Interview with Hugo Blick

What was the inspiration behind the series?

The Honourable Woman is about Nessa Stein. The series centres around a woman who is deeply conflicted about past events, events that have haunted her. It is the reason why she is constantly battling a consuming internal conflict – this internal struggle for reconciliation with her past and her search for personal equilibrium – is manifested in her political activities – to try to reconcile a conflict that has equally haunted a region of the world, countless lives, and political agendas for many years.

Why did you decide to write The Honourable Woman?

I was interested in exploring what appears to be a very centred woman’s purpose. A woman who has this idealistic principle but who is also on a world stage searching for personal and professional reconciliation. Mostly this pursuit is because inside, she has yet to reconcile herself, both with her inheritance and with something that has happened to her in her past.

What was your motivation?

My previous TV series (The Shadow Line) was a thriller. Prior to that, I wrote a lot of social comedies, which are essentially dramas with funny lines, because I like looking into the psyche of people’s characters. Then I did the thriller, and on its completion I was keen to marry the two experiences – one, the psychological investigation of a woman’s psyche and to then put that into a thriller format. So that was the pursuit – to place a woman into a thriller genre.

Did you always have Maggie Gyllenhaal in mind?

Nessa Stein carried deep emotional complexity; from a professional requirement, I cannot possibly think of anyone better suited to deliver on this. Also it might be interesting to note that the role demanded an atmosphere of internationalism: Nessa is neither wholly Israeli nor British and to a degree this rootlessness, in tandem to being an orphan, helps explain her isolation. Maggie was a dream casting for this role and I am delighted that she chose The Honourable Woman as her first project for long-form drama.

How did you secure her involvement – especially as it is her first move into TV?

A trip to New York and the threat of flying back empty-handed! That and my willing acquiescence to eating her homemade nettle pasta just before flying back. Her insight into the character and scripts was profound and her consequent performance more than delivered on that promise. The fact that my return flight didn’t have to take an emergency detour to Iceland due to nettle poisoning was simply a bonus.

It is a very eclectic, international cast – was that important to you?

It’s an international story - the cast reflect that. It was a great coup for me to work with Lubna Azabal and Igal Naor, among others, of whose work I have been in huge admiration.

You are creator, writer, director, producer – is it harder or easier when you are responsible for so many aspects of a production?

Basically, I get to say to every significant contributor to the project that there’s this nail in the middle of the desert and this nail is the Vision Thing - it could be any number of nails but it’s this one I want you to strike. In a production by the time you’re ready to go there could be 300 people gathered around that nail. And the key to it is that everyone’s got to strike it at the same time and, crucially, they have to do it for themselves. I find tortuous metaphors like this useful because they appear to be equal parts confusing and gnomic.

You chose to set the drama against a provocative and complex political conflict, the Israeli/Palestine conflict - why was that?

The Honourable Woman explores a range of complex and provocative themes of conflict, deception, betrayal and ancestry on both a very personal, human level as well as on a much wider, international and political stage. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict provides a perfect framing device for that drama as it is not only a fair representation of the wider themes addressed within The Honourable Woman but also the internal struggles existing within the character of Nessa Stein as she attempts to lay to rest the ghosts of her past.

How did the character of Nessa Stein evolve once you started filming?

If you don’t find the sympathy of performer to character, then you don’t find the character. So without Maggie’s remarkable empathy with the Nessa Stein character, we certainly wouldn’t have arrived at something which I think is really authentic and, for me, easily the most creative relationship I’ve had on screen.

What makes The Honourable Woman unique?

The story asks big questions and it’s not afraid of engaging on an elevated space. Big things happen which are all psychologically grounded and truthfully explored. But big stories, big key moments, set pieces, for which I suppose I had something of a reputation before, have been developed and maintained. I see no reason why a thriller cannot engage in really quite complex issues. The drama shouldn’t belittle one or elevate the other; there should be a nice tension between the suspense and drama and the wider, more complex themes being explored. I think that is what makes this series attractive to watch.

Do you prefer one 'role' over the others? Is there one that gives you particular satisfaction?

Each one is extremely demanding, but the role of producer and director with all their complex logistical and emotional demands are as nothing compared to staring at a blank page in the knowledge you’re going to have to fill 500 of them, sensibly, before anything else can happen.

Would you ever consider getting in front of the camera again? In one of your own productions?

Maybe. But it’s like horse riding – knowing what it demands makes you sensitive to others when they’re doing it. It’s a delicate thing for an actor to have the confidence to be vulnerable. As a director, a massive percentage of what I do lies in the casting. Get that right, then all you have to do is watch and listen – everything else, where to put the camera, how to make the day, all that will follow.