Bringing books to life
Ahead of the BAFTA TV Craft Awards, nominated directors Peter Kosminsky and Molly Manners reflect on their respective work behind the camera on BBC historical drama Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light and Netflix’s One Day, explaining how the source material for each was brought to the screen.
Nearly a decade passed between the launch of BBC historical drama Wolf Hall and its long-anticipated sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light. Yet for director Peter Kosminsky, the work never stopped.
Based on two novels by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, Wolf Hall debuted in 2015 and centres on Thomas Cromwell, who rises to power in the court of King Henry VIII.
The Mirror & The Light, which aired last November and is adapted from Mantel’s final novel in her Cromwell trilogy, picks up the story after the execution of Anne Boleyn, as Cromwell faces the prospect of his own demise.
“Hilary Mantel died as we were gearing up to make The Mirror & The Light [in 2022]. I’d been working on this for 11 years pretty closely with her. As she was writing the book, we were working together and talking, so this has felt like a fairly continuous process for me,” Kosminsky tells DQ. “In fact, I had started talking to her about the final novel while we were still in the post-production phase on the original Wolf Hall so it’s been a long road and her death, just as we were about to start on Mirror, was a tremendous shock.”
He reveals he felt “an obligation” to carry on with the adaptation of what turned out to be Mantel’s last novel. “She was she was one of our great writers in the English language. So I took that responsibility pretty seriously, as I think did all of us working on the show, and I’m very glad to have delivered it for her and I’m glad it was well received.”
But making the series “was an exhausting experience. It was difficult to do on the budget we had available. But I’m very proud of what was achieved.”
Kosminsky is now among the nominees for the Director: Fiction prize at this Sunday’s BAFTA TV Craft Awards, where he is in competition with Molly Manners for Netflix series One Day, Nida Manzoor for Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts and Weronika Tofilska for another Netflix series, Baby Reindeer.
Kosminsky calls The Mirror & The Light “one of the proudest moments of my working life,” but to make it, he first had to wait for Mantel to finish writing the book before returning screenwriter Peter Straughan could transform it into a six-part series.
“She had the most enormous success imaginable with the first two novels of her trilogy, including winning Booker prizes for both novels, and it was a huge success all over the world, and she took time to enjoy that success,” he says. “And I think there was a reluctance on her part – well, I know there was because she told me – to complete the story.
“First of all, she was very attached to her central character, Thomas Cromwell. And secondly, I think she realised that this was in fact the acme of her professional life.”
But what stands out most about the project for him is the performances. Kosminsky was able to reunite almost the entire cast and crew of Wolf Hall for The Mirror & The Light, including Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry. Wolf Hall was named best drama series at the BAFTAs in 2016 and also won for sound and editing, with Rylance winning leading actor. This year, alongside Kosminsky’s nod, it is in the running for drama series and costume design, with Lewis nominated for supporting actor.
“Damian and Rylance are truly extraordinary actors and they are currently at the top of their game. We were very lucky to have them. For me, it’s always the script and the performances. Those are the things that make something memorable, and we were blessed in both cases here.”
Like The Mirror & The Light, One Day is based on a novel. But David Nicholls’ story, which follows the relationship between Emma (Ambika Mod) and Dexter (Leo Woodall), is notable for its unique structure, which revisits the couple on the same day over a number of years as they grow and change, together and apart. Manners is nominated alongside writer Nicole Taylor for Writer: Drama, while the show is in the limited drama category.
Manners “adored” the source material. “I always loved that this was a story about two people who somehow can’t quite put each other down,” she says. “That connection is so rare but also quite universal. It’s such an intoxicating thing. I wanted to explore that; a bond that goes on for years that’s more than just a romance. It felt like it covered so much of life and growing up.”
From the outset, working with writer Nicole Taylor and producer Drama Republic, “we all wanted to create an adaptation that felt bold, that did justice to the original text while also bringing it to a new generation,” she continues. “In terms of filming approach, I wanted the series to feel completely truthful in the characters and casting and intimate in the relationship; to feel like you’re in the room with these two people. And there is something you can’t quite put your finger on that binds them whether they are together or apart.”
Mirroring the book’s structure, each episode of the 14-part series revisits Emma and Dexter a year on. “You see these slices of life each year; intimate, seemingly small, silly even, that accumulate until you slowly begin to look back and see the meaning in these moments, a significance you might not have recognised at the time,” Manners observes. “Something that seemed slight is in fact epic, life-defining. That’s what I wanted to capture.”
To do that, her approach was all about intimacy and scale as time marches on through the story, with a specific approach to filming the central couple. “It was about binding these two people together, pulling them apart and creating this feeling of memories feeding seamlessly into the present day, accumulating meaning over the years,” she says. “To achieve this, I reserved a filming language just for Emma and Dexter that wasn’t used with any other character in the show.
“The locations were of huge importance in bringing cinematic scale, a stamp of time and place, as were the framings in those locations to make you feel their togetherness and solitude, feel them echoed in each other’s lives even when they were separated. We also played a lot with this sense of time evolving, by using recurring visual motifs, flashbacks, intercuts, time transitions and audio motifs.”
For The Mirror & The Light, Kosminsky wanted to continue the style he had deployed on Wolf Hall years earlier – one that took its lead from Mantel’s belief that the characters don’t know they are to become famous figures in history.
“That dictated a kind of immediacy,” Kosminsky says. “It made me realise I wanted to shoot this as if it was happening now. For Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Henry, it feels like now, and so we should shoot it as if it’s now.
“That meant not shooting the buildings in a show-off kind of way. It meant not shooting the costumes in a ‘wow, look at these costumes’ kind of way. I tried to shoot it just as I would have shot a contemporary political thriller or contemporary whodunnit.”
