Interview with Claire McCarthy - the Director of The LuminariesPictured: Claire McCarthy on set21st June 9pm, BBC OneOFFICIAL PRESS RELEASENEWS PROVIDED BY BBC One What drew you to The Luminaries? Tell us about that pitch and your initial ambitions for the drama? I was intrigued by Anna Wetherell's character and I was really excited that the first script of The Luminaries was very much about Anna's journey and vested much more in the love story between her and Emery Staines, as well as the female friendship between Anna and Lydia. I thought that was really interesting. In the book, Anna is much more of a cipher for their experiences. In our retelling, Anna is more the subject than the object; it's her experiences and we tell the story through her eyes. These are all the complexities that the book also has but we're retelling it in a different way. It was about simplifying and thinking about how to make that world feel cinematic and truthful to the book and also bringing a visual language that would draw an audience in, in an entertaining way. How would you describe the world of The Luminaries to people who are expecting a version of the book? What I really love about Eleanor's rewriting of the story is that it’s a very bold retelling and it could have only been Eleanor to write this screenplay. It might have felt a little irreverent for somebody else to rewrite it. In some ways, the story is constructed like a piece of clockwork, its architecture is so intrinsic to the pleasure of reading that book. Eleanor was cognisant of that, and we spent a long time figuring out how to translate that world; the things that we wanted to take over as well as the things we felt worked better in the book and were maybe too conceptual to put into the television series. Another thing that I found really delightful about Eleanor's retelling is that we're set in a period, in New Zealand in the gold rush of the 1800s, but there is a sense of play and a tongue-in-cheek, roguish quality in Eleanor’s writing where she delightfully brings these rich characters to life. With the 1800s setting also comes this Victorian 'sensation' idea, the Victorian novel where you would commonly see the innocent ingénue who moves through the world and is corrupted by the forces of that world. In some ways Eleanor has lampooned the Victorian sensation idea, which makes this feel contemporary. Anna Weatherell is not an ingénue and she's not an innocent: she is a woman with a past. We don't find out exactly what it is that she is running from, but we understand that she is playing by her own rules, that she's resilient and that she’ll last the distance. Would you describe this as a period drama? We are aware that it's a period setting but the narrative drive has an energy to it and there's a muscularity to the way we're telling the story. We didn't want it to feel slow or languid, or to feel like we're in a dusty, musty period piece. The characters have a sense of humour, they have flaws and they make mistakes. It's sophisticated in the sense that we're not dumbing it down for an audience but we're asking them to get involved, to get their hands dirty and to ask them to think while they watch. What did Eve Hewson bring to the role of Anna Wetherell? Anna Weatherell is not an innocent in a classic Victorian sensation idea. She's not corrupted by the world around her, she comes with her own past, and we wanted a richer idea of what a woman could be within the story and within this historical context. Anna has sent herself to the gold rush, she has her own secrets and her own sense of dynamism and power within the story. She's playing her own game. Casting an actor that has an in-built sense of strength and resilience, who isn't just flimsy or tossed about in that world, was really important in casting Anna Weatherell, and Eve is incredible. She's just absolutely amazing. It’s a big ask for a young actor to shoulder the scope of a whole series, and it was a difficult and a long shoot at times and Eve was incredible, so dedicated to making sure that she gave her all day after day. How do the planetary elements of the story how themselves through the characters? What did Himesh Patel bring to the role of Emery Staines? Tell us about the character of Lydia Wells and that Eva Green brought to the role? It must have been a huge challenge to create this world - where do you start? It's a period film so we had to make a lot of things from scratch. We didn't have existing locations that we could just walk into. We probably had about 10,000 historical references from museums, we visited Hokitika a number of times, we'd collect and reference pictures from the era as well as reference pictures from other gold rushes from a similar point in time to investigate the details of things like equipment, the way people looked and just the whole aspect of what it was like to be digging gold. It's such a filthy, dirty, visceral world, you've literally got your hands in the dirt and you see pictures of people covered from head to toe, caked in mud. We really wanted this world to feel filthy, textured, grounded in the earth, and we wanted to feel like people were inhabiting that world as opposed to just being ornamental or just placed in sets. I was working with a fantastic team. The colour palette is more gothic and grounded in the shadows. We wanted a sense of mystery and intrigue and a kind of burnished golden world inside the interiors. We were very influenced by gold and not only did we have to research how gold could