MCMAFIA PRESS PACK Writer Hossein Amini Why did you want to adapt this book? Well the book is factual and there are no story lines as such, but what was really exciting is the world that it painted was so interesting. I've always loved the gangster genre and even with things like The Sopranos, which I loved, it's about the end of that genre and the end of the gangster. It was really the death of that [in the 1990s]. And then suddenly I read this book and it was all about how [gangsters] were being reborn globally. And that the triads were dealing with the cartels who were competing with the Russian mafia and it was almost like Game of Thrones with mobs. And I thought that was such a potentially exciting canvas. You know, this [book] gave us great characters and a great world and it's easy to invent scenes for that. Has Alex changed much as a character? Alex doesn't exist at all [in the book]. No I mean, literally none of the characters are historic and they never exist in the book. It was really the world and the tone that appealed, because the tone of it is so authentic and it felt to me like it was that whole thing of 'truth is always more interesting than fiction'. And also, I suddenly thought well, these people could be sitting next to me while I'm having dinner in the restaurant, or staying at the same hotel. And so the idea was to be able to almost drop the audience into something that feels familiar. So, it's not this heightened world where gangsters are all movie clichés but actually they look more like bankers and are totally unexpected and surprising. You know, there's a detail that Misha told us about a gangster whose hobby was dog shows and I could never have invented that. Did that make it in to the series? Yes, yes! It's in. You can't ignore a thing like that. So in the course of your research, did you talk to any gangsters? Misha brought in some people who are on the fringes of that world. One was actually, to my surprise, someone who's a friend of my in-laws, and was described to me as a legend in the gangster world! There was a lot of research work where Misha was incredibly helpful and helped us talk to people involved in hacking and the police side of things. So this is going to surprise us, is it, because it's not about Tony Soprano mobs who operate in a small area of New Jersey or New York City or whatever? It's not about turf wars? I mean we're shooting second units in about ten different countries and the Russians are always speaking Russian and so on. This was really about how they all interconnect over the globe. We didn’t get into the triads and stuff but potentially that's open. We've got cartels, the Russian mob, the Czech mob, Israel we have some scenes, there's a lot of India. Is it hard to keep one step ahead of everything with all the recent news about America and Russia links and so on? Yes, absolutely. The other thing we try to explore in the series is this almost the connections between crime, intelligence agencies, banks and politicians which is just getting murkier and murkier. And obviously, everything that's happening now is slightly feeding into that. You know, the tricky thing is we have to try not to be too specific about individual characters and stuff because it's going to overtake you. Politics is going to overtake you, so it's trying to stay away from that. Can you talk about the decision to cast James Norton and what he brings to the role? Well, Alex's character in the series is really an anti-hero in the sense that he's charming [but] there's definitely a dark side of him. He surprises you more and more over the course of the series by almost embracing this area of work he's entering. And what James brings, apart from his fantastic talent as an actor, is this likeability on the screen. And that makes it even more exciting because he can do some terrible things and I think you're still on his side and that's really important in this kind of series. And actually, the supposed villain in this, Vadim, I tried to do the same thing with him to give him a family relationship and a big heart. All these people are not gangsters all of the time. It's like all of us: we work however many hours a day but the rest of the time we are parents or husbands and wives and have friends, and so we want to show that side of their lives, as well as the bits when they are doing violent crimes, which is a very small part of it really in a 24 hour day. Why do you think we love anti-heroes so much these days, it almost seems like there is no bad guy? Because I think storytelling in some ways has become more complex and I think there's that acceptance that everyone has good and bad in them and that you're different one moment to the next and you can hurt someone and actually feel guilty about it. I feel that you look back at films in the 40s and 50s, which I love, but they tend to be a bit more black and white and I think gradually it's just got a bit more murky. As a writer I love, for example, writing the most moving speech coming from supposedly the villain, or the most heart breaking moment or the cruellest moment coming from the hero, and I think just mixing that up is very exciting for a writer and hopefully for an audience as well. From the people you met, were there any stories that were too strange to include or were there any things that you wanted to include from the book but couldn't? The hacking story was tricky because hacking is quite a difficult genre for a film, so we have some of that, but to be honest I didn't really know enough to tell that story, I'm not very technically minded so that was a hard one. But no, there's nothing. I mean it's quite a complicated world and some of the stuff they smuggle, like aluminium was a massive gangster trade in 1990s Russia but that's quite tricky to explain to an audience. Money laundering is also something we get deep into but, you know, I had to get banker friends and stuff to help with that! Is there a lot of violence in there or is it all implied? There is violence. I think the violence is not that frequent but even when it happens it is quite violent and I think the reason for that is one of the things that came across very much in Misha's book is for a lot of these modern day gangsters, violence is a last resort. They'd much rather behave like businessman and negotiate and co-operate and only when there's no other option do they resort to violence, so we tried to reflect that in the amount we show, that it's really something they do quite reluctantly. That said, did you receive any threats? No. I have been a bit more paranoid! But so far, no. We are skirting quite close to some of the things that are going on in the world. So it doesn't feel as imagined as other stuff. Also, when you just do the research, you look at people wiping poison on people's faces and… That's one where they were ahead of us because that form of assassination is completely new. Who is the most terrifying in the crime organisations? From my reading I'd guess the two powerful kingdoms right now are the Mexican cartels probably and the Russian mob, but I'm guessing. Certainly in our kind of world that feels like those are the two super powers. How open were they to talk about their world? We didn't meet any hardcore foot soldiers. It was mainly guys who dabbled, who were on the outskirts, and they were… It's funny because they don't talk about it as gangsters, it's as businessmen. They're dealing in product. But I think people are quite open, certainly from what Misha told me, who did much more meeting the gangsters than I did. They're quite eager to talk about themselves and their lives and the fact that they're helping people as well as, you know, being gangsters. It's a classic thing in all kinds of story telling that every villain is the hero of their own story and I think with all these people, they're the same. Because they don't feel like they're the bad guys, necessarily. How prevalent is the gangster world? I think it's really prevalent, it's also incredibly wide reaching because it's dealing with all sorts of things from people smuggling to cigarette smuggling, to drugs, to intelligence and it's so broad now. And I think also in terms of the money it makes.