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HBO:
What attracted you to 'Five Days'?
Simon Curtis:
I was interested in these cases that had
obsessed people like OJ Simpson, or Lacey Peterson in the UK. There'd been
some big stories where something awful
happened in a community, and a whole range
of people got caught up in the ongoing
narrative of that. And it almost came to be a
sort of real life soap opera.
Obviously the families of the victim, the
families of the accused, the police, the press,
the witnesses, everyone involved in those
stories became characters in the narrative.
And I was interested in why that might be the
case and what it said about us as a society.
How we were all almost bound together by
those narratives.
There's an impulse in us all for stories, and I
think they're expressed in different ways now,
both fact and fiction. And it's emblematic of
our times that there's this blurring of fact and
fiction, reality TV as opposed to fictional TV.
HBO:
The way in which events unfold is quite
interesting. Layers get peeled away and we
discover that these characters are not the
people we thought they were.
Simon Curtis:
This story is what might be called an
imperfect narrative, just like life--that
information comes at different times and
sometimes there's a huge lull in the case.
HBO:
And the way the series is shot in some ways
echoes that in that we often feel like these are
real events that are unfolding.
Simon Curtis:
Yes, well (writer) Gwyneth Hughes is a genius
of a writer, and much of her work previously
had been doing television dramas based on
real life events. And she has an astonishing
eye for what I would call telling details. So
there would be this little three line scene that
on the page didn't seem to amount to much,
but as soon as it was staged with the actors,
you suddenly felt, my god, she's written this
brilliantly original thing. Characters are doing
in her work what we want great writers to
offer us: the unexpected.
So much in drama and television on both
sides of the Atlantic is what I would call the
expected. And it's when a writer can offer you
the unexpected, teach you something about
human nature that you and I hadn't already
thought of, that's what we gravitate to, I
think.
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