I think it's as simple as just committing to what's written down, you know. I always say this
it's all in the script. The script was so good and our job is to do justice to what's written down.
- Chris, I don't think I can say goodbye to you. - No one is saying goodbye my love.
Just tell our story. No need to make anything up. Just tell them the truth.
- Good evening.
Yesterday morning two bodies were found buried in the back garden of a house in Mansfield.
- This your signature? - No comment. - It's okay Susan, you can answer. - Sorry, that's my signature.
The following is an account of the events as I recall them.
No need to make anything up. Just tell them the truth.
Whatever it is, it'll be between us. Just you and me.
Just tell them the truth.
Well I'd never read anything done in that way, including the fantasy element,
so it meant purely from an acting point of view it was just so much fun to do.
You're telling your story but you go into this...
Will [Sharpe, director] sort of created this red and green place. Ed [Sinclair, writer and creator] had written it and then Will's visual
genius took us into it. And I remember Ed saying, is it weird to talk to the police
and in the same scene, is that...? No that's great! He's very good at writing for actors
so I just thought it'd be a challenge and quite fun.
I don't think when I read it I knew it was true. I can't remember but when I found out it was and that actually the strangest parts of
the story are the truest parts of the story I just thought it
was the best thing I've read for years. It's just an incredible piece of writing, wonderful script.
And then the idea of playing this character which is sort of like playing several characters really
because you're playing in these different genres in the different time frames,
we're not dealing with just flashbacks, we're dealing with different fantastical sequences
almost hallucinatory transcendental sequences, we're playing in the European cinema, the Hollywood
cinema, we're playing cowboys but in England and we're playing ourselves at different ages,
so it was just something that doesn't come along very often in a career. So for me
I didn't have to think for a millisecond about it, I just thought this
is something I'm passionate to do and then getting the part was just it's just been a dream come true.
Just the completion of it and even just seeing it all fully completed in the past few days it's been a dream.
When when we first brought this script to Sister
it was about the... it's such an interesting fresh original exciting take on the true crime
genre. I loved, like Will said earlier, how the procedure sort of sits right down in the
mix and it's all just about the characters at the heart of it and the love story and how
funny it was as well, that was really important how that sort of came to life as well.
I think you have to just believe in the script and the writing and
the direction and the cast that you involved and also the incredible heads of department
we got involved in the show so it's always a challenge, every show is a challenge if
you're ambitious and you're bold and you want to try and push to try and make something
amazing and it was challenging before but it was challenging for all the right reasons
and everyone embraced the challenge and it was incredible to watch everyone succeed and produce
the show that we've made today. So yes it was challenging but it was fun getting there.
Inherent in the scripts were fantasy sequences, these
dramatised versions of the police interviews, flashbacks or memories and lots of
playing with the form which was one of the things that was really exciting when
I first read these scripts and also one of the big challenges is how do we honour these ideas
but make sure they always serve the story, always serve the characters and feel germane to
the psychology of what's going on with Susan and with Chris. And also I guess the biggest
part of it arguably is when we start to prep this with the heads of department
find a visual language for it and find a way to sort of massage this all into a cohesive aesthetic if you like.
Really striking was the first time I met Darrell Ennis-Gayle [Edwards' lawyer], who's the real life
Douglas, one of the first things he said and he talked about with Chris and Susan was that
they're still in love and that actually during the police interrogations, the police had
said to him, well they're just clearly incredibly in love. And so that was just a really
striking thing to start with. I don't think I necessarily thought that I was making a love story
when I first started writing it and developing it but it was so ingrained in their relationship
that I think it was kind of inevitable and I think certainly by halfway through
development we were thinking of it as as much a love story as it is a true crime story.
- Okay so let's get back to you then Mr Edwards. That following Friday you both take the coach up to Mansfield.
- That is correct. The Friday right after I finished work. - And she still hasn't told you?
- I'm getting to it. It wasn't until we arrived at the house. First we picked up fish and chips.
We always have fish and chips on Fridays. It's just when I'm tucking in that Susan starts to act a bit
different and suddenly she says something like - I can't stand it anymore. They haven't gone away, they're upstairs.
- Now of course you know, what are they doing upstairs? Why don't they come down and say hello, something like that.
And then I don't remember the exact words but then she says something like
- Because they're dead. - Oh you know what do you mean? It's a surreal disbelief thing.
I lose all interest in my haddock and chips and I love haddock and chips, it's my favorite.
- Big deal then. - Well I've not had a single bite of haddock since that day, strictly cod. - Isn't there a smell?
- What? Oh you mean a fish smell? - It was warm that week, we checked. - Yeah but it was night when we
was eating our fish and chips. - The point is that the bodies would have been lying there for days.
Forgive the unpleasant image there you're in-laws after all but it would have been quite a stench.
- Ah. I uh yes well I know that's one of the uh... No I didn't smell it but Susan, Susan said...
Well later I think she said that there had been
an awful smell. But no, I didn't notice it at the time myself.
It's always harder to play a real person because for obvious reasons I think. Anyone
could go, shouldn't sound like that, doesn't look like that, whatever. But in this case we never
met them so the only... I spoke to the real Douglas and said what does she sound
like, what's her accent? And he said she sounds just like you. So great well I'll stick with that.
