With six features in eight years, all cult and critical successes, Ben Wheatley has emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices in British cinema. Or, rather, joint voices. In interview, Wheatley uses “we” as often as “I”, referring to his co-writer, co-editor and wife Amy Jump, and their producing partner Andy Starke.
Wheatley takes the tropes of 1970s genre movies and puts his own particular spin on them. His latest film, Free Fire, courts comparisons with Reservoir Dogs, with its warehouse setup of quarrelling criminals and quotable dialogue. But the ensuing hour-long gun battle for survival harks back to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. And the blackly comic tone is all Wheatley’s own.
Creative Screenwriting talked to Wheatley about using realism in generic stories, writing movies you can actually make, and avoiding being given script notes.
<div id="attachment_18400" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18400" class="size-full wp-image-18400" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free_Fire-02037.jpg" alt="Ben Wheatley on set of Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free_Fire-02037.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free_Fire-02037-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free_Fire-02037-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free_Fire-02037-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Ben Wheatley. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>What do you start with when you write a screenplay? A theme, a character, a situation?</h2>
It depends on the screenplay. Sometimes they lurch into existence through an image or a concept, or sometimes it’s something I want to see. Perhaps there’s something I enjoyed in a film but there hasn’t been that kind of movie for a while, and I’d like to see what the modern version might look like.
<h2>And where did Free Fire come from?</h2>
I’d written a crime script years ago with Rob Hill, who’s the co-writer on Down Terrace, and as part of that we did a bit of research and found this transcript of a shootout in Miami between FBI agents and prospective bank robbers. The FBI had written a forensic report of what happened – basically a blow-by-blow account of a gun battle between lots of different people in very close proximity – and when I read it, I thought that a) it was like a short story, and b) it was very different from anything I’d ever seen in cinema.
What came across in the report was the thing of people firing and missing. I started reading accounts of other police and special forces operations, and apparently firing guns is a perishable skill: unless you’re highly trained and do it all the time, you revert to being as bad as a civilian quite quickly.
You can shoot paper targets completely accurately all day long, but as soon as someone shoots back at you, you go to pieces. They’re moving and you’re moving and it’s so terrifying that it’s very hard to shoot straight. So that was the reality I wanted to try and represent.
<div id="attachment_18404" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18404" class="wp-image-18404 size-full" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF038.jpg" alt="Noah Taylor as Gordon, Jack Reynor as Harry, Sharlto Copley as Vernon and Armie Hammer as Ord in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF038.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF038-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF038-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF038-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Noah Taylor as Gordon, Jack Reynor as Harry, Sharlto Copley as Vernon and Armie Hammer as Ord in Free Fire. 
 Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>How important is genre in your work?</h2>
I swing backwards and forwards on genre. On the one hand, it’s a critical construct: there used to just be films, and then they got categorised and stacked up. But equally, genre is why I like cinema: I’m a film fan first, and came from a position of watching a lot of movies before I was making them.
But all genre has to be dealt with through some kind of filter, and that filter for me is always my own experience and my own taste in movies.
So in the first three or four films we did, the filter was a socio-realist look at genre: a strategy of not using generic characters, but trying to put real people in genre situations.
Some genre situations are so hysterical that they can pop you out of the movie; they make people not take the movies seriously because they recognise the tropes from other films. But if you have realistic elements within that film, people tend to forgive the genre elements.
<h2>Free Fire has elements of several genres: action, comedy and crime.</h2>
Well, it fits in the broader genre of crime. It could be an Elmore Leonard story. At one point we almost wrote the pulp novel version of the film.
There was a version where the script had “Adapted from the novel Iron Sight” with a fake author name. We got quite a long way down the road with that, then Amy said, “Why would we do this? We’ve written this thing, why would we pretend we hadn’t made it up properly?”
But it was a nod to that “Based on a true story” stuff that the Coens do.
Like Fargo.
Exactly. It gives a legitimacy to the film. If it comes from a book, it always feels much smarter!