be filmed, and how it would appear on screen, but also just the way that we would light largely through flame, candlelight and natural light. We were trying to inhabit a specific kind of world and the resources that they would have at that time, so we were embraced that as a visual aesthetic. We wanted there to be a visceral quality to the show, rather than it to feel typically period or dusty, and so there needed to be an energy and a dynamism to the way the camera captured the world. What did Edward K. Gibbon and Jane O’Kane bring to the look of the series? Edward didn't have a costume store that he could grab period clothing from. We ended up having a small consignment of period costumes sent over from the UK, but other than that, the Kiwi team made everything from scratch. The cutters, pattern makers, the recycling and sourcing of fabrics, the workmanship and craftsmanship is world-class. There is a lot of intricate detail and thought that has gone into the look of the sets and these characters. There are little hidden treasures that if the audience knows the book, they will understand. Can you tell us about the incredible work that went into creating these sets? We built - from scratch - the Hokitika town, which included the main township and all the elements that are within that: the jail, the cemetery, the opera tent, as well as 10 or 12 workable buildings plus additional components of buildings. I can’t even put into words the amount of work they did. If you don't have a believable world, and the effort's not put into creating that world, no matter how hard you try it just won’t feel real. It needed to be a living, breathing, visceral experience for the actors and it was. We were trudging around in the mud and slipping around the rain. We were constantly wetting-down and it was certainly hard going for everyone, but it really translates to the screen. I'm sure I haven't made many friends in that process! But it was a labour of love to get that texture and a commitment to the creative ambition of the show. Within the interior of The House Of Many Wishes, which is Lydia Wells' world, there are so many whimsy and delightful ideas in there about Kiwiana and the intersection of the world of that time. There are things that are now extinct, images and pieces of New Zealand’s history. Each set is a little jigsaw puzzle of delightful storytelling that speaks to both the world of the story as well as the world of New Zealand at that time. The one thing that as a visual idea in the show that comes from the book is the idea of the planets, there's this idea of orbiting and shadowing and circles, which is quite a feminine symbol. The book covers the phases of the moon and each chapter gets shorter and shorter as you read the book. We weren't able to mimic that structural approach in the series, but as a symbol and as a motif visually we used a lot of circles in our design. We have the astrological and the lunar ideas in the show, and also the stars and the constellations, but we have translated them into architectural ideas and sets. The House Of Many Wishes is one of the biggest sets. We did a lot of research into how Dunedin looked, and we were struck by this strange, gothic, Victoriana, mish-mash building that was situated near this rocky outcrop in Dunedin that we found in old maps and discovered it was called The Hotel Oriental. It had this really salacious past and had burned down three times. There'd been a sole female lease holder and it was a house of ill repute. We read about some terrible things had happened within those walls. It became our reference point for The House Of Many Wishes. Although it's Victoriana, there is collectivism to the world which comes from the cultural diversity of the people living there at that time. Lydia’s world is one of dream weaving and magic and sleight of hand, and there is a gothic glint in the eye. We used a lot of mist and atmosphere to make the series feel painterly, rather than crisp or brittle. Had you spent much time in New Zealand before coming to this project? One of the things that The Luminaries is exploring is the cultural tensions and relationships of that era, which was a huge thing at that time. The Chinese community was completely vilified and shut out, and it was hard for anyone that wasn't white to survive in that world. Territories and treaties were being written at that time, wars were being fought and there's a cultural discussion that's happening which we don't necessarily put a pin in, but it's felt within the story. We have the character of Tauwhare played by Richard Te Are. He’s a wonderful Māori actor and his character really is a moral compass for the story in a lot of ways. He really brought mana and his own artistic sensibility to that character. He went to Hokitika and he met with Ngāti Waewae and all the community there who were so kind to us and really honoured our process. When we started filming, we had representatives of the Hokitika Māori community who came to visit the set and gifted us a really beautiful piece of greenstone. They blessed our production and were there the whole time to consult with us on all the Māori content and of the show and also supply us all the pounamu (greenstone) for the show. So, there was an integrity to it and there was a discussion and a discourse about the way the work was being done between the team. So, even though I am a foreigner, and I'm not from the culture, I felt very connected to it.
Source BBC One
June 22, 2020 5:30am ET by BBC One |