Last week our Head of New Writing for 大象传媒 Drama Commissioning, Jess Loveland, hosted an online Q&A with the Writer/Creator of 大象传媒 One's Crossfire, Louise Doughty and Executive Producer, Laurence Bowen from .
Read their conversation below to find out more about the production of this latest 大象传媒 thriller and for some valuable writing advice.
JESS: I'm going to start with you, . So we know you primarily as a novelist first and foremost. Can you tell us about your writing journey up to this point? And that transition into writing scripts? How did it all start?
LOUISE:
Yes, I really owe it all to the television version of Apple Tree Yard which was adapted brilliantly by in 2017. It starred . That show was a great success and really introduced me to the wonderful world of television. The producer on that show was one , who works with now at Dancing Ledge Productions but he was a freelance producer at the time for Kudos.
He took me out for lunch and he asked "have you thought about writing for television?" Because he had read the novels, and I think it's fair to say that my novels tend to be plot driven books and I'd done five plays for radio by then, I had worked as a theatre critic, I wasn't just a pure prose writer but had always had an interest in drama. So he said "have you got any new ideas?" And I said, "well, there is this idea that came to me when I was lying on a sun lounger on holiday recently". I just gave him a one sentence summary of Crossfire, Woman on the sun lounger on holiday, family separated across the resort, friends, what would happen if gunmen came into the building and he said immediately, without hesitation, that's a TV drama, and that's what I want, which was terrifying because then I had to go away and think a bit more about it.
After that, we went in for a meeting with at the 大象传媒 and pitched the idea to her, and she commissioned a script for episode one on the spot. It was a bit of a punt. She was probably thinking, "I don't even know if this duck can quack" but she loved Apple Tree Yard and she said, right, let's give it a go. So I really owe my entire scriptwriting career and the transition into TV drama to Apple Tree Yard. And I'm very, very grateful to Amanda Coe and everyone at Kudos. It's really thanks to them, they were the portal that got me into TV.
JESS: That's great. And Laurence, how did the project then make its way to you and Dancing Ledge Productions?
LAURENCE:
The key person is Chris Carey, who you mentioned, Louise, who joined me at Dancing Ledge about three years ago. I had really loved the 大象传媒's , produced by Chris. We met, and got on, and we were circling each other a bit thinking, I really like you, but could it work to sling our hooks collectively together. And so a bit like businessmen exchanging business cards very respectfully, we exchanged a few projects and things that we loved. So I started developing and showed him the first episode of that and then he already had a first episode and early draft of Crossfire, which I read and I just loved, particularly when I heard the story of how it had come about from Louise (which we will talk about more later on).
Chris and I then worked together, and essentially over the next couple of years went through developing episodes two and three with Louise and looking for a director and finding the wonderful and working with Freemantle, who we are partnered with at Dancing Ledge on a finance plan, that would make it all happen.
So at the point that we were greenlit (subject to casting) by the 大象传媒, we just thought, who would be the most brilliant person for the lead, and we all agreed with the 大象传媒 and Louise that it would be . And it was very similar to on The Responder, Keeley read it overnight and said yes. For anyone listening and watching who has had any experience of trying to get amazing actors attached, it can take a long time. And so when you send the script to somebody and they come back the next day, you don't really take that for granted. And so as soon as she was onboard, we were off to the races, weren't we, Louise?
JESS: So she loved it right from the get-go?
LOUISE:
She said yes. We had a getting to know each other Zoom call, and at that stage we only had episode one so she also took a leap of faith because she didn't know that I could write a whole series, and she also didn't know that, in my show, she would be the one running around with the gun. She has commented on that in interviews, and it's pleasing because quite often, the woman in an action series is in a passive role. The whole point about Crossfire is that she is at the very centre of the drama, she is the driver of the drama and she is the one active in it. That was a very important part of the show from the beginning.
JESS: She is in the driving seat all the way through. She is the one making decisions and influencing the response. How did the idea of Crossfire come to you, Louise?
