Second Boy: One analogy that comes up, from literature, is with epic poetry, or with an epic. And "The Prisoner" seems to have all the qualities that belong to an epic, including the kind of structure which you ended up with: the thing that began with seven parts and ended with seventeen.

McGoohan: Yeah.

Second Boy: There have been a few peculiar epic works which have done that sort of thing or been on the way, Spencer's "Faerie Queene" for instance, or Tennyson's "Idylls of the Kings" ..."Idylls of the King" which became a twelve-part non-epic with all the properties and qualities of an epic. I have one question based on that perhaps peculiar observation, and that is: one of the figures in some of the epics, like the "Faerie Queene," is the dwarf who accompanies Una and the Redcrosse Knight where the idea for Angelo Muscat come from?

McGoohan: Oh. I don't know. Where did that come from?

Second Boy: Is there a literary image...

McGoohan: No, I certainly never thought of one. There were all sorts of interpretations to little Angelo. He's a very sweet man and...a very, very sweet man. It's this sort of...there should be something also--sinister about him. I mean, there was always the possibility that he might be No. 1. See, I don't know if anyone...do you pick up that at all? I don't know, but that...because he was such a good friend and always by the side of No. 6, that there was...should have been an implication that perhaps he was a sinister character, and particularly in the last episode, when he goes...he's the one that goes out with No. 6 and they go into the...Maybe he's over No. 1 somewhere...you know they have so...they have stars, superstars, and what are they gonna call them next? Comets? So what...maybe he's a comet or something, little...little Angelo. So there should be that remaining sinister thing about it.

Second Boy: I was just curious, because there were so many images of all...of all the figures that are in the series that are...that have literary connections, whether of not they're deliberate...(McGoohan: Yeah.)...deliberately connected or not doesn't really matter, does it? There might be an element...

McGoohan: No, I don't think...I don't think it does.

Second Boy: No, doesn't matter at all.

McGoohan: I don't think, in that sort of...I, I use the work "surrealistic" about it...thing, that one has to tie up all the loose ends. I think there's...that you...options are open for the beholder to interpret whichever way he likes.

Third Boy: Mr. McGoohan, my question deals with religion.

McGoohan: Yeah.

Third Boy: I understand, in reading a little about you, that you're a very religious man, and my question pertains to "Fall Out." I have interpreted a lot of the acts as being...having this content. I'm thinking specifically of the crucifixion of the two rebels, of when their arms are drawn apart, the temptation of No. 6 by the President of the Village, of the temptation of Christ...

McGoohan: They give him the throne.

Third Boy: "Drybones," all of that. First of all, would you agree with my idea that that is intentional? That it is...

McGoohan: Ah, answering: No, I had never any religious inspiration for that whatsoever. I was just trying to make it dramatically feasible. Certainly the temptation with the guy putting me up on the throne and all this stuff, ah...it's Lucifer time. But I never thought at that moment. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind it was there, "And the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone" thing. I just thought it was a very good song for the situation and also was applicable to the young man because, as you know, it's easy for us to go astray in youth and he was astray and he's trying to get everything together again.

Third Boy: When I speak of religion, I mean a moral attitude towards life.

McGoohan: I would think that's necessary, yeah.

Third Boy: OK, then, is it fair to say that No. 6 draws upon that? Is that the source of his defense? Is that how he gets up in the morning and faces another day in the Village?

McGoohan: I think that's a very good comment and I think that's probably true, yeah...moral force which says, "I have a spirit of my own, a soul of my own and it's not all my own because it's joined with a greater force beyond me." I don't think he got up every morning and analyzed it to that extent, but I think that that force is within him and anyone who is able to fight in that individual way.

Third Boy: Would you say that there is a distinct lack in the rest of the villagers? Are they soulless beings?

McGoohan: Ah, the majority of them have been sort of brain- washed. Their souls have been brainwashed out of them. Watching too many commercials is what happened to them.

Troyer: I used to think that television commercials were spiritually healthy because they made us skeptical and that that was probably a very good thing to learn very early on.

McGoohan: Well, they don't make enough people skeptical because if they made enough people skeptical, the people who were made skeptical wouldn't be buying all the junk that they're advertising and then they'd be out of business.

