WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE FLASH / ARROW CROSSOVER
The Flash and Arrow producers on the fun of bringing together the characters - and making them fight!
1 DEC 2014 BY ERIC GOLDMAN
This week sees a big TV event occur, as
The Flash and
Arrow have a crossover, bridging both series over two nights. First, on Tuesday's The Flash, Oliver (Stephen Amell), Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) and Diggle (David Ramsey) visit Central City, and then the next night, on Arrow, Barry (Grant Gustin), Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) and Cisco (Carlos Valdes) venture to Starling City.
It’s only episode eight of The Flash, making this a pretty early occurrence to bring both shows together in such a notable way. However, at a recent screening of both episodes, The Flash and Arrow producers revealed they originally had wanted to do it even earlier – before deciding they needed a bit more time to prep for it.
Said executive producer
Greg Berlanti, “One of the most rewarding parts for me is to see the actors just cross over to these separate shows and how much they hold the screen in each other’s show. It shows how lucky we are to have such amazing actors on these shows and what super stars they are. Just because [The Flash] is a spinoff doesn’t mean it’s not a whole other show, yet they go there and you look up on the screen and they fit in and they totally own it, so we’re really fortunate.”
“What was fun is we actually combined the writers rooms,” noted EP
Andrew Kreisberg. "We actually had the Flash writers came for the Arrow episode and vice versa. A writer’s room is such a... everybody has their personalities and their specialties and to throw two rooms together, in some ways, it was like having two casts together and those rooms meshed so nicely. When you look at this, you really see the results of all those minds coming together.
As for what had to make it into a crossover of this story, the producers said that not only a superhero fight but a fight
debate between the characters was a must.
As Kreisberg explained, “I think one of the biggest things was the argument that Dig and Felicity and Cisco and Caitlin have about who would win in a fight. It was one of the earliest things we talked about because we’re all fans. We’ve all sat around as kids – or adults! -- and, you know ‘Who would win in a fight, Superman or Batman? The Hulk or Wolverine?’ We’re having it today! So we knew that they would fight each other in one of these episodes. It was one of our earliest ideas and that the cast members would have that Comic-Con argument on-camera was one of our earliest ideas.”
Asked what the preparation was like for the Flash vs. Arrow fight,
Stephen Amell (Oliver Queen), replied, "It wasn’t that much different than a typical episode. I worked with the same stunt team because we’ve essentially leant our stunt team to Flash and they’ve created their own team. But the actual fight with Grant which we shot over three nights, that was a different experience because of the special effects element. I think we came out okay!" Amell admitted that thanks to The Flash's abilities, "I fought the air a little bit."
While there are plenty of big action moments, including that aforementioned fight, many of the producers and cast agreed on a highlight. Said Amell, “The scene where David sees the Flash for the first time, you could build an entire blooper reel on that scene. I don’t now how—if you watch it again, you’ll see me bite my lip. It was the only way I could get through.
Grant Gustin agreed, remarking, “That’s actually my very favorite moment from all of the crossover stuff is the first time David sees Barry arrive in the suit with the powers. We had a lot of fun that night... that morning! It was very early in the morning.”
The Flash episode involves the DC Comics villain Rainbow Raider, with Captain Boomerang the main villain on The Arrow episode. Said Kreisberg, “We have a board up in The Flash office of like all the villains that he has. Some of them, they sound so silly and Rainbow Raider was one of them. Geoff Johns, his favorite thing to do in the world is to take old, silly characters and rehabilitate them and make them cool. I think we kind of did that with Rainbow Raider. If you see his costume in the comics and what he can do, it’s very silly. But I think we’ve gotten pretty adept at taking some of these comic book characters and we usually say Arrow-fying them - or in this case Flash-ifying them.”
While the producers love being able to interweave the shows and bring characters between them, along with other references, don’t look for another large-scale crossover of this sort for awhile. As Berlanti explained, “We’re just working out the back half of the year. And they’ll be other crossovers, but there won’t be a two-parter like this in the back half of the year. You know why that is? Because our finales that we tend to build toward on both of these shows are so massive to begin with, that it would just be an impossibility.”
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/01/what-to-expect-from-the-flash-arrow-crossover
