Original subtitles

Vision Behind Steven Spielberg's Taken - Miniseries 2002 English

[NARRATOR] It's an enormous event in television history.

Now prepare to explore the vision behind Steven Spielberg's Taken.

- Guys... - What do you got, Toland?

Lights. Blue ones.

They're following the plane.

They just flew up and started tailing us.

[MAN] Are you the people we talk to about flying saucers?

[BOY] We know where one crashed.

It started when I was eight.

[MAN] These people call themselves contactees.

[SECOND MAN] They claim that they were taken aboard a craft.

Taken?

Ram!

The human message, Are we alone in the universe,

has not changed.

It's a fundamental question that everybody asks themselves,

ls there, in fact, life in the universe?

Steven Spielberg has always been fascinated

by the possibility of alien life.

But this great Hollywood storyteller

was ready to explore the topic even further

in the ultimate tale of alien abduction.

That super-secret spy balloon of yours... I wanna see what it crashed into.

[DIRECTOR] Action!

Over the next hour, learn what it took

to bring the epic vision of Taken to the screen.

From crafting a script for the 20-hour drama...

[BOHEM] It's a love story, there's some extremely dastardly deeds along the way.

[GUNSHOT]

To recreating five decades of history down to the last detail...

The B-17... yeah, they flew one in. There was a real one.

To special effects that rival any Hollywood blockbuster.

My goal is to revolutionise,

not only the way that the aliens look, but the way they move.

This is how Taken came to be

and why this science-fiction story might not be fiction.

For years, the idea for Taken was being developed,

an alternative view of history, one that tries to explain what life would be like

if aliens had crashed at Roswell in the '40s.

K Dams 3 Am.!

Sometimes chilling, sometimes optimistic,

Taken brings decades of reports, rumours, and UFO sightings to life

and makes you stop and think, ls there anyone out there?

I do believe there are other planets out there somewhere

that have some sort of life.

It's so big and so vast that, yeah,

it'd be a shame if there's no other beings out there,

and I do believe there is.

I'm kind of more from the Show-Me state.

I need that alien prod up my backside.

But the answer to one of life's biggest questions

wouldn't be found on the silver screen.

[CRASH]

And I thought that I couldn't acquit this genre in a two-hour

or two-hour-and-15-minute-long movie.

That we would all need a lot more patience and a lot more time

to really do the history of alien abductions.

And when it came to developing the project,

Steven Spielberg turned to Dreamworks,

the Hollywood studio he helped create.

Dreamworks SKG television executive Darryl Frank

was given the responsibility of taking Taken from script to screen.

Steven felt like there was still more story to be told

on the alien abduction experience and how it affects people,

and he felt like television was a format that he could tell the full story

over multiple episodes in a limited series.

Dreamworks found an enthusiastic and willing partner in the Sci-Fi Channel.

Sci-Fi is offering us a tremendous forum,

the same way HBO offered Tom Hanks and I a great forum

to do 11 hours of quality television, Band of Brothers,

and now we have a chance to tell a great fictitious story.

[MAN] Sound, speed.

[DIRECTOR] Here we go. And... action.

As the project moved forward,

the issue of how to treat popular alien mythology had to be addressed,

from the rumoured crash at Roswell to crop circles

to the countless reports from those who claim to have been abducted.

Steven wanted to stay true to the UFO mythology and to the lore

and everything from the scoop marks to the way the greys looked,

the way the shapes look.

If you speak to a hundred people who claim they have been abducted,

they basically give the same story,

and he felt it was important not to change the lore, but to stay with it

and come up with new revelations upon it.

You're talking about the tumours.

They are not tumours. They are something that they put in our heads.

Possibly.

In order to breathe new life into these popular accounts,

Dreamworks would need to assemble a seasoned producting team.

They first turned to co-executive producer Steve Beers.

As a veteran of James Cameron's 7 V series Dark Angel,

he had experience in bringing science fiction to life.

His primary responsibility

was to oversee the entire production on location.

I wanted to be involved the first time I heard about it.

- You're hot! - Action!

That was pretty good. Yeah.

Looked really good, and no one was hurt.

I loved the idea of going back through the history of the United States,

playing with the myths or mythology, I should say, of alien abductions.

Tying some of that into what was going on in our history at various times.

