91Èȱ¬

Introduction - The Journey

When Terry Cafolla got on his bike and cycled out to Bangor, Northern Ireland in September 2004, he was searching for an idea for the fourth series of the hit 91Èȱ¬ thriller, Messiah.

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His first idea wasn't coming together so he decided the sea air of County Down might prove inspirational.

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"I was sitting on the beach looking out at the sea in Bangor and it just struck me that I had always wanted to use Dante in something I was writing and this was perfect for Messiah - it was an opportunity to use Dante's structure to look at people's sins and the way they lived their lives.

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"I'd studied Dante at university," he continues, "and I always knew it was a unique metaphor for life.

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"One of the elements of Dante is Contra Passo, where your punishment in hell reflects or mirrors what you have done in your life. It seemed like a really interesting way of looking at how people are punished by how they have sinned. So, people who are inactive in life are never allowed to stop moving in hell," he says.

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"Initially, when the production team sat down to discuss Messiah IV, they wanted to do something slightly different, to write another story," says Cafolla.

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"We quickly arrived at the decision that what makes Messiah so engaging are the dark elements at its core which were so prevalent in the very first series.

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"So we looked at those elements and tried to bring a few of them across into this series… the thriller aspect, Red's deep connection with each victim, and essentially it had to be a story that was dark and gothic but above all else put Red through an emotional hoop."

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It took just six months for Cafolla to write the core scripts for the three-part series - and the idea of using Dante's Inferno as a structure for the drama stemmed from a fascination he developed with the Italian writer during his university days.

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"I read Russian studies, Italian studies in translation and Philosophy at Queen's University. But the Italian studies course only covered four of the 33 cantos (chapters) of Dante's Inferno. It was so engrossing that I went on to read all 33 cantos and there are another 64 to go in the trilogy.

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"There are three books in total: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and they are so graphic, visceral and really very nasty in places - but incredibly absorbing.

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"And the whole series is a metaphor - Dante's journey through life and coming to accept things he has done and pay penance for in Inferno; then his journey through Purgatory; before finally reaching heaven in Paradise."

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Having decided upon Dante's Inferno as his core structure, Cafolla then began constructing the make-up of the characters - and in particular the killer at the heart of the investigation.

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And in true Messiah style, the identity of the killer doesn't become clear until the final scenes.

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"The difficulty in creating a killer character - particularly in Messiah - is to write someone who is capable of the most heinous of crimes but has a strong motive behind their actions… something that moves them out of reality and into another world and in this case the world of Dante," says Cafolla.

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"In creating a killer, I felt their pain had to be very grounded, emotional and real. And a quote I read somewhere 'to break faith with the dead' applies as much to the killer as it does to Red.

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"He is in a unique position where he can't do that - he has to feel their pain and make a connection with the victim and almost live what they went through in order to find the killer."

Producer Peter Norris agrees. "The inclusion of Dante's Inferno is an interesting concept and one which you could end up becoming too literal about - which we have been very conscious of avoiding.

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"The reason why the murderer uses the structure of Dante's Inferno slowly unfolds and becomes entirely credible."

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It was important that the complex nature of the Inferno was explained in a way that an audience unfamiliar with Dante's work could easily comprehend.

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"We cast Harriet Walter as our Dante expert Professor Robb," says Norris, "and she brings the literal academic world into Red's world and blends the two together to provide the background explanations to the Inferno which help Red and the team to piece the murderer's next moves, albeit too late.

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"The scripts were incredibly powerful and hence attracted a superb cast from Hugo Speer, Helen McCrory and Maxine Peake to Beattie Edney, Kika Markham and Adam Kotz - and the trick with Messiah is that anyone could be a suspect, right up to the last minute."

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One of the advantages for Cafolla of working on a

long-running series is that he was already familiar with the key characters of Red, Metcalfe and Duncan Warren, played by Neil Dudgeon.

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"Unlike Holy Cross and other dramas I have written where you are starting from scratch and building characters, I already knew their voices and then built in new characters like DS Vickie Clarke and the new pathologist Helen Price around these core people."

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For Cafolla, the success of Messiah is twofold: the audience's fascination with solving mysteries coupled with the strength of the characters at the centre of the drama.

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"There is a great story at the heart of Messiah and Ken Stott is such a charismatic actor who can do so much with just a look that the audience keep coming back for more. You invest in the characters and thus invest in the story," he says.

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"Red is a tortured soul and is living in his own purgatory, hell, and limbo - as are Vickie and Duncan - and the story exposes their own weaknesses and fears as much as it does the victims of the killer."

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"This allows the director and me to add something to the series as well as adhering to the strengths that it already has."

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Messiah isn't afraid to scare people," he continues. "The subject matter is difficult without being gratuitous but the films don't run away from that and it is one of the few horror dramas around."

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For Norris and the rest of the production team, it was essential that every detail - from prosthetics to pathology - was sought from experts.

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Due to the nature of the murders the pathology advisory team were a crucial source of information to the cast and crew.

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"The killer leaves vital clues on the victims' bodies that are essential to Red's investigation," says Norris.

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"It was important that we got the pathology scenes as realistic as possible and we relied on our advisors for that enormously.

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"Prosthetics are also interesting as they are difficult to pull off due to the nature of television, but our prosthetics team were fantastic. At one stage we had two prosthetic bodies hanging upside down off a railway bridge.

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"We did actually think at one stage that we would talk to acrobats about the possibility of them hanging upside down but we were filming those scenes for 12 hours at a time which was just impossible when people are involved.

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"The bodies are absolutely lifelike and amazingly believable," he adds.

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"We had another scene where we had to film a bee coming out of an actress' nose and we had to match the face to the actress - which was difficult to do because our prosthetics experts had to make a cast of the actress' face and nose which takes a lot of time.

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"The bodies and most of the smaller prosthetic work, like faces and arms, took about five to six weeks to make."

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Filming in public places in London can be difficult at the best of times due to noise, passers-by and other factors - but Norris was pleasantly surprised at how little disruption the hanging bodies caused in North London.

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"Most of our murder sites were quite secluded so we didn't have that many passers-by stopping to ask questions; but under the railway tracks, with our two dummy bodies hanging, a number of people asked what was going on.

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"It was pretty obvious it was a film set with the lights and amount of people, despite our cast being dressed in forensic blue suits, and luckily we had no complaints."