As we have been telling you, there is a new Treasure Island ahead for us this Saturday on Syfy, who is showing the four-hour miniseries all in one night. More about that below. This version bears little resemblance to any recent pirate movie, other than the ship, ocean, and island involvement. We’ll have a review for you a little later.

For now, check out what star Eddie Izzard (Riches, Oceans 13, Mockingbird Lane), Executive Producer Robert Halmi Sr. of RHI (Tin Man, Alice, Neverland), and Syfy Executive Vice President of Programming and Movies Thomas Vitale had to say about the production, during a recent Q&A session with the media, including SciFi Mafia. They started the session with a brief statement by Mr. Halmi:

Robert Halmi Sr.: I first saw Treasure Island in 1935 in Budapest, I was 11 years old. The movie actually was made in ’34, but it took a year to get to Budapest, it was Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. And it made such an impression on me that I really never, never forgot it.

And this remarkable book and movie was remade 30 times by now, it was sequelled and prequelled 20 times. It is the most remade movie and piece of work that I know of and it was a great challenge to again reinvent it. And thanks to Eddie Izzard we found a way and we modernized it, we brought it up-to-date.

And Eddie’s contribution is incredible as John Silver because this is a relationship movie, it’s a coming of age movie, it’s as important today as it was important 130 years ago.

SciFi Mafia asked Eddie Izzard to identify the highs and lows of the production for him, as it looks like it must have been pretty grueling:

Eddie Izzard: Yes that is very true. Let’s see, the highs – when I was a kid, I was seven years old, this is – acting is a long story for me. I was seven and I said, “I want to act.” And I was ten when I realized that films exist and dramas, and I wanted to be in that. Not a comedian, I wanted to be a dramatic actor. So to finally get – and the essence for me, films just seemed such fun and such a great thing to do.

To do a drama that’s a film and it’s on location, two locations here, we’re here in Dublin in Ireland, the capital of Ireland, doubling for Bristol the West Coast of England, and then Puerto Rico for our treasure island. To be on location with such great actors as well, with Donald Sutherland and Elijah Wood being from America, but great British actors as well in Danny Mays and Rupert Penry-Jones and Philip Glenister, these are real top line guys. And these were highs, just to be with that team. And I always try to be the captain, I encouraged everyone to play soccer, a lot of soccer was played, a lot of football as we call it. So I liked team activities and so these were the highs, just doing the work were the highs.

The low was it was bloody freezing in Dublin. Dublin was the coldest in the UK at this time. It was snowing, you see the snow in the film. That’s real snow. We didn’t bring the snow in, that was actual snow. So we were freezing. Some people got frostbite, some of the extras got frostbite on the day when we’re running around and I’m trying to trip up Jim Hawkins at the beginning of the film. And then in Puerto Rico it was extraordinarily hot. I had to hide under an umbrella between takes because it was that hot. So the temperature differences was the crazy thing. I suppose those were the most.

Noreruns.net asked Eddie Izzard to identify the source of his inspiration for the way he plays Silver:

Eddie Izzard: Churchill was my inspiration. It sounds kind of weird, but obviously you’re looking for a fresh take. And the interesting thing with Silver is that he keeps changing sides, he keeps shifting the ground. Sometimes it’s pushed upon him but sometimes it’s him manipulating and moving. Churchill has been voted by the British people as the greatest British person ever in a television poll program that they did. This is someone who changed his political party twice, which is called “Ratting.” So Winston Churchill was not only a rat, he was a double rat, he changed from the conservative party to the liberal party, and then back to the conservative party. He should have been vilified and dead and out for the count. In the end, because of 1940, because of setting up against the Nazis, he’s become our greatest person ever…

Robert Louis Stevenson based (Silver) upon a friend of his who was actually an editor and a journalist, and a poet who actually wrote the Invictus poem. So the writer of the Invictus poem, which is the one that influenced Nelson Mandela when he was in prison, is in fact the basis for Long John Silver. And it’s about the indomitable spirit which is in that poem, so this spirit, this changeability, this determination to get the gold and the treasure.

And we worked out the treasure was the equivalent of something like $500 million, 300 pounds, about $500 million. So imagine what you would do to get $500 million if it was buried on a treasure island? That’s the essence of Silver and that’s the story we wanted to do. And we wanted to do a real kick-arse version as opposed to a campy version, which I think has been done before. This one was with teeth, 20 main characters go out there and only about (spoiler) come back. And I wanted Silver to be this engine behind this that’s just determination to go. And I’m a very determined person, and I like to bring that to my characters.

