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Bonding with the villagers through laughter and rituals for Tribes, Predators & Me

2016-03-18T10:04:49+00:00

Spending time with the Waorani tribe in Ecuador for Tribes, Predators & Me has had a real impact on my life – their spirit is truly engaging.

I have filmed with many indigenous communities around the world. However, the experiences of being with the Waorani were some of my favourites. I was out in Ecuador for seven weeks in total, setting up the filming, directing the shoot and carrying out the translations afterwards and during this time we became close.

Some of the women in the Waorani tribe have lost loved ones to the anacondas that live nearby

They are great people. Kind, passionate and ultimately hilarious. But, it’s when the jokes stop that you know something serious is going on. One evening early on in the filming, the jaguar shaman (the group’s spiritual leader), Kemperi, said that I was filled with darkness. This needed to be sorted.

A cleansing ceremony followed which involved him spitting on my face and rubbing me with his sweat and some giant nettles. Half way through, he spat so hard that his false teeth fell on to my head. Despite my giggles, he didn’t laugh. This was real business.

The rest of the crew were also then cleansed by Kemperi too – whether they had any darkness in them or not. Unfortunately this meant that we all came up in giant welts as a histamine reaction to the nettles. Not ideal in a tropical climate…

Kemperi, 75, goes into trances to become possessed by a jaguar

The crew go through a lot of what presenter Gordon Buchanan experiences on screen, but sometimes he’s all on his own. When we were out filming the peccary hunt in Bameno, we couldn’t keep up with all our large cameras and sound gear.

So whilst we were left behind, lost in the forest, Gordon ran after the men who sped off and came back with a prized wild peccary kill. It takes incredible speed and agility to hunt in that kind of terrain, and on that rain-drenched afternoon we saw for ourselves that everything that the men bring back is hard won.

Gordon loses the tribe during a hunt and finds himself alone

I became a vegetarian when I was 13 and it’s only on special occasions when this slips. As they passed around the peccary skull to suck the juice out of, and handed us each a portion of peccary testicles to chew on, this became one of those special occasions!

The Waorani are incredibly accommodating, so I didn't want to cause any offence or confusion by refusing to share their food. However, it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience... They were charred all over, with a very peculiar texture; almost like warm jelly beans set into a rigid blancmange casing.

Gordon tries out 'choice' cuts of peccary to bond with the tribe

And there were plenty more special occasions that followed as we embraced the Waorani traditions, at one point I found myself dining on a spider monkey's arm. It was a particularly impactful moment.

Having spent time with several indigenous communities, I can say that I’ve eaten more monkeys than I have meatballs and now after being with the Waorani I’ve eaten more bollocks than I have burgers. I’m just not so sure I can call myself a vegetarian any more…

Rachael Kinley is the producer and series director Tribes, Predators & Me.

Tribes, Predators & Me starts on Sunday, 20 March at 9pm on BBC Two. Each episode will be available to watch in BBC iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Love You To Death: What domestic violence does to a family

2015-12-16T12:30:00+00:00

The statistics about domestic homicide are shocking. On average, seven women a month in Britain are killed by their male partner or ex-partner. My idea for Love You To Death: A Year of Domestic Violence, was to make a film that would name all the women killed by their partners in one calendar year, to dignify all them with a name and an identity so they would be more than just a Home Office statistic.

We approached all 86 families of the women killed in 2013 to explain that the project would name their relative with a view to raising awareness of the issue of domestic violence – a terrifyingly common occurrence that people often shy away from discussing.

A board of photos and clippings marks out the 86 deaths as part of the documentary

There are so many assumptions about domestic violence, but the striking thing was that the women were from all over the country and had died in such widely differing circumstances. They were from very different cultural backgrounds. Some were teenagers, others in their 80s. And the length of their relationships with the perpetrators varied from just a few weeks to over 40 years.

Some were relationships with a history of violence, but – perhaps surprisingly - in many instances, the murder was the first act of violence ever to occur. The thing that shocked me most was how extreme the violence was in many of the cases – a beheading, a man who cut his wife’s heart out, women brutally murdered in front of their children.

The film features the stories of several of the women in more detail, remembering who they were and trying to piece together what led to their deaths. Their stories are told in the film by their families, friends and neighbours, so it quickly became apparent that the film would also explore the traumatic impact of domestic violence on those left behind.

Assia Newton's murder caused a rift between her three daughters

The effect on all the families we talked to in the course of our research was overwhelming and enduring. Many were suffering post-traumatic stress and are still in need of counselling or medication. As well as shock at the sudden and violent loss of someone they loved, people often described feelings of guilt. Why did they not know more about what was happening behind closed doors? Could they have done more to intervene?

Others reported feelings of anger that their warnings and advice were ignored and that they are now left to live with the consequences - a never-ending legacy of grief, helplessness and anguish. One young woman in the film describes how her friend’s murder has damaged her trust and has made it much harder for her to form a relationship with a man. Another woman whose sister had been killed explained to me (off-camera) that she panics when she sees her husband picking up a hammer, even though she knows he’s just doing a spot of DIY.

The primary reason these seven families took part in the film was because they did not want their loved one to have died in vain. I hope we have done them justice and that the film will have the impact they are hoping for. Many of them said to me that if even one woman who is in a bad situation reaches out for help as a result of this programme, that would make their involvement in the filming worthwhile.

Vanessa Engle produced and directed Love You to Death: A Year of Domestic Violence.

Love You to Death: A Year of Domestic Violence is broadcast on Wednesday, 16 December at 9pm on BBC Two.

If you, or someone you know, is affected by the issues raised in this programme, please see the information and support page (available until 25 January, 2016) for details of organisations which can help.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Bringing to life a Brussels sprout: Creating BBC One's Christmas veggie

2015-12-02T00:01:00+00:00

The humble sprout. Love 'em or hate 'em, you'll be seeing a lot of them before the year is out. That's because BBC One's chosen an animated and adventurous Brussels sprout to appear in between this year's festive programmes.

Below, Oscar-nominated directors Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes explain how the idea germinated. But first, watch the one minute film they made to introduce our plucky green hero, Sprout Boy:

This external content is available at its source: The full Sprout Boy film

How did you imagine Sprout Boy’s personality – and how do you get that across in an animation? (We love his little quiff.)

