The Worricker Trilogy: Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield
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Interview with Sir David Hare, Writer/Director of The Worricker Trilogy: Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield Sundays, November 9 & 16, 2014 on MASTERPIECE CONTEMPORARY One of England’s foremost playwrights, screenwriters, and film directors, Sir David Hare completes his Worricker Trilogy on MASTERPIECE CONTEMPORARY with two more gripping dramas charting the exploits of spy-on-the-run Johnny Worricker, played by Bill Nighy. Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield marvelously thicken the plot started by Page Eight, which first aired on MASTERPIECE in 2011. The two films bring Johnny together with fellow spook Margot Tyrrell (Helena Bonham Carter) and lead them to a heart-stopping denouement. It’s all in a day’s work for Hare, Academy Award® screenwriting nominee for The Hours and The Reader. Actually, the writing and directing were “completely exhausting,” he says in this interview with MASTERPIECE, in which he discusses his inspiration for the trilogy, the amazing cast, the spy genre, and much else. What is the genesis of the Worricker trilogy? When I wrote the first one Page[ Eight], the producer at the BBC said, “We can either make a feature film, in which case it will take three years to put the money and cast together. Or we can be filming in six months if you agree that it’s television.” And I said, “Okay, let’s do it on television.” Then the BBC immediately said, “Can we please have six?”—because quantity is something television understands. And I said, “No! It takes me a year to write one of these.” In the end, we all enjoyed ourselves so much on the first one that I agreed to do two more. Was it tricky to continue the story? Well, I’ve done a trilogy before, so I knew that the second one [Turks & Caicos] would be the hardest. The one where you’re setting out is easy. And the one where you’re bringing things to a conclusion is easy. But the middle one is always difficult. And Turks & Caicos was a very hard film to write, partly because the subject is so difficult—about theAmerican government having been ripped off in the War on Terror and now trying to get some of its money back. That’s not easy to write about. What was your inspiration for the films? Everything has changed in British intelligence since the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001. Unfortunately, as part of an alliance, we have had to use intelligence gained by torture, which has been illegal in Britain for 400 years. So this has led to tremendous arguments within MI5 about the ethics of the new way of doing things—namely, surveillance, detention, rendition, torture. I had the idea of this heroic guy in MI5 who does things the old way and therefore is a little bit of a fish out of water. -more- Interview with Sir David Hare, Page 2 That would be Johnny Worricker. Is he a throwback—an homage to a John le Carré type of spy figure? Oh, I don’t think so. John le Carré did the Cold War absolutely brilliantly, but this is a completely new situation. In a way, the message of le Carré is always, “Oh my God, in fighting the bad people we’re turning into people just as bad.”The arguments now are a little more sophisticated than in the days when we were shocked to discover that Americans and Brits behaved just as badly as the enemy. Now people are concerned with what Michael Gambon’s character says in the first film—when he wonders whether it’s possible to do dishonorable work in an honorable way. That’s Johnny’s dilemma. What kind of insight do you have into what’s going on inside MI5? Mostly a lot of people in MI5 talking to me. I was invited into MI5 to give a talk just at the turn of the century, before all of this happened. They sometimes invite outsiders in to talk about things that they’re interested in. And so I met people who have been happy to tell me what’s going on—but obviously deeply off the record. Did you invent the Johnny Worricker role with Bill Nighy in mind? No, I was thirty pages in before it became apparent to me that he would be perfect. Bill says that when he got the script, which begins, “A man in a blue overcoat steps onto a pavement and lights a cigarette and crosses the road,” he said, “I’m in!” There’s a wonderful phrase somebody used about him “moving like a pencil-thin shadow through the dark streets.” He just embodies the character most beautifully. He’s amazing, but so is the rest of the cast. How did you assemble such a team? I just go to them. The second and third films are very rare in that absolutely everybody who was offered anything accepted. I think it’s because most of the people coming on board had seen the first one. It’s also a mark of Bill’s popularity. I don’t know an actor in English-speaking cinema who doesn’t want to work with Bill Nighy. One of the wonderful things about him is that he’s not a screen-hogging actor. He’s an incredibly generous performer, and he also creates a wonderful atmosphere on set because he’s so pleasant. Winona Ryder, for one, was just in heaven to be acting with Bill. Christopher Walken as Curtis is a perfect foil for Bill Nighy in the second film. Was that your plan? It wasn’t inevitable. But on the other hand, Chris Walken is an actor who Bill admires very much and always wanted to work with. When they met, Chris actually said to Bill, “I’ve always thought of you as my twin.” Meaning, their approach to work is very similar. They’re both very practical, very down to Earth, very laconic, very humorous. They’re almost transatlantic cousins, the two of them. So putting the bar scenes together where they just riff together is just heaven for me as a director. That’s when “The Great Pretender” comes on the jukebox. Pretty obvious, yes! That's what he is. At the end of the film, we actually never know who Chris Walken is. The one thing we know is his name isn’t Curtis Pelissier! But who the hell he is, we never know, from beginning to end. I assume the title of the third film,Salting the Battlefield, alludes to ancient Rome’s treatment of Carthage? You’re absolutely correct. After the Romans came and wiped you out and destroyed you and killed all your young men, they then threw salt on the battlefield so that your crops would never grow. So salting the battlefield means destroying utterly, which is what current Anglo-American policy is toward Islamic terrorism. They’re trying to salt the battlefield—but not very successfully, because look at what’s happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. -more- Interview with Sir David Hare, Page 3 What was your original vision for the films? My original vision was that very heavy subject matter should be presented very lightly. I wanted to talk about complicated and profound moral problems—about intelligence and the way societies organize themselves to fight threats. But I wanted to do it in a way that was completely lighthearted and easy to digest—that was fun, really, and had a humorous tone to it. But to make a rather profound point… To make a series of points about the way the intelligence services are running the country at the moment. In both of our countries, there’s a strong feeling that the intelligence services are out of control, and that there’s no longer any democratic oversight. In a way, the real business of government has moved from government to intelligence. That’s why it’s such an exciting subject to write about. Look at the obvious point: Obama came in making various promises about intelligence malpractice, which he’s been unable to do a single thing about. Here we are six years into his presidency and there’s been absolutely no change whatsoever. That tells you where the power is nowadays. Do you think spying has achieved a bad name since the Cold War? It depends on your view of the Cold War, doesn’t it? Look, be clear: I do believe that there is a danger to civilians, and there clearly is a threat against Western societies from Islamic terrorism. It happens to be nothing like the scale of threat that we faced in Britain in the 1970s from Irish terrorism. We are fighting a much, much smaller threat with a much, much larger apparatus. Somehow things have gotten totally out of proportion. I don’t remember in the 1970s it being necessary to curtail our liberties to the degree that they’re now curtailed. However, I don’t deny that there is a threat, and I don’t deny that I feel grateful that there are people watching out for that threat on my behalf. In the third film, you make the point that there is ubiquitous video surveillance in Britain, while that’s not the case in Germany. It’s absolutely true. The people in Germany lived first of all through the Nazis and secondly through the Stasi—the East German secret service. So at this point in German history, they have rather strong views about individual rights, which would be wonderful if we had in England, but we don’t.