SciFiVision asked how each of them came to be involved in the production:

Robert Halmi, Sr.: Well how I was involved, I was asked by Sky in England to become Exec Producer to produce it. Sky had a script which wasn’t too good. So it had to be redone and Stewart Harcourt, wonderful writer, redid it. And they had to find a director and my good friend Steve Barron came on board who really is the responsible how this picture looks like, the look of it, which is fantastic.

And you know as Eddie said, we had to film in incredible weather. I mean nobody – even the cameras were blown away it was such a storm. I personally was blown from one set to another, and then in Puerto Rico with the heat. But that gave the reality to this piece. Because of the pirate’s times in the end of the 1700’s, and the beginning 1800’s, was the most romantic period in the water. They were incredible characters, and John Silver represents the composite of those wonderful characters. There’s so much – so many sides of it and it is so exciting.

And also – this book started depicting how a pirate should look like, with one leg missing and a parrot on the shoulder. That started with this book and I must say Eddie had on the crutches and with one leg back behind his back. It was a very physical demand on the actors and especially on Eddie.

Eddie Izzard: Yes, I should speak up with that because I was asked if I wanted to do it. I think it was Sky that came to me first. Actually it was through another production company working with Sky. And they said, “Do you want to it?” And I said, “Well I’d like to do it, but I’ll only do it if the script has teeth and is gritty.” Because I feel the story has been portrayed in a somewhat lighter fashion over the years and has got watered down. So I said, “It’s got to be harder than Pirates of the Caribbean,” which is fun, but sort of fun and a bit flotsam and jetsam. I wanted something with teeth. So that was me coming in. And we went to the script, Stewart Harcourt in the end came up with the final version of the script that we did, which had teeth in it.

Working on the crutch I must say, is tricky. I didn’t actually have my foot strapped up in the back, but the green screen took it out. But I never used my right foot, it never actually touched the ground in any scene. So even if they said, “Oh we’re shooting you from the waist up,” I just never put it down, I just wanted to be in there. And it’s very hard to use just one crutch. Normally you’d use two crutches and you’d have a crossbar but I just used one. So the toughness of doing that added in to the character. But I have run 43 marathons – well three years ago I ran 42 marathons in 51 days, and so Steve Barron saw me do that and thought, “Well this guy can play Long John Silver because of the determination…”

Thomas Vitale: And from the network side we’ve had such a longstanding relationship with the Halmi Company, and they’ve given Syfy some of its best, highest rated, most popular and highest quality programming, including Tin Man, which is Syfy‘s highest rated thing ever, that any time we have an opportunity to with Mr. Halmi we are honored to work with him and to pick up his programming. And this is a special project and we’re just thrilled that we were able to work with him on it.

fangirlconfession.com asked what about the story makes it so appealing over the ages:

Eddie Izzard: I think, well it’s interesting, villainy, crime plus time equals romance, the way it is. Because we know that with the Somali pirates, you know, I was born in Aden, which is a city in Yemen, Arabic country. And the Gulf of Aden has all the Somali pirates going around. And we know that that’s hellish down there. You get caught by those pirates, you just do not want this to happen. Now that’s what the pirates back in the 1700s were like. But pirates plus time equals romance. And it’s just – we have a different take on it. It’s kind of weird that we do this but, yes it is this.

But the story is interesting. We worked at it to fight for the soul of Jim Hawkins. Toby Regbo‘s great because he’s 19 – well he’s 20 now, but 19 when he filmed it. And so he can play 17-18. He could be a young man or he can be an older teenager. So I think anyone in their youth can identify with that, even young tomboy girls and women can identify with him because he’s not like a big macho man, he’s kind of slight but feisty.

So it’s a story that anyone can identify with. What would have happened to you? Because he finds the map and it’s his story of, “Should we go on the adventure to…” which is like going to the Moon. Going to the Caribbean in those days is like going to the Moon now. Imagine there’s $500 million — I go back to that number — on the Moon and you’ve got to find, like the Millennium Falcon or Han Solo, could you go and get it? It’s kind of one of those stories. So you do get caught up in it and it just gets nasty. And it’s about death and blood and life and finding yourself and what would you do in those situations?

Robert Halmi Sr.: But it’s also remarkable that when it was written originally, Stevenson wrote it for a younger age group and all of a sudden it became extremely popular for everybody, all ages. So this romantic adventure, and the incredible complex characters and the main relationship between a novice and an old wise pirate is remarkable and it’s survived till today, and as I said, survived 30 remakes, and it will keep going on.

Pop Culture Passionistas asked Eddie Izzard what it was like to work with Donald Sutherland and Elijah Wood:

Eddie Izzard: Yes, Elijah Wood came onto the scene and he was just a joy. He had no attitude, no size to him. He just joined us, hung out with us and was great. I’d love to work with him again.

