Interview with Robert Jones, writer

Congratulations on the Bafta! How did you find the reaction to the first film?
It was great. It was one of those times where everything seemed to come together.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the first film, can you talk us through the premise of Murder?
I based it on the time I spent watching court cases. The underlying idea is that the viewer is cast in the position of the juror, so they see each person’s version of events. We only take a more objective look at what happened near the end of the show.

Kath Mattock, the producer, and I spent a lot of time at the Old Bailey and we were struck by the way a story changes when you hear it from a different angle, or even when a different person questions the same person. You get a very different sense of what’s going on. So that was the idea behind the unusual format. You hear each person give their partial account straight to the camera. They’re individuals - you have to judge them on how you find them and the believability of what they’re saying.

How did you approach writing the second set of films?
The first film was a very basic, visceral story with just three characters. We were determined to use exactly that same format, which has its own internal rules, but with slightly more complex stories.

With the three new films we tried to broaden the format out and see how it worked in different social strata. The original was a simple story of a brutal murder in a flat, whereas the first in the new series is set on the banks of the River Tweed in Scotland; the second film looks at an aristocratic milieu and the third one is set in a prison.

Why did you choose three individual films instead of having a single storyline running throughout?
We looked at having a returning element from the original film, like a detective or a location. I tried a lot of different ways to achieve that but the format is so story-hungry that it feels artificial to bring anything back. You can use up an entire place and group of characters in one film, you look so deeply into their lives and they have so much to say. We ended up with three entirely different stories and that fits into the idea of showing the different sections of society.

Did you find the concept of having actors delivering lines directly to camera a challenging prospect to write?
I imagine it’s very challenging for an actor to be on their own speaking directly to the camera, but I’m sure it’s also really enjoyable because they get to set their stall out without sparring against other actors. They can really live that part and it’s probably the same in the writing - I think that’s why they’re quite hard to write in some ways. What the character is saying comes quite easily, but you have to delve quite deeply into them in order to give them their own, completely unabridged version of themselves.

That’s much harder than when you put a character up against another and they knock sparks from each other, and things come about because of that. Here you have to find the essence of them a little bit more.

There are three sets of very different directors per film. What do each bring to the series?
We knew Birger’s work from before and he has a fantastic way with actors, a very humane approach. He seems to have a real affinity with the work that worked fantastically before and does again.

Paul, who directed The Lost Weekend brought a completely different energy. He’s a younger director and less experienced, but that brings a lot of benefits as well. He’s made a feature film quite recently which has done very well and he had a lot of ideas of his own that weren’t necessarily part of a TV tradition. I think he’s brought a freshness to the format.

Iain and Jane have a very different background in the arts, they really came to this with such enthusiasm. We weren’t sure when we first approached them what they would be like but they were fantastic. The first thing they said was “we love telly!” which isn’t necessarily what you’d expect artists of their calibre to be saying! But they do love telly and it shows. They had a real dedication to the format. They set up hugely complicated CCTV live action rigs and they were really on board with the rules of the show. I think they’ve brought something wonderful too - it’s lovely to see what everyone’s done.

How do you hope the viewers will react to the three films?
I hope they’ll enjoy the fact that it is three completely different films. Kath used to say that it was like making three different feature films in nine weeks and they are three completely different things. I hope viewers will be engrossed and I hope they’ll agree that the format that we tried out in the pilot has legs and can work on a broader canvas. The films are challenging. They aren’t the easiest watch because you’re not watching conventional drama. They ask a lot of the viewer, but they also give a lot.