Wolf Hall in the Sunday Times... again!

source: Sunday Times

The highly anticipated Wolf Hall is coming to BBC2 in January 2015, and then to PBS Masterpiece Theater on April 2015. 

As we cannot wait for Wolf Hall to arrive on our TV screens, let’s hear the director Peter Kosminsky (Warriors, Government Inspector, The Project) talk about directing Wolf Hall, the brilliant cast he worked with and how well Hilary Mantel received the final cut in excerpts from this Sunday Times article.

 “I got called up about Wolf Hall and, to be honest, I thought somebody was having me on. Me? Wolf Hall? I loved the books, but I do contemporary stuff, and mostly write it myself these days. Why would you want me?”

There were two reasons. One was Mark Rylance, who was already on board to star as Thomas Cromwell. He had won a BAFTA for The Government Inspector; if he were to return to television, he wanted to do it with his friend and collaborator. “I was asked first whether I would play it,” Rylance says, “and it was on condition that there was a director I was confident about. I felt Peter’s knowledge of political intrigue and his attention to detail would be just right for this.”

The other was Mantel. “She was interested in me directing it for two reasons,” Kosminsky says. “First, because she sees it as an intensely political piece, and I’ve done a lot of political drama. Second, she wanted it to be a million miles from the normal interpretation of the Tudor dynasty — which is very colourful, very pretty, slightly stylised, emotionally perhaps a little overintense. It seems she’d seen some of my stuff and thought this would be an unexpected way to go.”

source: Radio Times

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Kosminsky tried to make the series the same way he would a contemporary political drama. He hired an academic and “researched it to within an inch of its life”. Everything — even the food and the way it is eaten — is as authentic as it can be. Take spoons: they appear in some dining scenes, but not in others, because, although spoons came into use around this period, it wasn’t in all levels of society. Their introduction is staggered through the 20-year time frame of the series. Other nods to fastidiousness include the fact that nobody in court writes with their left hand — actors were corrected on several occasions.

The entire series was shot on location, and the locations are often the real thing, too. Penshurst Place, in Kent, for example — used for York Place (later Whitehall Palace) — did in fact receive Henry VIII as a visitor. “I’m told there’s no doubt that, 500 years ago, Henry VIII stood in the room where I was standing, playing Henry VIII,” Damian Lewis says.

I hope I will bring the same ethos — of a well-researched, contemporary, quite political drama — to Wolf Hall that I’ve tried to bring to my own work in the past 10 years or so,” Kosminsky says.

That ethos extends to how Wolf Hall has been shot. I watched a scene in a room at Broughton that doubled as the king’s privy chamber. Lewis and Rylance, Henry and Cromwell, were reacting to the news that there are traitors in their midst. “Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye,” Rylance said, very still, exquisitely menacing. It was filmed with a Steadicam, another technique transplanted from Kosminsky’s contemporary dramas and documentaries. “The camera is on [the cinematographer] Gavin Finney’s shoulder a lot,” Lewis says afterwards, “as a cameraman might hold it if they were in the field. The audience will always be aware that these people are alive, and they’re in the room with them. It will give you that immediacy.”

source: Sunday Times

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“The key is to cast the right people,” Kosminsky says. “I have stuffed this show with the best acting talent we have, and moments that are about discussion and debate come to life because of their inspired interpretations. Without giving too much away, when Cromwell realises he either brings Anne Boleyn down or he himself will probably end up on the scaffold, it’s just as exciting as shooting a battle sequence in Warriors.”

And what about Hilary Mantel?

“I showed her the first two episodes,” Kosminsky says. “At the end of episode two, I was sitting behind her, and she held her hand up above her head in a thumbs-up, but she couldn’t actually speak — she was affected by it. When you’ve taken somebody’s most precious literary possession, and you’ve tried not to f*** it up, that kind of reaction is what you dream of.”

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