LOUISE:
It was interesting, looking back when I was speaking to Chris over that lunch, I was thinking about this idea that I had lying on the sun lounger, but once you start writing the idea, it's a bit like the thread in the Minotaur's cave. You've got to follow that germ of an idea right back through your own subconscious and think, what am I actually trying to write back here. Because it's one thing to dream up a character and a plot but it's only when you sit down to write something that you work out what it is that you actually want to say. Quite often the results are surprising, and quite often they come late in the project when the penny drops and you say, oh, yeah, that's what it's about.
With Crossfire, I realised really as soon as I started to actually write the script that what was in the back of my mind was an incident that happened to me 30 years ago, in fact, when I was a young commuter. I was on the platform at London Bridge railway station when it was . I wasn't injured but I saw injuries. I was involved in the evacuation and there were two things that I remembered very, very clearly from that incident and one was the idea that immediately, there were announcements on a tannoy saying that nobody should go near the platform where the bomb had exploded and I was on a adjoining platform. And if you had asked me beforehand, I would have said that my instinct, you know, with my Girl Guide first aid would have been to rush to help an injured person, but how in fact every fibre of my being was calmly walking towards the exit. There was nothing heroic. I was just doing what I was told and heading to the exit. And as thousands, literally thousands of people were streaming out of this huge station, there were these two young police officers who came pelting through the crowd in the opposite direction, their faces set. Tall young men with great long legs running through this crowd. And that image has always stayed with me, you know, it was a very powerful image watching as these young men ran towards what we were all fleeing.
The other thing that I remembered very clearly was my irritation with the press coverage. There was a sentence in one of the newspapers the next day, 'there was mass screaming and panic as everyone ran for their lives'. That was nonsense. There was no screaming, there was no panic and nobody ran. We all walked very calmly to the exit. And I think at that point, it obviously had entered my consciousness then and, in fact, it's an instance that's in my first novel, Crazy Paving, published in 1995 and you would imagine that writing it in a novel would put it to bed but very clearly not. And I think as Jo said at the beginning of Crossfire in the voice-over, there are some incidents that create a hinge in your existence. They are so big that everything that happens before leads up to it, and everything that happens afterwards leads away from it. Those instants stop time, and it feels like time isn't linear, everything stems from around it. And when you have an incident like that, very shocking, it does enter your DNA. It's not something that you forget and remember, it becomes part of you. And obviously for people who are caught up in very serious incidents like these, that can be horrendous because a lot of people don't want to be the new person they have become after the incident. They want their old lives back.
What was always in my mind the whole way through writing Crossfire, the whole way through making it, was how can we honour the real experience for people who have been through something so horrendous? How can we make a show which on the one hand, it is an action drama, you know, it's compulsive, it's exciting, you want to watch, you want to know what's going to happen, who's going to survive, how can we do that in the form of mainstream mass-market entertainment at the same time as honouring the real human experience? That's the thing that we had endless conversations about and that we were most passionate about, that we should do that. And that is why (without spoilers) but in episode three, you come home with the characters and you see something of their, 鈥渙rdinary lives鈥� after the experience. We tried to address some of the trauma that they would have been through.
JESS: In terms of sitting down to write Crossfire, you said that it was quite daunting, understandably, writing your
first original series. How did you approach it? Was there anything that you were taking from your novel writing background in terms of approaching the drafting?
LOUISE:
It's worth saying to writers who are working on their own first dramas, good luck! This was something rather unexpected that happened! I had an e-mail one evening from Chris Carey forwarding me the e-mail saying that Crossfire is being greenlit, I think he said, 'not too shabby!'. That was an evening of celebration, and then at three o'clock in the morning, I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling thinking, "I can't do it". And at three o'clock in the morning, I said, "I'm going to have to ring Chris up in the morning, and say, I'm really sorry, I can't do it. I haven't got a clue".
It was frightening. Be careful what you wish for. Don't try this at home. It was incredibly daunting, and in terms of the strategy, all I could do was to go back to what I can know from novels, which is character, and think about the characters, and think about character development. The events in their lives that had led them to this point. And then, you know, the plot, the ideas, the dramatic developments. They all came out of that. That's the only starting point that I know. If somebody sat me down and said, now, be thrilling. My mind would go a complete blank. What I have to do is sit down and say, there's a woman and she's in a situation. And who is she? What has brought her here? And that's my starting point for anything, novels or drama.