Alan: We always saw him as a wide-eyed innocent, so excited that Christmas has finally arrived. He sees festive joy in everything, even if he’s not exactly welcomed with open arms. But despite his rejection, his spirit shines through and he never gives up hope. Finally, his persistence is rewarded.

The directors' doodles - every character starts on paper before computer modellers take over

It was important to capture these different emotions - initially his hope, excitement and wonder at the world around him, before doubt and confusion appear. Then, finally, the joy and celebration.

Adam: Sprout Boy is like a little naïve schoolboy, an eternal optimist. He can’t help but skip everywhere. For some reason it felt right that he would wear little hobnail boots.

A still from a 3D animatic - an animated storyboard where cameras are set to film the action

How did you begin to animate him?

Alan: The scenes are storyboarded and put into an animatic which shows us how the story is evolving. There are then further steps involving cameras filming the action, while concept artists work up designs for each location, bringing together the perfect mood and atmosphere for each shot.

A very early concept of the sprout plants helped decide the shot's composition and lighting

A pencil sketch clarifies the layout of a shot, and a later coloured version sets the mood

How well do Brussels sprouts lend themselves to animation, compared perhaps to other vegetables?

Alan: A sprout is a great vegetable to bring to life but we had to be careful with scale when he stands next to humans. Obviously we had to be able to see him but if we made him too big there was a danger of cabbage confusion. And nobody wants that.

Several character designers had a go at interpreting Sprout Boy - the hat/quiff came from these

Adam: This is the first vegetable character we’ve animated but once you put arms, legs and eyes on a sprout it becomes a very versatile character with a full range of emotions. I imagine Broccoli Boy would have been a lot harder.

Sprout Boy meets a big group of BBC One celebrities in the woods – how difficult were they to draw?

Alan: It was fun to design all the BBC One stars in the style of the film rather than just as crazy caricatures. Some were easier than others, but most have their ‘thing’ that makes them recognisable no matter how simplified the design.

Adam: Will.i.am has his glasses, Dot her hairdo and Mary Berry her signature pink jacket. It didn’t help that Claudia and Tess seemed to change their hairstyles on Strictly every week and we’re not sure if Graham Norton still has a beard!

Do you feel under more pressure to create a compelling animation given the focus on big Christmas adverts and moments?

Adam: Christmas is a very hard thing to reinvent as the cultural images are ingrained on our consciences since childhood. That’s why it is useful to play upon a commonly-held belief, such as ‘everyone hating sprouts except at Christmas’. There is only so much Christmas imagery to go around, so inevitably the concern is that there will be some crossover of similar ideas with commercial campaigns. But making this film allowed us to tell much more of a story than we could in a commercial. It’s a story about the spirit of Christmas itself, so hopefully it will stand out for that.

Would we find sprouts on your plate at Christmas?

Alan: I love a sprout at Christmas. But I might avoid the ones with eyes, arms and legs.

Adam: I just couldn’t.

Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes of Nexus Productions directed the short animated film Sprout Boy, and the 2015 Christmas look for BBC One.

How we brought River’s imagination to life

2015-10-13T16:22:39+00:00

We showed River’s series creator, Abi Morgan and lead director, Richard Laxton, this clip from their new BBC One drama to see how they reacted watching it back. Read on to find out what they had to say…

ABI: I think the character of Thomas Cream - a manifestation of a former Victorian serial killer – represents the darkest part of despair for John River. And for me he’s a marker for the opening of the series. He shows us that River is really in the darkest place. The tone of it was meant to feel like this is a man who’s trying to hold it together and failing. And Cream becomes the voice of the darkest part of his subconscious.

For me this is a sort of ‘out of reel’ moment. And yet it feels placed, because you’re just given a moment of it and then you take him away. So it’s just telling audiences this is going to be something slightly different, you haven’t seen it all yet. And it shows the range of what you can do with River and his imagination.

RICHARD: When I read the script, I believed this man was having these experiences. So as the director the first thing for me to do was to find a way to make this feel completely dramatic and authentic but also make it real for that character.

When I first read Cream’s character, I remember thinking: ‘I should find this really alienating as a device’, but I feel, in the writing, it’s incredibly engaging. And it’s also putting the audience in a very privileged position. River, who we are asking you to get to know and fall for, has these experiences and you must understand what that’s like. It’s communicating that emotional state and it’s from that philosophy that every decision falls out.

Eddie Marsan's character Cream must be 'exorcised' by River during the series

ABI: Cream was a really important character because he was the place to go to when you needed to screw the show up a bit and take it away from the convention of a cop show really. Eddie Marsan, as a performer, is so dangerous. You feel like he’s a grenade about to explode and it’s so incredibly useable to express River’s inner ticking time bomb.

Richard and I talked about how we were going to make this Victorian character exist and breathe in what is an inherently contemporary look of urban London and the City. So it had to be done very lightly, and somehow I think it really comes together.

RICHARD: We had to balance how Cream looked – we didn’t want a top-hatted, tail-coated Victorian man - but we wanted it to be obvious that he wasn’t dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

But it was also Eddie’s performance. He viscerally played that character’s truth. He’s a clever actor, he knows what his character’s doing and he owned the character.

Abi Morgan also wrote The Hour and new film Suffragette

RICHARD: We did some work in post-production to create the voiceover, partly because – I have to take some responsibility – I’d protracted River’s walk through this corridor, the bowels of the building, and we wanted the audience to be clear about who Cream was.

ABI: Often your greatest artistic choices are just because you need clarity. We just needed to place him to feel like he comes out of the book that River’s been reading. He sort of steps out of the pages.

RICHARD: And what we did with him – actually with all the manifests – we took out the ambient sound. Just to bring that experience into River’s head. And I’m pleased with that, having watched it some time after. I still think it was the right thing.

Stellan Skarsgard and Lesley Manville film scenes under Richard Laxton's direction

ABI: When I wrote the first episode, I didn’t know who was going to play River. But as soon as Stellan Skarsgard came on board I really started to write for him. He’s an extraordinary actor in terms of his range, and my concern with River’s character was that an audience could be quite exhausted by it, because he’s in every single scene. And when you put an actor under that much scrutiny, like us all, you see the tricks. But Stellan somehow doesn’t have the tricks. I think it’s because he comes into every scene really fresh and ready to play with it.