And he might have terrible ear for accents but I just ran with that because it was easier and
then a lot of your job is done by incredible hair and makeup teams and
taking back to the 80s and as David was saying all these different film genres.
But I think it's as simple as just committing to what's written down.
I always say this, it's all in the script. The script was so good and our job is to do
justice to what's written down. So yeah I'm not big on research
but I knew that Ed had done all that for us so yeah.
My first instinct before I'd really talk to anyone I was like well I'd love to go and meet this guy not knowing that
it wasn't possible to do that. In the end I think I'm glad I didn't because
for all one feels an enormous sense of responsibility to be playing a real person
I think not far into filming it kind of it didn't really seem that important to me that it
was someone real because it became about playing this character in the script in this style of
filmmaking and under Will's direction. Not that it felt like any other
project because it certainly didn't because of the extraordinary range of this project
but I wasn't constantly dwelling on oh this is a real man I'm playing because of these
leaps of fantasy and really wasn't cumbersome to be going I must get this right.
There's always a question mark of how we were going to make it into feel like one cohesive piece of
work but then with with Will's vision and the way that he saw the characters and the stories
and the way that he wanted to tell that story and then taking the head to department, the brilliant
department along with him, we as producers just have to trust in the filmmaking process and
the talent involved, the cast, the direction, all of the head of department,
the music, the rest, all of the elements work together to create this cohesive
feeling. And there's always going to be risk but you just have to believe
in the creative and believe in the story and believe in the people involved. So risk yes
but risk worth taking and at the end you have to believe in it too for it to succeed I think.
I did find it quite scary. [laughter from Chris Fry]
But like Chris I felt, for example when we walk from the police set to
the set of the Mansfield house, in that instance it felt like...
In the prep process and in the development of the script you interrogate everything
with such intensity and it really felt like this is a moment where Susan's rehearsed version
of events that she herself perhaps even has come to believe in is being completely
dismantled by the police and it's in a way also being dismantled by us
the audience at home. And so it felt like is this an effective and enjoyable way to kind of share in
the terror the horror of that? And it felt like it could work but I would be lying if I said
it wasn't also quite a scary thing to try and do. - Yeah.
I need you to promise me something Tabitha um
You see I've done something rather silly and it might sound bad, might sound very bad even but
it's not what it seems, not at all. It's not what it seems and just needs a little bit of
clearing up that's all so that's why I need you to promise me, I need you to promise me that you
won't tell the police, there you go. Can you promise me that Tabitha? Uh because I can't
I can't let Susan down, do you understand?
She's
She's very uh fragile.
[Over the phone] Just tell me what you need Christopher. I'm always here you know that.
I remember when I first read it thinking it was very funny when I read the four episodes
thinking oh this is kind of naughtily funny and made me laugh more than it perhaps should given
the subject matter. And then I remember we did a first read-through of it like this
because it was lockdown we did it on zoom. And as we read it all out Iremember
thinking actually my the character I'm playing actually isn't very funny at all. He's not got
many laughs and I realized a lot of the laughter was coming from elsewhere. And I got a little
paranoid at first. It's just not funny everyone's doing it much better and then I realized actually
the comedy isn't so much from Olivia and myself, our characters Susan and Chris.
It's elsewhere and it's in the texture of the the whole thing. And then when we actually came to
play it, it was a matter of like anything else just trying to find the truth in the characters
and dealing with it scene by scene and looking at what we're doing that day. But
because we're in different ages approaching it as you might approach anything else. So therefore I
stopped worrying about the comedy, therefore I also stopped worrying about the initial question of
are you worried about making it too empathetic when you're playing characters who are culpable in this way.
No I think that was the whole point of it. And as Ed says
the abuse of her as a child at the hands of her father is not something to be
pushed aside I think and it does make her a sympathetic character.
I think one of the skills of storytelling if you can change people's...
It's quite black and white: they're murderers, bad. But to change
someone's view by just doing it in a different way that's part of the skill and that's part of
the joy of storytelling and I wanted her to be empathetic and sympathetic and so I'm pleased with that.
From my point of view I always felt, in relation to your previous question
actually, trying to understand from Susan's very traumatic back story how does that
relate if it does to her fascination with classic Hollywood films, with the open plains of the wild
west? Is it in some way a kind of yearning for some kind of fleeting sense of freedom if there was a
feeling of having had her freedom taken away from her long before she was even arrested for anything?
And so I felt like playing out these different romantic memories of first
getting together with Chris in a kind of cinematic old Hollywood way and then again kind of feeling
the tension and the vulnerability of presenting a very constructed rehearsed version of the truth to
the police, that all of that felt like it spoke to how they were feeling and indeed it kind of speaks
to this theme of different versions of the truth I touched on earlier where I think part of
it is us also just being quite honest with you the audience about the fact that we also
are just storytellers and this also is just our version of the truth. We don't have any agency
over the truth. These are fictionalized dramatized versions of these characters
and we're just inviting you to draw your own conclusions ultimately.