Steve Beers would be teamed up with

Emmy Award-winning producer Richard Heus.

It was his responsibility to make sure shooting would go off without hitch.

To me, I come out of making movies, making television,

and a big 20-hour TV project was just a huge challenge,

and basically, we took the premise, What if all this mythology was true?

And we've treated it as if it were true with great authenticity and great belief,

and that's where our story takes off.

This debris was recovered in a field near Roswell, New Mexico.

None of this debris is from outer space.

But before a single frame of film could be shot,

someone had to write a script,

and this wouldn't be any ordinary script.

I'm Les Bohem. My role in Taken...

I wrote the show. I wrote the whole story.

It wound up being a 20-hour story.

Les Bohem had written a number of feature films,

including Dante's Peak.

Initially, Les was brought on to write only the first three episodes,

but all that soon changed.

Dreamworks liked what they read so much,

they decided to have Les write the whole series.

It's quite remarkable what Les Bohem has done here.

To write one two-hour movie is difficult for some.

He wrote ten, and for us, that was the only way to do it.

We wanted to have one voice, one vision, one person's point of view.

We weren't sure he'd be able to pull it off,

but I'm not gonna say he surprised us, but he impressed us by his speed

and his quality in his writing.

I never thought of it as, Oh, my God, I'm writing ten movies.

If I'd thought of it that way, I would've frozen.

I saw it as a novel. It's one big story.

From the moment I knew what that story was,

I wanted to tell the whole thing.

Just the opportunity to tell it on such a big scale,

to get to actually explore the characters in that much depth and do all that...

It wasn't daunting at all. It was exciting.

Action!

Dreamworks and Sci-Fi Channel were off and running

on their ambitious story of UFO mythology.

But the project quickly became bigger than anyone had expected.

Ram!

Dreamworks had hand picked a writer to script the story of Taken.

The challenge facing Les Bohem was to jam-pack 50 years of UFO mythology

into a screenplay that would keep television viewers glued to their screens

for ten nights.

I'm never gonna fly your saucer. Not ever.

So what do I hope people will take away from the show?

Of course, I hope they'll be thrilled, delighted, scared, moved...

All the things that you are when you invest 20 hours of your life in a story.

And when your story is about aliens, anything is possible.

The thing that always grabbed me about science fiction

is it frees the imagination to journey anywhere it can imagine itself.

It doesn't have boundaries, it doesn't fence you in.

It really liberates you.

But the tale Les was beginning to craft had to start somewhere.

And that was over the skies of 1944 Germany.

[PILOT] Bandits, 12 o'clock.

It's the story of alien abduction in the second half of the 20th century.

It starts with the Foo Fighters, the lights in the sky

a lot of pilots saw over Germany during the Second World War

through my own ideas about what might have happened at Roswell...

It even says in the damn paper it was a flying saucer.

What is it that you don't want me discussing'?

Through the UFO-flying saucer sightings of the '50s

and the abduction stories of the '60s and '70s on up to the present day.

But Les felt the key to telling an epic tale about aliens

would be to centre his story on the human element.

We wanted to tell a very human story,

and I was interested in all the things that people are taken by.

They're taken by love...

Once you go alien, you never go back.

They're taken by greed, they're taken by power.

Either you give me exactly what I want, or I'll go public with this.

I'll bring your flying saucer crashing down on your head... Dad.

Certainly, in our show, they're taken by aliens as well,

but that's really only one aspect of the story.

Les decided the best way to illustrate his character's emotions

and views towards alien abduction was through three different families.

What's great is that it takes the story over three generations

with the Keys family, Clarke family, and the Crawford family

and their interaction with aliens from another planet.

The Keys, of course, they fight back.

If they come for me again, I'm not going without a fight,

and if that lands me in some hospital room screaming,

then that's what it does.

[BOHEM] The Clarke family...

A family whose lives have also been touched by the aliens,

but in a very different way.

I've met them, too.

Do you think they'll be coming back soon?

Our time and their time is not the same time.

[BOHEM] The Crawford family, which is a family

involved with the government military investigation.

They are an extremely self-serving lot.

They're the three sides to the alien abduction story.

Whatever they did to me killed all the members of my crew.

They really are ordinary people that extraordinary things have happened to.

This is like Dynasty with aliens.

I really wouldn't know how to tell any story,

and certainly, I wouldn't know how to tell a story this epic

without having it be really about family.