RICHARD: Stellan as a man is incredibly compassionate, mischievous and opinionated, in the most lovely way. And I think that part of his nature means he can play that character. Because there’s no ego in that, he just wanted to do good work. He cared about it. But also his sound, and his look to a certain extent, he feels like someone who is different. And of course his character feels isolated. So storytelling-wise I think it’s a great thing.

ABI: I also think his casting is endemic of the fact that the piece is about interlopers. It’s about London, where everybody’s from somewhere else. So I felt quite comfortable about having him there. And as long as you place that in front of an audience and kind of say ‘we know he’s Swedish as well’ [laughs] then you will trust us and you’ll go with it. The plot in a way is about people who don’t quite fit.

Abi Morgan is the series creator and Richard Laxton is lead director on River.

River starts on Tuesday, 13 October at 9pm on BBC One. Each episode will be available in BBC iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast on TV.

See Abi Morgan's interview with BBC Writersroom

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Oakwood’s William is disaffected, angry and vulnerable. I was that kid.

2015-07-10T09:38:00+00:00

Oakwood had me hooked from the first page: a disaffected young man, standing in a field, reeling off everything he hates about the Great British countryside. Angry and smart yet vulnerable and naïve, he was the English Holden Caulfield. When I finished reading the script for the first time, I scribbled down four words on the front page.

‘I was that kid.’

"I just want some noise!" William finds farm life too quiet

William crashes a tractor on his first driving lesson, I crashed my Dad’s car into a field. William wants to be in a band and play punk music, I used to DJ in my local pub for a few years playing obscure East Coast hip hop to bemused old men. William’s father wants him to stop daydreaming and take over the farm, while my parents were (understandably) less than ecstatic when I told them I wanted to be a director.

Besides the personal connection, my previous short films had been high concept, technically tricky stuff and I think I was looking for a simpler story with rich characters and a theme that resonated.

"Fields are the worst..." especially when you can't get phone signal

Coming from a small town in Fife, I understood William’s need to escape and I thought writer Simon Longman had realised the family very well - they are funny and flawed and care for each deeply although they’d never say it out loud.

Simon also has a good ear for believable dialogue so I did my upmost to respect the precision and brevity of his words.

Will William's dad and sister support his dreams of being like Iggy Pop?

The story of a teenager suffocated by all this wide-open space, struggling to make some noise in the silence endeared itself to me.

William’s story is about finding the courage to follow your dreams even if you mess it up on the first few goes. As a wannabe director, I understand that struggle.

Andrew Cumming is the director of Oakwood.

Oakwood is available to watch and download from Friday, 10 July at 9pm in BBC iPlayer.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Wolf Hall: Why I was lost in admiration for Anne Boleyn

2015-01-27T14:21:30+00:00

Hilary Mantel’s books, though written in the third person, are very much told from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I wanted to find a shooting style which reflected this. In consultation with our director of photography, Gavin Finney, I decided to shoot hand-held. This allows a great freedom of movement to the camera which, in turn, allows the actors equal freedom on the set.

To cement the sense of being with Cromwell, we rarely enter a room ahead of him, rarely meet a character before he does. The fluid camera follows Cromwell as he moves through the various royal palaces and Tudor houses that are the stage for our drama. It sees what he sees, then comes back onto his face to discover his reaction. This natural, contemporary, point-of-view style of shooting makes Wolf Hall stand out from other recent Tudor dramas.

Mark Rylance read Hilary's books twice in preparation for the adaptation

I think it would be possible to read and watch Wolf Hall with little or no prior knowledge of the period. Our primary objective was to bring to the screen Peter Straughan’s wonderful adaptation of Hilary’s novels, which create an entirely internally consistent world, and don’t owe a great deal to other cultural references.

For this reason, it was possible to create Wolf Hall for TV without drawing on earlier Tudor depictions. We commissioned our own research in a variety of relevant fields and tried to be faithful to the naturalistic, very contemporary style of Mantel’s originals.

I think I am, first and foremost, an actor’s director. I’m not especially focused on the technology.

I long ago realised that a director has two main jobs - to get the script right and to cast the right actors. Once you cast them, (and I had a lot of help from casting directors Nina Gold and Robert Sterne), the best bet is to stand back and not get in the way!

My strategy is very much to trust my actors, to try to create an environment where they can do their best work, insulating them where possible from the inevitable pressures of budget, schedule and physical production.

A good eye and arm: Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) is impressed

Mark Rylance is arguably the best actor of his age-group working today. He is a director, a writer and has run a theatre for 10 years. He is not going to react well to the ‘just stand right here and deliver your lines’ school of direction.

Mark is, I think, looking for a collaboration with a director - not a dictator. He is a master of his trade and all a person like myself can do is offer little thoughts here and there, and provide a somewhat detached sounding-board for his own developing ideas. Since this chimes almost completely with my idea of how to direct actors, this may possibly be why we have managed to work quite well together, at least thus far.

Anne Boleyn's sister, Mary (Charity Wakefield), confides in Cromwell

I was very aware of Hilary as a political figure, and as a person of forthright views who didn’t tend to cut or trim to ingratiate herself with wider public opinion. She appeared to be a person who spoke her mind and wasn’t easily cowed by the howls of protest which sometimes resulted.

I believe we need more people like Hilary, ready to stand up for what is right, in this country. I admired her before working with her and I admire her even more now. She had done a great deal of research for Wolf Hall, studying the sources for five years before even putting pen to paper. She has been incredibly generous towards me at every stage of the project. She made her research archive available and quickly responded whenever I had a question about the text or the depicted characters. She has been hugely encouraging throughout and, on seeing the finished programmes, very quick to offer her very public endorsement.

In many ways, it would be a model for me of a perfect working relationship with an author. I doubt I will be so lucky next time.

Wolf Hall has altered my opinion of Tudor figures across the board. But probably most dramatically of Anne Boleyn. I didn’t know that much about her before we started. But during my research I discovered that Anne was not simply an ambitious and scheming knight’s daughter who over-reached herself and paid the price in blood.

On set with Peter Kosminsky and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn

Anne was a very significant political figure in her own right. Like Cromwell, Anne was of the 'heretic' persuasion - desiring that a Bible in the vernacular should be made available in every Church in England, (this came about eventually, though some years after her death); seeking to repatriate powers from Rome and from the Church and invest them once more in England, in the person of the King.

