Interview with Director Michael Keillor
Interview with Director Michael Keillor
Published: 15 August 2017
There’s a certain romance to Strike. If you wanted to be a one-legged detective living in your office, you'd want to be him, living in Denmark Street. Hopefully there is a resurgence. I think there’s space for more detectives.
Can you introduce us to The Cuckoo’s Calling?
The Cuckoo’s Calling is a chance to bring Cormoran Strike into the world. It's the story of Lula Landry, a young model, who has died in complex circumstances. It could be suicide, it could be murder.
We find Strike, at his lowest, in Denmark Street. He can’t pay his rent, he's been left by his girlfriend, and a case falls at his door. John Bristow comes in - he’s the brother of Lula Landry - and he brings the case to Cormoran Strike.
Can you introduce us to Cormoran? What do you think about him?
He’s a detective with one leg, not much work, living in his office having broken up from his girlfriend. He has a new assistant PA, Robin Ellacott. Cuckoo finds these two characters coming together, Robin trying to discover her love for detecting and us learning about Strike. He’s part of the canon of great detectives, but is also a type of investigator that we haven’t seen before.
We all know all the TV detectives, we’re trying to find out what is different about Strike - it’s been a bit of a challenge. But I think in some ways he’s a modern guy: he’s fought in Helmand, he’s lost his leg there, but he’s also a guy out of time if anything. I like to think of him as a Paul Newman or a Steve McQueen, someone from the 70s landed into our world now.
I think the big thing for us is that he sees the world differently to everyone else, he sees the world at a different pace. Maybe that’s something we can reflect on.
J.K. Rowling attended the read-through. Did you get a sense that you had quite a responsibility to bring a well-known and successful novel to the screen and adapt it in a way that felt authentic to what she’d done?
There’s a huge responsibility with these books because they have a huge readership, who are great fans of Strike and Robin.
J.K. Rowling was very encouraging with my ideas for how to realise The Cuckoo's Calling and find Strike in his world in Denmark Street. Throughout the process, whether it was casting or looking at locations, and generally discussing how we were going to bring Strike to the screen, she was there. But at the same time, she was very hands off and let us get on with discovering these books for ourselves and realising them.
Did you talk about Strike and where she had got the idea for him?
As far as I know, the character of Cormoran Strike is based on an amalgam of some real people. Where we joined up, was this idea of a Celtic, he’s the Cornish giant, Cormoran. Someone who’s come in from the countryside into the city, this huge guy in his overcoat. Limping around London. I think we connected over the sense of someone who is maybe just not right for our time right now, someone who can reflect back on us how we’re seeing the world right now.
Let’s talk about the coat: you’ve got to have motifs with a detective. Is the coat’s a good way of doing it because it says a lot about him?
Yeah, I think the coat and the detective, whether it’s Columbo, there’s always an outfit and a particular look. I think for us it was about the sense of size. Cormoran Strike is a giant, 6' 5", so putting this big coat on Tom and giving us a silhouette to wander through the streets of Soho was perfect. I think the coat in Soho, in Denmark Street, is part of the character. Winter or summer, he’s always dressed the same.
I also see Strike as being more in the mode of Philip Marlowe the detective, so someone who’s less melancholy and more pragmatic. He’s the guy that’s got to do this job. There’s something about Tom wearing that gear that felt like, in any condition, it’s almost like a uniform. In any conditions, he goes out into the world and takes it on. Tom got close to the coat pretty quickly and enjoyed it.
Did using London as a backdrop help to reinforce the book?
There’s a big thing about the books being London-based. That’s what drew me to him as well.
Having lived here for 15 years, I thought it was a great opportunity to discover a gumshoe detective in the city. So, whether it was Soho and Denmark Street and where he lives, Mayfair - which was representative of the money of Lula Landry’s story - and also where I was from, which was Hackney and Dalston, which is the new London of cool fashion.
So those three areas were broken down for Strike - The Cuckoo's Calling. That was a big draw for me, for the book, was how Strike investigates London as well. Maybe, show a London that we don’t always see on television or on film. It’s often the landmarks of London. Whereas with this you feel it’s a London that Londoners would recognise.
Jo lived and worked in London prior to moving to Edinburgh and I think this was a chance for her to honour that time as well.
When you’re representing the fashion world, do you have to be careful of how fast it changes?
Definitely. With Suzanne Cave, our Costume Designer, and Helen Scott, our Production Designer, we all sat down to try and work out how could we make it timeless yet still have the quirks of fashion.
You always think you’re timeless, but you’re always going to be dated in some way. We wanted to make the industry seem as crazy as possible, but at the same time as timeless as maybe a Chanel, Stella McCartney or Alexander McQueen. Living in Dalston, you see fashion change daily or weekly, so we couldn’t really keep up.
In the end we created our own brand for Guy Somé and our own collection of clothes, and did photo shoots and took it away from what was happening in fashion right now, so hopefully in ten years’ time it’ll survive. That’s the challenge of shooting fashion, it’s always going to be forward.
We understand that shooting the Lula Landry’s apartment was a complicated set up. Can you talk us through that?
It’s a very specific apartment in the book, with three flats in a row of pull-down stairs and a penthouse with a balcony. When we looked round London, we could only find a set of apartments that had certain elements.
In the end, we had five different locations to shoot the one apartment. Threading these together in the shoot was one of the biggest challenges, and making it feel cohesive. We wanted the audience to get the sense that Strike can investigate this place because the building itself is absolutely crucial to the discovery of the crime.
