find out?
SARAH: I think it was sometime after everyone kept asking me if I ever watched "The Prisoner," during that stretch where I was watching "The Avengers" all the time. I looked into it a bit and found out what the show was about.
So.
No more questions?
OK.
Good night.
Questions Copyright ©1977 Warner Troyer for the Ontario Educational Communications Authority.
Answers - circa 2006.
TROYER: I guess the first thing I should tell you is that your guest and mine is Patrick McGoohan. Mr. McGoohan, known familiarly to his friends as No. 6, was the creative force behind, the executive producer of, and in several cases the script writer of a series called "The Prisoner," which appeared on television a number of times, not least notably on this network. Mr. McGoohan has come here from Los Angeles to meet you and talk to you and to me. And to meet a group of Prisoner, ah, club groupies, some of them from Seneca College which has been operating a course based on the series, some of them from OECA, and some other people, and we're going to talk about "The Prisoner" and I suppose the obvious first question is: Where the hell did that idea come from? How'd you get started?
SARAH: Actually, I'm not really Patrick McGoohan. To tell you the truth, I watched a lot of "The Avengers," but not so much "The Prisoner." I'm familiar with it. I know it has a lot of fans, like the "groupies" of Seneca College. So did "The Avengers," I guess. Whenever I told people I watched "The Avengers" they'd ask if I also watched "The Prisoner"....
TROYER: Just that? With T.V.? With society, or you?
SARAH: Um, I watched it with a T.V....
TROYER: "Danger Man."
SARAH: No - it was called "The Avengers."
TROYER: Was that a personal thing in terms of your reaction to society or was it more of an observation? Do you feel you're being...
SARAH: Actually, I just stayed up late a lot in high school, and one night I saw on PBS that there was this cool old show in black and white at, like, midnight called "The Avengers." And after "The Avengers" was over, came "Star Hustler," with Jack Horkheimer, which was great! The theme song was that Debussy song. I always think of that when I hear that song. Then after that the station would go off the air for the night with the national anthem and the flag waving.
TROYER: You didn't initially want to do 17 films?
SARAH: 17 films? I guess I would watch 17 episodes - wait, are we talking about "The Avengers" or "The Prisoner"? Because I know there are 17 episodes of "The Prisoner."
TROYER: But you did ten in two days? Ten outlines?
SARAH: No, I would watch "The Avengers" once a week... on Sundays.
TROYER: How would you have described or explained the concept of the series to those writers, the first time you sat down with them, what did you tell them?
SARAH: You must be talking about "The Prisoner" now. I would say that it's about a guy who wakes up a prisoner on a desert island, with all his stuff. And every time he tries to escape, a big white ball chases him down.
TROYER: What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...
SARAH: It's funny, actually, when I graduated from high school I started working with a couple of screenwriters who were supposed to adapt "The Prisoner" for film, and I did a bunch of research to inspire what the Village was like. They wanted different prison households to be essentially stuck in time from the decade at which they were imprisoned.
TROYER: To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?
SARAH: Oh, it wasn't so bad. The one screenwriter of the partnership that I mostly worked with was pretty nice. And I liked hanging out in the library. This was before the internet was so prevalent.
TROYER: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
SARAH: Well.... It was a prison, right?
TROYER: Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)
SARAH: No, not really. It's just a show.
TROYER: But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?
SARAH: Um. Sure.
TROYER: How much psychic attrition is there, spiritual attrition in not rebelling? How much do you give away or lose? How high is the cost of not rebelling every time? Not complaining every time?
SARAH: Well, you could argue that when you feel like rebelling, perhaps the thing to do is really to just consider it sticking to your guns. Rebelling sounds so juvenile. When I feel indignified, I think the best thing is just to let that be known, and why, and to let the indignifier know that I don't deserve that kind of treatment.
TROYER: Do you have ulcers?
SARAH: No.
TROYER: Bad ones?
SARAH: No, not at all. I get stomach aches sometimes.
TROYER: How many scripts did you write? Your name was on two.
SARAH: I wrote three scripts.
TROYER: So how many all together?
SARAH: Three. Two in college and one after. Well, not including the short ones. I wrote about 4 or 5 shorts too.
TROYER: Which ones? The last one...
SARAH: The features were: "Ohio," "Dewlaps and Bag Balm" and an untitled one I worked on with those aforementioned writers.
TROYER: What's your response to what could really only be adequately described as a "cult" which has grown up around the series, a kind of mystique about it, here and in Europe?
SARAH: It's so mod and ahead of it's time. There's a very retro cool factor to the show.
TROYER: They were angry?
SARAH: Who?
TROYER: Why? Why were they angry?
SARAH: Who are you talking about?
TROYER: It was themselves.
SARAH: Oh.
TROYER: D'ya know what's really interesting, to me, is a number of my friends and colleagues who watched the entire series told me, after the last show, that they were angry because they hadn't found out who No. 1 was. That went by quickly and they refused to acknowledge it.
