Gwyneth Hughes interview
Tom Green talks to scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes about her original BBC TV serial, Five Days, and how her background as a documentary maker informs her writing.
Tom Green: Each episode in Five Days follows a different day in a single police investigation - how did you arrive at the concept?
Gwyneth Hughes: It’s hard to remember exactly where the first inspiration for that came from. I always like working with classical unities – so comforting! - but I got really excited about it when I discovered that these days police investigations get assessed at certain points, with the major review, often from an outside police force, coming after 28 days. That seemed perfect for me, dramatically raising the stakes for my own detectives, and it confirmed the idea of having each episode following a separate day. The 28 day review is episode three.
The serial goes across the whole summer, was it difficult to write episodes spaced so far apart?
I wanted to be quite bold and take big jumps from one episode to the next. But on the other hand I didn’t want viewers to feel that they’d missed something. It was a real challenge to try and get the balance right.
HBO are co-producing Five Days with the BBC, did they have much involvement in the development process?
They came on board after they read my episode one, and after that saw each episode as it was written. It could have been a nightmare, with different notes coming from them and the BBC, but in fact it was fine – though this may be because my production team protected me from the worst bits! They seemed to like it and their notes were quite straightforward. I had to resist some requests to make some of the dialogue ‘less British’ but that was fine. It’s being shown in America as part of their autumn schedule, so it will be exciting to see how it goes down over there.
Can you describe your approach to writing an original story? Do you plot it all out first?
I don’t plot it out at all. I’m not sure how unusual that is but I do very little storylining. I have an idea about the story and an almost musical sense of what key it’s in and what the emotional temperature will be. But when I wrote the first episode of Five Days I had no idea what would happen in the subsequent four. I can do storylining – I had to when I wrote on The Bill – but I invariably throw it out once I start writing so there’s not much point. Stephen King talks about writing being almost like archaeology, where it feels as though you’re excavating a story that already exists, and that’s how it seems to me.
It’s not an approach that always goes down well in development meetings though, is it?!
You are so right - I suspect when I tell them that I’ve no idea what happens next they think I’m just holding out to be paid for the next episode! But I believe that both Ian Rankin and Ruth Rendell take a similar approach, so I’m in good company. I like to take the same journey as the audience and I’ll come up with quirky little details as I go that I know need to be paid off later. With Five Days my main concern was to imagine what it would actually be like to be in the horrific situation where a member of your family has disappeared. On the surface it’s a whodunit thriller, but underneath it’s a family drama.
You’ve dramatised several true life stories (Cherished, Mysterious Creatures) – how do you approach these?
I’ve been a documentary director, so I’m used to dealing with people and trying to find meaning and narrative sense from their lives. It’s not easy, because in real life people don’t “change and grow” in the ways beloved of film-makers and story gurus – more often than not they just get defeated. Real life doesn’t lend itself to dramatic arcs in the way that characters in a story do, so you have to find a way to put the facts of their lives into a workable structure while still telling the truth. You also have a huge responsibility to the people whose lives you’re portraying. The worst thing, though, is when a film ends up not being made. That’s happened to me a couple of times and it can be devastating for the people involved – after all the emotional upheaval of recounting their story they feels as if they’re being told that it’s not interesting enough.
Your last drama, Mysterious Creatures, based on the real-life story of the parents of an autistic child created quite a media stir – has that put you off pursuing similar projects?
No, it hasn’t. The controversy blew over very quickly and the people involved told us they were happy with the film. Having said that, I do get a lot of offers to write real-life dramas and mostly I turn them down.
What projects have you got coming up next?
I’m in pre-production for my film called Miss Austen Regrets for the BBC. It tells the story of the last couple of years of her life, and tries to make sense of how she felt about her own romantic choices. I’m also in the middle of writing another true-life story for ITV and there are various other projects in development which I am too superstitious to talk about.
And if Five Days is a success could the format be used again for a different investigation?
People have already started talking about it and I can see that it could work. The main problem from my point of view is that writing five original episodes is so exhausting!
This interview will be reprinted in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Spring 2007).
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