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Lyn Goldfarb and Margaret Koval
Documenting the Roman Empire's First Century
Directors/producers Lyn Goldfarb and Margaret Koval.
(Photo: Edgar Asher)
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Julius and Augustus Caesar, Caligula, Claudius, Nero -- these are names that immediately pop into mind when one thinks of the Roman Empire. However, the names Ovid, Josephus and Seneca are, for the most part, familiar only to historians and Empire buffs.
Documentaries on the Romans have focused primarily on the emperors and generals who dominated this period. But a new four-part documentary PBS series, The Roman Empire in the First Century, from DGA director members Lyn Goldfarb and Margaret Koval, blends familiar history with accounts from lesser known witnesses to the period. There's the poet Ovid, the Jewish rebel Josephus, the philosopher Seneca and others whose writings provide a more personal glimpse of this era.
The inspiration for the project actually came when Koval, who also wrote the series, was helping her son for a second-grade science project on volcanoes. "I remembered that I'd once read a firsthand account by Pliny the Younger of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius," she explained. "We dug that account up and my son wrote a play for his class based on it. I was sitting in the audience thinking, 'You know, if second graders like this stuff, maybe there's a series here.' So I went around and looked for other firsthand accounts of the first century and, sure enough, there was just a multitude of writings and authors."
In a case of synchronicity, shortly thereafter Goldfarb, who had teamed previously with Koval on the PBS series, The Great War, called saying, "Devillier Donegan Enterprises is doing a series on empires. Do you have any ideas?"
Koval said she just burst out laughing, telling Goldfarb about her Roman Empire idea.
The series begins with the rise of Augustus, immediately following the death of Julius Caeser, and continues until slightly after the year 100 with the Emperor Trajan. It is a period of empire building, treachery and catastrophic destruction.
One of the things that struck Goldfarb about the series was the parallel to some of the situations today and the similarities of the thoughts of the people. "The people that lived then are amazingly like us," she said. For instance, Ovid's popular erotic poetry created such a stir that Augustus clamped down on morals and exiled the poet to obscurity on the outer frontier of the empire.
Koval hoped that one of the things viewers would take from the series is how very much like Rome we are today. "We can certainly understand them better by feeling their own contradictions and angst, because, in many respects, it's also ours," she said.
To bring this period visually to life without the benefit of photographs and archival film, the filmmakers had to be extremely creative in their shot selection. The key was to find fresh ways to shoot Roman ruins of the period and combine them with restorations that had never been photographed before. Their pre-production scouting eventually led to them to film in eight countries at 47 locations.
"It was very challenging because we had four hours to fill," Goldfarb explained. "We took advantage of using natural elements to try to tell the story. We used a lot of earth, wind and fire in terms of telling the story, and we tried to make our scenes look different."
They attribute their success in the telling to the initial location scouting. "We scouted extensively, and for documentaries that's quite a luxury," Koval said. "We went to scout some locations two, three times before deciding to shoot. Big monumental locations were not so hard to find. Marble survived. It was the intimate domestic locations that were harder for us. We were blessed by the tragedy of Vesuvius, so Pompeii survived. And knowledgeable museum professionals led us to reconstructions that were appropriate for what it would have looked like in the first century."
"It was like the Colonial Williamsburg of the ancient world," Goldfarb added.
Each director was scheduled to cut two of the four episodes. While they were able to scout locations together, they had to work out how to shoot all the footage in the diverse locations that would in some cases appear in all the episodes.
Because of the limited funds available, they decided to maximize their shooting by dividing up the locations being shot with Goldfarb shooting locations for Koval's episodes and vice versa. For instance, one would shoot all the Italian locations and the other might shoot all the locations in Turkey. They used the same cinematographer, Michael Chin, shot it on Super 16, and depended heavily on the storyboards of more than 5,000 digital photos they had taken on their location scouting.
"It was very important for us to have a consistency of look as we switched off directing," Koval said. "The first and most important shoot for us in Pompeii, Germany and the Netherlands, Lyn, Michael and I did together to make sure we were all on the same page about style and look."
Another unique aspect was how the talking head shots of historians and other experts were filmed. All of the experts were brought to Los Angeles and filmed over a three-day period in a studio. Roman images, such as frescoes, were rear projected behind them. This blended the location footage with the interviews and eliminated the jarring that sometimes occurs when one cuts from an ancient ruin to a shot of a scholar in front of a bookshelf in his office at a university.
"This was much better than taking a crew from place to place," Goldfarb said. "It helped maintain that consistency of look and lighting and a color coherency to the entire series. We always treated this as a series, not as four separate shows. It also made the most sense in terms of scheduling and budget."
Narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver, the series airs on July 18 and 25 on PBS.
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