Can you think about me once in a while?

I love you, mum.

Besides family, what makes Taken so compelling and believable

is that it incorporates actual historical events.

One of the things I think that makes this really special

is the mix of fact and fiction.

Les was able to incorporate everything from crop circles to the Lubbock lights

to the Roswell crash to the Cuban Missile Crisis

to historical events and historical people,

and I think that's what sort of gave it the sense of realism and truth to it.

[BELL RINGS]

Make it real and make it documentary-like, guys. Really.

Those guns... good, good.

My approach in telling the whole story was this all really happened,

and it happened while you were busy watching something else.

The idea that really intrigued me was when I was reading the first script

and you have the two explanations of what happened in Roswell,

which was it was a weather balloon, on the one hand,

or it was a flying saucer, on the other,

and what happens in our story is the flying saucer hits a weather balloon.

Are you who we talk to about flying saucers?

There's someone here who can help you just down the hall.

- My boys and I have some information. - Down the hall.

[BOY] We know where one crashed!

To help make sure the story he was telling

was as believable as possible,

Les worked closely with a variety of experts.

I found the people who like science fiction

know a lot about science,

and I think in any story where you're asking people

to believe in something that's made-up,

everything else about your story has to be as real as possible,

so the more real or rooted in reality that your science can be,

the more easily everybody will go with the liberties you're taking

when you start to have fun with it.

She can manipulate time.

We use all kinds of technical advisor's whenever it's appropriate.

We do a birthing scene, we'll have a medical technical advisor's.

We try and be as authentic as we possibly can.

We've looked for surgical information,

we've looked for cellular mapping information

from experts at universities in the United States, here in Canada.

John Underkoffler, who was our science adviser,

who worked with Steven on Minority Report,

has been very instrumental in tracking for us

what was going on from 1947 to the present.

Because Taken involves an elaborate government cover-up,

the army would play a big role in the story.

This meant authenticity for all military scenes would be essential.

[ADVISER] Don't forget to signal your rear men.

Don't look anywhere without looking with your weapon. Good. Bring it back.

We have a gentleman, Ron Blecker, who's ex-U.S. Army,

who I first met up here doing Dark Angel,

who is also just a military history buff,

has been very dedicated to the authenticity

from the military standpoint.

Combining the military aspect of this production

with the alien aspect of this production is incredibly difficult.

I have to keep in mind what the writers, producers, and directors

want to achieve with their production

and still try and keep the military aspect as true as possible.

Okay, here we go. Quiet. Let's roll, please.

Having completed the scripts for Taken,

it was now time to put the vision on film.

Screenwriter Les Bohem had all ten episodes under his belt,

and he had written them at an unprecedented pace.

But now a lot more people were about to get a lot more busy

because shooting was about to begin.

This show has been really challenging

because it has every element of film making involved in it.

Virtually every episode of Taken takes place in a different time period,

from World War ll to the present day.

Every one of the two-hour movies was a distinct period

that had to be started all over again in terms of wardrobe, cars,

the houses that we could use, the buildings we could use.

Takes a lot of research from all the department heads

to understand what the look of the time was,

and then it takes a lot of coordination among the First A.D.s

and the rest of the production departments

in order to figure out a schedule that allows us to deal with

the 1983 look on one day and then the 1996 look on the next day.

The Taken production had close to 200 shooting locations,

replicating everywhere from Area 51 in the '40s

to 1970s Alaska

to modem-day Seattle.

However, the producers decided that the best place

to recreate 50 years of American history wasn't in America at all.

It was in Vancouver, Canada.

For this, the producers hired

two of the best location managers in the business...

Greg Jackson and Rob Murdock.

We're lucky here that we have a pretty good range of locations,

from rural New Mexico to New York City

to France for the very opening sort of battle,

battle army sequence.

We're in France today.

Vancouver does pretty well have everything.

It has certain old sections of town for the older areas.

And it has lots of new architecture.

So once we got to the contemporary time,

we've had lots of choices for what we need.

But we've also had to have other challenges.

For crop circles, they wanted to do a corn field.

Originally, it was a wheat field, and it was at Christmastime,

and the chance I thought of finding something like that left standing

would be minimal, but we did find it.

On a typical two-hour film,

the entire production process can last as long as twelve months.

