Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, recording his regeneration scene for Twice Upon a Time on 10 July 2017.
Director Rachel Talalay receives applause and flowers from the crew – including writer and showrunner Steven Moffat (second from left) and producer Peter Bennett (right) – on the last day of shooting for Twice Upon a Time.
On 12 June 2017, shooting began on that year’s Christmas Doctor Who episode, Twice Upon a Time — but director Rachel Talalay first had to record the closing moments of The Doctor Falls, an episode to be broadcast just 18 days later.
“That was as tight as I ever had it on Doctor Who,” she says. “We shot that sequence with David Bradley as the First Doctor and it immediately went into editing.
I was then shooting the rest of the Christmas episode, so [executive producer] Steven Moffat came down to Wales to approve editing of that scene, and he’d physically bring work in progress on a laptop to me on set for my feedback. That was kind of backwards from the way I’d normally supervise the edit and then put it in front of him, but it’s what had to be done. And then it immediately had to go into visual effects and everything else…”