Anne was probably also a proto-feminist. Women, perhaps especially royal women in that era, were little more than merchandise - sold into wedlock for the advancement of the male members of their family. For a woman to be such a player, politically and spiritually, was extremely unusual in the early 16th century. By the end of our film-making, especially as played by Claire Foy, I found myself lost in admiration for Anne and devastated by her unjust killing.

More on Wolf Hall

The Guardian: Wolf Hall: a challenging book should also be challenging TV
Mirror.co.uk: Wolf Hall star Claire Foy reveals she was emotional filming Anne Boleyn death scene

More on Henry VIII

BBC iWonder: How did Henry VIII use sex and power to secure his legacy?
Mail Online: Lucy Worsley: Henry's horrible history: You won't find any left-handers or extras in specs

Peter Kosminsky is the director of Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall continues on Wednesday, 28 January at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

That Day We Sang: It began in my bedsit

2014-12-23T08:45:41+00:00

In 1975, when I was 22 and on the dole in a bedsit (happy days!), I saw a documentary about the Manchester Children’s Choir who made a record of Nymphs and Shepherds in 1929. The programme featured a reunion of former choir members, now middle-aged, talking about that wonderful day when they had sung with the Hallé orchestra.

The Manchester Children's Choir performance reimagined for That Day We Sang

When I was approached by the Manchester International Festival about writing a stage piece for them, the story of that choir came into my head as a possible basis for a play.

As I started to write, the memory of that 1975 documentary grew a little stronger and the play became a musical about the reunion, and the memories of the middle-aged people whose lives had perhaps not matched up to that marvellous day.

The musical I created, That Day We Sang, had 10 performances as part of the 2011 festival at the Opera House in Manchester, but I wanted it to have a further life, and I was really lucky to be supported in that wish by Ben Stephenson at the BBC, who commissioned it as a 90-minute film.

Most people know musicals are not written, they are re-written, and it was great to have a second chance at exploring the story. I was able to write another number for my main female character Enid - which takes place in an exercise class, in her bedroom, on a bus and along a street - something which would have been hard to pull off on the stage.

Scared of life, scared of sheep, scared of thunder: Enid reflects on her timid life

And I was able to weave in extra elements of the story, for example, I expanded the character of Mr Kirkby. He is the gruff religious choir organiser, wounded in the First World War, and he develops a friendship with our boy hero Jimmy. It’s an undemonstrative relationship, but brought to life by Daniel Rigby it’s a very touching performance.

At first it’s very liberating to take something from stage to film - you can cut so easily between the two periods, the 20s and the 60s, and you can nip about from place to place without all the scene changing and prop setting of the theatre.

And then you are faced with the cold hard facts of the budget and the constraints of filming anything that is not contemporary. My story is set in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester - in the 60s this was an ornamental gardens with flowers and shrubs and benches for office workers to have their lunch.

Now it is unrecognisable and not somewhere you would rush to have your butties.

The perfect civic space for Tubby and Enid's Fred and Ginger sequence

The children of the 1929 choir made their record in the Free Trade Hall. That hall was bombed in the Manchester Blitz and even the post-war rebuilt version has now gone, replaced by a hotel. Terraced streets tend to have replacement windows and satellite dishes now, and most streets are lined with parked cars.

But somehow, with the help of the producer Paul Frift and the imagination of the designer Tom Burton - you come up with solutions that will enhance the story without breaking the bank.

We found a lovely square in Liverpool that housed not only a perfect office for Enid to work in and a bit of pavement for Tubby to walk by on, but a cobbled area where they could meet for lunch and even sing and dance.

Tubby (Michael Ball) and Enid (Imelda Staunton) do a turn

We wanted Michael and Imelda to sing live wherever possible, and so Liverpool office workers on their own lunch breaks were treated to the sight of Michael Ball up a ladder serenading someone they couldn’t see, to an orchestral accompaniment that only Michael could hear.

But it’s a great way to record vocals if you can manage it - it gives a spontaneity and freshness and reality you don’t get when actors are lip-syncing to something they recorded weeks before.

The whole thing was a great privilege to work on and I really hope people enjoy it!

Victoria Wood is the writer and director of That Day We Sang.

That Day We Sang is available to watch in BBC iPlayer until Saturday, 19 September 2015 at 10.30pm.

It was first broadcast on BBC Two on Friday, 26 December 2015.

More on That Day We Sang
Life of Wylie: Q&A with Victoria Wood, Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Peaky Blinders: Filming with a PJ Harvey trilogy

2014-11-04T16:35:45+00:00

One of the things that I liked very much about the first series of Peaky Blinders was the use of atmospheric contemporary music within the palette of the soundtrack. This was something that I was keen to develop and refine as part of my approach to directing series two. I loved the use of Nick Cave's songs and along with show creator Steven Knight and the music producers, we all discussed that the track Red Right Hand was part of the brand and we decided to keep this. We use it playfully throughout the series with several other versions and different contexts changing its meaning and feel.

Listen to Flood’s remix of Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

One thing that changed this year around the overall tone of the show was Steve's notion that the first series was opium and this second series was cocaine. I took this mostly to represent the hunger and ambition of Tommy Shelby as well as the loosening grip on reality and emotional peaks and troughs of the other characters. Therefore I wanted this year to have a different voice within the music and to blend the original tracks into the score in a way that would make the music more cohesive in its voice.

My fantasy from fairly early on was both to use music by PJ Harvey within the source tracks, and to find a way to collaborate with her. Cillian Murphy, who plays Tommy Shelby, is great friends with Flood, the producer who has worked with Polly Harvey (as well as Nick Cave) and we began to talk about whether there might be a way for this to work. We needed someone else in the process who could create an original score from Polly’s music and Flood suggested Paul Hartnoll (formerly of Orbital) as a final collaborator in the process.

The creation of music for the show began with When Under Ether by PJ Harvey.

An exclusive extract from the score featuring PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love and When Under Ether

I knew that I wanted to use this for Tommy's epic recovery canal boat journey in episode two from early on. In the first series violence was often handled in a way that was heavily stylised - using slow motion photography and blissed out white noise soundtrack.

Stylised violence in series one: Inspector Campbell (Sam Neill) raids the Peaky Blinders’ territory

I wanted the violence to feel overly vivid and intense. Somehow I wanted the violent acts to have larger consequence and danger for our central characters. At the end of episode one, I wanted the audience to feel that Tommy might actually die for real. I tried to achieve this through use of overly long held takes, hand held cameras getting into and becoming involved in the action and small shutter angle (also known as a skinny shutter) creating sharper, more vivid images for these moments.