But in the case of Taken, ten Mo-hour feature films

would have to be produced in that same amount of time.

That would mean ten times the amount of preproduction, casting,

filming, special effects, and editing.

Such a responsibility would be virtually impossible

for only one director to accomplish.

We had ten directors on Taken,

each of them who brought their own sensibility and style to it,

but all of them sort of worked within a singular vision.

We had everyone from Tobe Hooper to Breck Eisner to Sergio Mimica,

and they all sort of brought their own style to it

and were really interested in making sure

that it all felt like one big movie.

Action!

Tobe Hooper, director of the cult classic.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

and Spielberg's own Poltergeist, directed the first episode,

which takes place from 1944 to 1947.

We just went total 1940s, and what I mean by that

is it really looks like the '40s

because we got all 1940s vehicles, aircraft, and sets.

Hey there, soldier.

Not now, Sue. I'm on duty.

You look ready for action, but you don't look like you're on duty.

One of the things we did when we started the stories in the '40s

was to use a sort of '40s-style lighting.

And as we've come up into contemporary times,

we've changed that lighting in every episode.

By change the lighting,

we've changed the physical instruments we've used.

We used to use large tungsten lights many years ago.

We started using some of them in our earlier episodes.

Now we're using cooler, more HMI blue and green kinds of lighting

to give a more urban, contemporary texture to the final episodes.

Breck Eisner took the helm of the second episode

that spans the 1950s.

Okay, let's do it.

So we're trying to give it a feeling

that we're actually shooting it in the '50s.

So there is a certain amount of feeling of Technicolour world.

We're enhancing the colours to get that Technicolour feel.

Using film and lighting techniques to take viewers back in time

is only part of the challenge.

It's especially difficult to recreate a small Texas town in 1953

when there's a modern skyscraper next door.

We're shooting around the corner, a motel from here,

and there's one angle we can shoot a motel which looks period,

and then all around it is modern buildings,

so it's a real challenge to find it, and you have to frame carefully

and pick your angles and not get boxed in,

but you don't have the world to show.

As soon as the Jeep pulls out, you come in.

Episode three was directed by Sergio Mimica.

His episode would take place during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis

in 1962.

You look at a lot of Life magazines from the '60s

and pictures of people.

It's really amazing how very little things...

A haircut on a man and a hairdo on a woman...

Can even change their performance.

I'm Bryan Spicer, directing episode number four of Taken.

And my episode takes place in the '70s.

And it's been quite fun trying to recreate the '70s in Vancouver.

A lot of camera movements,

try to incorporate some of the style that I remember from the '70s

with the characters and the visuals.

Each one of the ten directors had a unique challenge.

Felix Alcale had to recreate the infamous Area 51 in Canada.

Director Thomas Wright, familiar with the challenges of shooting in Vancouver

during the X-Files and Dark Angel,

had to stage an alien birthing scene.

- And Jeff Woolnough... - Where's my cappuccino?

- They got that on tape, too, Matt. - Oh, great.

Had to blast a giant UFO out of the sky.

Roll cameras.

[MAN] Oh, yeah!

No matter what the episode,

each director had his work cut out for him,

from military battles to love scenes aboard an alien craft,

but all moved forward according to plan.

While the directors were instrumental

in capturing the essence of different eras,

it was up to the actors to show the passage of time.

This was achieved two different ways...

The first was by having several actors play the same role

during different periods of that character's life.

The second would require special-effects make-up artists

to put their skills to the test.

One of the interesting things about Taken

was the fact that every 18 days,

we literally had to replace almost the entire cast,

and most of them had to play probably a span of 30 years.

We had actors like Joel Gretsch, who plays Owen Crawford,

who we really had to age up.

He started as a young military officer, and we aged him all the way up

to when he got thrown out of the military.

My character ages I think it's 20 years,

so I was daunted by the fact

and very excited about playing a character

that ages and matures.

It's like having a beginning, middle, and end to your character,

and that is thrilling to me.

I'm excited to be a part of that.

I age from 25 to 65. I keep thinking of my grandmother.

I look so much like her during this period.

A lot of the actors have sat in prosthetic make-up

as their characters have aged for innumerable hours.

Joel Gretsch would spend sometimes 18, 20 hours in a work day...

It's 4.00 in the morning. I'm still sleeping.