JESS: I think that's incredibly good advice for people starting out. Laurence? Dancing Ledge. It's collecting quite a portfolio of successful and thrilling dramas at the moment: The Salisbury Poisonings, The Responder, (which just won best TV Drama at the Edinburgh TV festival), can you sum up its taste in three words?
LAURENCE:
Three words is very tough. Well, for me I'm really attracted to things that are visceral and personal and emotional and then just to chuck in a cheeky fourth word ideally then universal because we all know, don't we that if you go down a rabbit hole in something very specific and you get that right, the truth of it, that's how you get something universal. Not by appealing to the whole world, you get something very specific.
We love working with new writers. It's something that I have done throughout my life and so the thing that's given us real joy is mentoring and some of the new structures that we have put in place. We have a writer in residency programme here, and we do a mentoring programme with and ITV at the moment. These are the kind of things that are good to have in the industry because you want to support new people and also you want to be relevant, don't you? And you want to find new voices that renew TV, rather than just recycling old stuff. Some of those initiatives, what's been brilliant and given us such pleasure is that they have given birth to writers that we have worked with on shows that we have got made like The Responder.
Louise was a paradox in that on the one hand, she was like one of the most experienced storytellers in Britain but on the other she was a new screenwriter. So that was really interesting, and as much as she is very, very modest and has a genuine sort of humility about her own skills and talents, in the end, TV drama is still storytelling and innately, as a producer, what you're looking for is talent in terms of characterisation and dialogue and all the things that you would want from a drama but at the core of it a really good story. If you look at TV drama as a whole, the writers that do best are the ones that combine amazing characters and having something to say and ideas with a good story, and Louise - she's got a Ph.D. in storytelling. So that's what we were attracted to, but also what is the truth the writer is trying to bring to it, sometimes that's very conscious, and sometimes it's unconscious.
When I started talking to Louise, the thing that lit the whole project up for me was what she told us about that experience at London Bridge Station. The way that had gnawed away at her over so many years, what would I do given a different situation, and also as you begin to have kids yourself, Louise, as a mum on holiday with your children, what would you do if you were separated? That was the starting point for Crossfire that gave it roots, and then in the third episode the desire to go into the repercussions and emotional damage and pain of people who have experienced something like this. And then what happens to them, rather than the newspaper headline at the end of the thing. We love Louise, she's lovely to work with. She's got a great instinct for story and character, and we are actually adapting (which I think is a far less stressful ride for you Louise), her novel Platform Seven now, which will begin shooting at the end of the year. Louise isn't adapting that, somebody else is, so you can sit back and let somebody else do that, which is quite therapeutic, probably.
JESS: Louise, would you want to adapt one of your own novels?
LOUISE:
No, I always say, there should be a law against novelists adapting their own books. Although I have got one of my earlier novels that I would consider adapting. Perhaps you could adapt a novel that you felt had not entirely worked as a novel, obviously you wouldn't be able to say that, because it would feel a less finished thing, but to me when I had the idea for Crossfire, there was never any sense that it was a novel. Most of the ideas I have, I think, "Yes, this is a novel." But there was something about Crossfire where it was a TV series from the start. And equally I wouldn't want to do a novelisation of it. It's just a inherently dramatic idea. And no, I'm very grateful. Amanda Coe did Apple Tree Yard, is adapting Platform Seven, I couldn't be more grateful to the amazing talent of those fantastic women and I'm really happy to leave them to it!
JESS: Do you talk to them at all when they're in the process of adapting your work? Do you have meetings?
LOUISE:
Yes and I love those conversations because nobody is ever going to read your novel as intently as somebody who is adapting it for television. They are excavating every single thought that you have had, and, you know, there's nothing that I love better than the phone call that asks, "what do you think about ... ?" It's a really, really exciting journey and I love being adapted actually. There are seven more novels apart from the ones that have already been done. My dream solution is that I get them all out there and not just for creative reasons but because I would like to be able to pay off my giant mortgage! And it is creatively a fascinating process.
JESS: Louise, you were Executive Producer on Crossfire as well, what did that involve for you? And how did that role sit alongside your responsibility as writer?