Fourth Boy: There's one sequence you do with Leo McKern where he says, "I'll kill you." You say, "I'll die," and he says, "You're dead." Is that a figure of speech or was there an underlying thing happening there?

McGoohan: Now you're talking about 'Once Upon A Time'?

Fourth Boy: Yeah, 'Once Upon a Time'.

McGoohan: Well, that was very interesting that one...(which was probably my favourite earlier on, Warner. That was probably it.) That was one that was written in the 36 hour period. And Leo McKern, who was a very good friend of mine and a very fine actor I think, came in on short notice to do it, and it was mainly a two hander. The brainwashing thing, he was trying to brainwash me and in the end No. 6 turns the tables. And the dialogue was very peculiar because all it consisted of was mainly "Six, Six, Six," and five pages of that at one time. And Leo, one lunchtime, went up to his dressing room and I went to see the rushes and I knew he was tired. I went up to the dressing room to tell him how good I thought he'd been in the rushes. And he was curled up in the fetus position on his couch there, and he says, "Go away! Go away you bastard! I don't want to see you again." I said, "What are you talking about?" He says, "I've just ordered two doctors," he says, "and they're comin' over as soon as they can." He says, "Go away." And he had. He'd ordered two doctors and they come over that afternoon and he didn't work for 3 days. He's gone! He'd cracked, which was very interesting. He'd truly cracked. And so I had to use a double, the back of a guy's head for a lot and eventually Leo did come back and we completed them and also he was in the final episode, so he forgave me for everything, but he did crack, very interesting, I thought....

Troyer: Much as he cracked in that final episode.

McGoohan: Same, exactly the same.

Troyer: I was wondering about how much intensity there was in that. I know that acting is always an enormously intense experience but in that head-on two hander where there was so much dynamic pressure. Obviously, it was real.

McGoohan: It was 8 days shooting and for most of those 8 days we were head to head on from 8 o'clock in the morning 'til 6:30 at night with an hour for lunch. So, it was pretty intense. It was psychiatrist couch time, sort of thing.

Troyer: Were you a different person when you came out the other end of that series?

McGoohan: Tired, that's all.

Troyer: Beyond that?

McGoohan: No, no....

Troyer: It wasn't purely psychoanalysis?

McGoohan: No, no, I never let any part that I play sort of take over. I think that that's nonsense when that happens. I think you should be able to go in and do it, learn your lines and do it. Some are more fatiguing that others, some are more emotionally exhausting than others. I mean, you can't play Hamlet without being drained or King Lear without being drained but to say that you lived through the day playing Lear or playing Hamlet before you go out the next night and go on to the stage, I think that's ludicrous.

Troyer: What about the notions that some actors, some people in other creative endeavors have, that we all have a finite bank of energy that each time one brings some of it up there's a little less left for next time, or for the other end of the road.

McGoohan: I think that the contrary is true. When one looks at people such as Arthur Rubenstein, people with tremendous talents and they are young men. They're young men at 75, they're young, 80 they're young! Their vitality, in fact, increases. Their energy increases. It just happens, I mean the force. The adrenalin increases. It just happens that the machinery of the body, the parts, the spare parts are wearing out a little bit...I think it increases and I know a lot of old folks who are young, young people.

Troyer: So the creative urge is a muscle, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets.

McGoohan: I think so, yeah. Yeah. It's just this stuff wears out. That's all.

Fifth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, when you began "The Prisoner," you began it in a decade in which a lot of people were used to secret agents. You very neatly saw the next decade coming. I thing you saw Watergate; the enemy within as opposed to the enemy without. I don't know if you can answer this, but if you were going to do the series again and you had to look aged to the 80's and you were thinking in terms of what you see as being the real enemy, not the storybook enemy but the enemy that's really going to hassle us. If you were going to look into the 80's now, what would you look to?

McGoohan: I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself, and that goes with oneself, a two-handed pair with oneself and progress. I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...I don't know how we're gonna stop it, not it's too late, I think.

Fifth Boy: Do you think maybe there's going to be a strong popular reaction against "Progress" in the future?

McGoohan: No, because we're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.

Sixth Boy: We tend to view the threat, the Village there, as sort of a thing as something external like Madison Avenue, the media. How responsible are we for accepting this? Where do we become involved in being "unfree"?

McGoohan: Buying the product, to excess. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed.