And would spend eight in front of the camera

cause he'd need five to get into his prosthetic make-up

and four hours to get out of it.

Actually, it's really incredible what these guys do.

If you think you're getting that five back, you're not.

It's Canadian. That's okay.

It's been so much fun to see really, really talented actors,

young actors, who put on ageing make-up

and become their parents and their grandparents.

- I'm finished. - That looks great.

As principle photography came to an end,

it was time to move on to the next step of the Taken vision...

Visual effects.

Dreamworks turned to award-winning visual effects supervisor Jim Lima.

He and his team were off to Los Angeles to create the visual effects

that would transform Taken from a television series

into a television event.

Nine months of shooting UFOs, car chases, and explosions

had finally come to an end.

Flames this big coming out of the side of an aeroplane.

I'm a little worried, but we'll be all right.

But even with filming complete, there was still much work to be done.

From their offices in Los Angeles, the visual-effects team

would use digital technology to create everything from UFOs

to the extraterrestrials themselves.

Jim Lima and his team were crucial to the success of Taken,

and we wanted to have first-class effects,

and we felt like Jim Lima was the guy to do it.

Taken is a very exciting project, and the reason why

is because of the magnitude and the variety of the visual-effects shots.

Jim Lima's first visual-effects sequence

would be to recreate a World War ll bombing mission over Nazi Germany.

This scene is based on actual documented reports

where American fighter pilots claimed to have witnessed

mysterious blue lights known as Foo Fighters.

[PILOT] Lights. Blue ones.

[SECOND PILOT] Easy here. We got 'em, too.

This sequence would use computer technology

to augment actual footage shot of the 5-17

on set in Vancouver.

The B-17 in a sequence in episode one is pretty awesome.

The intention was to do what Steven did with Private Ryan

on the Normandy beaches.

[MACHINE-GUN FIRE]

The greatest compliment we get from the viewing audience

is that when they see this B-17 sequence,

they feel like they're watching a documentary film

that was actually shot in 1944.

This is Alan, and he created the environment for the B-17 sequence.

What Alan did was he found a photograph from 1944 of Germany.

It was actually a spy photo.

This is an actual spy photo from 1944, colourised it,

and then he expanded the size of this photograph

and then stitched it together with the skydome

and basically, we have a completely synthetic environment

made out of real photographs that, when the camera's moving

and we're flying through this environment,

will look absolutely realistic.

And here's the final composite, the final shot.

When it came to integrating the visual effects,

one of the biggest issues facing Lima didn't involve digital technology.

It involved real actors.

It is very challenging when you do a show

that has a fair amount of visual effects.

There's a lot of acting that you do without the actual ship there

or the actual alien there.

The actors were amazing about this

at sort of being able to adapt and act in situations

that they had to use their imagination

and really had to put themselves in places that they really weren't in.

The wonderful thing... Jim Lima, who is the special-effects coordinator,

he was there the day I was shooting the scene

where I see the spaceship for the first time.

So, fortunately, he pulled out a book and showed me drawings

of what was there, the dimensions.

You have the height and width of this huge spaceship.

That's a huge benefit to an actor because you see that,

and you can kind of put that in your mind's eye.

The way it's crashed into the ground is like a meteor,

so it's made out of some sort of unbelievable unobtainium,

some sort of incredible metal that we can't comprehend,

and instead of disintegrating at impact, it literally embeds itself...

- I can't wait to see what I just saw. - I know, I know.

Jim Lima was on set every day visual-effects scenes were shot,

helping the actors to envision what was not yet there.

Meanwhile, a team of designers and animators

were already hard at work making the imaginary a reality.

We'd appreciate your not speaking to anyone about this.

- It's a matter of national security. - It's from outer space, isn't it?

Designing the UFOs would become a collaboration between Jim Lima

and production designer Chris Gorak,

the same expert who helped Spielberg

create the futuristic world of Minority Report.

On a series like this, the production designer

is responsible for taking the written word of the script

and through the director's ideas and input,

developing that into the scenery and settings where the story takes place.

Steven always goes back to the mythology and the legend and the lore

of UFOs and alien abductions and the stories told.

The production designer, Chris Gorak, did a brilliant job

of creating and designing the inside and exterior of the UFO,

and simply, what we've done, is we've taken his design and animated it.

