How did this series of Talking Heads come about?
Piers Wenger, the BBC’s Head of Drama, called me on the evening of 26 March, ten days after all the theatres - including my own, the Bridge Theatre - closed. He said that BBC drama production had halted, that the only films they could imagine making were monologues, and that he’d remembered Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads - so:

Could I imagine remaking them with a group of today’s leading actors?
Could I imagine making them while observing all the restrictions imposed by social distancing - in particular, the requirement that nobody comes within two metres of anyone else?
Could I imagine making them on pre-existing sets at Elstree Studios, many of them sets used for EastEnders?
Could I persuade Alan Bennett to get behind them? I’ve directed all Alan’s new plays and films for the last 30 years, so I seemed to Piers to be the person best placed to do that.
And finally: they’d like to get them ready for transmission within weeks. Would that be ok too?

Without thinking I said yes, and started calling all the people who could tell me how to do it: Kevin Loader, who produced The Lady In The Van and The History Boys with me; Naomi Donne, Oscar-nominated Hair & Makeup designer, because I reckoned if she could do her job from a distance, everyone could; and Lesley Manville so I could get some sense of how a leading actor would react to the idea of learning, absorbing and rehearsing a long monologue in three weeks while meeting only on Zoom. They were all excited and enthusiastic.

What were the biggest challenges in making Talking Heads within social distancing guidelines, and how did you overcome these?
To begin with, the challenges were no different from anyone else’s in the post-virus world: the series had to be set up from three laptops -mine, Kevin Loader’s and co-producer Steve Clark Hall’s - all working from home. Many people, the world over, started to realise how much their missed their colleagues, their offices, the vitality of collaboration. We were the same.

Zoom rehearsals have no future. Working with an actor cries out for human contact. But we all managed, because there was no alternative. It’s the same as seeing your family and closest friends only on screen - better than nothing at all, but nothing like enough. Still, we coped.

The sets all needed refurnishing and redressing, but nothing could be done that couldn’t be done by one person, or one person with a trolley. The designer Simon Bowles and his associate India Smith worked wonders.

Zac Nicholson, the extraordinary Director of Photography, couldn’t use many of the routine tools of his trade: the camera could only move, for instance, when moved by the operator on its own pedestal. Lighting was slow as everyone had to keep their distance. Many of the sets were familiar to regular viewers of EastEnders, so they had to made strange and new again through the way they were lit.

Jacqueline Durran, who had just won her second Oscar (for Little Women) had to conjure up whole worlds mainly from eBay and the actors’ own wardrobes: none of the usual costume stores were open.

The resident EastEnders crew were a godsend. They threw themselves at this new challenge and nothing was too much trouble for them.

You’ve directed three of the Talking Heads films: Bed Among The Lentils, An Ordinary Woman, and The Shrine - can you tell us a little about each of them?
An Ordinary Woman and The Shrine are new - they’ve never been seen before. Alan wrote them about two years ago and we hadn’t yet decided what to do with them. It’s a particularly exciting feature of this series that it includes two entirely new pieces by Alan Bennett.

An Ordinary Woman - like so much of Alan’s work - imagines what it’s like to be seized by terrible, irresistible desire, to be unable to put a halt to the kind of urges that lead to disaster. Alan’s work often hates the sin but loves the sinner - he has infinite compassion for and empathy with the people he writes about, even when they behave in shocking ways. He finds humour in the darkest places.

Gwen, in An Ordinary Woman, is a contemporary reimagining of Racine’s Phèdre. That’s a spoiler, by the way. Though Hippolyte is Phèdre’s stepson, whereas Michael is Gwen’s son, which makes the story even more affecting. That’s also a spoiler.

The Shrine is about grief, and where it can lead. And about how little we all know even about the people who are closest to us. It’s very funny and very, very moving. Lorna discovers that her dead husband Clifford had an entirely separate life from the one she led with him.

Bed Among The Lentils was written in the late 1980s. It’s about Susan, a vicar’s wife, who is witheringly funny about the ridiculous people who surround her absurd husband, but who - like all the characters in Talking Heads - is heartbreakingly lonely. She is made happy - for the first time in her life - by a young Indian grocer. She blossoms. But, like almost every character in the series, the more she talks, the more you realise there’s a whole other story that she can’t bring herself to admit to herself.

What do you think it is that makes Alan Bennett’s writing so special?
Like all the greatest writers, he creates a world which is at the same time a reflection of the real world and completely original. It has its own texture. It’s infused with his humour and humanity. His characters may often be blind to themselves, but they are never stupid - they all speak with vividness and wit. Whether he’s writing about a mad king, a smelly old vagrant in a van, a disreputable old schoolmaster, an actress who finds herself making porn, a malicious writer of poison pen letters - he asks you to imagine yourself in their predicaments and he never allows you to judge them easily. (The character he’s always hardest on is himself.)

Can you tell us a little about the casting process?
One of the first people I called was Robert Sterne, who has worked as casting director on all of my recent productions at the Bridge Theatre. (He’s also done the same job on The Crown and Game Of Thrones - like everyone else who worked on this project, he’s at the top of his profession.)

We made lists for each Talking Head. We were working at speed because we had to get going so quickly. We allowed ourselves to imagine going to the country’s very best actors, so the lists weren’t long. I kept reporting back to Alan Bennett, and we were always in agreement.

In a matter of days, we had approached these 12 actors: they were excited, daunted and impatient to get to work. I asked six directors, all of them primarily from the theatre, to get involved mainly because I knew they had pre-existing relationships with the actors who made up our shortlist. For the three I directed: Lesley Manville is a close friend, but it was the first time I’d worked with Sarah Lancashire and Monica Dolan. They are remarkable, truthful, inspirational. I met them first on the computer screen, worked with them for many hours over three weeks, and saw them in the flesh for the first time on the day we shot their performances.