<div id="attachment_18405" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18405" class="size-full wp-image-18405" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF101.jpg" alt="Babou Ceesay as Martin, Brie Larson as Justine, Armie Hammer as Ord, Sharlto Copley Vernon and Noah Taylor as Gordon in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF101.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF101-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF101-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF101-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Babou Ceesay as Martin, Brie Larson as Justine, Armie Hammer as Ord, Sharlto Copley as Vernon and Noah Taylor as Gordon in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>This is your first movie set in the US. Did that present any writing challenges, or as a genre fan did it come naturally?</h2>
Years ago when I was doing TV stuff, I went out to the States to pitch comedy shows for America, and I had a twinge of, “Do I understand the culture of the place enough to do it?”
But as I’ve got older and spent more time in the States and have more American friends, I’ve relaxed into it, so I didn’t feel as nervous. And because it’s period and it’s genre, that kind of sits outside of an actual experience which can be interrogated too closely.
<h2>I believe you were also writing with two of the actors in mind: Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley, who are both Irish, like their characters?</h2>
Totally, yes. And the movie is also about characters moving from Europe and Africa to America, and that experience. So it’s not as cut and dried as all American characters talking about American stuff, it’s a mixture of people travelling to a place and existing in a place. And that appealed to me, because that’s what the film is for me, career-wise: a stretching of the legs into the American idiom.
<div id="attachment_18401" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18401" class="size-full wp-image-18401" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF017.jpg" alt="Cillian Murphy as Chris and Michael Smiley as Frank in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF017.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF017-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF017-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF017-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Cillian Murphy as Chris and Michael Smiley as Frank in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>You seem to like contained environments: a warehouse, a high-rise, a field. Do you find that those limits somehow give you more freedom?</h2>
The tighter environments are budgetary, really. We tend to think about what we can make, rather than writing a script and seeing if it can be financed. I don’t want to write stuff I can’t make, because it’s pointless.
A Field in England was a case in point. If you started it, “Scene 1: They walk through Norwich and it’s full of people and horses”, then that’s the whole budget and you’re never going to shoot that film. But if it’s four guys walking in a field, then immediately you can make that movie.
Looking across all our films, there’s obvious themes running through them that we’re not as aware of as we might think. We try to make the films different from each other, but then these things slip back in. In a genre sense they’re different, but tonally they’re quite similar.
If I was to step back from it, I’d say there’s two types of scripts we write. One is the woman having to deal with the man child, which is Down Terrace and Sightseers and Kill List to a degree. The other is the fractured soul, where there’s a character represented by many characters, so that’s A Field in England and High-Rise.
<h2>Which one is Free Fire?</h2>
I think that’s child men again, and the one woman going, “Oh, God!”
<div id="attachment_18402" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18402" class="size-full wp-image-18402" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF026.jpg" alt="Brie Larson as Justine in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF026.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF026-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF026-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-FF026-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Brie Larson as Justine in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>Amy Jump has written or co-written all but one of your previous features, and you share a credit on this one. How does your writing relationship work?</h2>
On this film I would have written the original draft, and probably drafted it two or three times, then she came on and did her draft, and that was the shooting script.
Then, because the actors were doing improvisation and we were changing the script as we shot it, she was on set and writing a day ahead of production. She would incorporate the improvisational bits and we would look at the rushes and have discussions about how it was going.
We really liked Noah Taylor in the rushes: his character and the way he was performing. Then we looked at the script and were like, “He’s not got enough stuff. He’s really good and we’re not using him enough.” So she would go, “OK, we’ll write a scene for him here,” and we’d add a bit in. We could only do that because it was shot in chronological order, so there weren’t horrific continuity problems of performance across the film.
The other important thing in all this, and the difference with most productions, is that the writer is also the editor, so the writing is integrated into the whole process.
<h2>How different was Amy’s draft from yours?</h2>
I would say she probably replaced every line of dialogue.
<h2>And then half of it was replaced with improvisation?</h2>
Not that much. It isn’t improvisation as you might imagine, of people just talking and scenes spilling out from that improvisation, because that never really works, I don’t think. I tend to shoot a take that’s the script, and then a take where they can paraphrase the script and throw in any other lines they’ve got. But it’s small changes, not massive character bits.