Sixth Boy: Did you regard the Village as an external thing or as something that we carry around with us all the time?

McGoohan: It was meant to be both. The external was the symbol, but it's within us all I think, don't you? This surrealist aspect; we all live in a little Village.

Troyer: Do we?

McGoohan: Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.

Troyer: Well, I know who the idiot is in mine.

McGoohan: Yes, Number One - same as me.

Seventh Boy: Is No. 1 the evil side of man's nature?

McGoohan: The greatest enemy that we have...No. 1 was depicted as an evil, governing force in this Village. So, who is this No. 1? We just see the No. 2's, the sidekicks. Now this overriding, evil force is at its most powerful within ourselves and we have constantly to fight it, I think, and that is why I made No. 1 an image of No. 6. His other half, his alter ego.

Troyer: Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?

McGoohan: No, I didn't. That's an interesting question.

Troyer: When did you find out?

McGoohan: When it got very close to the last episode and I hadn't written it yet. And I had to sit down this terrible day and write the last episode and I knew it wasn't going to be something out of James Bond, and in the back of my mind there was some parallel with the character Six and the No. 1 and the rest. And then, I didn't even know exactly 'til I was about the third through the script, the last script.

Troyer: How about you colleagues, the other writers. Were they surprised?

McGoohan: Yep.

Troyer: Were they annoyed?

McGoohan: No.

Troyer: Did they decide it was untidy?

McGoohan: No, they used to come along from time to time and say, "Who's No. 1?" you see. And I told them , "It's a secret" until I actually sat down and wrote it - and it was, actually; they didn't know until I handed out the script.

Troyer: But were they disappointed by that...?

McGoohan: No, they liked it. They said they always knew it was going to be him.

Troyer: (laughs) Once you told them.

McGoohan: Few of them did really. Nobody really knew. No.

Troyer: Why the double mask? Why the monkey face?

McGoohan: Oh, dear. Yeah, well, we're all supposed to come from these things, you know. It's the same with the penny farthing symbol bicycle thing. Progress. I don't think we've progressed much. But the monkey thing was, according to various theories extant today, that we all come from the original ape, so I just used that as a symbol, you know. The bestial thing and then the other bestial face behind it which was laughing, jeering and jabbering like a monkey.

Eighth Boy: Mr. McGoohan, during the last episode, Fall Out, we see the Prisoner. He's smiling and laughing and dancing for the first time and yet later on the very last scene is exactly the some as the very first scene where he's driving off with his familiar stern face. My question is, has the Prisoner between the first and the last episode actually changed any?

McGoohan: Ah, no, I think he's essentially the same. I think he got slightly exhilarated by the fact that he got out of this mythical place and felt like doing a little skip and a dance, and singing a bit, and felt very happy to be going home with his little buddy, the Butler, you know. And we never did a cut of him when that door opened. We just saw the door open and he went in. So, you never knew whether his exhilaration was lost when he saw that sinister door that was left like an unfinished symphony.

Ninth Boy: In the final episode, does the Prisoner really consider becoming the leader of the Village?

McGoohan: No. He does not. He just wants to get out and he uses a technique which he hadn't used before that, which was violence, which is sad, but he does; and that's how he gets out and then, of course, in the final episode, he goes back to his little apartment place and he has his little valet guy with him and the door opens on its own when he goes in the car. There you know it's gonna start over again because we continue to be Prisoners.

Ninth Boy: And that leads to my last question, what would the Prisoner be likely to do with his newfound freedom?

McGoohan: He hasn't got it. Which is the whole point. When that door opens on its own and there's no one behind it, exactly the same as all the doors in the Village open, you know that somebody's waiting in there to start it all over again. He's got no freedom. Freedom is a myth. There's no final conclusion to it. Ah, and I was very fortunate to be able to do something as audacious as that with no final conclusion to it because people do want the word "THE END" put up there. Now the final two words for that thing should have been "THE BEGINNING".

Troyer: This is kind of a banal question, I guess, but if you could leave one sentence or paragraph in the head of everyone who watched the Prisoner series, the whole series, one thing for them to carry around for awhile, when it was over, what would it be?

McGoohan: Be seeing you.

Troyer: Just that?...enigmatic to the end.

McGoohan: Be seeing you. That means quite a lot.

Troyer: It does indeed.

McGoohan: Be seeing you. Yeah.