He consequently employed an documentary style with a handheld camera, which follows Cromwell around rather than preceding him. “So we experience these events with him rather than feeling as an audience that we have the advantage of knowing things that he doesn’t know,” he says. “Really, the whole thing flowed from that piece of advice Hilary gave me 12 years ago.”
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The show marked the fourth time Kosminsky had partnered with Rylance and the third with Lewis. That meant “we have a history and have fallen into a way of working,” the director explains. “It’s not so much telling the actors the style, it’s choosing the right actors who intrigue innately, since the style that’s required.
“If you’re creating a very calm atmosphere on the set, where nobody’s really making a lot of noise, a very considered professional atmosphere in the way the crew are going about their business, which is what I insisted on for this show, the actors are working in that environment and it percolates across. So they perform in a thoughtful, quiet, considered way – which was clearly, for such an internal piece as The Mirror & The Light, the right approach.”
On One Day, finding the actors to play Emma and Dexter was “absolutely central” to the series, as their interpretations of the characters and their chemistry would inform so much of the series. Once Mod and Woodhall signed on, “their incredible and very particular chemistry just made it all come alive in this completely magical way. They made it easy,” Manners says. “From there, it was about supporting them and creating a safe and freeing environment.”
She likes to avoid rehearsing specific scenes, instead rehearsing in character using improv and exploring different incarnations of the characters over the years. “In terms of filming, I like to be as prepped as possible so that we can then have the confidence and freedom to find and follow things we see emerging on the day,” notes Manners, who previously won a BAFTA and BAFTA Cymru award for Welsh drama In My Skin. “That takes a lot of trust from the crew, and they were amazing in adapting and being fleet of foot.
“There’s a huge amount of creative development that goes into the prep work with myself and the HODs, and I love for these ideas to go across departments. A photo reference from our costume designer might end up influencing the lighting or blocking of a scene. It’s all about sharing ideas and evolving the vision in the early stages. This process is very much a part of my prep across all projects.”
In particular, Manners praises Taylor’s ambition for the show and ensuring enough drama was happening on every July 15 – the day the series visits in each episode. “Nicole was incredible in her vision for this, ensuring we stuck to the ethos of the book, that we didn’t reach around and bring in other material, that it lived in that detail and the everydayness and the minutiae of their lives and connection,” she says. “That’s what made it so special and so relatable.
“Practically speaking, the span of years was a challenge, as was the specificity of the period. I always knew I wanted to cast young; to feel that these bright young things had their lives ahead of them. So then it was about aging up these amazing young actors and filming them playing age 35 and 40 on day three of the shoot. But they rose expertly to the challenge and transformed in such subtle ways.”
Evolving the period of One Day was also a “great challenge” as the show edged forward 12 months in each episode. “Everyone was so granular in their research of the specifics of each year,” Manners adds. “Mighty White in the bread bin. The duvet cover in Emma’s bedroom got its own Guardian article, I think. Any tricky situation we found ourselves in –extreme weather meaning we accidentally made Leo look 80 instead of 40 while stuck on the side of a mountain – was brilliantly rescued by the team.”
Kosminsky, meanwhile, believes The Mirror & The Light stands out for the work of Mantel, “a uniquely talented writer,” and the way the story transforms Cromwell from “Henry VII’s thug, his hatchet man” into a sympathetic hero.
“That’s a pretty radical piece of historical revisionism,” he notes. “Peter did a fantastic adaptation. He was trying to turn 800 pages of fairly dense narrative into six episodes of television. It’s no small feat.”
However, despite the show only coming out around five months ago, Kosminsky does not think The Mirror & The Light could be made today. The crisis at the centre of British high-end drama means budgets are difficult to find, he says, as costs have risen at the same time as a commissioning slowdown and flat broadcaster licence fees. Public broadcaster-backed British series are also struggling to find US coproduction partners.
The director has been outspoken on the crisis, even revealing that he and a number of other execs took pay cuts to ensure the show could be made on a budget that was “cut to the bone.”
“We cut almost every exterior sequence. We cut crowd scenes. We cut the extras numbers down to almost risible level. We cut the CGI budget and still we couldn’t afford to make the show,” he says, “so the executive producers, myself and Colin Calendar, the screenwriter and the lead actor, gave up the majority of their fees. Bear in mind that Colin and I had worked on the show unpaid for 11 years, expecting to eventually get paid when we made the show.
“As a matter of fact, Colin and I did something fairly similar on the preceding show we made together, The Undeclared War, for Channel 4. But you can’t do this show after show after show, nor, frankly, should you be required to. Broadcasters should be able to pay a fair rate to people for doing a job.”
Kosminsky even contributed to a UK Culture, Media & Sport Committee inquiry that has recommended introducing a 5% levy on streaming platforms to raise money that can be used to “protect distinctly British content.”
“The only thing that’s in question is whether the government of our country has the guts to do it,” he says. “Currently, as we know, they’re giving the every outward impression of being fairly terrified of Donald Trump and his administration, so it does beg the question whether the British government would have the courage and the guts to bring in the levy, which 17 other countries in Europe have already done.
“It really comes down to this: which is more important to preserve? A 100-year tradition of public service broadcasting in this country, and preserve our ability to watch shows like Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Hillsborough, Three Girls or Wolf Hall? Or risk upsetting the Trump administration? I hope we have a government brave enough to put the interests of our culture and our society before nervousness about the reaction of some here-today, gone-tomorrow president sitting in Washington.”
Until then, Kosminsky is continuing to develop new high-end drama projects. “Of course, there’s no guarantee,” he adds. “But then when you develop things, there’s never any complete guarantee, so we voyage hopefully. That’s all we can do.”
tagged in: BBC, Molly Manner, Netflix, One Day, Peter Kosminsky, Wolf Hall, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light