<div id="attachment_18407" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18407" class="size-full wp-image-18407" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-01325.jpg" alt="Sharlto Copley and Ben Wheatley on set of Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-01325.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-01325-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-01325-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Free-Fire-01325-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Sharlto Copley and Ben Wheatley on set of Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24</div>
<h2>Do you write the script differently, knowing that you’re going to be directing and editing the film?</h2>
Because we’re writing to shoot and to edit, the scripts are quite splintered. They’re written “cut”, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of short scenes, and the lines from one scene juxtapose against the lines in another scene. But because there’s a conduit between writer, director and editor, we can have that shorthand.
I want the script to be a representation of the feeling of what the film is going to be like, rather than a set of choices which then have to be made.
<h2>Were you given script notes at any point?</h2>
There weren’t really notes from anybody. We’ve been lucky like that. We tend to write spec scripts, so we don’t really do development. We say, “This is the script we’re going to do, who’s coming with us?” Not, “I really want to do a film about this, who wants to help me write it?”
<h2>That feels like the way it should be, really.</h2>
Well, wanting to get paid up front for services is the problem. I think you’ve really got to go, “Fuck it, I’m going to write stuff, tons of it.” And not just one script that you’re holding onto like it’s the only thing that’s going to save you. You’ve got to have 10 or 12. And then keep writing all the time.
Last year we wrote six. They’re not finished, they’re all in different states of polish. But to keep on top of it you have to be pouring it out as much as possible.
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Featured image: Armie Hammer as Ord, Brie Larson as Justine, Cillian Murphy as Chris, Sam Riley as Stevo and Michael Smiley as Frank in Free Fire. Photo by Kerry Brown, courtesy of A24
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A Distinctive New Voice: Ben Wheatley on Free Fire

­With six consecutive James Bond scripts to their credit, from The World is Not Enough to Spectre, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are no strangers to the spy genre. For their first TV project, they’ve combined it with two other genres – crime and war – in a 5-part BBC series based on Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB, helmed by award-winning German director Philipp Kadelbach (Generation War).
Brighton Rock star Sam Riley plays Scotland Yard detective Douglas Archer, investigating a murder in Nazi-occupied London in 1941, who becomes embroiled with the German SS, the British Resistance, rogue A-bomb scientists and a seductive American journalist (Kate Bosworth).
SS-GB is Purvis and Wade’s twelfth produced screenplay, and has been bought for US TV distribution by Weinstein Television. Other forays into espionage include an unproduced adaptation of John le Carre’s The Mission Song, and an original script, Our Man in New York, based on the true story of the Stasi’s top agent in the US and currently slated to be directed by David Mackenzie.
Creative Screenwriting talked to Purvis and Wade about adapting a complex plot into series format, turning budget limitations into creative opportunities, and delaying the moment when the gun comes out.
<div id="attachment_17764" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17764" class="size-full wp-image-17764" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Purvis-Wade-Headshot.jpg" alt="Neal Purvis and Robert Wade" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Purvis-Wade-Headshot.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Purvis-Wade-Headshot-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Purvis-Wade-Headshot-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Purvis-Wade-Headshot-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Neal Purvis and Robert Wade</div>
<h2>Was SS-GB a passion project of yours, or was the book brought to you?</h2>
Robert Wade: It was brought to us, but I’d read it many years ago. Both my parents were big Len Deighton fans, so his books were always around the house. I remember it coming out, and I liked the cover: a British postage stamp with Hitler on.
There’s a whole genre of “Hitler wins” books, so Len wasn’t the first, but it’s a great, thought-provoking book – and the thing which made it really interesting for us is that it’s set in 1941, 14 months after the Battle of Britain, so history is still fluid, whereas all those other books are about aftermaths and consequences.
Neal Purvis: And for us it was good was that it was a book: you’re doing TV, but you’re doing something where you can see the end, so we could structure it as five hours. It was conceivable for us.
<h2>The five-hour structure was your idea?</h2>
Neal: We were given freedom for four, five or six hours, whatever felt best.
Robert: And it just felt organic. It’s going to be six parts in America – six times 45 minutes – whereas this is five BBC hours. Which are real hours.
Neal: More daunting.