It is quite an honor to work with these people. And then Donald Sutherland coming and playing John Silver, that’s crazy. And I have worked with Elliot Gould on Oceans 12 and 13. So both Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould were in MASH. And I’ve asked them both this question, because there’s a whole section of MASH where they go off to Japan and they keep saying, “We are the pros from Dover,” because they’re these two great surgeons who are going in to work on some Congressman’s son.

And I said, “What the hell does ‘pros from Dover’ mean?” And both of them said, “We just made it up, it’s actually doesn’t mean anything, but we just liked the sound of it.” So it was quite amazing to have words with Elliot Gould and then to work with Donald Sutherland. And he was great and he gave me a book on Treasure Island and it kind of blows my mind sometimes working with people who I’ve known from a long time and then finally get to work with.

Airlock Alpha asked Thomas Vitale of Syfy why Syfy chose this project, as it’s not really science fiction or fantasy:

Thomas Vitale: You know the character of John Silver is such a larger than life character. He is a character that sparks the imagination. And what Syfy is about, it’s about programming of the imagination. I mean we are a channel that is – that airs science-fiction, fantasy, supernatural programming.

We really are a broad-based entertainment channel. And I just felt that this was such an imaginative piece that the take on the story and the way it was done was so imaginative and so larger than life that it really fit our brand, kind of a broader definition of our brand, when you talk about the Syfy channel as a place that celebrates the imagination and celebrates larger than life heroes.

And you know we have such a great relationship with the Halmis that we know that they deliver quality. They deliver programming that the audience likes and watches. So we were thrilled that we had an opportunity to get involved with this project. But it is a story that stirs the imagination. Now I read this when I was very young and it stirred my imagination then, and I hope that we can do the same for our viewers and young viewers today.

But not too young; it is, as they say, gritty.

Noreruns.net asked how the decision was made to air both parts on one night:

Thomas Vitale: You know, we screened the final product – I actually screened the final product at home with my wife. And the kids went to sleep, we turned it on and we never turned it off. And we didn’t feel like it was long, it actually flew by and that’s kind of the way I made the decision, one night or two, as Mr. Halmi said, it was more satisfying. For some stories, you want to take in all at once.

Noreruns.net asked Robert Halmi Sr. how he decides which works to adapt, and how to adapt them:

Robert Halmi Sr.: Well you know, I always said that television did a horrible thing, took the books out of the hands of young people and almost everybody else. Book publishing is at the lowest point today. So to revive stuff that was written 100 years ago and is exciting and it’s of value and of meaning, is a wonderful thing to do.

And you have to use a different language, different morality, to sell it to today’s people who never read the book. And that is what I like to do. I can pick up any classics and make it in today’s – for a modern adventure or a modern fantasy or a modern sci-fi, whatever modern history, whatever it is and retell the story that people understand it.

When I did Gulliver’s Travels for example, Simon and Schuster called me and they said they sold more Gulliver’s Travels books after the movie was shown than five years before.

Fresno Beat asked Eddie Izzard how the look of his Long John Silver came about:

Eddie Izzard: The interesting thing – shaving the head was the big dramatic departure. Because we were playing around – we were just looking for – I didn’t have any set ideas on how it should be. We obviously knew there was going to be a lot of crutch work, which is really important in how he moves. And we worked with moving people on that.

But the shaving the head sort of defines it. And the – I’d been trying to do a role where I could shave my head for some time. And if you ever do choose to shave your head, people out there, it’s all about the skull shape, you’ve got to have a good skull. Some people have an unfortunate skull that doesn’t quite work. And you don’t know that until you get down there.

So I knew this and had literally – for eight years I’ve been saying to makeup artists, “Could you do a bald wig on me at some point during some other production and I just want to see what it looks like when I have no hair, find out if it works.”

But anyway Steve Barron came in to me with one of the people who he works with who does imaginations of different design ideas. And he’d done a mockup of me with no hair in a look, in a Long John Silver look. And I immediately said, “Yes.” They’re, “Would you think of doing this?” And I said, “Yes,” immediately because I’d been trying to do this for so long.

So we went down to a very short buzz cut to just check out the skull shape. And then we said – I thought, “No this is going to work.” So I cut all my hair off, when I got to Dublin this was. And it seems my skull works, I don’t know how, it was just genetic luck. But I was very happy with my skull shape. So that changed everything and made it interesting.

The accent I that I use is a London accent. Now this is – well may not resonate for Americans, but Long John Silver, if you listen to him he actually, there’s a West country accent. He was always seen as West country, which is Bristol, which is to the West of England. And it’s much more “Ooh-aarr, Jim lad,” and all that, that West country accent that’s like this. But can be seen as a comedy accent in the U.K., in America, probably not so much.

