Interview with Peter Kosminsky, Director

How did you become involved in Wolf Hall?

I think there were probably two reasons why they wanted me. The first was Mark Rylance, who was already involved. I’d worked with him before on The Government Inspector, and we’d had a pretty happy experience - he won a BAFTA for it. We’d been talking about working together again if we could ever find the right thing to do. The other reason, it now transpires, was Hilary Mantel. She was interested in me directing it for two reasons, really. First of all, because she sees it as an intensely political piece, and I’ve done a lot of political drama.

Secondly, she wanted it to be a million miles away from the normal interpretation of the Tudor dynasty, which is often very, very colourful, very pretty, slightly stylised, with slightly heightened performances and perhaps a little over-intense emotionally. It seems she’d seen some of my stuff and thought that this would be an unexpected way to go.

How do you think your interpretation will differ from what people might think of as a ‘normal’ historical drama?

One of the challenges in adapting Wolf Hall is that although it’s famously not written in the first person, it does very much inhabit Cromwell’s interior space. Given that Peter Straughan’s wonderful scripts don’t really use a voiceover - there’s no Cromwell narration - how do we make the audience identify with him uniquely? I thought the answer is to stick the camera on his shoulder, really, and follow him.

Hilary Mantel always says, “Remember about these characters; to them, this is life happening.” So, I was trying to find a way of shooting it in a sense that it felt real and immediate, that the people felt like us. Let’s try to make it feel like real life.

How do you go about making drama out of a book in which there are not many obvious climactic incidents? Much of the action is spoken or implied…

The key is to cast the right people. I have stuffed this show with the best acting talent we have, also a number of actors that I’ve worked with before, so I feel on fairly sure ground with them. Moments about discussion, debate, nuance, danger, personal danger, come to life because of the inspired interpretations. If you’re in the hands of an actor like Mark Rylance, an actor like Damian Lewis, an actor like Claire Foy, it’s very real, and you do feel that you’re on the edge of your seat because of what they are doing. You don’t get excited in an action film because of the action sequence per se, you get excited because of the jeopardy facing a character about whom you care. That jeopardy can be just as powerful when two people sit facing each other in a room, as when one of them is holding a gun and about to jump out of an aeroplane.

How authentic is the Tudor England you are portraying?

We’ve tried to make it pretty authentic, down to the food they eat, the way they eat, the way they use their napkins, and of course the costumes, which are authentic right down to the fastenings. Of course, although the timeframe is short, it’s still the best part of a 20 year period, so there was an evolution through the period, and through the six episodes. Throughout we’ve tried to be pretty accurate; we’ve shot in properties that are almost all period, or within the confines of television, you could believe that they were period. To take one example we were shooting in Penshurst Palace, using part of it as part of the set for York Place, which becomes Whitehall Palace. There’s no doubt that Henry VIII stood in the room where we had Damian Lewis standing, playing Henry VIII, 500 years ago.

Does that help inspire the actors’ performances?

Unquestionably. You could see it in the actors, the way they responded to the environment. This is why I like to shoot on location, and not on the stage, and in fact, we didn’t shoot anything on the stage, it was all locations.

What do you see as the crux of this story?

This may be a little bit external, but for me, this is about the point when modern society begins. What do I mean by that? Well, things were changing at around this time in a number of rather important ways. First of all, people stopped sleeping in big stone halls, and started sleeping in bedrooms. Windows stopped being tiny and started being large, with light coming in. So, when you go into a Tudor house, it’s essentially recognisable as the way we live today, just without all the modern conveniences.

Secondly, what Cromwell really is, is the first professional civil servant. His predecessor and mentor Cardinal Wolsey rose to the position of power and influence through the hierarchy of the church. But Cromwell wasn’t a churchman, and yet he rose to be the second most powerful person in the land, briefly, more powerful than all the lords and knights. Eventually, of course, he was made a lord, but not in the timeframe of these dramas. As far as I know, he was pretty much the first person to do that. The tool he used was parliament - and of course, these are all subjective judgements – but to some extent, he was the first person to really use parliament for the enactment of legislation on a massive scale. And yet, he always felt himself to be one error away from death, and of course, eventually he did make an error and he died. So it’s like watching a man perform a high-wire act.

I find that combination of the first stirrings of modern government, and yet trying to navigate what he thought was right, when his own life depended upon his success or failure, day by day, fascinating.