LOUISE:
A shed load more work than I realised! That's for sure. The best thing was really, being an Exec Producer gave me a chance to see from the inside how a drama is put together. As a writer new to television, you've got to learn about the nuts and bolts and it is incredibly time-consuming and sitting in on all the self-tapes for the actors, listening to the actors, talking about how they choose an actor, what they thought would work, the chemistry between different actors. I went on the location, spent a lot of time going round and round Tenerife looking for the right resort. I got to know about the practicalities of scheduling and financing, and all of these things make you a better writer if you actually understand the practicalities of a drama being put together.
Also learning that sometimes you have to think on your feet. We had, towards the end of filming, a small but crucial scene where one of our child actors tested positive for COVID that morning and couldn't do the scene, so suddenly you have to rewrite the scene, you have to take the child out and think on your feet. And all of that stuff was really, really good for a writer. I used to do a lot of journalism to very tight deadlines and you've got to be able to respond to pressure. That's one thing that I would definitely say to anyone who writes, because there is a lot of pressure, and there are a lot of occasions where you have a stressful day on set because (for example) the focus puller isn't doing what you want them to do, and everyone is in a state of extreme heightened stress. And as the writer, you can be a bit of a stress sponge for that. And you've got to be able to take that. You've got to have the hide of a rhinoceros or develop one by the end, whilst still hanging on to your creative vision. It's a very peculiar thing and very tough and sits apart from the writing process itself.
JESS: How do you find that calmness and resilience when there's chaos around you and you're soaking up all that angst?
LOUISE:
The key thing is learning to let go and understanding that if you want total control, write novels. And if I want total control, I'll write a novel. You have to step back, and go, here's the script, here's the thing, because unless you're going to direct your own work, even then, the broadcaster has the final say.
JESS: Can we talk a little bit about Tessa Hoffe who directed the series? At what point did she become involved in the project?
LAURENCE:
We loved Tessa. She is an amazing director and we were very lucky to have her and she's really, really thoughtful about everything on it. But she also brought an amazing Director of Photography , and together they created an aesthetic for it. But most important for her are the characters and emotions.
Tessa got involved fairly early. She was there giving notes on rewrites of episode one but also two and three. And we had seen some short films which we loved of hers, and we had seen some other work, and we just thought when we met her and heard her thoughts on the script that she would be a brilliant person for it. Keeley Hawes (her company Buddy Club Productions were making it with us), so the Executive Producers were Chris Carey, myself, Louise, and Keeley, we all spoke to Tessa and were just really struck by how thoughtful she was about how she wanted to bring it to life. It's such an extreme story that in the wrong hands, it could go in a very different direction. One of the other themes in Louise's work that we responded to is wanting to empower and give voice to middle-aged women. I don't know if you can say middle-aged anymore, but I'm going to say it, and give them roles in novels and TV dramas that sometimes were roles that would be more often given to men, so we really wanted to find a female director as well that would be part of that journey for those reasons.
LOUISE:
I think people who become directors are just incredible. Seeing up close how hard Tessa worked, long days on set. Never taking a break, hardly pausing to fork some food in her mouth while carrying on. We had no lunch breaks. We did continuous days. It was a COVID shoot, everybody was masked up. She was on her feet all day long. It was in the heat. It was a co-production. And we had Spanish crew as well as British crew. We had COVID cases during the shoots. It was such a tough one, because what a director has to do is so much more than simply the creative vision, the creative vision is only the start of it and every single evening while most of us would shrink gratefully to the bar, she was straight back to her hotel room to plan out the following day's shoot. I think directors are phenomenal. A couple of people said, "Will you ever direct your own work?", and I thought, "You must be joking". I could never do that job in a million years.
LAURENCE:
Just to add to that, the other thing that made the process more challenging than normal was the fact that the cast and crew stayed in the hotel featured in the series, so over the course of the six or seven week shoot, the claustrophobia and lockdown of going to sleep in the bedroom that you are also filming in did become quite intense, didn't it?