I decided to move him to London. I had this idea of, “Why not make him more London,” which is much more about – there’s a lot of villains in London. And it was – London was huge at that time, this is 1700s. It became a city of a million people, which is – the last city before that of a million people was Rome. So if you could imagine that, there was Rome, everything collapsed after Rome and then it builds all the way back up. And then the 1700s, early 1800s, London becomes the size of what Rome was. So it was a really pumping city. And out of that a lot of villainy was coming.

So we had this look. I could throw that on because the – I had no hair. The makeup, the tattoo, that came up from the makeup designer. He did brilliant job, wonderful punk edge that was pushed for by Sky, which we liked. And then Steve Barron the director had designs on the crutch. And learning to use that was very tricky actually. And I did my back in and I setup an assault course in Steve Barron‘s actual flat so I could come up and down stairs so I could get to use it but – and practice.

But in the end I got very comfortable with that crutch which is now sitting at home here in LA. And I will use it in Treasure Island Two as well because I know how to do it. It’s – and it’s quite tricky to use, but I’ve gotten very comfortable on it. I saw it as part of me in there.

Robert Halmi Sr.: And Eddie’s bald pirate is the only bald pirate in history.

Eddie Izzard: Yes, it does look so. I haven’t seen any others.

SciFi Mafia asked where the overall look came from, if it was the design of one person or many:

Eddie Izzard: That was a lot of ideas. That was from Imagine, I think help from Steve Barron, a wish from Sky back in Britain who were part of the Producers and the money. We all wanted to do something different. And this look, which I feel is like a 1700s punk thing.

Also the colors, the skin colors of the actual actors is very important because we feel that’s what the pirates would have been like. In a lot of films through the last century, you had a lot of white pirates, a lot of white things, a lot of white people. And no, this was – this is people, oriental skin colors, black, brown, white, a whole mixture in there. And I really liked that. And I think that’s going to resonate because that’s what the world really is. This film could play all ’round the world and people in different countries could say, “Yes I see – I could be in that, I could have been a pirate.” So that was the look. And a lot of different people put that – from costume design and makeup design and Steve Barron‘s overall design going into that. And we all fell upon that.

And having the different buzz cuts, different Mohican cuts. It looked just like Mad Max meets Pirates of the Caribbean meets Goodfellas, it’s quite a mix that goes in there. And I think we’ve reset – I mean I’m saying that I mean the bloody production, but I do think that we’ve reset Treasure Island. This is the benchmark, I hope, which everyone’s got to measure Treasure Island looks by.

Robert Halmi Sr.: Yes, Steve Barron should get lots of credit for it. This is the fifth movie he did for me and his vision and his technique, it is almost like a small art movie kind of thing. And inventing completely a new look, and with wonderful actors, resulting in a very entertaining product.

Near the end of the session, Mr. Halmi mentioned the beautiful ship. As you’ll see, they used an actual ship, though of course some scenes were shot on a set. But here’s a cool tidbit:

Robert Halmi Sr.: Just imagine a 3-mast schooner, an old one, sailing from England to Puerto Rico, really. And that journey must have been – of course we weren’t on it, because we just needed the ship in Puerto Rico, but that journey alone must have been an adventure.

Eddie Izzard: Yes, that is – I forgot that we’d done that. That boat really sailed, as Robert said, it sailed the Atlantic. We filmed in Dublin, then they had to leave early because they were going across. A number of those sailors who were on it, they did their first ever Atlantic crossing. And they did it just like they did back in the 1700s. They had to sail right down to off the coast of Africa, and then go across using the trade winds, which are lower. I didn’t even know this stuff. And there’s some shots in the actual movie where you can see some really gnarly kind of seas, these big swells and bad weather, those are from the actual crossing. Those are real shots, nothing CGI, really that boat out at sea in the Atlantic, miles from anywhere.

And they are not kidding, that was a very rough ocean.

Since Robert Halmi Sr.’s RHI was the production company for Tin Man, Alice, and Neverland, SciFi Mafia asked Mr. Halmi if he could tell us anything about future projects with Syfy. He chuckled and thanked me for the question, but said that he couldn’t make an announcement just yet. “But I’m working on at least three major exciting projects for Syfy which probably will take me to the end of my life.”

We’re hoping for many more major projects and many more years for the charming Mr. Halmi. Thanks to Robert Halmi Sr., Thomas Vitale, and Eddie Izzard for taking the time to speak with us about a great production.

Treasure Island, starring Eddie Izzard, Toby Regbo, Elijah Wood, Daniel Mays, Rupert Penry-Jones, and Philip Glenister, airs Saturday, May 5 from 7/6c – 11/10c on Syfy.