With COVERT AFFAIRS’ second season already underway, the adrenaline-pumping series has demonstrated that it is willing to venture across the globe this season. During a recent conference call, executive producer Doug Liman: talked about how the globe-trotting filming came about.
It seems there is a lot of traveling around the world for location shoots this season. Do you choose a location first or are they selected after the episodes are written?
Doug Liman:: We choose the locations first. Some of it is weather dependent. We are sort of a warm weather show because it runs in the summer. So some of it’s just like: what haven’t we done or what sounds cool? Obviously it wasn’t a stretch that we would think of going to Paris. We shot Bourne Identity there and who wouldn’t think of Paris? But we also went to Sri Lanka last year and that’s not something you necessarily would ordinarily think of. So this year we’re also going to Rio and we went to Puerto Rico; and we are going to Istanbul next week. So we sort of think: okay, we haven’t been to that part of the world in a little while. Because sometimes as the show goes there, but we don’t physically take the actors there. The show travels to some exotic locations, but the reality is that the actors stayed behind in Toronto and we send a crew to the exotic location. This season we’ve already sent Piper to Puerto Rico and Paris. We’re sending Chris Gorham to Turkey and we have trips planned to Berlin. But maybe the thing I’m most excited about in the whole season is that we have a trip planned to Rio for Piper coming up. That’s one of the great things about being in the second season and having been a hit in our first season is we’re being allowed to do something extraordinary. Because no TV shows are allowed to take their cast to these foreign cities ever. And it makes such a difference — and if you caught last Tuesday night’s episode of Covert Affairs — we could not have pulled that episode off unless we physically took Piper Perabo to Paris. Everybody loved that episode so much that it’s just giving the network and the studio even more confidence to let us travel even more. [Read more…]