Italian crime boss Sabini ambushes Tommy (Cillian Murphy) at the end of episode one

I also knew that When Under Ether contained the emotional tone that I wanted certain aspects of the story to be saturated in. Flood deconstructed the track from the multi-tracks and Paul composed around and from that in a way that was sympathetic to Polly’s original, supportive of the drama and content of the scenes, and emotionally moving in a direct manner.

Down By The Water: Listen to an exclusive Peaky Blinders version of PJ Harvey's 1995 hit

In the end Paul's score is very much his music, but the process to get there means that it belongs absolutely to the same world as Polly’s compositions that make up the heart of our world: When Under Ether, Down By The Water, To Bring You My Love being the central trilogy (though we have used many other tracks of hers through the show).

Colm McCarthy is the director of series two of Peaky Blinders.

Peaky Blinders continues on Thursday, 6 November at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on The Peaky Blinders
BBC Production: Listen to an extended interview with Colm McCarthy
BBC Production: Listen to an extended interview with Steven Knight
BBC Radio 6 Music: Cillian Murphy and Flood speak to Lauren Laverne

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

The Missing: Finding the location for a dark journey

2014-11-04T16:22:59+00:00

One of the many things that excited me about directing Jack and Harry Williams' scripts for The Missing was the clever use of two time zones to tell their twisty-turny thriller. I loved the idea of really contrasting the bright, colourful atmosphere of a family holiday in France, with a bleak, wintry present when all our characters are more estranged from each other.

Tony (James Nesbitt) and Emily Hughes (Frances O’Connor) in the town square with Oliver

For 2006, the year Oliver Hughes goes missing, I kept thinking of summer holidays I’d had as a kid, when we actually did break down a few times in France. I remembered the exotic sounds of mopeds and cicadas, the bursts of colour in a market, the way everyone seems to live on the streets and in town squares. After Oliver’s disappearance, I wanted to make those same sensations feel threatening. The woods around a beautiful outdoor pool would now exude menace. Cheering voices in the Grand Place would suddenly sound abrasive and threatening.

Tony searches the same town square after his son Oliver has just disappeared

In the wintry present, we used many fewer extras so streets would be almost deserted, making Tony Hughes – Oliver’s father - look more isolated in his dogged quest to find Oliver. I kept ordering up more rain and then snow, to get a feeling of Tony’s ‘stop at nothing’ determination to find Oliver.

Tony returns to Chalons in the present day to pursue a new lead after eight years

Despite the different atmospheres in each time zone, it was important to me that the overall tone of The Missing was naturalistic and consistent. Aside from some subtly different lighting and lenses, we tended to shoot both time periods in a similarly composed style. The director of photography, Ole Bratt Birkeland, and I would joke that we were making ‘pretty realism’ as opposed to 'gritty realism'.

Although the performances and design are very authentic, Ole and I felt that if we could infuse the imagery with mystery and a certain kind of melancholy beauty, the viewers would be more likely to come on a dark journey with us. I’ve always been a big Hitchcock fan – he was master of blending nasty events with seductive, suspenseful imagery. You never feel like looking away, whatever hideous things might be going on in the story.

The trail reveals Tony's determination to find his son

The biggest decision about the look of The Missing was always going to be what town we chose to be Chalons du Bois. Along with Willow Grylls, the fantastic executive producer who developed the project with Jack and Harry Williams, I made a trip to Belgium in summer 2013 to look for the town. The French speaking part of Belgium is a very good match for Northern France, and it was pretty close to Paris and London, where we were also planning to shoot.

As soon as we drove into Huy, we knew we’d struck location gold. Although the town felt real in the sense that it wasn’t a tourist town, everywhere you looked there was something curious or atmospheric. There was a beautiful river with a massive power station right next to it, bang in the centre of town. You enter the town by crossing over a very striking modern bridge – magical river islands to one side, grim factory to the other. An eerily windowless castle glowers over the town. There’s a creaking cable car suspended across the river, which has never worked since a helicopter crashed into it.

Emily and Tony attend a press conference about their son's disappearance

Instantly, I started to picture the places where certain characters might live and the way we could stage set-pieces. It was a joy to shoot in Huy, especially during the World Cup when Belgium were doing pretty well. We’d be shooting a scene full of celebrating football fans, and suddenly car horns and cheers would erupt all around us, as the Belgian team scored a goal.

Tom Shankland is the director of The Missing. Read a second post from Tom, all about working with The Missing's cast.

The Missing continues on Tuesday, 4 November at 9pm (10.35pm Scotland) on BBC One and BBC One HD. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

More on The Missing

Radio times: Is BBC One's The Missing the new Broadchurch?

The Telegraph: The Missing review, 'supremely compelling'

The Guardian: The Missing review - hauntingly brilliant television

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

The Missing: Building intrigue by shooting each actor differently

2014-10-27T10:31:25+00:00

One challenge about shooting The Missing’s two time zones was that we were shooting the present first, so the actors and I had to make sure that their performances were haunted by a past which we hadn’t yet shot.

Tony returns to Chalons Du Bois with evidence he hopes will lead him to his missing son.

Me, Frances O’Connor and Jimmy Nesbitt were lucky enough to have a few days of rehearsal before the hectic shoot kicked in. I decided that during that period, we would only focus on all the 2006 scenes, that way when we went into shooting the present, we’d really experienced the past.

By and large this worked really well, but not always. Like there’s a scene I love in episode one when Tony Hughes, played by Jimmy, and police detective Julien Baptiste meet for the first time (in the present) in a bar in the town we chose to be Chalons.

When we shot this, Jimmy and Tcheky Karyo, who plays Julien, had really been enjoying the great bromance of their 2014 story, and it was a little hard for me to convince them that they weren’t really all that friendly in 2006, and that this first meeting in the present should be informed by that. But Jimmy and Tcheky were gents and trusted me on that one.

Julien (Tcheky Karyo) and Tony (Jimmy Nesbitt) come to an uncertain alliance in the hunt for Oliver

I didn’t get a chance to have a conventional rehearsal period with Tcheky because he came late to the party. He was always our first choice for the part of Julien but, as can happen, it took until the last moment for us to bag him for the role.

