Harper's Island s01e00 Episode Script

One by one.
People died.
Horribly.
Violently.
Viciously.
Viciously.
Then it was me.
Like father like son.
One by one.
So, poor old Henry had a dream, to live in perfect harmony on a deserted island with his best friend.
Sweet.
But killing everyone probably isn't the most romantic way to go about it.
And she's your sister, you big freak! THIS PROGRAMME CONTAINS SOME SCENES OF VIOLENCE.
So now we know.
The magic word is Henry.
After 21 killings, the man behind the murders was Henry Dunn.
You have been! Darn it.
Chris Gorham got us all.
I didn't have a clue.
The fact that it was Henry, he was so sweet.
I'm so mad that he never said anything to me.
I was totally surprised.
We made a pact, I said if you find out who it is, call me, text me, carrier pigeon, whatever.
Just let me know.
At the end of the day, the whole series ends up hinging on whether I pull it off or not.
The discovery of the who was great, but the why to me was the pay-off.
And why indeed? Henry was such a sweet boy.
I blame the parents.
I love Callum.
He just gets into it, he just has that psycho look.
Some of the other girls, they're like, "Who's that? He's like, psycho.
" You can't really tell.
He's outside, and he's like smoking and all, just like, glowering at everyone.
Who knows? It's hard to tell.
He just It's his personal charm.
He just looks disturbed.
Is that bad to say? I definitely always thought that Nikki would try and fight, no matter what.
So I was really stoked with the short barrel shotgun.
And like, the slo-mo! I thought that was so cool.
I'd have liked a few punches maybe.
What does Wakefield use? He likes looking people in the eyes when he's doing somebody's death.
So with his big boarding knife he can really go at Shane, and also give Shane a chance.
You don't scare me.
'It's funny when you do fights like that.
' Sometimes your adrenalin goes up, and there's a point at the end where he impales me, and then he kind of grabbed me and threw me to the ground.
I'm a 200 lb man and six foot three, hitting the ground, I didn't even really feel it, just because the adrenalin was pumping so high.
It was fun.
It was a bit of a rush.
So Henry did it for love, and love hurts.
Just ask Cal and Chloe.
Will you marry me? Yes, yes! Surely the most memorable death scene of Harper's Island.
I bet most people picked Cal and Chloe jumping off the bridge.
Cal and Chloe.
Favourite murder scene.
Ooh Cal and Chloe.
All the elements were there.
I think it was the best moment of the show.
It's a love story, and it's just so heart-wrenching.
I'm going to go with Chloe and Cal.
I'm sure everyone says that.
It's like the best scene.
But that song too, such a tear-jerker.
If a man would do that for me.
God, no! No! No! No! That location was impossible.
No-one wanted us to shoot there.
But the director and I pushed for it.
We said, "We have to make this work.
" I just thought it was just such a great way to go out, the Last Of The Mohicans.
Like a Romeo and Juliet love story.
It was just such a gift from the writers.
The death, we wanted to be epic.
We wanted it to be dramatic.
We wanted them to go in a great way.
One of these days the sky's gonna break and everything will escape And I'll know Instead of just stabbing someone over and over again, it gave it a little feeling and emotion, you know, with the song.
The song that they ultimately found physically told the story that just programmable music couldn't.
I found this band called Civil Twilight, and their song, Letters From The Sky, and it played beautifully.
That really pulled at my heartstrings.
Actually, everybody in the studio that works with me also just couldn't stop staring at it, it just affected them so deeply.
When actually watched the scene .
.
I cried.
You can't have me.
Never fall away Hold me here Chris and myself are just witnessing the death on the other side of the water and the bridge.
And we felt very safe, and we were quite far from the edge, but we were even harnessed in, just for our reactions to them falling over.
We had safety belts, harnesses and things.
I went out just to see where we were gonna be, and the stunt guys were all screaming at me, "Get back here! "Get back here, don't go out!" You know, OK! Sorry, sorry! That bridge looks well scary.
I wouldn't fancy going there.
So we sent executive producer Karim Zreik and the plucky Brit Cal to show us how the deaths were captured on camera.
Tell us a little bit about the stunt.
You were here and you watched your stunt man take They had a wire, I think, going across the gorge.
There was wires coming this way, and then, as he fell, he was protected from the cliffs.
But he fell at full speed.
Like a bungee jump? It was a bungee jump, but at the bottom they slowed him down, he didn't bounce.
We also did it for the Chloe character.
We shot it from three different angles.