Robert: When you spread it out over five hours you’re still losing a lot of stuff from the book, but you’re also having to manufacture things which aren’t there in the book – so that, for instance, a character will appear in an episode, whereas in the actual narrative flow they wouldn’t. If it was a two-hour movie it would be fine that the character’s not in this bit, but if they’re not in an episode at all that doesn’t work, so you have to find new ways of doing things.
Neal: The structure of the book, and the way we were going to do it, was all through Archer’s point of view. So the other characters have got to be interacting with him, because we don’t cut away to other scenes until towards the end, when we felt it was justified.
Robert: Then the cuts are motivated by the building pressure, the tension.
Neal: But until the last episode, Sam Riley is in every scene.
Robert: Also, because of that structure, the point of view Len Deighton observed, two of the characters in the book die off-screen, as it were. But it’s just not acceptable in a modern entertainment to have people you care about die without seeing what happens to them, and that led us to reconsider both of those characters.
<div id="attachment_17761" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17761" class="size-full wp-image-17761" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-6.jpg" alt="Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and Kate Bosworth as Barbara Barga in SS-GB © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-6.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-6-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-6-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-6-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and Kate Bosworth as Barbara Barga in SS-GB 
 © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures</div>
<h2>Did you meet with Len Deighton before you started?</h2>
Robert: Yes. Sally Woodward Gentle [producer of SS-GB] is friendly with him and managed to persuade him to meet us, and the prospect of meeting with Len Deighton was extremely exciting.
Neal: He asked us if we had any questions – holes in the plot, that kind of thing – and at that point we were so pleased to be talking to him that we hadn’t analysed it in that much detail. Then when we came down to writing it we realised it probably wasn’t meant to be analysed in that much detail.
Robert: When we initially met him we thought that we’d understood the plot, then when we really did understand the plot we realised that we hadn’t understood it before, and there were some quite big things that needed to be… finessed.
<h2><a href="http://amzn.to/2ksC86f"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-17762" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel-197x300.jpg" alt="" width="197" height="300" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel-197x300.jpg 197w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel-99x150.jpg 99w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel-115x175.jpg 115w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel-150x228.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-novel.jpg 328w" sizes="(max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px" /></a>How did you set about adapting the book?</h2>
Neal: We broke it down and split it up into episodes, then worked on an episode structurally, because it was all about getting the structure right. Then when we were happy with how much we had in an episode, we worked in exactly the same as we do on a film script, taking a scene each in the leap-frogging way that we operate.
In a film script, the hardest part always seems to be in the middle, getting that kick-start towards the end. But in 60 minutes it’s somehow easier: you don’t feel that sagging in the same way as you do in a 2-hour or a 90-minute piece. So that was an advantage structurally.
What was harder was that in a film script a scene should only last a couple of pages. If it lasts longer there’s got to be a very good reason for it, because film is all about moving on. TV is more about staying there for some time, partly because they can’t afford to keep moving on.
The word “montage” doesn’t seem to exist in television, because that’s individual brief scenes that they’ve got to get together and shoot. It’s too expensive, too time-consuming. So for us it was new to spend so long on one scene, but the advantage was that we could go into more depth in the characterisation.
Robert: For example, there’s a scene in episode two which is a 10-minute dialogue scene between four men playing cards. It’s a very good scene because of Len Deighton’s dialogue, but it’s like Casino Royale: a card game, with people playing their cards close to their chest.
<div id="attachment_17760" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17760" class="size-full wp-image-17760" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-5.jpg" alt="Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and James Cosmo as Harry Woods in SS-GB. © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-5.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-5-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-5-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-5-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and James Cosmo as Harry Woods in SS-GB. 
 © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures</div>
<h2>Were you concerned about giving each episode its own three-act structure?</h2>
Robert: There’s a certain amount of plot you’ve got to get through, but in a way you’re liberated from the three-act structure within those hours.
Neal: As far as structure is concerned, what you’re aiming for is the end of the episode.
Robert: You have to know the break point, and build towards it. We also learned that you’ve got one episode to grab the audience, so you have to tell them what it is and…
Neal: Introduce everybody.
