Floris (TV Series) - Production

Production

Finding actors for the series was a problem because television was still regarded as inferior to the theatre. Hauer was introduced to Verhoeven as "maybe not such a good actor, but he will do and dare anything". Verhoeven was indeed worried by Hauer's lack of acting experience, but he looked good physically, could handle swords and ride horse well and did most of his stunts himself. The original name of the series was 'Floris and the Fakir' and Verhoeven used 'two shot' filming just in case. Hauer learned the TV acting fast enough.

For the time it was a major production with 80 actors and 2500 extras. Verhoeven overspent the budget of 355.000 guilders by more than 300%, (the total production costs cannot be calculated exactly anymore, but are estimated to be ƒ1,200,000 or €545,000). When this became clear, it was already too late to stop the production because Verhoeven used 'vertical planning', in which the filming was done per actor instead of per episode. Stopping the production would mean that all work was lost. As a TV production of this scale had never been done before in the Netherlands, there was a lot of pioneering. Recordings were usually made in the studio, but Floris was mostly shot outside. Everyone on the set, including Verhoeven, had to learn the trade as they went. Tasks were also not strictly delineated, like they are these days; everyone was a bit of a jack of all trades. "We didn't stand with our arms folded smoking a cigarette when it wasn't our turn". Ironically, finding good locations for this TV production was difficult because the popularity of television had resulted in transmitting antennas being ubiquitous.