We shot everything in slow-motion, so we were burning twice as much film, and developing that film to make you look good.
And then you got both of us together, right at the end.
After the bungee, we threw the dummies over.
We needed a shot of the impact.
The dummies were so far apart, that we later went back and CGIed the dummies together.
It looked like you guys were holding hands at the end.
Hold me here Hold me here We could jump now and hold hands.
You first.
I'll meet you down there.
So romantic(!) And you're in my shot again.
He told you not to lean in, and you're leaning into my shot.
So Henry and his Dad needed somewhere to commit the murders, and where better than a frightening forest? For a horror film, you need a place that's inherently scary.
Very few horror films take place in brand-new modern buildings.
You need age, you need history, you need a sense that something has been there before.
Forests give you that feeling.
Trees give you that feeling.
It's the oldest location ever.
Little Red Riding Hood didn't get lost inside of Harrods.
It's always the forest you gotta go through, because you don't know what's in there.
How are we supposed to find anybody in all thisnature? The woods definitely scared me cos I'm out of my element.
Generally, people feel scared because you don't know what's out there.
We spent a lot of time shooting in forests and woods like these.
Yeah.
In episode two, I had to sort of stumble through this forest looking for Chloe, and on one of these trees, I was hanging.
How long did we keep you upside down for? It was about Felt like four hours.
In my head, I think the blood is just now starting to seep back to the rest of my body.
Your hair never looked better.
My hair has never looked bushier.
Somebody help me! The words that we used in episode 12, where Henry kills Trish, was probably one of our best locations, because of the vastness of it all.
We did it on purpose, we revealed Henry is the killer in episode 12, to set up for the recap.
I didn't see that coming.
I heard that you thought it was Madison all along.
I'm suspicious of all children.
The spirits told me.
My money was on Madison all the way.
She is creepy.
In episode 12, it was finally revealed that Henry wasn't quite as perfect as we first thought.
We already felt, we're keeping this secret desperately and pathetically, doing everything we can.
Just let them know already, and let the drama not be who is doing it, but who is going to make it, and how.
After I saw how he died, I thought it was very beautifully written and done, and very poetic.
We're going home.
Yeah.
Thanks to you.
You need to see the turn in Henry, you need to see his true self.
But you can't lose the guy you've seen through this entire show.
It's one of those scenes, that if it doesn't play right, then the rest of the show kind of falls flat.
I'm in my wedding dress, barefoot, running through the forest and freezing my ass off.
My toes felt like they were going to fall off, my feet were scraped, they were trying to put these tiny little leather suede things on the bottom of my feet.
It was almost perfect, because again, it just heightened things that much more.
She was just a wreck.
Just wrecked, non-stop crying.
It was great.
Oh, my God! I've got you.
It's OK.
It's OK.
For Henry to kill her in the wedding dress, that seemed interesting.
It felt like good storytelling, it felt cinematic.
That was something we always knew.
It's funny, because early on in the show, it must have been the first time Katy put on that wedding dress for a scene Ta-dah! Yeah? It's spectacular.
Really? Henry is going to lose it when he sees you in this.
Oh Trish, such a waste of a good dress.
I hope it's not dry clean only.
She turns to Karim and goes, "You better not kill me in this dress.
" They did kill me in that damn wedding dress.
It was sad.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm cursed now.
You bastard! It's not fair.
BLADE PLUNGES So we'd no idea it was Henry.
But did he? I found out Henry was the killer when we started shooting episode 8.
What? In fact, Geoff over the speakerphone, started the conversation with, "The magic word is Henry.
" Wakefield has an accomplice.
It's just not Jimmy.
No He was suddenly infused with a whole bunch of subtext and back story, and it became very fresh.
And he hadn't been using up his techniques or tricks to play the deception.
I'd go to dinner with Matt Barr and CJ Thomason, and these guys would just grill me after a while, like, "You know don't you, you know? "Do you know? Do you know? "Do you know? You know, right? You know! "I know you know! I know you know.
"You know?" I mean, just non-stop.
I was actually sitting at the airport with Chris, flying to Vancouver to finish the show, and he told me that it was him, and I was like, "No! No! "You lied to me! You're a bad friend! "I don't trust you! I'm going to tell your kids.
" Ah, son of a bitch! He's really, really good at keeping secrets.
Really good at keeping secrets.
As I said, he even kept it from his wife whilst filming.
Some bad people pretend to be nice to get what they want.
He really did a great job.
Just this innocence and commanding personality, taking control but not revealing too much, and then looking back, you can kind of see little clues and little hints.