I’d say that was probably the number one challenge for everyone involved.
How did you set up the relationship between Strike and Robin?
I left it to the actors to find their way day to day together. I had a plan set out for how close they would get. We sat down and discussed over the scenes and over the three episodes how they would come together.
Actually, it was in the edit and looking back now, that I you can see smart both those actors are, sensitively finding each other through scenes. Hopefully when you watch you get this sense that they are on a journey together.
Did it help that you’d got such a huge number of reference points with the book being so detailed?
I think you can always reference back to the book and think, "Where were Strike and Robin at this stage in the book and how can we honour that?"
Although we might have the odd scene which isn’t in the book and we have to paraphrase to a certain extent, Cuckoo’s Calling was always a great book to go back to.
How much do you like to reference other work, when working in a genre? How do you balance that as a director?
It’s interesting because when I read the book there was no TV show that came to mind; there were more films that came to mind, especially through Strike’s character. He felt like someone from a different era.
I’ve gone back to the 70s to films like French Connection and Chinatown and that idea of a 70s man and a 70s grittier world, whether it was New York or LA or London, it tended to be films we were referencing. That influenced the look of the show as well and trying to find a different vision of London.
I couldn’t think of any television series without it being too referential basically.
It’s interesting that his office is a good nod to that, because it is kind of timeless.
I think so. The thing about the office being in Denmark Street is that there’s a musical influence. His Dad is this big rock star, so we thought we could tap into that as well. It’s the timeless P.I.’s office. It’s a nod to Angel Heart and films like that. It’s sort of saying he could be in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, whenever. I think it’s so iconic, Denmark Street, as a place, and making his office iconic within it was very important for us.
You get freedom in that it’s not such a procedural show. You don’t have the technology to rely on, they’re not constantly looking at the screen or tracking where anyone is...
There are big advantages. We discussed early on that Robin’s a young woman, a modern woman, she uses technology, she’s very familiar with it. While Strike will utilise technology, for me he’s a guy who can step back from it and can see the world without technology.
So, it was a great advantage for me that we don’t have to have high tech screens and lots of people chasing around the city. He’s really about a guy who’s thinking most of the time. It’s his thinking and his process which actually uncovers the crime. So, the challenge there was how to show a man thinking.
Tom was just fantastic at opening up this man who slows down the world to his own pace so he can understand what’s going on.
You’ve been blessed with a great supporting cast for the show. Does that help when you’ve got actors who are coming in and just doing little bits?
I think it does. We got a great balance of more experienced hands like Martin Shaw and Sian Philips and then newer talents like Kadiff, Elarica and Amber, who are in the fashion world. The book helps to draw them in. J.K. Rowling is known for great characters. Actors love to play great characters. So, if they can come on screen for only two or three scenes and we get to make somebody alive, that’s a great advantage.
Also, it being a whodunit and a crime story, we needed characters who were big enough and interesting enough that in the end, you can suspect any of them. That’s also a draw because everyone wants to be the killer.
Strike seems to be so astute and so in tune with what’s going on around him in his professional life, and yet his private life is an absolute disaster. Why do you think that is?
It’s interesting. Lots of detectives have a private life that is a disaster, but for me reading the book was really important, because you look back at his history and his past. Losing his mother at a young age and being estranged from his father, it’s kind of obvious that this guy’s going to have a tough life.
He’s gone into the army which is very organised and seems like a natural course of action. So, coming out of the army, life does fall apart for him a little bit. But I think what’s interesting is that he turns to work, he’s not melancholy or maudlin. When Robin arrives Strike has a bit of a surprise and thinks there’s something a bit different here. She is the bright light, she’s the new thing that comes in. I think that’s what separates him, for me, from other detectives. He’s not navel-gazing. He gets up in the morning and he gets on with it and that’s refreshing I think.
The prosthetic leg is an interesting dichotomy - how much did you make it part of the show?
It’s almost a case of he’s a guy who happens to have a leg missing, rather than a detective with one leg.
We’re very keen on that all the way through. Tom did a lot of movement work with a movement coach and with Barney Gillespie, our army advisor, who’s only got one leg. Together, they worked out that actually, he moved pretty elegantly. You can’t really tell, but of course part of Strike is that he doesn’t really look after himself very well. This is what makes a little bit tougher for having one leg.
A big thing here was that it was normal and only at certain times did it slow him down. It pisses him off, it’s annoying, as it would be. He’s lost his leg in a terrible explosion and it’s hampered him in life. I think that’s where, if there’s any introspection or psychology, it’s him dealing with the fact that he wants his leg back.
Tom was fantastic at referencing and using the leg as a prop that became a sort of character.
Do you think this could be a resurgence for our love of the private investigator?
It feels like the investigators we’ve had have been so hyper-efficient and so brilliant, and almost super hero that to go back to someone that’s a bit more human and real is important.
I referenced Marlowe, but things like The Long Goodbye was a great film reference for me. He’s somebody shambling around Los Angeles and in some ways Strike shambles around but of course uncovers the case in the end.
We enjoy those characters who feel a bit like ourselves, whose lives are a bit like our own, they don’t quite work properly. But at the same time there’s a certain romance to Strike. If you wanted to be a one-legged detective living in your office, you'd want to be him, living in Denmark Street. Hopefully there is a resurgence. I think there’s space for more detectives.