SARAH: I can imagine that would be frustrating. But isn't it a trick question?
TROYER: What is your response to all the analysis and all the philosophizing and criticism of the series? People have tried to make so much of it and to find so many levels of meaning, to parse it in so many directions.
SARAH: Yeah, that sort of comes with the territory of something becoming a cult fave.
TROYER: (Chuckling) Or more pompous?
SARAH: I guess it's the pompous part of something becoming a cult fave.
TROYER: Some questions...over here...
Girl: How did you feel about the response to "The Prisoner" when it was first shown in Britain?
SARAH: I wasn't actually born yet.
TROYER: Did you get any special kind of response from politicians, from bureaucrats, people in the kind of corporations we all know and hate?
SARAH: I don't know....
TROYER: Uh-huh. Was there any one that was more fun for you than the other? Was it fun playing a Western?...a western hero for a few...(SARAH: I, ah...) a few scenes?
SARAH: That sounds fun.
TROYER: It was harmless...
SARAH: I'm sure.
TROYER: Can you make a decent creative enterprise, build one, in any medium, without building it on several levels at once? However much of it is conscious or unconscious?
SARAH: That's a very complicated question... build a creative enterprise on many levels? I think I consciously build creative enterprises on many levels at once, but even more levels arise from my unconscious as I proceed.
TROYER: "Rover."
SARAH: What?
TROYER: Did you really?
SARAH: Did I?
TROYER: So you'd lose a lot of scenes, then, when you were shooting in a boat...
SARAH: Oh, I'm sure that was tough, yeah.
Boy: What interested me was the style in which it was done and the whimsy and the hundreds of little touches, but from what you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been accidents. You know, the white balloon was a accident and you happened upon the Village...
SARAH: You mean the big white ball that rolls out into the ocean?
Boy: And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.
SARAH: Incredibly.
Boy: No, but the little touches...
SARAH: I'm with you.
Boy: But I haven't seen them come very often in any other series.
SARAH: No? No, probably not.
Boy: And the style of the way...
SARAH: VERY stylish.
TROYER: Was it a series, do you think, which had an appeal, a kind of narrow-gauge appeal, chiefly to people in the upper twenty percent of the intelligence quotient bracket or whatever?
SARAH: Oh, uh, yes definitely. I mean, anything where the main characters' names are numbers.....
TROYER: Yeah, I meant that.
SARAH: Uh huh, exactly.
Second Boy: One analogy that comes up, from literature, is with epic poetry, or with an epic. And "The Prisoner" seems to have all the qualities that belong to an epic, including the kind of structure which you ended up with: the thing that began with seven parts and ended with seventeen.
SARAH: Well, when you've got a good thing going....
Second Boy: There have been a few peculiar epic works which have done that sort of thing or been on the way, Spencer's "Faerie Queene" for instance, or Tennyson's "Idylls of the Kings" ..."Idylls of the King" which became a twelve-part non-epic with all the properties and qualities of an epic. I have one question based on that perhaps peculiar observation, and that is: one of the figures in some of the epics, like the "Faerie Queene," is the dwarf who accompanies Una and is the Redcrosse Knight where the idea for Angelo Muscat come from?
SARAH: Oh, sure.
Second Boy: Is there a literary image...
SARAH: Oh. Yeah.
Second Boy: I was just curious, because there were so many images of all...of all the figures that are in the series that are...that have literary connections, whether of not they're deliberate...(SARAH: Yeah.)...deliberately connected or not doesn't really matter, does it? There might be an element...
SARAH: Totally. There's totally a LOT of literature in it.
Second Boy: No, doesn't matter at all.
SARAH: Oh. It does.
Third Boy: Mr. McGoohan, my question deals with religion.
SARAH: .... Yeah?
Third Boy: I understand, in reading a little about you, that you're a very religious man, and my question pertains to "Fall Out." I have interpreted a lot of the acts as being...having this content. I'm thinking specifically of the crucifixion of the two rebels, of when their arms are drawn apart, the temptation of No. 6 by the President of the Village, of the temptation of Christ...
SARAH: No, actually, I'm not very religious.
Third Boy: ...."Drybones," all of that. First of all, would you agree with my idea that that is intentional? That it is...
SARAH: "Drybones"?
Third Boy: When I speak of religion, I mean a moral attitude towards life.
SARAH: Oh, OK. Yes, I suppose there is some relevance there, definitely.
Third Boy: OK, then, is it fair to say that No. 6 draws upon that? Is that the source of his defense? Is that how he gets up in the morning and faces another day in the Village?
SARAH: No. He just gets up and goes about his business. If there are parallels to religion, that's because the stories of religion are archetypal - Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Islamic, etc. Depends on the tone.
Third Boy: Would you say that there is a distinct lack in the rest of the villagers? Are they soulless beings?
SARAH: Oh. I forgot to mention Scientologists. There are soulless archetypes in religious as well. Not that that has anything to do with Scientologists.