Baby, you understand me now If sometimes you see that I'm mad But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood We don't want him to be too normal, but there were times we thought, we need to put some stink on him, which is why we put blood all over his hands at the end of episode eight.
In episode five, when Mr Wellington is walking with his daughter in the woods, he mentions I don't trust the boy.
Even the fishing, with the guys on the boat.
They even say, "Dude, it's all you've been talking about is to go out here," because Henry killed Hunter, he put the money on Hunter's boat, and he knew if we go out here close enough, we'll find the boat.
And we'll see what happens with that.
We had a shot of Henry having scratches on his arms in the bathroom, and Trish says How did you get these? I don't know.
Didn't feel it.
'Henry has never been normal.
' The Henry you see at the beginning of the show is the mask that he has been wearing since he was a kid.
It's what he does and how he acts to get through life and not get arrested.
You know? He is broken.
And then meeting his dad really released his true self and allowed him to Really kind of honed it.
He was like his Jedi master of evil.
It's horrible! But you know? He was the guy who taught him how to make his true self most effective.
From Wakefield's standpoint, he had found the son he had been denied by the sheriff and by Abby's mother.
Having Henry back was a validation of everything Wakefield had done up until then.
It justified everything he had done, justified his anger and his rage.
It all seems so obvious now, but just about every character was a suspect at some point.
I think red herrings are at once the most difficult thing to build in a show like this and also one of the most important things to build - crucial, in fact, because the fun of a show like this for an audience is the guessing game.
I don't know who he is but I think that you do I felt like there was enough in the scripts for every character to be suspect.
"Oh, it's my dad.
" "Oh, it's the sheriff.
" "Oh, it's Abbybut that's weird.
" I started freaking out going, "Oh, my God, it's me.
"It's me.
I know it's me!" They quickly tried pinning everything on me.
His sister-in-law almost drowns in a pool.
I save her but I'm almost saying, "You guys better be careful.
I know you know about the affair.
" Madison says it's the sheriff who took her.
I didn't know I wasn't the killer until right before I became a victim.
I didn't trust this guy, this little Englishman.
You think of everything, don't you? You always think of everything.
Everyone else was pretty sure it was me, so it did cross my mind a couple of times.
I thought it was going to be Jimmy.
Finding the police records on Jimmy, it does bring him to the surface again.
At this point, people are scrambling.
Nobody is what they say they are.
A lot of the things that people were murdered with are not the type of things that a child could easily carry and hit people with.
Chloe's with him.
He's British.
I don't know what that has to do with it.
I wouldn't worry about that, Sully.
I'd look closer to home.
With best friends like Henry, who needs enemies? It's funny, because originally I had wanted a really gruesome death.
One of the actors had a fake head, like they had made a cast of this fake head, and I thought, "I want a head!" What an honour to have a fake dead head.
But when I read it, it was really a pretty poignant scene.
It had a lot of I think, gravitas to the show.
What about Wakefield's kid? He could have done it.
Then he's a ghost.
Cos there is no way in hell this guy slipped past us.
'There's a lot of story to cover.
' There's a lot of mystery to be revealed in that last episode.
One of my big questions to Jeff and Dan and Karim was, "How are we gonna do this without it becoming corny?" What they came up with was that brilliant scene with Sully in the woods.
Dude, you're creeping me out.
You're right.
Sorry.
'They essentially used the reveal' as a way to taunt Sully - to just play with him, psychologically.
It's just brilliant.
He runs down a good chunk of the people he killed.
Danny's dead.
You don't know that.
So's Trish.
I killed her.
Shut up, man.
Seriously - just shut up.
That scene also for the first time showed us, no more Mr Nice Guy.
I am now a serial killer.
It's not like I killed them all.
My dad did a lot.
Your dad is dead.
I went to his funeral.
No, man, not that guy - not that liar.
My real dad - John Wakefield.
He's the only person who's told me the truth.
Sully would go out fighting, but I do think he accepts his fate.
And it's just tragic - it's heartbreaking.
You never should have dogged, Trish.
You never should have what? You never should have dogged Trish.
What he says is, "You never should have dogged Trish.
" I actually had to ask the producers, what does that mean? I'm from Texas, we don't use that phrase, but I guess it was to kind of hustle and hit on Trish.
And now I use it in my vocab.
I try to use it once a day.
So with cast members leaving by the dozen, some poor soul had to be the bearer of the bad news.
Ah, Karim, the assassin.
The assassin.
