"And, action!" "[ Dog barking ]" "[ Explosion ]" "Move it!" "Where's my wife?" "I don't know!" "You're a clever one Corky." "[ Men cheering ]" "[ Gunshot ]" "man:" "People always think that the times they live in are unique, and they also think that the times they live in are the most difficult and the most chaotic." "If you go backwards to the civil war, the country came to an end..." "it split in two." "And they weren't sure whether it was ever going to come together again." "To do a cop show set in the 1860s is so rich with drama, because everything that a contemporary audience faces on a day-to-day basis, they faced back then, but..." "They didn't have a lot of the stuff that we have to make it a little easier." "Good, the next scene's going to be like this, right?" "Yeah..." "Yeah." "Let's go right away, guys." ""Copper" is a cop show set in New York during the civil war." "You're now looking at." "New York City 140-some years ago." "Man:" "You move through all these different parts of New York and see how aggressive, unsure, and violent the time was." "I think it's a show that's built on hope and survival." "I mean, the fact that it's built around a police force in the most dilapidated area in New York during 1864 is a struggle for most people." "I guess it's an "upstairs, downstairs"" "type of dichotomy going on, but they very much overlap." "One one level, you have the downtown, five points aspect." "And then you have what goes on up in fifth Avenue." "Try not to miss me too much." "Man:" "I definitely think there's a huge class structure, which was more simple... you had the people who are in the elite part of New York, and you had the people that just weren't." ""Copper" is a..." "it's about a lot of things, but it is a crime drama." "It's an interesting discussion about the nascent New York." "Man:" "The way "copper" came about was, I received a call from" "Christina Wayne, and she had been working on an idea for a series with a wonderful screenwriter, Will Rokos." "Woman:" "I had recently met will for other projects, and had read a script... he was, you know, nominated writer for "Monster's Ball,"" "so, upon meeting him, I just thought his dark sensibility would be great for a show like this." "Man:" "I started off with a great producer who helped get executives and producers interested in actually making it into a television series." "Christina was able to get Tom Fontana to take a look, and Tom really brought a lot, made it more alive and richer." "You know, once you have a green light, and once you have the funding, and once you have a script, and once you have a vague outline of a plan, the real hurdle becomes finding the people to actually execute it." "But you must find people who are not only excellent at what they do as craftsmen, but can also really handle the pressure of something this gigantic and this unknown." "Man:" "It's a great team, from top to bottom." "I think it's really good storytelling, and it has a great backdrop to it all." "There was huge immigration that took place, five points, crowded, chaotic." "I mean, you're really talking about some very, very interesting elements through the eyes of this detective." "I want to know what Schwarz knows." "Schwarz!" "I'm Tom Weston-Jones and I'm playing Kevin Corcoran, who is the Irish American cop in the five points, trying to create some semblance of law and order in the place." "Captain..." "Every time I've seen a man drop, he tries to grab one more breath of air." "Mm-hmm?" "He was dead before he was lynched." "That's these kind of beginnings of crime scene investigation." "I'm not sure yet if Gerlin is guilty." "I am sure that O'Connor was killed with a long, thin needle." "More of your scientific nonsense." "Let me prove Gerlin's guilt before we hang him." "Man:" "As he's investigating other cases as a policeman, he's trying to solve a personal mystery that's been haunting him." "If you should happen to come across a distinctive gold locket engraved with the letters "e" and "c" on its face, it might have pictures of a man and a little girl on the inside." "Man:" "What's interesting is, through the police eyes, you can have contact with all the different neighborhoods in New York City." "From the five points... a really squalid situation that New York was in... also, uptown on fifth Avenue." "Man:" "In civil war era New York, fifth Avenue becomes synonymous with opulence, luxurious living." "They had a way of life that was known only to a few of the elite." "I think someone needs to dance." "Yes, he does!" "[ Chuckles ]" "Woman:" "Five points wouldn't really leak into fifth Avenue, even though those areas are very close together." "There is this knowledge all the time that we're living this life, and just down the street there is a completely different existence going on." "Jones:" "In the five points, although it was bad to live there, there were still people who were trying to be industrious and make the best of it." "But it's just the sheer number of people that make it impossible to survive." "New York City, America's first Metropolis, reached roughly a million people by the civil war era." "Of those million people, roughly 500,000 were packed into the small strip of Manhattan below 14th street." "The five points..." "the sixth ward... had roughly 20,000 people, and had the highest density per population, not only of any place in New York City, but of just about any place in the Western world." "Fontana:" "Jacob Riis's groundbreaking book," ""how the other half lives,"" "was the first time that this environment was documented." "His photographs were taken 20 years after our series, but the lives that he depicted in his photographs are not