I wanted to give Tcheky as much support as I could when he arrived in Brussels. We had a conversation that went like this:

“What do you need Tcheky? Whatever you want…”

“OK, could we read the scripts together?”

“Sure. The first couple?”

“All of them?”

“Er. . . OK.”

So on my first Saturday off after a week of shooting, Tcheky came round to my flat and we spent most of the day and night reading all eight episodes. I played all the other roles. It was one of my favourite moments of prep, working with Tcheky, bringing Detective Julien Baptiste to life.

At a certain moment, I put some things out to snack on and Tcheky started eating some pistachios while we were reading a scene. “That’s exactly what you should do in the big hotel scene in episode four with Tony,” I said. Tcheky just looked so natural and at ease, eating those nuts while dishing out some great Julien wisdom.

Tcheky Karyo brings 'rock 'n' roll spirit' to Julien

Introducing little bits of business that Tcheky would naturally do just made the character feel grounded and real. These kinds of human details that sprang so naturally from Tcheky’s wonderful, warm, rock 'n' roll spirit (he’s a great musician), became a big part of how Julien developed. In fact, lots of Julien’s clothes are actually Tcheky’s.

Sure enough, when we came to shoot Tcheky’s first ever scene, in a hotel bar with Jimmy, he spotted a bowl of oranges on the counter. He took out his knife and started peeling an orange and eating it during the scene. Tcheky looked just as cool as he had in my flat.

Although, in the present day Tony and Emily Hughes are living in separate countries and seem to have different relationships to the disappearance of their child, we tried to frame them in a similar way. I didn’t really want the camera to judge them.

Part of the intrigue of The Missing is that we don’t spoon-feed answers and opinions about characters and their motives. I wanted the visual approach to almost feel neutral at times, leaving it up to the audience to work the characters out.

Frances O'Connor feels that Emily 'gains strength' through the series

Inevitably, subtly different approaches to shooting the actors crept in. Frances, who plays Emily Hughes, Oliver’s mother, so brilliantly, always looked very compelling and intriguing in profile. Sometimes we would go more extreme and film her behind her head. There’s a great Danish painter called Vilhelm Hammershoi who painted a lot of his subjects from the back. This made me intrigued by the secrets concealed in their hidden faces. Sometimes this approach felt right for Emily’s character.

By contrast, I loved shooting Jimmy in big wide shots so we would get a sense of his struggle and the scale of the mystery that has shrouded and obsessed him for so many years.

James Nesbitt says: 'At his core, Tony is a good and decent man whose side we're on'

I’m amazed Jimmy didn’t catch pneumonia during the shoot – it seemed like every other day we were chucking rain at him or making him leap into freezing water. He was a true hero though and completely embraced all of Tony’s extremes. I think Jimmy is fantastic in this role – it’s unlike anything I’ve seen him do before.

Tom Shankland is the director of The Missing. Read a second post from Tom, all about finding the right location for the drama, next week.

The Missing starts on Tuesday, 28 October at 9pm (10.35pm Scotland) on BBC One and BBC One HD. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

More on The Missing

BBC 6 Music: Jimmy Nesbitt in conversation with Shaun Keaveny
The Guardian: BBC drama The Missing goes to the heart of parents' worst nightmare
Daily Mail: A missing son... and the anguish of every father

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Great War Diaries: Turning diaries into compelling drama

2014-08-05T12:50:33+00:00

I first got involved in Great War Diaries four years ago, as both director and screenwriter.

Great War Diaries is a three-part factual drama about how ordinary people from all over Europe and the USA lived through the war, based on their personal diaries and letters.

I loved the idea of showing history as a kind of chaos or confusion; the way we all live history every day, without knowing the why, how or even the outcome of events.

It is in the real diaries and letters of ordinary people, those who lived through the Great War, that you can see this so clearly.

There are, of course, a great many diaries to choose from.

But it soon became obvious that those written by leading politicians and generals were of little use.

They were usually written with an eye to the future, for creating or preserving a legacy – where mistakes and doubts are almost never admitted to.

Instead, we chose to stick to the diaries of ordinary people, for example, a Russian girl, an Austrian peasant, an English volunteer munition factory worker.

During our research at the Imperial War Museum, we came across these handwritten pages, with tiny little drawings and some photographs in it.

Gabrielle West while working at Standish Red Cross convalescence hospital, Gloucestershire

At the beginning it feels like a dreamy girl's diary, even though this well-bred girl from the south of England was 22 years old when she decided to volunteer as a worker in a munitions factory.

She had never worked before in her life, and you can feel the impact on her of the actual working and living conditions.

A visit to the factory: ‘Powder in the air makes you splutter & gives you a horrid bitter taste’

But even though she seemed to be on the brink of collapse several times, she kept going, trying to do her bit - working, not in the shell assembly, but first in the kitchen and later as one of the first female police officers in Britain.

Her illustrations and cute little drawings were soon abandoned, but at the very end of this diary there is a small note about her sending the diary to the IWM, written in 1977, by 'GMW'.

Gabrielle was 87 when she donated her journal

So almost 60 years after the Great War, this then elderly women was still "Miss West".

She survived both wars, and never married. I always tried to imagine her life - a very impressive women.

Gabrielle West is played by Naomi Sheldon, whose previous TV credits include The Hour and Doctors

From the beginning, I thought and believed that for a German to make a new series about the Great War could be only done in an honest, multi-perspective way.

This was a truly multi-national project, with every major nation that participated in the war involved.

Everyone had to be enabled to share his or her perspective, even though today we may feel it wrong, or out of place.

And for true authenticity, all of our characters had to speak their own language - which meant a film with seven different languages and an awful lot of subtitles.

To realise this goal was a hard fight with broadcasters and editors all over the world, but in the end, everyone agreed.

So we have now a series with maybe the most different languages spoken ever produced.

In the dialogue we can hear English as well as Italian, French, Austrian, German and Russian.

Shooting with all the actors from different countries was quite a job.

In the morning my director of photography, Jürgen Rehberg and I were filming in a Russian village, while in the afternoon we jumped to an English club, and all the distinction it brings with it.

Jan Peter with director of photography Jürgen Rehberg, on location in Canada

To keep all the different languages and temperaments in my mind was both challenging as well as mesmerising.

On some days I actually forgot which language was to be spoken on set and had to ask an assistant whether we were in Italy or France at that moment.

