Ryin Colenat Interview
Question: What was your favorite scene?
Answer: Definitely the balcony restaurant scene. I've never had an experience like that before or since.
Question: What made it so interesting?
Answer: Well, you see, the thing is, we couldn't get the right format in that part of town to write it, so the reason that scene looks grainy in the book is because we had to hide a sneak it all in Athel's purse. Do you remember that waiter guy who was giving us trouble? That wasn't a filler character, he was a real waiter. Originally the scene just had a couple lines of dialogue, but then Athel starts flicking snails around. At first I thought she was going crazy, but I decided to just go for it. We started laughing and flicking snails everywhere. One even landed in this lady's hair. I was so sure we were going to get thrown out. Oh, that waiter guy was furious, but he never threw us out. Athel just stared him down with sheer force of will and he backed off.
Question: Any good pranks on the set?
Answer: Oh yeah, we got Alder really good. Didn't you hear about the carriage? No? Okay, this was a good one. So, Alder was really really excited, because he got his own personal carriage during the writing to take him from his apartment to the setup every day. Now, the rest of us are pretty used to all that by now, but this was Alder's first big book series, so he was like, really excited about it. He would tell everybody how excited he was to have his own carriage, called his mom up about it, stuff like that. So, he has a weekend off, and while he is gone we all chip in and hire a ghost writer to come in and re-write the carriage bright pink, and covered the thing with ponies. Hundreds of ponies, all over the thing. Every inch had a bright pony on it, and then on the side we made a big banner that said, Alder's Pony Carriage. Oh man, you should have seen the look on his face when he got back and saw that thing.
Question: So, what did he do?
Answer: Believe it or not, he left it that way. He kind of embraced it and rode onto the setup each morning in that bright pink carriage covered with ponies. It was really funny, everyone had a good laugh about that one. I think Mr. Yeager even let him keep the carriage once the book was done.
Question: Now, you were injured at some point during the process, can you tell us about that?
Answer: Yeah, the author had built this really wonderful full scale replica of The Dreadnaught for the battle scene where we escape from Thesda. A week before the scene was to be written that hurricane blew in. Remember that one? Hurricane Bieber or something like that. Anyway, they tried to tie everything down, but the whole thing was completely destroyed. The worst part is I heard that the insurance forms hadn't been filled out properly, so they had to eat the costs. Something crazy, like 36 million dollars lost. Very sad story. Very sad. We ended up changing that scene across the bay, there was this old ship that had been converted into a museum and a restaurant, and we used that instead.
Question: So, how did you get injured in all that?
Answer: Oh, I got drunk and hit my head on my coffee table.
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