We've put it into motion and treated it as a character.

The flying saucer or the UFO is like the character.

It's actually saying something.

You will never get this craft off the ground without an engine.

We can't find the engine.

In deciding how to portray the alien spacecraft,

the team decided that science fiction should be guided by science.

For the interior UFO and exterior,

we were guided by Steven to do something mechanical,

where the audience could relate to it as a constructed craft,

where it wasn't flown by magic, but maybe there was some technology

that we could relate to.

The ships... we wanted to stay close to the lore.

We weren't gonna come up with a ship that looked different

than what people had reported seeing in the sky.

But he created details in them that really made them unique and special

and sort of took them to the next level.

But perhaps the greatest labour of love for the effects team

was giving birth to the aliens, otherwise known as greys.

Everyone knew you can't tell a great story about alien abduction

without great aliens.

People have seen in films and in television shows the aliens before,

and my goal is, on this show, is to revolutionise,

not only the way they look, but the way they move

and to really show them in a way that's never been shown before.

Redefining the way aliens look was difficult enough.

Even more challenging, however,

was balancing the need to be innovative and different

with the need to stay familiar.

The designers were very aware sci-fl fans would be watching closely,

so they had to remain faithful to the most popular accounts

of alien sightings.

The grey, with a large head, the skinny body,

the hugely almond-shaped eyes,

is the most common form of alien in all reports,

whether it's in the National Enquirer or wherever else you would look.

We're going based on the accounts, on the mythology, on the lore,

and on the interviews of actual people who have been abducted.

- Did you like your abductions? - Like them?

Yeah, as in look forward to 'em, enjoy 'em?

For me, it was always that.

I used to get this buzz, this energy thing. It felt great.

But what makes the aliens in Taken so unique and so real

is that they were designed from the inside out.

Our philosophy from day one has always been

these are real beings and they have real attributes,

they breathe, they have muscles, they have bones.

We feel we can give each alien a particular uniqueness

in terms of things like blemishes and expressions and like that,

and one of the goals is to make them all slightly different from each other,

the way the humans are.

What I proposed in the eyes was that we'd actually see a pupil

and we'd actually see the colour of the eye,

so that, not only would we see the alien looking around

and this pupil contracting and expanding,

but you would also see thought.

However, if you're expecting to see the same old aliens you've seen before,

you're in for a big surprise.

Ram!

Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks are keeping a tight lid

on their new generation of extraterrestrials.

That means we can't even reveal what they look like in this special,

but we can do the next best thing.

They're very spooky-looking, very creepy.

Sort of like chihuahuas on their hind legs.

- Sort of... grey. - Large heads.

I mean, they're freaks.

And they were a lot more human than you might think.

Oh, those aliens. Always late. Never knew their lines.

- They get to sleep late. - The aliens were divas.

A lot of times, I'd reach for something off the craft food table,

and I'd turn back, and it's gone.

Always wanting coffee on the set.

Yeah, I'll kick 'em in their little green asses.

Frankly, we all have to cater to them a little bit,

which was irritating at first, but now we understand,

they are special, they are entitled.

They're aliens, and it's really all about them at the end of the day.

Once the aliens and the countless other visual effects

were seamlessly added,

an entire new reality had been created.

Taken was to be the ultimate tale of alien abduction.

One that would explore the topic more comprehensively

than any series or film before it.

Ram!

After spending close to a year of their lives

bringing the project to the screen,

the cast reflected on what drew them to Taken and how it changed them.

I did Dark Skies, and my first hesitation

was, I hope it's not too much like that.

But it's completely different,

and so I liked that there was a new story, new ideas,

and I was excited about that.

And then the fact that Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg were involved.

Both the characters I play in Blair Witch and in this

are both sort of obsessively ambitious women

with little regard for the feelings of others.

This character has been one of the most fun

and challenging I've gotten to do.

It was an opportunity to do a little action, do some sci-fi stuff.

I've never done any sci-fi before. It was an adventure.

Got shot with an air cannon.

Never been shot with an air cannon, which is basically a huge funnel

that's powered by some type of air tank,

and it's stuffed with peat moss, it explodes, and it shoots out debris.

Will almost knock you off your feet.

We had Dakota Fanning.

Dakota Fanning plays Allie, who is the outcome

of all of the interbreeding of the aliens and two of our families.