In the course of this huge project I have become increasingly aware of how important and precious handwritten testimonies of a time long past could can be – and how good it is not only to have journals from the great and the powerful, but from ordinary people.

Everyone can become a witness; I have started writing my diary again.

Jan Peter is the director and screenwriter of Great War Diaries.

Great War Diaries continues on Saturday, 9 August at 6pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programmes times please see the episode guide.

More on Great War Diaries:
Wikipedia: 14 - Diaries of the Great War
The Telegraph: Great War Diaries: A Global Remembrance

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Welcome To Rio: Ten minutes to film the vital shots

2014-05-27T04:30:14+00:00

When I announced I was off to Rio de Janeiro to film Welcome To Rio for several months, the reaction of my friends and family was a universal cry: “You lucky b------!”

Yet after raving about beaches, caipirinhas, mini-bikinis, Carnival and the Christ, all fell into a foreboding whisper.

“But look out for the favelas. They’re crazily violent.”

Favelas are the flipside of the Rio legend, the city’s infamous slums whose residents have forever been characterised by the 2002 feature film, City Of God, as a pack of smoked-out teenagers pointing their guns in our faces.

That's why the favelas were exactly where I was going. Because the Welcome To... approach is to venture into rough, crooked places to discover what lies beyond clichéd stories.

Favelas are the epicentre of Rio's street culture and dancer Breguete lives in Complexo do Lins

From the moment I set foot in the favelas, I fell in love with them.

I’ve rarely been anywhere in the world that’s so instantly welcoming.

Kids would come dancing after me asking cheerily whether I’d been born in the snow – was that why my skin was so white and I was sweating so much?

The only argument I ever had in a favela was with Rocky – the hero of episode one – over who was going to pay for two enormous roast chickens he insisted on feeding us an hour after we’d had breakfast.

They were elevenses, favela-style, typical of the generosity you find there.

King of the stairs: Rocky brings deliveries up the steep favela steps

Of course, the warnings aren’t based on fairy tales.

Many favelas are under the control of drug traffickers, who always kept their distance from us, muttering jokes no doubt at our expense.

Our problem was that we had to find a way to film them - because you could only appreciate the courage of our characters once you saw that they maintain their good humour in a landscape of street stalls selling crack 24 hours a day.

After six months, we still hadn’t got permission from the drug traffickers to film.

For our last attempt, I picked a favela where the guns were plentiful but where we’d already passed days waiting for the boss to give the OK.

That day, our luck was in: he was throwing a barbecue and, lulled by sun and beer, in genial humour.

“You’ve got 10 minutes,” he said. “But if you film anyone’s faces, you’re in trouble.”

I’ll never forget the tension of those 10 minutes.

Just 10 minutes to get the vital shots of the series in the centre of a circle of curious teenage gunmen.

Ten minutes and 24 seconds later, we turned off our cameras. I was a wreck.

We went to thank the boss. He fixed me with a piercing stare.

This was it, I thought. He’d changed his mind, he wanted us to destroy the footage. Worse yet, he wanted to destroy us.

Sweating, I bowed my head before his gaze.

“You look hot,” he said. “Bring this guy a beer.”

That’s the spirit of the favelas, summed up in one of their famous sayings: Estamos Juntos. We’re in it, together.

Edward Watts is the director of Welcome To Rio.

Welcome To Rio is on Tuesday, 27 May on BBC Two and BBC Two HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

From There To Here: Recreating an iconic era

2014-05-22T08:36:01+00:00

To be sent a script from Pete Bowker for the BBC One series From There To Here and be asked to read it is a very exciting prospect.

To then open it and immediately have a personal connection to the events was unbelievable.

In 1996 I was living in Manchester training as a director with Granada TV and was walking towards the Arndale Centre when the IRA bomb went off.

Watch the trail: 'Ever since the Arndale bomb it feels like one life isn't enough'

I vividly remember suddenly being knocked off my feet, staring up at a beautiful blue sky and the complete silence all around, immediately followed by a wall of sirens, alarms and chaos in the immediate aftermath.

Having lived in the Manchester of the mid-90s I really wanted to accurately capture the feel of the period: the clothes, the fashion and most importantly the music.

This is recent history so although initially one assumes not much has changed, our production team quickly realised everything had moved on.

The cars, the clothes, the phones and the fashion were all of their era - so extensive research into the footage and photos of the time all fed into our recreation.

Euro 96: The legendary football match between England and Germany

Manchester's music scene was iconic so our soundtrack took on huge importance.

But I didn't want just a simple greatest hits parade, the music had to support and expand the narrative.

Our musical supervision was done by DJ Rob da Bank whose forensic musical knowledge allowed us to dig a little deeper and unearth those gems that were both iconic but had impact beyond simple nostalgia.

We also used the brilliant current Manchester band I Am Kloot to give us an authentic and yet determinedly Mancunian score.

From There to Here is about a family, but it is also the story of a city and a country during a time of great change.

The effects of which are explored through our fictional families. I wanted an ensemble who you believed were two real families.

We were incredibly fortunate to get (among others) Philip Glenister, Steven Mackintosh, Bernard Hill, Saskia Reeves and Liz White, who all threw themselves completely into the project.

In many ways their story mirrors the effect of New Labour over a few key years.

Election 1997: Louise (Morven Christie) waits for the results with the family

From the desire for change before Blair’s election, the euphoria of his first moments in power and how this begins to wane as things like the credit crunch raise their head.

The genius of Pete's scripts is that these themes are examined in such a personal and emotional way.

You realise how much we are all part of a larger world.

I'm very proud of the series and feel very privileged to have been trusted with Pete's brilliant words.

It's a weird feeling to look back to that moment lying on the pavement looking at a clear blue sky, and think it'd still be so relevant to my life 18 years later.

James Strong is the director of From There To Here.

From There To Here is on Thursday, 22 May at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

More on From There To Here
BBC Four: A Writer's Journey From There To Here
BBC News: TV drama From There To Here revisits 'optimism' of 1996
The Telegraph: From There To Here: how the IRA bomb changed Mancunians forever
BBC Media Centre: From There To Here: Watch interviews writer Peter Bowker and the cast
BBC Writersroom blog: Peter Bowker: Writing 'A love letter to Manchester'

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

I Was There: The Great War Interviews

2014-03-14T10:19:09+00:00

More than two years ago, I learned that the Imperial War Museum still had the original interview rushes of The Great War series from 1964, which the BBC had produced in partnership with IWM.

