TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > BLOOD FEVER > Behind the Scenes

	Director Andrew Robinson plays Garak, who has a semi-regular role as a Cardassian living and working on the Deep Space 9 space station in DS9. He also directed "Unforgettable".
	Andrew Robinson decided to employ a handheld camera for the scenes between Tom and B'Elanna in the Sakarian caves, so that the inevitable shaky rough-and-ready impression of the shots would enhance the mood of charged and tense emotion conveyed by actors Robert Duncan McNeill as Tom Paris and Roxann Dawson as B'Elanna. click for audio clip from the episode (Handheld cameras were also used in the Akritirian prison scenes in "The Chute".)
	The Sakarian leader is called Ishan. The name is not mentioned on the tv screen but is from the script.
	Roxann Dawson: "Blood Fever was a very fun episode to shoot. I think that we all had fun. It was directed in an interesting way where it was mostly handheld. And Marvin Rush, our director of photography, was there with us alone basically in very tight spaces in this cave, and a lot of the camera movements and a lot of the blocking was improvised with natural lighting."
	Roxann Dawson: "We were in dark caves with flashlights and we basically choreographed the fight scenes, the fight-love scenes, to light each other's faces with the flashlights, and he would work with us, the director of photography, as a kind of three-person dance. And we would be struggling and the camera would be right there, and we'd know that as we landed here, as he had a line and the camera moved to him my flashlight would have to light his face, and you know the struggle would bring a flashlight onto my face. It became this great dance that we had. A lot of physicality was all choreographed and improvised within boundaries, and I think that's what gave it the life. I haven't seen that episode in a while, but I'd love to go back and look at it. The shooting of it was a blast. We had a lot of fun."
	Tim Russ: "We did an episode that dealt with pon farr happening to one of the other characters, Vorik, on the show. There was a scene in there, where he and I, in which we encounter each other in his quarters, and he's going through this pon farr, and I'm not of course at the time. And we had to figure out, well, how would they behave towards each other? Among human beings there would be a certain degree of sympathy perhaps. If you had cancer and I had cancer, we could understand what each other is going through. We would be sympathetic towards each other, we might bond that way, we're in the trenches together. Well, for the Vulcan characters pon farr is the displaying of emotions and anxieties, and that is embarrassing and disturbing for them. And so it was nice we played the scene together."
	Tim Russ: "When I worked it out with the writers, I said: "How do we do this? How can we make this happen? Well, I think they should be very uncomfortable in the presence of each other, not even look at each other in the eye very easily, avoid each other's gaze and be very aloof with each other, very distant from each other, very cold, whatever needs to be done and then we get out. It's very uncomfortable for both of us, and that's how we should play it." And so we came up with this moment which had not been exposed or shown before that."
	Tim Russ: "What are other the cultural aspects of pon farr? I mean, what about the marriages, what about if they're betrothed to someone when they're born, what happens if they're not, if that falls through, what happens if one of the other partners reject, can they marry outside their race as was done in TOS, or what's the cause and effect for it? We had to make it up. We had to create this backstory, so that was part of designing and building upon what we already had, so far as the philosophy of this character."