substantially different from the lives that we're depicting in our series." "Man:" "The five points, by the civil war, was principally an Irish neighborhood." "There were blacks, there were Jews, there were Italians, but by and large it's the Irish working class that defines the area." "So, by our time, the police department is roughly one-half Irish catholic, and there were a lot of concerns about that." "Would the Irish catholic immigrants be loyal to their own people?" "Or would they be loyal to the job of being a cop?" "[Irish accent ] You're committing an insult against our people!" "If I wanted to be locked up for being Irish, I'd go to belfast!" "Man:" "Not everybody in the neighborhood is a criminal." "I think that there's a lot of hard-working people here that really respected and appreciated what the police officers were trying to do." "But at the same time, I think it was probably the most dangerous job in New York at the time, was to be a police officer in the five points." "Man:" "If you're given power in an area filled with people that will do whatever they want to survive, you're gonna have to play it pretty tough." "Always good to be on the right side of the law." "It was a messy, confusing time;" "There was bigotry, there's prejudice and crime." "I think this has a lot of the elements which makes for very good storytelling, and you're also showing very much the American experience." "No cane?" "Yeah, feeling risky." "When you see something that you go," ""wow, that's actually what I saw,"" "it's pretty damned exciting." "What's even more exciting is when you see something better than what you thought you wanted." "Essandoh:" "I mean, it's almost like it smells of New York back in the day." "I mean, so..." "especially in the butcher's!" "Yeah, oh, yeah." "You really don't have to act all that much when you smell a rotting pig." "It's very honest." "Very, very honest." "[ Bang, woman gasps ]" "Christ!" "Can't you knock?" "[ Whistles ]" "[ Laughing ]" "♪ Ah ♪" "Creating new characters is always fun and challenging, because what you want to do is come up with characters that haven't been seen on TV before, which I think we have done with this show." "Our lowly Irish asses would hang for a lesser crime, but you... you sit there, letting them win, because you want the hoi polloi to think." "Ciaran Joseph Sullivan was a good boy." "You finished, copper?" "Fontana:" "In terms of the individual characters," "I think, uh, the character of Corcoran is a hero without necessarily being heroic." "You know, it's like a Greek myth, almost, in terms of the size of the struggle that he has in the course of the series." "Jones:" "Some people would say he's an incredibly tragic character." "He's come back from the civil war to find out that his wife has disappeared and his daughter is dead." "And his morals come into question a little bit, because he has to do the wrong things for the right reasons." "Maguire and O'Brien are his boys, and you'll get a real sense of defense of each other." "And especially Maguire and Corcoran, he's his go-to guy." "Get Freeman!" "Get Freeman!" "Ryan:" "I think at the core of our relationship with Corcoran, Maguire and O'Brien," "I think it's friendship." "And it's ultimate friendship and trust." "And we've all, you know, have our layers of what we've done that isn't correct, or that, that affects our friendship, but I think we absolutely have each other's backs." "Thank God there's three of us, then, huh?" "Jones:" "O'Brien is the powerhouse of the group..." "O'Brien is the guy who will just pick someone up and throw them through a window." "That's his go-to place during a fight." "Taylor:" "Andrew O'Brien is a very loyal man... he's married to Sybil O'Brien, who wears the pants in the relationship, certainly." "And he's relatively new to the whole detective business." "You seem awfully calm for a guilty man." "I think O'Brien is really enamored by the work that Corcoran does, because he's this detective that thinks outside the box." "[ Knock at door ] Yes?" "There's a body in Cow bay." "Wayne:" "Franka Potente plays "Eva,"" "who is the madame at the brothel." "She is a very powerful woman in five points;" "She is very cunning, and also has a soft side, a weak side to her, which is her love for Corcoran." "As little courtesy is all I'm asking." "I'm not thinking courteous thoughts right now." "With Corcoran and Eva, their relationship, you'll see, is a very, very heated, sexual one." "Potente:" "I think, overall, she wants prosperity." "This is why she came to America and left everything behind." "She wants the American dream." "You know?" "And she works hard for it." "She wants a home, she wants everything that other people want, too, but, you know, without children and that kind of stuff." "In the case of Annie, which is kind of like this little thing that comes to her by accident," "I always imagine that it's, like, a hint of a memory of herself, maybe." "So, you don't have to be afraid, all right?" "Come along, Ann." "Annie Reilly is a girl who's a runaway, she's grown up way too quickly." "She has had a horrible childhood, and I think she's searching for, just, someone to care for her, to love her, and for protection." "Please don't send me back to Mr. Reilly!" "Jones:" "Well, Annie is an immediate reminder of his daughter, and it breaks Corcoran's heart to see her suffering so much." "Get some rest, Annie." "So, that need to make things okay becomes very convoluted and very strange." "So, it's a fascinating relationship between the two, because you never really know which way it's going to turn." "Kevin, I'm sorry." "I think women during the 1860s had a lot of conventions forced upon them." "And