LOUISE:
It really did. And I was on set for the whole time, and also because it was COVID, people couldn't do what they normally do, people couldn't go out clubbing at the weekends to let down their hair. Everybody stayed, trapped in the hotel. People couldn't fly their families in and out because we had to reduce COVID risk and you would go down to the restaurant at breakfast and you would be going down to have breakfast a few feet away from where you were filming a traumatic scene the day before. A lot of what you see on screen with the intensity of the actors' faces, a lot of that is real. I think it was tough on them. Towards the end of the shoot, you know, everybody was on their knees.
JESS: It's interesting that you say that, because you really pick up on that, because it feels very claustrophobic and intense.
The following questions were put forward by members of the online webinar audience.
Louise, what would you say was in the first draft of Crossfire that stayed the whole time which you are most surprised or proud of? Was there anything that you particularly fought for?
LOUISE:
What a good question. I can remember my first draft as really awful. So I'm trying to think what stayed. I think broadly, broad point, what I fought for, and luckily I didn't have to fight hard because everyone else was on board with it, was this idea that we had to deal with aftermath. There's a brilliant film called , the adaptation of the novel by Emma Donoghue, which is a kidnap novel, and normally the story ends when the victim is released from the kidnapping, but the second half of that film took on board what it was like for the victim when she got home and similarly, with Crossfire, you know, there's any number of action dramas out there and a traditional action drama would end when the gunmen are shot down, the police have arrived and the attack is all over and we were absolutely determined that this was not going to be that. We were going to come home with the characters and see what it was like for them.
In the very opening scene it shows Jo on her hotel balcony having a cigarette with a sign that says, 'Please, No Smoking on the Balcony' and that to me was a very important visual image because I think in that visual image, the audience gets exactly who Jo is. She's lovely looking, she's a bit irresponsible. She's not really accountable for her own actions. That particular image stayed in although that particular shot was not actually the first shot of the show in the end. So there were little individual images like that that stayed in but the overall point was the idea that we would deal with aftermath.
How long were you given to write your pilot episode and did you get many notes?
LOUISE:
My very first draft was just terrible. It was full-on action, and I think to begin with, we did think it was going to be more of a traditional action series. I suppose what I'm trying to say is there is a difference between an action drama and a drama that has action. In the early drafts, I think I probably concentrated too hard on the action siege situation. When I thought about the importance of aftermath was when I realised that we had to pull back on some of that. And Chris Carey, who helped me with the early drafts, he was incredibly patient. He knew me well enough that there was no point in going through every single thing that I was getting wrong, because I was having to teach myself how to be a screenwriter as well as write a screenplay. So he would give me quite gentle steers, and then it got gradually harder and harder the closer we got to production, the more it gets down to the nitty-gritty. But I think a good Executive and a good Producer know when to really push a writer, or when to give them a more gentle steer to let them work it out for themselves.
LAURENCE:
I think just to add to that, when I came on board looking at the scripts, the discussion and the rewriting was about how much story to have in the first episode with the characters before the attack begins. At what point should the attack begin and what felt too long in terms of introduction. You begin to think, where's the story and what might feel too early? And that yoyoed a bit between the attack happening really early and then moving back. And you had earlier drafts where there was a lot more character establishment and others where it was even shorter. So that was a journey trying to find that point.
LOUISE:
And that's where the use of flash forward and flashback came in because as Laurence pointed out, when the attack only began halfway through the episode there was just too much. There was a whole half hour of getting to know the characters. But when the pre-credit sequence involved the attack, it wasn't enough. And once we brought it to the first few minutes we had to understand how to make people care about these characters.
JESS:
That's interesting because the flashbacks and the way you cross-cut between the near past and more distant past all plays to the central theme of time and how big traumatic events sort of have ripple effects on people's lives and become a before and after event in people's lives. It struck me as well that you needed those moments to take you away from the intensity of the unfolding action in the hotel as well. But I imagine that was tough to write.
Now that you can binge-watch one episode after another, how has streaming changed the way episodic TV series are made?
LAURENCE:
Great question because it does change things a lot actually. And it's interesting. I'm a viewer as well as a producer. We get used to box set releases now don't we. You feel a bit annoyed that you can't watch all of Frozen Planet in one go. My family really love that. We want another dopamine hit of that. Oh, God, it's not on until next Sunday. That feels wrong. But actually, equally, there can be dramas and series which you watch where you do have to wait like, you know, whatever box set is coming out of HBO at the moment where it does add to the pleasure, where you are having to think, I can't wait for the next episode.