The assassin.
Grim reaper.
The death reaper.
The assassin.
"Your time's up.
" "Hey, Cassidy, let's go.
" "Oh, script comes out tomorrow.
You don't make it.
" "I'm dead, right?" And he's like, "Yep.
" I just dreaded that phone call.
You didn't want to turn your back cos of the tap on the shoulder.
He walks by me and taps me on the shoulder.
"Hey, David, How's it going?" I'm like, "Ohh.
" Yeah I got tapped by the assassin, I know.
Adam? Oh hey, Karim, how are you doing? I'm really enjoying today.
How was your lunch? Lovely, thank you.
Great.
Can I talk to you for a second? One man who wasn't expecting a tap on the shoulder was Wakefield, but his son had other ideas.
In order for Henry's plan to actually work he needed to get rid of Wakefield because there was no way that Wakefield was going to allow Abby to remain alive.
According to Wakefield and Henry, their plan was to get rid of everybody.
Henry had an ulterior motive, he needed Wakefield to help him murder these people so he can then ultimately be alone with Abby.
I think it's good drama, you know, for the son to kill the father who has trained him to kill.
So, um, so I thought that was quite Yeah, it was right that it was Henry.
It's OK.
It's over.
Not her.
Henry's drive throughout the entire show is, "I want to return "to the only moment of my life when I ever remember being happy," which was signified in the show in the flashback we see in the last episode, of the two of them as children on Harper's Island.
When they were kids, Abby whispers to Henry "I wish it was just you and me on the island.
" The beginning of this horror story is that secret between the two of them on that beach, and than the end of this horror story is in the same spot.
And this is where it all ends.
Where it all ends and where it all starts, yeah.
What do you mean it all starts? Well, flashback scene, young Henry and young Abby, she whispers to him "I wish it were just you and me," and it was difficult as you can see, just shooting here on the location, but it does give you that feeling of isolation, where the show should end.
And there bluff that They fall down this bluff? They fall down this bluff and land here.
And the final moment happens.
Then she Booph! Ooaagghh And that's an end to our hero.
There's a time cut in the middle of the last episode, we don't really see how long it is, whether it's a few days or weeks, where Abby wakes up and they're on the island alone together.
Hey there.
Just the fact that he has her in that moment is enough and he's so happy about it.
You want something to eat? No.
It's OK, I'll explain everything.
I think he's completely surprised that she's not happier about what he's telling her, you know? The fact that she's holding the glass as a weapon and she's trying to run away becomes very frustrating for him, because he just so badly wants it to be how it is in his head.
For Abby, I don't think she can just hate him straightaway, she can really dislike what he's done and all the people he's killed.
Abby, I could never hurt you.
Everything that I've done I did for us, I'd die without you.
The trick of it is that the audience has to want Henry to die, AND feel badly for him.
We wanted them to cry for the killer.
I don't see what he could live for after Abby rejecting him and not wanting the same as him, not wanting to just be on the island and play happy families.
It's hard at that point to feel sympathy towards this horribly broken person, but, for me, that's what you had to see on my face, you had to see that little boy, and just that he's that, like he's this horribly broken little boy and he's turned into a monster but at the essence of him, he loves this girl.
Abby? I love you.
'There was a moment where we looked around and there was probably two actors on set' for that final episode, it was Henry and Abby.
You'd whittled them down to two.
It felt like We started at 40 and we were down to two.
Are you happy with your choice, particularly to make Henry the killer? Henry was always going to be the killer, there was no way around that.
We broke the story backwards knowing that Henry was going to be the killer.
He offered us the most He had the reasons for bringing everybody together on this island and killing them all off.
His character had that - we wouldn't have changed it.
So, 29 gruesome murders later, bet you'd be happy to get off that island.
Not many people could say they survived Wakefield.
Our mandate from the beginning was very few people should escape.
SHE SCREAMS We felt killing a kid on a network show like this, it just wasn't Wasn't worth doing.
Yeah, but she is creepy.
We felt like for Madison to survive but everyone else she knew and loved was wrong, so her mother survived.
Come on.
To make it to the finale felt great.
It was just such a wild ride.
And the way it turned out and finding out everything, the way it all happened, it was really exciting.
'I kind of had an idea Abby would be there till the end, just because 'she seems quite central to the story,' and also I was allowed to take out a six-month lease in Vancouver, no-one told me not to.
So, poor old Henry, shame no-one ever told him that the way to get the girl isn't to murder all your friends and family.
A lesson for us all.