the way that you behaved in society, it was much more rigid and restricted, in terms of what you were allowed to do or say." "Thank you." "Elizabeth Haverford is a well-to-do woman who was brought up in London, and she finds herself on fifth Avenue, where they're all emulating that same stifling British society, and she's really not finding the space and the freedom that she wants." "She's seeing a lot of men who say one thing and do another..." "live a very polite life but actually behave very badly." "And she doesn't respect it." "And she really doesn't care that much what society thinks." "You may show yourselves out once the performance is over, and then, please, never call again." "It's a complicated thing for Corcoran, because he has spent his entire life surrounded by the people of five points, where he really feels at home." "But the person who he mixes most with from fifth Avenue would be morehouse..." "that's where he gets his flavor and his sense of, you know, the elite class of New York." "Corky, join us." "Man:" "Morehouse is an upper-class character who has a very interesting political compass that separates him from a lot of the upper Echelon in New York City." "Father!" "I see you have a new clerk." "He isn't 100% about money..." "of course, that's business." "He's not willing to let go of his wealth." "There will be a proper commission." "But I think his moral compass is a place where he kind of feels that he's a man of the people, although I don't think anybody else would feel that way." "Your friend Corcoran is beneath contempt." "Which puts him one level above you." "If you weren't norbert's son," "I would give you a good thrashing." "If you were to say that there's one character who is the most honest and true and good," "I'd say that Matthew Freeman is that character." "I think he's an incredibly moral person." "What do you want?" "I want to know how she died." "You know, I feel that the character," "Matthew Freeman, he represents where we all want to be as people, because what he does is, he doesn't look, necessarily, at the color of your skin." "It's my assistant." "His name is Kevin." "Jones:" "He's someone that Corcoran not only turns to for help with the detective work that he comes across, but also in terms of, you know, his choices and what he does with his time." "And both of them have concern for one another." "Today is moving day." "You're moving?" "To where?" "Just up north of the new park, Commonsville." "So far away?" "Look around you, Corky." "Since the riots, my people have been moving out of five points." "What a love about a lot of the relationships in this is that they're bonded through turmoil and suffering." "And you can see that with the relationship between" "Freeman and Morehouse." "I wouldn't call them friends in the true sense of the word." "I'd call them..." "Unlikely companions." "You, me, and our good friend, Matthew Freeman, we three must tread carefully." "Our lives depend on our finesse." "Morehouse, Corcoran, and the character that I play," "Matthew Freeman, we all fought together in the civil war." "Morehouse was the major who led us, and Corcoran and I, we were in the trenches together." "Jones:" "I think the thing that ties them all together is they're all kind of modern thinkers, in their own ways." "They all see something in the other person that they really admire, but there are huge differences between all three of them." "If he beats McGuinness, you know these fine people will riot." "You could give me a free consultation now and then." "Fontana:" "The actors that we've hired are so wonderfully human." "And they're so multi-dimensional, what they're bringing to the characters... because none of these characters is evil, and none of these characters is totally good." "They're real people in a real time that existed, and our actors are, I think, doing a terrific job of depicting these lives." "No pain." "No shit." "I would say my biggest hope for this series is that it shines a light on a time in America that people don't really think too much about." "Potente:" "We live in the year 2012, and we think, "we're the shit," we think this is it... 100 years from now, people will look back and be like," ""oh, my God, cute, they had iPhones!" "Ha-ha!"" "You know what I mean?" "And people back in the day probably felt very modern, too." "Wolynetz:" "People don't think about history very much anymore, they don't think about how we got to where we are." "For the most part, I think audiences might be able to take away some idea of how their current urban landscape came into being." "The five points, although it doesn't exist anymore as a specific intersection, still lives on in history and imagination." "And as William Faulkner taught us, the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." "I guess two words for "copper" would be..." "Uh..." "That's a good question." "Can I get three?" "That's a really interesting question." "Well, "city at war," rather... you said "two words," and I couldn't make it two words, so I was thinking about this all night, and I was thinking, "how am I going to do this," so..." "Honest, explosive." ""Cops and robbers."" ""Cops and robbers"..." "that's three words." "Um..." "I, uh, two words..." "What did other people say?" "Gritty and real." ""Copper" in two words for me would probably be "sex" and "addiction."" ""Dirty" and "intriguing."" ""Bloody brilliant."" "I already gave you two words, I don't have two more words." "I would describe "copper" as "mind boggling."" ""Gritty" and "real."" ""Raw," "modern."" ""Rich and poor."" ""Mystery and extremes."" ""Dirty justice."" ""Fungus."" "McClaugherty." "[ Laughing ]" "What do you think?" "No?"