There are arguments for the strengths and weaknesses both ways around, but in terms of viewing figures, it does have a big impact on episodes two and three and further episodes because obviously the further that you get on with the terrestrial transmission, the more people who may have been able to watch it online as a box set through 大象传媒 iPlayer. You have less people watching it live than you would have done if you just released it separately without having box sets. So you're kind of weighing one up against the other, and often the decision from a broadcaster's point of view, (and we had the same from The Salisbury Poisonings), whether to single drop it as one box set on one night or not was whether it's something that's very potentially shocking and emotional that actually if you really want to carry on watching it, and see what happens and get to the end of it, that's important. With The Salisbury Poisonings, there was the additional importance of the real life people knowing that their story could be watched all the way through, and it wasn't being suspended episode by episode in the air while they waited for the country to catch up with what they had been through. It was also a discussion with the real life people. But those are my thoughts.
Some series are spun out for too many episodes but three episodes seemed right this time for Crossfire. How did you reach that decision?
LOUISE:
I have to credit Lucy Richer (Executive Producer for the 大象传媒) because my original thought was that it would be six episodes. There were going to be episodes more from the point of view of the other women, Abhi and Miriam, more back in Leicester. And Lucy and I had a meeting with Chris one day and she just looked at it and she said, I think this material is three episodes. And she was absolutely right. And I think it was a combination of factors. I think there was possibly an element of my inexperience, I mean, writing six episodes yourself, on your own is a huge, huge project to take on for a new writer. Three episodes is more manageable. But also, this story is better told in an intense way, and if it's spread out over six or eight episodes, there have to be lulls and a wave, an up and down of the tension and this particular narrative. We wanted to spread the attack out in real time with the flashbacks and the flash forwards and she was quite right to say, yes, it's three. That's what this is. And that was her call, and it was absolutely right.
Laurence and Louise, what advice could you give to budding writers who don't have industry contacts but are hoping to start conversations?
LAURENCE:
Well, it's difficult. Because I have been on the journey with new writers for the last 30 years really and it's a difficult industry to get into. There's no two ways around it. What's brilliant is to have amazing homes like 大象传媒 Writersroom where the entire reason for their existence is to try to provide support and advice and information and encouragement and sometimes money for people. It's an amazing resource for people but in terms of getting into meetings, I think you've just got to be resilient and try everything. We don't read unsolicited scripts but we will look at unsolicited ideas, which you can send in as a short synopsis, and if we like it, we will ask to read the script. So we don't have a closed door on new ideas, some companies do because of the amount of time that it will take to read material.
Agents obviously help. But then you get into the whole territory of how do you get an agent. And I think agents, like broadcasters and like us really as producers, you do respond to really good writing. When I used to work as a script reader, I know there was a fear that there are so many scripts and ideas around, how can I ever break through as a new writer, because there is so much competition. And my experience, actually, was really positive on that front, that if you read something that you feel has got something. Because you've got a lot of material that you don't think works, if you read something that has an emotional connection, you get really excited about it, irrespective of whether it's written by somebody new or not new. And then, finally, I would say, you know, we run some mentoring schemes. In addition to the 大象传媒 Writersroom, there is a general awareness that new writers do need help, and a desire to find new talent, and there are other ways in through writing for theatre or writing for radio. So there are other ways into TV and film. But there's no way of avoiding the truth that it is a tough journey to get in, and you have to really want to make it work in order to begin it.
LOUISE:
I'm a big fan of talks, courses, the 大象传媒 Writersroom is fantastic. All the organisations like ScreenSkills. Creative writing courses, I used to teach on a lot of novel creative writing courses. One day seminars. There is the . I just think you put yourself adjacent to the industry. Keep watching lots of television and keep writing and produce lots of ideas. Because a lot of them are going to fall through the net. There's a huge amount of rejection. Keep going. You can have something that looks like a dead cert and dies a death. You can have something that's almost moribund for years and suddenly gets greenlit. You have to have lots of ideas. And don't give up!
All episodes of Crossfire are available to watch on 大象传媒 iPlayer
Read scripts from Apple Tree Yard in our online Script Library