I was intrigued. Having worked on a few similar history series myself – such as Laurence Rees’s The Nazis or Auschwitz – I knew that only a tiny fraction of the recorded interviews would have made it to air.

Never-before-seen footage: Watch the trail

I reckoned many strong and insightful testimonies must have ended on the cutting room floor because they didn’t fit into the series’ narrative or because they were simply too long.

IWM had digital audio files of the interviews and I went through all 280 recordings (more than 50 hours) looking for testimonies about the human experience of the war.

I didn’t want to make I Was There: The Great War Interviews about the military or political history of the war. I wanted to make a film about individual responses to extreme situations.

Researcher Julia Cave interviewing Great War veteran Victor Packer for the 1964 series

As I went through the recordings, it became clear that the people researcher and director of most of the interviews, Julia Cave, had done an amazing job.

This was the stiff upper lip Britain of fifty years ago but the veterans opened up to Julia about the horror, the tedium, and sometimes also the humour of what it was like being there. They even told Julia what it was like to kill a man!

'Bayonets at the ready' - A soldier reflects on the time he killed an enemy soldier

Since The Great War series concentrated much more on the big picture and grand strategies of the war, the majority of these emotional testimonies were never broadcast.

I grouped the selected interviews thematically, following the timeline of a soldier’s experience, from enlistment to death or survival.

There was to be no presenter and no narration, just music by composer Dominic de Grande and captions to introduce each thematic block.

I wanted the interviews to tell their own story.

Home Front: Some soldiers returning on leave had trouble relating to civilians

The greatest challenge was to find the film material for the pieces of dialogue I had selected.

The Great War series was produced on 35mm film using blown up footage from selected original interviews shot on 16mm film.

As a result, each interview was spread over several reels.

To make things even more challenging, I had to synchronise the picture with the sound from the digital audio files.

This proved a major and often tedious undertaking as picture and sound drifted apart considerably.

I got pretty good at lip reading and it certainly helped that in a previous life I had earned a living as a dubbing writer for German versions of American TV series such as The Lone Ranger and Quincy.

Oral history can be tricky. Just because somebody was there it doesn’t mean their story is true.

We had thorough fact checks done and sure enough, some of the interviews proved just too good to be true.

One interviewee described in vivid detail an Anglo-German football match in no man’s land during the famous Christmas truce of 1914. He turned out to be a fantasist.

Another interviewee, Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka The Otter, gave a different account.

In the 1930s and 40s, he sympathised with the Nazis and joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

I wondered to what extent this could have coloured his recollections of the truce.

Research showed that he written a letter home immediately after the event. The description in his letter matched the account that he gave 50 years later in his interview to the BBC.

'A slight spice of danger' - A look at life in the trenches on quiet days

Executive producer Mike Connolly and I were keen to make the archive feel more current as the interviews as well as all film and most stills archive from the period are black and white.

Artist Jon Wilkinson, who specialises in colourising archive photographs, provided extremely realistic and subtle colourisations that not only add depth to the images but also make the people feel less remote and much closer to us.

My ambition was to help restore the humanity of the Great War generation.

I hope viewers will see that these were recognisably modern people, recorded within touching distance of both the experiences that shaped them and our lives today - not distant figures moving jerkily in newsreels.

Detlef Siebert directed and edited I Was There: The Great War Interviews.

I Was There: The Great War Interviews is on Friday, 14 March at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD.

More on The Great War Interviews
BBC Four Collections: The Great War Interviews: Featuring World War One veterans and civilians
About the BBC: BBC Information and Archives: Restoring Archive for I Was There: The Great War Interviews

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Original Drama Shorts: I directed Flea

2014-03-11T10:51:18+00:00

I directed Flea, one of the three short films commissioned for Original Drama Shorts on BBC iPlayer this year.

Of the three scripts, Flea immediately jumped out to me – actually that’s not entirely true.

I read the first line of the stage directions and felt a bit disheartened. I’ve seen a lot of bleak British shorts set on estates and was hoping for something a bit more magical.

Then I got to the dialogue, which is in spoken word, and the story jumped off the page! I loved it. It was different and bold.

'My world’s a tough world, a rough world, a kick-in-the-guts and a spit-in-your-food world'

Cat Jones showed such great skill in writing really unique, funny, engaging and heartfelt poetry that it elevated the story, making it more than the sum of its parts.

I could see various ways it could be conceived, one of them being a bit like a music video, which would have been cool and cutty.

But my instinct was to embed the dialogue in truth and naturalism and make the world around it heightened as opposed to the other way round.

It is true that the theme of domestic violence is at the heart of the story, but for me it was always subsidiary to "the world according to Flea."

Flea’s is a heroic narrative, a kind of recipe for rising above adversity in any form, no matter how powerless or vulnerable you may feel.

For that reason I felt it was deeply important to heighten the characters, the colours and visual style of the short yet find the truth, heart and emotion in the performance and delivery of the verse.

I saw it as a kind of Dr Seuss for adults.

One of the biggest challenges was casting the right Flea. Originally she was written as a male.

We saw both spoken word artists and young male actors but no one was really doing it for us.

I think it was in the second round of casting that I said it might be worth seeing what a girl could bring to the role.

'I'm mostly unnoticed and that's an advantage' - Flea (Alice Sykes)

Alice Sykes was perfect. She was able to carry the verse and she was a spontaneous and truthful actor.

I was actually really delighted Flea ended up being a female character because I am definitely of the mindset that if a protagonist can be played by a female then it should be.

There are a disproportionate amount of male protagonists, and anything I can do to shift that I will!

It was a challenging shoot (as all are) due to the amount we had to get through in three days but it was a great crew and such a pleasure to work with cinematographer, David Rom.

We’ve worked on a few things together now and don’t need to say much to understand each other.

Collaborative relationships like that are one of the most enjoyable things about working in film.

Vanessa Caswill is the director of Flea.

Flea is part of the Original Drama Shorts and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

More on Flea
BBC Media Centre: Interview with Cat Jones
BBC Media Centre: Interview with Alice Sykes
About The BBC blog: Outside the box - original drama shorts on iPlayer
BBC Writersroom blog: Cat Jones

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.