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HBO:
Where did the idea for 'Five Days' came from?
Gwyneth Hughes:
We were interested in doing a really
grown up crime story that would be forensically detailed, and extremely contemporary. The kind of
story that if it happened in the real world
would really grab the attention of the entire
country. The idea came after a series of very
high profile child abduction stories which had
gotten the entire country talking. My
imagination was immediately caught by the
real life cases that we'd all been living through
sort of collectively in this country at that time.
I began to think about a woman who seems to
have abandoned her children, and embarked
on writing with only that image in my head of
these two children left by the side of the road.
And that's where we set off from. Quite early
on we began to think that it would be good to
have them as twenty-four hour periods to give
a real fourth dimensional, so that each
episode would be a single twenty-hour period.
It began to seem like a really good idea to have
those twenty-four hour periods jump forward
quite, almost randomly, and quite big jumps
from time so that you would go away at the
end of one episode and come back at the
beginning of the next one and maybe a month
had passed and you'd come back and
everything would have changed. So you
would have snapshots of different points of
the investigation.
I thought it would be quite exciting and
interesting for the audience to be challenged
to work out for itself what had been going on
between episodes. So each, each individual
episode would be very detailed. But there
would be huge jumps between them. This
was quite hard to pull off, just working out
what all the missing stuff between episodes
you needed to cover and what you could just
let the audience work out for themselves. That
was quite hard, but that's what we did.
HBO:
Did you know where you wanted the story to
go, or did you let the characters take you
where they wanted?
Gwyneth Hughes:
I didn't map it out very much ahead of time.
I'm not really a very plotty sort of writer, I am
more character-led in the way I work. So
yeah, the characters sort of arrive by slightly
mysteriously mechanisms. I mean some of the decisions about what would happen on the days gave it a shape.
Quite early on I discovered that there's a bit of
British police procedure which means that
twenty-eight days into any large inquiry that
was important there will be a review, and that review could be mean that officers from an entirely different force come in and tell you
where you've been doing your investigation
wrong. And that seemed to be quite exciting
and I loved how that could easily put huge
pressure on our hero detectives if they weren't
getting anywhere. So from early on, it seemed
to me that episode three should be twenty-eight days in, which is a big jump and that
immediately gives it suspense and an interest.
So the format itself provides a lot of quite good
opportunities to put our characters under
huge pressure.
And then there are all sorts of other things
that became interesting. You've got different
skeletons to hang all the events week by week
on. But the characters will pick up along with
it. You never know when you start to write
which of the characters are going to be the
most interesting. Quite often a character
who's quite minor will turn into something
quite major as the theme goes along. And if
you plot it out too far in advance you sort of
lose the ability to go with that, to run with the
slightly mysterious way in which characters
take charge apart from the story.
HBO:
Like the woman who becomes involved first as
a friend but eventually becomes romantically
involved with the father.
Gwyneth Hughes:
I was interested in dramatizing the way in
which we all get over-involved with the stories
that happen in the news. They're actually
none of our business. It's part of this
phenomenon called conspicuous compassion.
In Britain the obvious example is Princess
Diana's death. Princess Diana was killed in
an accident and the country sort of grounded
to a standstill. All over the country, people
were laying flowers for a woman they've never
met in a great collective outpouring of grief
and a real sense that this mattered to people
in their life. And in the disappearing children
cases that would also happen where you just
get too involved in something that actually
has nothing to do with you. And I was quite
interested in that process, how a character like Sarah Wheeler in 'Five Days' would get too involved with
something that isn't actually her life at all,
how she would gain meaning from attempting
to help. And then of course it turns into a
romantic attachment as well.
HBO:
And then, of course, there's the mixed marriage aspect.
Gwyneth Hughes:
Well, I wanted to do something very
sophisticated with that. It's not racism that's
the problem here. It's a failure of imagination.
And just looking at this guy and not seeing
him because they can't quite work out how to
treat him. And that seemed to be a kind of
modern British and international problem
that I wanted to look at in having a black
hero.
HBO:
What do you hope audiences will take away
from this story?
Gwyneth Hughes:
I think when you're doing anything that has
any kind of whodunit element, the outcome of
the whodunit is enormously
important to the audience. But you've got to
sort the whodunit part out and that's very
difficult, especially over five hours. It's quite a
lot of suspects to keep going. And you've got
to reach a point in the end when you reveal whodunit, it's both
enormously surprising and the only possible
person who could have done it. But at the
moment of the reveal, the audience goes oh,
oh of course. Ah, blimey this is difficult.
[CHUCKLES] It causes much lost sleep to get
it right. I wanted the deaths to weigh very,
very heavily.
So you're trying to work through this very
sophisticated picture of a family in absolute
meltdown and you don't want a kind of villain
with a black moustachio and big black hat to
come hurtling out of the undergrowth at the
last minute. You've got to do something a
little cleverer than that, and it's got to be
emotionally resonant for the audience so that
everybody feels the vividness and the
individuality of these characters, and feels for
their fate.
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