TROYER: I used to think that television commercials were spiritually healthy because they made us skeptical and that that was probably a very good thing to learn very early on.
SARAH: That's very interesting. And that is an incredibly positive spin on a horrid necessity to keep the world of television alight. That's like saying getting a stomach flu for three days every week is necessary for us to enjoy life.
Fourth Boy: There's one sequence you do with Leo McKern where he says, "I'll kill you." You say, "I'll die," and he says, "You're dead." Is that a figure of speech or was there an underlying thing happening there?
SARAH: Who's Leo McKern? Um, that sounds pretty good. I'd like to see that episode.
Fourth Boy: Yeah, 'Once Upon a Time'.
SARAH: ... in the future.
TROYER: Much as he cracked in that final episode.
SARAH: Whattaya mean?
TROYER: I was wondering about how much intensity there was in that. I know that acting is always an enormously intense experience but in that head-on two hander where there was so much dynamic pressure. Obviously, it was real.
SARAH: I'm sure there was some acting going on.
TROYER: Were you a different person when you came out the other end of that series?
SARAH: I think I need to see all seventeen episodes to come out the other end.
TROYER: Beyond that?
SARAH: Well, maybe I'll have dinner or something.
TROYER: It wasn't purely psychoanalysis?
SARAH: A good show might be able to teach something about life to you, but it's all in one's own interpretation. Certain parts of any good story speak to different individuals in different ways. With these morsels of one sided communication, we grow.
TROYER: What about the notions that some actors, some people in other creative endeavors have, that we all have a finite bank of energy that each time one brings some of it up there's a little less left for next time, or for the other end of the road.
SARAH: No, no, no. That is not true at all. You're talking about selling out. Selling out is simply when one gets to a certain point in their life and everyone is blowing so much smoke up their rear it's hard to judge one's own work. It's not like you run out of ideas. If that were true we'd have used everything up years, millennia, ago. Staying fresh and innovative takes a special sort of strength to self-edit creatively.
TROYER: So the creative urge is a muscle, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets.
SARAH: Oh, that too. Yes, if you cave to those who just want to curry favor with praise, you are losing that muscle.
Fifth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, when you began "The Prisoner," you began it in a decade in which a lot of people were used to secret agents. You very neatly saw the next decade coming. I thing you saw Watergate; the enemy within as opposed to the enemy without. I don't know if you can answer this, but if you were going to do the series again and you had to look aged to the 80's and you were thinking in terms of what you see as being the real enemy, not the storybook enemy but the enemy that's really going to hassle us. If you were going to look into the 80's now, what would you look to?
SARAH: I see a lot of hairspray, leg warmers and fluorescent colors.
Fifth Boy: Do you think maybe there's going to be a strong popular reaction against "Progress" in the future?
SARAH: No way. Progress is unstoppable. I used to wonder that too. But then I had a conversation about it with my father and he said something that has always stuck with me. He said that progress is cornucopia-shaped, with more progress comes even more progress, expanding outward.
Sixth Boy: We tend to view the threat, the Village there, as sort of a thing as something external like Madison Avenue, the media. How responsible are we for accepting this? Where do we become involved in being "unfree"?
SARAH: By all means, please, do as much as you can to prevent being "unfree." If you feel unjustly "unfree" you should do something about it. Personally, I don't like the idea of mainstream advertising very much, but then sometimes it amuses me. I end up avoiding and ignoring it as much as possible unless it catches my fancy like a short film might. But I dream of a world where there is no mainstream advertising - where it is considered old fashioned and plain wrong to erect a billboard in front a perfectly good view. I have not, however, dreamt up the way to enact this dream yet.
Sixth Boy: Did you regard the Village as an external thing or as something that we carry around with us all the time?
SARAH: I think the fact that we find out that Number One is the main character in the end (oops, did I spoil it?) speaks to the latter.
TROYER: Do we?
SARAH: Some do. Sure.
TROYER: Well, I know who the idiot is in mine.
SARAH: In your... what?
Seventh Boy: Is No. 1 the evil side of man's nature?
SARAH: Oh, come on. You expect me to answer that? Try again....
TROYER: Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?
SARAH: Well, I guess I'm not the only one spoiling the ending. Um, did I know? No, actually I, personally, was not born when these series were written.
TROYER: When did you find out?
SARAH: I think it was sometime after everyone kept asking me if I ever watched "The Prisoner," during that stretch where I was watching "The Avengers" all the time. I looked into it a bit and found out what the show was about.
So.
No more questions?
OK.
Good night.
Questions Copyright ©1977 Warner Troyer for the Ontario Educational Communications Authority.
Wow. Just read this again and I'm blown away by its brilliance. How often does it seem like we're living in a world where the people asking questions don't listen to the answers being supplied? You've really captured something essential (and hilarious) here sugarcakes.
ReplyDeleteI dig this more than the Sinatra one, but contrary to my earlier comments, would love to see some more.
yr spicy soup,
PG