She spans five episodes and is the narrator for our show.

Amazing actress. Great coup for us to get her.

'Cause we were really trying to find an actress at that age

that was innocent, but had the profoundness to her.

Do you know what this is about?

I'm not sure yet, but I think we're gonna find out soon.

My favourite part... I had to wear this helmet,

and it came down to here, and I couldn't see out of it at all,

and then I had... in a scene I had just finished doing,

I had these little microbes stuck on my neck.

She can heal a gunshot wound, she can stop time.

Matt Frewer, who many of the sci-fi audience know from Max Headroom.

The implants broadcast on a spread spectrum.

The frequencies are all based around the hydrogen hyperfine transition line,

the most fundamental wavelength in the universe.

It's a fun thing to work on, and it's a huge undertaking.

Shooting a two-hour movie in 18 days, you're going balls to the wall.

Can I say wall?

Taken was a rare opportunity for most actors.

Great writing, complex characters,

and the one thing every actor wants on a resume.

The chance to work on a Steven Spielberg project.

It didn't matter. Just gimme the smallest role.

I just wanna be a part of this project.

When you find out Steven Spielberg is producing it and behind it,

you go, Of course.

And to be involved in a project that is something

that he has been very hands-on in developing and producing

was definitely a draw.

He's very interested in the script, he's very interested in the directors,

he's been very attentive to all the cuts of the shows

and all the editing and how we finally decided to tell the story.

He really understands what the essential elements

of telling stories about aliens are.

But perhaps the greatest benefit of working on a Spielberg project

is the power it has on the people involved.

Close Encounters, E.T, and now Taken.

What Steven Spielberg has done with all of these stories

is to have raised some new questions...

Have we been visited by extraterrestrials?

Does the military know something they're not telling us?

What did happen in 1947 with our government?

Why was there so many sightings back in 1947?

I think it's an interesting question, and it's fun to let your mind go there,

to explore what might be out there in space.

I don't know if the government knows anything it's holding back from us,

but it's not surprising if the government had information it didn't know about.

Oh, I believe the military knows lots of things they're not telling us,

but specifically, I have questions about it either way, frankly.

How could something this huge have happened

and the whole world doesn't know about it?

To be honest, I don't know who's been here and who hasn't.

And I'm not waiting for 'em to come get me.

They mean us no harm. They don't want to hurt us.

They come in peace.

Steven Spielberg's Taken is epic in every sense of the word.

It's a story that spans five decades and four generations,

combining human drama with special effects

and offers a secret history of the 20th century.

As viewers will soon find out,

Taken not only breathes new life into the miniseries format,

but challenges the imagination.

What I hope that people come away with from Taken

is a sense that we're all asking the same questions.

That while, clearly, these beings

are far, far more technically advanced than we are, they're not God, either.

They're still asking the same questions.

I think our aliens are a race that's come here,

and they've found something interesting,

almost like we're the dolphins, and they're Jacques Cousteau,

and they're trying to figure out how the dolphins work.

I think the message of Taken, if you ask me, is a message of hope

and acceptance and accepting other people, other creatures,

being open to possibility.

You don't have to be scared, mum. This is all going to be all right.

A lot of things are going to happen because of this. That's all.

But it's going to be all right.

Ultimately, Taken is an attempt to offer an explanation

to one of life's biggest questions.

I think it's sort of arrogant to think we would be

the only cognisant creatures in the universe.

I've never seen it, but I do believe that there is something else

floating around out there somewhere.

When I was 13, I saw a UFO with a friend.

I've had an occasion to believe that they actually exist.

I think if we all look hard enough for it, we'll see it.

If you ask me if I'm a believer, yes.

I'm a believer.

I think the audience, when they see this,

they're gonna talk about how they believe

and do they believe in outer space that there's other beings out there.

But in trying to provide answers, Spielberg and his team

found they were left asking even more questions.

If there are beings from another planet, dimension, galaxy, universe,

that's incredible, but if it's not objectively true,

then why are so many people telling the same story?

I know there is life off this planet.

I don't really know in my heart whether we've been visited before.

I do believe that somewhere in the infinite reaches of these galaxies,

there must be life forms far more intelligent

and technologically advanced than we are,

so it's something that motivates me to tell stories like this.

Cause it's based on things I believe.