Robert: And you have to hang it on something. Like, is this about a murder investigation, or does it just seem to be about a murder investigation? You have to come down on one side or the other.
Another thing that was interesting, especially by comparison to Bond, is that there were limits. With Bond there are no limits, you can afford to do anything – and that’s really scary, because you can change anything.
For instance, the introduction of Huth [SS Intelligence officer played by Lars Eidinger] was originally a scene at Croydon Aerodrome, as in the novel. Then the producers owned up that we wouldn’t be able to afford that, so we had to think of a new way of introducing him. There was always an autopsy scene, and by putting him in that scene it saved on a location and created a more interesting introduction to his character.
So those kind of limitations can be creatively good.
<div id="attachment_17757" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17757" class="size-full wp-image-17757" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-2.jpg" alt="Kate Bosworth as Barbara Barga and Sam Riley as Douglas Archer in SS-GB © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-2.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-2-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-2-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-2-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Kate Bosworth as Barbara Barga and Sam Riley as Douglas Archer in SS-GB 
 © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures</div>
<h2>Did you include information in each episode to orientate viewers who hadn’t seen previous ones? </h2>
Robert: That was something we had questions about. We did a certain amount of due diligence, making sure certain things were in there, but we knew it was going have a “Previously”, and it was also going to have a “Coming Up Next”, so that changes your way of thinking about things.
We wanted what happened to one particular character to be a mystery at the end of the penultimate episode, but the producers said, “We’re going to be showing that character in the teaser for the final episode anyway, so there’s no point in having a mystery about what happened to them.”
As executive producers we watched all the rushes and pretty much every edit, and were very involved in the music and the sound edit. But when it comes to things like that you don’t really get consulted, and yet they’re fundamental in creating the experience.
<h2>What else did your role as executive producers entail?</h2>
Robert: Because it was a continuing narrative we wanted a single director. And in that respect our role was less than it would have been if there had been different directors, because then it would have been our job to be the final arbiter, and make sure it was all consistent. But Philipp hadn’t directed in English before, so our job was to reassure him that the plot made sense, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t fully understand every nuance. In fact, that was our job with almost everybody, wasn’t it?
Neal: It did feel like we were the only people who understood everything.
<h2>Is there ever a moment during rewrites when you lose track of things?</h2>
Neal: What we like about writing film scripts is that you can lie in bed at night and contain the whole film in your head – and if you can’t, that’s not great, because you should be able to, really. But you can’t contain a 300-page, 5-hour TV script in your head, and that does feel a bit uncomfortable.
<div id="attachment_17759" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-17759" class="size-full wp-image-17759" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-4.jpg" alt="Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and James Cosmo as Harry Woods in SS-GB. © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-4.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-4-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-4-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SS-GB-4-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Sam Riley as Douglas Archer and James Cosmo as Harry Woods in SS-GB. 
 © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures</div>
<h2>Do you enjoy adaptations as much as writing original scripts?</h2>
Neal: The book gives you an underpinning which is very useful, but the danger is sticking to the book too much. It’s a learning process as to how much you alter it. And when you are less faithful to the book, you can take more pleasure in your own work.
Robert: It’s about how much license you have: how much you can contribute and improve.
Neal: With SS-GB, although we could fiddle with the climax, we had to build on what was already there to reach it. If you started messing around with it too much, the whole thing would fall apart. So in that instance, a fairly complex espionage story, we had to stick with it for the most part.
Robert: But that’s not unenjoyable.
<h2>You’ve worked a lot in the thriller genre…</h2>
Neal: Almost everything we do has a thriller element. Even when we’ve done comedies, they’ve often had a thriller element. A thriller is only an exaggerated version of what you do in any script, and we enjoy the elevated drama of it.
Robert: The only problem is, things tend to slide into dullness the minute a gun appears. It should be a big moment when a gun appears, as it would be in real life, but guns are all over the place in thrillers. So I think the thing about doing a thriller is: delay the moment that the gun comes out for as long as possible.
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Featured image: Sam Riley as Douglas Archer in SS-GB. Photo by Laurie Sparham  © Sid Gentle Films Ltd and BBC Pictures
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