John Walker as The 6th Doctor
It was ambitious, yes. For us four writing big scripts, but never doing anything with them, to suddenly have to do a 4 part story with all sorts of characters, monsters etc, it was a big attempt at a film, especially with the effects. Lasers, split screening, space ships crashing etc.
I didn't think we would get it finished. I think, on the very first day of filming, one of the characters told us that they couldn't do a week, just a day and a half, so we thought we would have problems, but no, we got it done fine. Then, when we got to the night of filming for episode 1 we thought it was terrible, you couldn't see anything, it was just abysmal. We didn't think episode 1 would be recorded, but once it did, it looked like things were on the up. But then we had the filming for episodes 2 and 4, which caused problems because we were filming incredibly late at night, the costume wasn't ready - things started to go horribly wrong for us.
The other location I had PeaceHaven in Brighton for the 'mindscape' scenes. It rained that day, so we were a bit wet, but while they were setting up, they stuck me on this ridiculous rock quite a way out, for this big long shot, and the tide was coming in really quickly, covering my legs, so my shoes and ankles were all wet. My main location was in Cannons Health club in London for the scenes inside the space-ship. It looked really good because they turned the lights off so you couldn't see the gym equipment and it did look futuristic. We had the cleaners there too and they would always bug us. We turned off the lights and they would turn the lights off and moving around us, but we got there in the end with about 3 re-shoots!
The character of Stan (Steven Stanbridge) was supposed to be the comic relief of the story. Its difficult, because if Stan had been in all 4 episodes he would have progressed, but it was always like - "oh no, I've fucked up again, lets run away from the danger I've caused." I think that he would have benefited to have toughened up a a bit in episode 4.
My favorite scene in TRIDENT was the water scene where I get thrown into the pool by the entity as the Cybermen attack the cryogen chamber at the end of episode 2. I enjoyed it because it was doing something, where the rest of the episode was spent running around corridors, so being thrown into the pool was fun.